I step forward as I talk, closing the distance between us. “You think I don’t know pain? Degradation? I could sit here all night telling you about the horrors I’ve endured—the clients who beat me, who raped me, who told me I was worthless all while using me. Just because it hasn’t completely broken me doesn’t mean I don’t understand all the ways we can hurt one another.
“So don’t act like you invented pain. It’s an insult to the rest of us.”
The more I talk, the more Famine’s anger seems to drain from his face. By the time I finish—my chest heaving with my emotions, angry tears pricking at my eyes—his expression is almost soft.
You’ve felt it too, his face seems to say. The horror of suffering. He looks both comforted and oddly devastated by that.
“See?” he says quietly. “Look how awful your kind is, that they would hurt their young. Tell me I am not justified in killing them all.”
I level him a long look. “You’re not justified in killing us all.”
He takes a step forward, his armor brushing against my chest.
“And what do you think I am justified to do, little flower?”
“Leave us be. If we’re awful and doomed to die, we’ll kill ourselves off. If we’re not, then we won’t.” As I speak, one of those angry tears of mine slips out. Hopefully the last one. I’m tired of crying in front of this man.
The Reaper reaches up a hand. He pauses for a moment, staring at that tear, then he wipes it away.
I don’t know what to make of this situation—or of him for that matter. Not two hours ago he gruesomely killed an entire warehouse full of people. Tomorrow he’ll probably finish off the rest of the city. Why is he bothering to be gentle with me? What’s the point?
Famine is still standing way too close, and for a moment, his gaze drops to my lips.
It’s a shock to see the obvious hunger in his eyes.
I know that look.
But just when I think he might act on whatever heated thoughts are running through his head, he takes my hand and leads me out of the room and into the living room, where a large fire roars in the fireplace. He moves us over to it.
“Sit,” he says.
I scowl, but I do as he says.
The Reaper releases my hand, heading into the dimly lit kitchen. He’s gone long enough for me to turn my attention to the fire.
I twist my hair, squeezing the water from the curly locks.
I’m still soaking wet, but the fire more than makes up for the slight chill.
Famine returns with a pitcher, a basin, and a cloth. He comes to my side and sets the items down.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“You’re hurt.”
I do in fact have dozens of little cuts from the nasty plant I was restrained in. And then there’s my injured shoulder.
“Why do you care?” I say.
“I don’t know.” He frowns as he speaks.
The Reaper pours the water from the pitcher into the basin, and dips the cloth in. Then, taking my arm, he begins to clean my wounds, brushing the washcloth over the small, bleeding puncture marks that dot my skin.
This is ridiculous.
I try to withdraw my hand, but the horseman holds it fast, refusing to stop, and I’m left watching him work.
Methodically, he cleans one of my arms, then the other, being extra diligent with my shoulder wound. He then moves on to my neck and chest. As he does so, I catch sight of his injured hand. It’s still open, still bloody, but he’s made no mention of it and gives no indication that it hurts. But it must. I know he feels pain.
And I feel a whisper of shame. Even this monster feels more remorse for what he did to me than I do for what I did to him.
You also haven’t killed hundreds of thousands of people.
There is that.
Famine pauses halfway through, shucking off his armor. Beneath the metal, his wet shirt is plastered to his chest. After a moment, he removes this too.
I jolt a little at the sight of him. For the first time in five years, I see his bare flesh and the strange, glowing green tattoos that are etched onto it.
Lines and lines of them snake around his wrists like shackles, and more rows of them drape over his shoulders and around his pecs, giving the markings the appearance of a heavy plated necklace.
The symbols look like writing, but it’s written in no language I’ve ever seen.
Famine resumes cleaning my wounds, and I continue to stare at his chest. Before, I thought that Famine looked like some mythical prince. Now he looks far more like the archaic, otherworldly creature he is.
“Inniv jataxiva evawa paruv Eziel,” he says.
My breath catches for a moment as the words wash over me, drawing out goosebumps.
“The hand of god falls heavy,” he translates. His eyes flick to mine. “You were wondering what they said, weren’t you?”
I nod, my brows drawing together.
“What langua—”
“The one God speaks.”
I pause, staring at the words a little longer.
“I shall take their crops and cast them out, so that nothing may grow,” Famine continues without my prompting. “And many shall hunger, and many shall perish. For such is the will of God.”
There it is, the proof that this is supposed to happen.
It’s quiet for a long time. Then, softer, Famine says, “I was always meant to be the cruel one.” His eyes flick to me, and for once there’s something more than seething anger in those eerie green irises. “Pestilence, for all his disease, has always been perversely drawn to humans. And War was made from human desires. Terrible as my brothers are, I am worse.”
After all I’ve seen the Reaper do, I believe him. Yet if you had asked me which of the four brothers was most awful, I wouldn’t have placed Famine at the top of that list.
“How could you possibly be worse than Pestilence and War?” I ask.
He finishes cleaning my wounds, then sets the cloth aside. Sitting back on his haunches, he slings his arms over his knees. “Before your kind built fancy buildings and created technology that rivaled God—before that, I existed.”
I’ve heard plenty of stories of the days that preceded the horsemen. But I haven’t heard much about the world before that. The deep past that he’s alluding to.
“Humans would pray to me, they would sacrifice to me, they would kill and die for me.” Famine’s eyes are too bright as he tells me this; he doesn’t look sane. “They gave their lives to me so that I might spare the rest of their kind.”
His words make me think of the man tonight—the one who was asked to die for the rest of us. He wasn’t able to do it, but Famine makes it sound like others once regularly did so.
“And did you?” I ask. “Did you spare them?”
He lifts a shoulder. “Sometimes.”
Sometimes is better than never, which is his current track record. But I get it. This horseman has always been unforgiving and conscienceless. Or maybe thinking of him like that is itself forcing him to fit some human model when he’s telling me that sometimes famine just occurs in nature. Good and evil have nothing to do with it.
“I’m older than many of the mountains we’ve passed,” he says. “I have seen the world before humans ever touched it.”
And he will see the world after humans leave it.