Forty-Four. Rune

FORTY-FOURRUNE

A KNOCK ON THEfalse wall broke Rune’s concentration. She glanced up from the Earth Sunderer spell, which lay open in front of her, and found Alex standing a few feet from her desk. He wore a collared white shirt and pinstripe trousers. His hair shone like spun gold.

“Am I interrupting?”

She shut the spell book. “Oh. No. Of course not.” Glancing down, she found herself still in her nightgown, and blushed. “I … wasn’t expecting any visitors this morning.”

He stepped further into the room, leaving the passageway open. Alex was always forgetting to shut it behind him. If anyone wandered into her bedroom and saw the wall opened, and the spell books beyond … Rune would be finished.

Rising from the desk, she went to close it.

“I brought you something,” he said as the wall snicked shut beneath her hands.

When Rune turned to face him, he pressed a silver coin into her palm. It was nearly as wide as the length of her thumb, and still warm from his hand. A woman’s image was imprinted on the silver.

Fortitude.

The Ancient’s hair was braided over one shoulder as she held her chin high, and across her chest was a bandolier.

“Gideon’s access coin,” Rune murmured, not believing it. “You stole it?”

“Won it,” he said. “In a game of cards.”

Rune marveled at the coin, then glanced up. “You hate pitting yourself against your brother.”

“Actually.” He held her gaze. “I no longer mind so much.”

He was choosing her, she realized. This boy who saw exactly who she was—what she was—and didn’t care. Or rather: cared so much, he wanted to give her back what the revolution had taken.

In Caelis, we’ll go to the opera house every day of the week. Where they show real operas, not that propaganda you despise.

Again, Rune let herself imagine it: a life far away from the Republic. No more worrying about who was watching or listening. No more pretending to be something she wasn’t.

Rune would be free.

But what kind of person would that make her? How could she live a safe, comfortable life full of good, beautiful things knowing the Blood Guard was hunting down witches? Knowing she could stop it—but didn’t?

Rune wouldn’t be able to live with herself.

“There’s something else,” he said, turning away and letting out a rough sigh.

Rune studied him. “What’s wrong?”

“Cressida Roseblood is alive.”

Rune frowned, certain she’d misheard him. “What?”

Alex turned briefly back to her. “The fire that almost killed you the other night? It was Cressida’s spell, not Seraphine’s. Gideon found her signature after the fire.”

“That can’t be true,” said Rune, shaking her head. “Cressida’s dead.”

Alex strode to the window, his footsteps echoing on the floorboards. At the pane, he stopped and looked out.

“She couldn’t have been at the Luminaries Dinner,” Rune said, suddenly needing him to agree with her. “Because you killed her.”

He was silent for a long time. The silence turned the room cold.

“You killed her,” she said again, forceful this time. “Right, Alex?”

“That’s the other thing I came to tell you. I never finished my story the other night.” He stared out the window. “On the eve of the New Dawn, while my brother was murdering her sisters, I did go to Thornwood Hall to kill Cressida. I found her asleep in her bedroom. She woke to the barrel of my pistol pressed against her head.” He drew in a ragged breath. “I told her to get out of the bed, and she fell to her knees on the floor, begging me to spare her life. She told me she loved my brother, and that was why she did the things she did—because Gideon belonged to her.”

Rune heard the anger in his voice as he spoke the words.

“Before that moment, I’d never wanted to hurt anything in my whole life. But Rune: I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to squeeze the air out of her hateful lungs and watch her writhe. I had one of the most powerful witches in the world on her knees at my feet, with my gun pressed to her forehead. The girl who’d killed my little sister and damaged my older brother beyond repair. All I had to do was pull the trigger. And I relished it.”

“And that’s when you shot her,” said Rune, gripping the edge of her desk, the color leaching from her knuckles. Say it. Tell me you shot her.

He shook his head, staring out the window as if staring into the past.

“It was like there were two of me: the Alex who wanted to destroy her, and the Alex who knew dead witches weren’t the answer. Deep down, I didn’t believe the bloodshed and vengeance my brother craved would bring about a better world. Murdering them would make us no better than them. And that was what scared me: that despite my convictions, it could be so easy to give in to the bloodlust.

“So I raised my gun to the roof and shot three rounds. And then I told her to run. I told her if I ever saw her, if she ever touched Gideon again, I’d make her wish she was dead. I watched her disappear into the woods behind Thornwood Hall.”

Rune suddenly felt light-headed. Still gripping the desk, she lowered herself into the chair.

“You lied,” she whispered, feeling the world crumble in on her.

If Alex had told her this a few weeks ago, before she’d known what monsters Cressida and her sisters truly were, she would have adored him for it. A girl as powerful as the youngest Roseblood queen could save so many more witches from the purge than the Crimson Moth ever could. This alone should have made Rune happy. Or at least relieved.

But now …

Rune thought of the brand on Gideon’s chest. Of the things Cressida did to him. If the witch queen was alive, Gideon was in terrible danger.

It frightened her.

It angered her.

Her fists trembled. “Why would you lie?”

“I thought if Gideon believed Cressida was dead, he might move on. Maybe even heal.”

A tremor was building deep within Rune, shaking everything loose. She looked up at her oldest friend, but it was as if a fog had descended, and she could no longer see him clearly through the gray.

Alex turned from the window and strode towards the hidden door. “I need to tell Gideon the truth. I should do it now, before I lose my nerve.”

“No,” she said, rising from her chair. She might be disappointed in Alex, but she wasn’t going to let him admit to sparing Cressida’s life. “You’ll be convicted of sympathizing with witches.”

He stopped to look down at her. Quietly, and a little sadly, he said, “I do sympathize with witches.”

The words softened her. This was Alex, after all. The boy who, upon learning she was a witch, had drawn Rune a warm bath to ease her cramps instead of handing her over to be killed. Who else would have done that?

No one.

“If you tell the truth, they’ll kill you.” Rune reached for his arm, keeping him with her. “You can’t speak a word of this to anyone. Especially not Gideon.”

Gideon would be the first to hand him over.

Alex wouldn’t look at her, ashamed of the lie. Ashamed of himself and the mercy he’d shown.

Rune wanted to stay angry at him, and yet she knew the qualities that made him spare Cressida were the same ones that made him spare her. His gentleness and compassion; his firm refusal to take part in cruelty; his willingness to risk his life in order to do what was right … These things allowed him to see who Rune was, not what she was, and love her despite the danger.

“Sparing the life of someone you hate doesn’t make you weak,” she said, perhaps more to herself than to Alex. “It makes you better than the rest of us.”

It was the lie that was wrong.

She cupped his jaw in her hands and tilted his face to hers, holding his gaze. “If anything happened to you …” She shut her eyes against the thought of it. “Please, Alex. Promise me you won’t tell a soul.”

His breath trembled out of him. Finally, he said: “I promise.”