“You’re mollifying me, then? Why? Are you afraid of me now?”
“It was never your greatness I questioned.”
“That? Again? After all these years?! You think me a monster now?”
Her tone sharpens for the first time: “Do you think me a fool? You think you can hide your eyes from me? Your wife?”
I look away. “Something can surely be done. I’m not finished yet—”
“Take them off!” she snaps.
I remove the dark lenses, revealing my broken halos.
Her jaw tightens first, but then her mouth quivers.
“It’s not—it’s not like they say,” I say. “It’s not madness.”
“Of course you would say that. They all do.”
“BUT IT’S ME!” I roar.
It is exactly the wrong thing to shout when one is a red wight. But she doesn’t shrink. Closes her eyes only for a moment. There is no fear or tension on her face when she regards me.
God. She thinks I might kill her. That I really am mad. And yet she shows no fear.
I cannot imagine such courage.
“It’s me,” I whisper. “I always was special. I always was different. I was meant to do—to, to be . . . but somehow it’s all gone wrong. This can’t be happening. I couldn’ t—we couldn’t have been wrong. We worked it out perfectly.”
“There’s only one man in the world who could have fooled you, my dearest,” Felia says.
“If there is, I’ve not met him,” I scoff.
“A man unmirrored indeed,” she says quietly. “I meant you.”
“You think I wanted this? That this was all self-delusion? The hundred prophecies, the, the things we’ve seen? You think I wanted to do what we’ve done?”
“I think reason is the devil’s whore.”
“I hate that line. Always have.”
“You’ve always misunderstood it,” Felia says. “It doesn’t mean reason itself is corrupt. It means we use her to get what we want. We are the devil, and our reason is nothing more to us than the means by which we achieve our gratification. There’s always a purpose behind the questions we ask, and there’s always an answer we’re really seeking, even if we keep our preferences secret even from ourselves.”
“Now, that is a handy rhetorical bludgeon,” I sneer. “I can be accused of being nefarious or deceptive or malign at will. I’m simply so sneaky that I don’t even know it myself.”
She takes a deep breath. “I don’t think you wanted to hurt . . . anyone.”
“I’m not so fragile. You can say his name,” I snap. The red is rising in me.
She tries. But a wave of grief goes over her face. Maybe I can say his name, but she can’t. She hasn’t said Sevastian’s name three times since he died.
‘Since he died.’ Curious that I put it that way. Even in my own mind. I’ve always put it that way, even when I only think about him, don’t I?
“I love you, Andross,” she says finally.
“I’ve never doubted that.”
“You should’ve. Because I didn’t, at first.”
“What do you mean? You mean when we courted? Of course you did. I still have your letters. I still have that night at the pyre dances with Ninharissi emblazoned in my mind as with flames.”
But the memory doesn’t even elicit a smile, though it always has in the past. “No,” she says. “I had an instinct about you. I was so young. But somehow, I felt the heart of you, more clearly and instantaneously than I have ever understood another soul in all my life. Perhaps Orholam Himself gave me a special charism. Or a burden. For I didn’t choose you blindly. That’s my curse. I chose this. When my father put you off for an entire week? We made up all that stuff about Ninharissi later, after it was taking me too long. We did it because we worried it would sabotage the start of our marriage, and make you think twice about me.”
“What?!” I ask.
“Did you really think my father became the richest man in the empire by being an affable goof who laughed too much at his own jokes like a simpleton? Or that my mother was the boozy, brazen older lady susceptible to a bit of flattery? Andross, come on. We Dariushes are oranges all. Even my little brother fooled you.”
“What? He was eight years old!”
“He said you seemed to think he ought to be quite impressed with some knickknack you drafted for him. A bat or something? He tried to be polite, but thought you were a bit daft.”
“It was a dragon, and it breathed fire! And I swore that little shit to secrecy.” I’m suddenly glad he’s dead. Little fucker. I hope he was inside the palace when they torched it.
Of course, I can’t say any of that aloud. I can’t tell Felia anything she’ll find wight-ish.
Gods fucking in a fire, what am I going to do if she threatens to report my current state? One look at my eyes and . . . The law’s the law. That law applies even to men normally above it. It’s the one law that can’t be bought or bent. Voluntarily or not, wights must die. All the Chromeria’s power rests on that plank.
She goes on. “I asked my father to put you off while I went to sit vigil, to ask what Orholam intended for me.”
“I thought that was when I was still on my way.”
“I try to wrap the little deceptions in as much truth as possible, so I don’t have to worry so much about slipping later on. I haven’t got your memory.”
I say, “I figured that was simply a good way to go party with your friends for a while.”
“If by ‘party’ you mean ‘pray,’ and by ‘friends’ you mean Janus Borig.”
Janus Borig, one of my least favorite people. “The Mirror. That lying bitch.”
“Are you so surprised a Mirror should deceive?”
“Did she lie to you?” I ask. “Or was I special in that, too?”
“Never to me,” Felia says. “She confirmed that I was right about you.”
“Right about what?” I ask gruffly.
“That you were unstoppable. That you would become the most powerful man in the world one day. That if any impediment stopped you from proving yourself peerless, you would smash it. That you would not be a Prism, but you would be a promachos one day. And that if you couldn’t rise within the structures of the Seven Satrapies, you would go outside them and rise regardless and take vengeance on all who stopped you. That you were a bad man, but one who had goodness in him. Goodness, we both hoped, that might grow.”
“You did tell me you were afraid of me, that night,” I say.
“ ‘Afraid’ was the most tepid and colorless word I could find for how I felt about you,” she says.
“Thank you for that, dear. That is a story I could have gone down to the grave not knowing. Lovely that you share it now. Thank you.”
“I fell for you soon after that,” she says mournfully. “I did. Even though I could never claim real ignorance about what I was doing. I didn’t know what awaited us, but I knew who I was getting into it with.”
“You believed in me. And you loved me from the beginning. This is the raving of an old woman. You’re losing your mind. I can’t hold it against you. I don’t. Age is a cruel matron. You’re saying things that have never been true.”