Chapter 29

twenty-nine

The next morningas we’re leaving the Azores, I speak with Mark for what will be the last time until we get to Manhattan. I reassure him of the usual things, that Isolde is content and enjoying the yacht, and I try to keep my voice steady, like someone who’s slept a deep, untroubled night’s sleep, and not like someone who didn’t sleep at all. Not like someone who jerked themself raw thinking of the pink between Isolde’s thighs while the bed smelled like damp stone and rain, and then had to go into her room and wake her from a nightmare and act like everything was normal and platonic and fine.

But Mark hears something in my voice because of course he does.

“Is everything okay, Tristan?” he asks. “You sound strained.”

“Everything is fine,” I lie. “Just a little groggy still.”

It’s a bad lie, such a bad lie, because I’m never groggy in the morning, but he makes a little hum of acknowledgment.

“That’s good. Take care of Isolde for me. Give her everything she needs.”

“You should call her, sir. Before the signal’s bad.”

I say this every morning. And every morning he says the same thing.

“Why would I do that when I have you there to be me in my place?”

I am either lucky or outright damned that he has no idea how much I want to be in his place right now. Almost as much as I want to be in her place.

Jesus Christ, I’m a lost cause.

“One last thing,” he says. “Someone came to Lyonesse looking for you today.”

I’m at a loss. “Looking for me?”

“Seems they asked your father for your current address. Wanted to speak in person, not over the phone or over email. A sister of the soldier you killed in Carpathia.”

“Oh,” I say. Faintly. Dizzily.

“Reception didn’t write down her name, only his,” Mark goes on. I already know the name he’s going to say before he says it, but it still feels like a hammer to the face when he does.

Aaron Sims.

* * *

Dinner isa delicate affair of things like crustacean foam and olive oil powder, and when we finish dessert—light, cloud-like farófias with tangerines—I finally accept that I’ve barely tasted any of it.

My mind is on Sims, just as it has been since Mark’s call this morning, my memories sawing against each other in the same jagged grooves for hours and hours.

His death, and the usual memories of his blood, hot and wet against my fingers.

His burial.

I didn’t mean to go to the service—it wasn’t right for me to go—and yet I’d found myself outside that Pennsylvania cemetery anyway, white-knuckling a bottle of bourbon I planned to leave at his grave once everyone had cleared off.

And everyone had been a small group. There was no uniformed detail for Aaron Sims, Traitor, after all. No flag, no “Taps”. Just a handful of family and friends staring down at the rectangular hole in the dirt that I had no small part in making.

Had both his sisters been there? Chloe had been there, but had Cara been?

No, Cara wouldn’t have gone. No one had heard from Cara in years; last Sims had known, she’d gotten herself tangled up with some Mob-adjacent boyfriend and skipped town. It had made him sick with worry. No, it must have only been Chloe.

Sims had wanted me to date Chloe when we were at West Point. He was the kind of person who wanted everyone in his life connected, and he was especially determined to see his sisters married to his friends. Whether he thought that would make his sisters safer or make it so his friends couldn’t drift away from him, I never figured out. Either way, I hadn’t dated Chloe, had only met her a few times. Last I heard, she was a kindergarten teacher in Erie.

Imagining quiet, unassuming Chloe standing at the glass gates of Lyonesse is impossible. God, what she must think of me, working at a kink club?.?.?.

And then I want to stab myself in the eyeball with my farófias spoon because of course she doesn’t give a shit where I work now. She’s got bigger things on her mind when it comes to me. Like that I killed her brother.

What could she want?

She’d be right to scream at me, hit me, cut me into pieces and drive those pieces to the National Aquarium in Baltimore to feed the aquarium sharks. If this were biblical times, she’d consider herself within her rights to kill me. I’d consider her within her rights.

I’m very close as it is, because even though Mark was right when he told me I’d done the necessary thing, it still doesn’t make it the moral thing. It doesn’t erase the hole in the world that used to be filled by Aaron Sims.

I scrape my hands over my face, shame and foreboding filling me, a heavier dinner than actual food could ever be, and look up to see that Isolde’s no longer at the table but at the prow one deck below.

She’s wearing a white jumpsuit tonight, rolled up at the sleeves, cuffed above her ankles, fitted so well to her body that I can see the slope of her waist and the wings of her shoulder blades. Dressy sandals have been abandoned in favor of bare feet; the relentless breeze is tugging her hair from its habitual braid, but she doesn’t reach up to brush it away from her face.

There’s this way she stands when she thinks no one is watching her, so different from her usual erect posture. Shoulders pulled in, head bowed. Like something injured trying to protect itself.

A shell of glass.

Goran had said it about me, but I see it in her, around her. Snow White in a glass coffin, a priceless jewel in a vitrine.

A heart behind walls.

Her awareness, though, that’s still there. Like me, like Mark, there is no sneaking up on her. By the time I make it to the railing next to her, her shoulders have straightened and her head has lifted and she’s back to looking like a ballerina waiting in the wings.

A soft mist sprays up from the sea. I can taste it when I breathe.

“Do you regret killing them?” Isolde asks after several minutes of us standing there together, and I know it’s not the subtle pitching of the deck that has me off-balance.

How could she know I was thinking of war, of death, of Sims—

“The people who attacked Lyonesse, I mean,” she clarifies when I don’t answer right away. “The ones trying to kill Mark.”

“Oh,” I say, thrown for a moment. “No. At least I don’t think so. Wait, are you withdrawing your reassuring words about Cain and Abel from the other day?”

I know I manage some kind of smile, but she isn’t looking at me to see it. She wraps her hands around the railing and stares at the water.

“No,” she says. “Not withdrawing. Just?.?.?.?it’s been on my mind. Killing.”

Oh no. “Isolde, Lyonesse is safer than ever, and if you’re worried about—”

She shakes her head. “That’s not what I mean.” It takes her a minute to speak again, and when she does, her voice is low. “I was thinking about killing in general. When is it good. When is it bad. What it means if there’s not a clear answer either way.”

“What brought this on?” I ask.

“Oh, you know,” she says with a sound that could be a laugh if it weren’t so strangled. “Art history.”

I study her out of the corner of my eye, not sure what to make of this Isolde, this mood she’s in. Her fingers are gripped tight around the railing, and her face is tilted up to the sky. To the waxing moon with its full belly.

“I killed my best friend in Carpathia eight months ago,” I say, and then wish I could scrape the words back into my throat. I don’t want her to know this about me; I don’t want her to guess my nightmares. I want her to think that I’m good and noble and—yes—heroic. I want her to look at me with trust in her eyes. I want her to be the one person that I can start fresh with, without my past rotting around my neck like an albatross.

She doesn’t react to my statement, but it’s a near thing, I think, because it takes her a moment to respond.

“Why?” Her voice is low still, but uninflected. She could be asking me why I chose the shirt I wore today.

I blow out a breath. “He tried to kill the people we were protecting on a diplomatic escort. Two of them were kids.”

Her chin lifts the tiniest bit, but she doesn’t do what most other people do when they find out. She doesn’t swear. She doesn’t say Jesus Christ or what the fuck?

She just says, “That’s evil.” Like a statement of fact.

And it’s so reassuring to hear, because yes, it was fucking evil. Even if Sims wasn’t. Even if he looked desperate and strange and afraid of himself. He might not have been evil, but he was about to do an evil thing.

“And you never found out why?” Isolde asks. “Why he was going to kill them?”

I put my own hands on the railing. It’s wet and solid under my palms. “The official report said he’d been bribed into it by rebels. Paid off. There’d been a transfer into his bank account the day before from somewhere untraceable.”

“Does that sound like him?”

“No.” The answer is immediate. Of all of us, Sims was the most zealous about Being a Soldier. It was his whole identity. As was taking care of his mom and sisters, but being a soldier was how he did it, and he was so fucking proud of that. So fucking proud of being in the army, being patriotic, never harboring doubts about our mission. If the army had told him to fight a group of Girl Scouts, he would have done it without question and then left their corpses smoking in a pile of smashed Thin Mints and loose merit badges.

There’s no way he would have done anything for the rebels, no matter how much money they offered. He was too loyal.

“He must have had a reason,” muses Isolde.

I tell her the same thing I’ve told myself every day for eight months. “It doesn’t matter. His reason wouldn’t change anything.”

“But don’t you want to know?”

“Of course I want to know,” I reply, my hands lifting from the railing briefly to emphasize the word want. “But how can I know? And even if I do know, his death is far from the only blood on my hands. There were more that I killed over there. Many more.”

“Enemies,” Isolde says.

“Yes, but—” I look up at the moon. “People. People with favorite colors and songs they hated and aunts they couldn’t stand. And sometimes I’d be glad to kill them, you know? Like you’re shooting from some village street and they’re trying to pin you down, trying to kill you first, lobbing shit at you, and I’d feel this?.?.?.?like, fuck you, motherfucker, you can’t kill me feeling, and I’d be so hopped up on adrenaline, and I’d finally kill them. And there’d be this surge of?.?.?.?triumph. I’d be sick with how good it felt.”

Her voice is quiet when she speaks. “Like being drunk.”

She doesn’t know how right she is. “Exactly like that. But then?.?.?.?later—much later—my blood would cool, and I’d start wondering why they were there at all. Who they were. Why this was the fight they picked. And I’d still be sick with it, but in a different way. Like there was mold growing inside me and only I could see it.”

The ocean is a bit rougher now—lines of wave-foam and chunks of light. Like someone tore up the moon and scattered the pieces over the water.

“And then, other times,” I say, my voice barely louder than the water, “I’d feel sick from the very beginning. Like I could taste the mold in my mouth from the minute I lifted my gun to start shooting back. And the only way to get rid of that feeling was not to think about it. Was to pretend it was normal. And I think that must be what people mean when they talk about heroes. Heroes are the ones who can pretend the shame away, at least long enough to fool everyone else.”

This can’t be what Mark meant when he said to court Isolde, to give her everything she needs. Dumping war trauma on her seems like the exact opposite of courting.

And yet, she’s listening intently. She seems to understand. “Maybe that’s what’s heroic about it,” she says and looks at me. “You did it knowing that you’d have to give something up. That it would feel like a corrosion, like bits of you were being clipped off every time you drew breath and remembered.”

I look back at her. I don’t have to see my own face to know that my smile is sad. “Mr. Trevena would say that there are no heroes.”

“Mark is wrong,” she says, suddenly fervent. “He has to be.”

“You’ll get to tell him yourself in two weeks,” I say.

A low breath, gusted out quick. She looks away. “Right.”

I wonder if she’s thinking of the wedding, of going home to Manhattan.

But then she surprises me again, asking not at all what I was expecting. “You said you were Mark’s nephew-in-law,” she says. “How are you related?”

“Mr. Trevena’s older sister, Blanche, married my father.” Her hands twitch once on the railing, like she’s pushing herself to say something, so I add, “My mother died when I was in high school,” so she doesn’t have to be the one to ask.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmurs. She looks at me again. “It was awful when my mother died.”

“I’m sorry too.”

Isolde’s eyes go back to the water, back to the torn-up pieces of moon. “Do you still miss your mother?”

“Sometimes,” I say. “Do you?”

“Yes. She was—” A breath tears out of Isolde’s throat. It could almost be a laugh. “She was good. Not everyone in my family is. But she was.”

“My mother was good too. But that’s why, sometimes, I don’t miss her. Because—”

I can’t finish. I can’t find the words.

But Isolde finishes for me. “Because if she were alive, she’d see you now.” Her eyes are on the water. Sea spray has dampened her face—it’s caught in her eyelashes and is gleaming along her cheekbones. And at the fullest curve of her lower lip, it’s gathered into a single drop. When she speaks again, the drop falls. “She’d know the person you’ve become. And you can’t be sure if that would be a good thing or not.”

I am suspended in the air like the spray, weightless and flashing in the night.

No one, no one, has ever guessed this about me. And the shock of it, the relief of it, is annihilating. Someone knows. Someone can see.

Someone understands that sometimes I’d rather my mother still be dead than be alive to see what I’ve done.

And then I wonder how Isolde could have guessed that, that horribly specific kind of grief that makes grief itself a lie. “How did you know?” I whisper.

She turns to face me, and water is beading on her lower lip again. I have the absurd fantasy of leaning forward and licking it off.

“I know,” she says, “because I feel the same way.”

I want to know why. I want to know if it has anything to do with why she can’t sleep without nightmares, why she needs someone else to help her breathe in her own bed. But I don’t get a chance to ask. Before I can even part my lips, she’s pushing away from the railing and disappearing into the glowing belly of the ship.