The screen door bangs. Then Taryn rushes in front of me, her gown blowing in the morning breeze. If I didn’t know what a real princess of Faerie looked like, I might think she resembled one. For a moment, it seems impossible that we’re related, no less identical.
“What happened to you?” she asks. “You look like you got into a fight.”
I don’t speak. I just keep walking. I am not even sure where I am going, as slow and stiff and sore as I am. Maybe to Bryern. He’ll find me a place to crash, even if I won’t like the price later. Even bunking with Grima Mog would be better than this.
“I need your help,” Taryn says.
“No,” I say. “No. Absolutely not. Never. If that’s why you came here, now you’ve got your answer and you can leave.”
“Jude, just hear me out.” She walks in front of me, causing me to have to look at her. I glance up and then start to circle the billowing skirts of her dress.
“Also no,” I say. “No, I won’t help you. No, I won’t hear you explain why I should. It really is a magical word: no. You say whatever bullshit you want, and I just say no.”
“Locke is dead,” she blurts out.
I wheel around. Above us, the sky is bright and blue and clear. Birds call to one another from nearby trees. In the distance, there’s the sound of construction and road traffic. In this moment, the juxtaposition of standing in the mortal world and hearing about the demise of an immortal being—one that I knew, one that I kissed—is especially surreal.
“Dead?” It seems impossible, even after everything I’ve seen. “Are you sure?”
The night before his wedding, Locke and his friends tried to ride me down like a pack of dogs chasing a fox. I promised to pay him back for that. If he’s dead, I never will.
Nor will he ever plan another party for the purpose of humiliating Cardan. He won’t laugh with Nicasia nor play Taryn and me against each other again. Maybe I should be relieved, for all the trouble he caused. But I am surprised by feeling grief instead.
Taryn takes a breath, as if steeling herself. “He’s dead because I killed him.”
I shake my head, as though that’s going to help me understand what she’s saying. “What?”
She looks more embarrassed than anything else, as though she were confessing to some kind of dumb accident instead of to murdering her husband. I am uncomfortably reminded of Madoc, standing over three screaming children a moment after cutting down their parents, surprise on his face. As though he hadn’t quite meant for it to go so far. I wonder if that’s how Taryn feels.
I knew I’d grown up to be more like Madoc than I was comfortable with, but I never thought she and he were anything alike.
“And I need you to pretend to be me,” she finishes, with no apparent worry that suggesting the very trick that allowed Madoc to march off with half of Cardan’s army, the very trick that doomed me to agreeing to the plan that got me exiled, is in poor taste. “Just for a few hours.”
“Why?” I start, and then realize I am not being clear. “Not the pretending part. I mean, why did you kill him?”
She takes a breath, then looks back at the apartment. “Come inside, and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything. Please, Jude.”
I look toward the apartment and reluctantly admit to myself I have nowhere else to go. I don’t want to go to Bryern. I want to go back inside and rest in my own bed. And despite being exhausted, I can’t deny that the prospect of sneaking into Elfhame as Taryn has an unsettling appeal. The very thought of being there, of seeing Cardan, speeds my heart.
At least no one is privy to my thoughts. Stupid as they are, they remain my own.
Inside, Heather and Vivi are standing in a corner of the kitchen near the coffeepot, having an intense conversation that I don’t want to disturb. At least they’re finally talking. That’s one good thing. I head into Oak’s room, where the few clothes I have are shoved in the bottom drawer of his dresser. Taryn follows, frowning.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I tell her. “And smear some ointment on myself. You’re going to make me some magical healing yarrow tea from the kitchen. Then I’ll be ready to hear your confession.”
“Let me help you out of that,” Taryn says with an exasperated shake of her head when I’m about to object. “You have no squire.”
“Nor any armor for her to polish,” I say, but I don’t fight when she lifts my shirt over sore limbs. It’s stiff with blood, and I wince when she tugs it free. I inspect my cuts for the first time, raw and red and puffy. I suspect Grima Mog of not keeping her knife as clean as I’d like.
Taryn turns on the shower, adjusting the taps and then guiding me over the tub’s edge to stand in the warming spray. Being sisters, we’ve seen each other naked a bajillion times over the years, but as her gaze goes to the messy scar on my leg, I recall she’s never seen it before.
“Vivi said something,” Taryn says slowly. “About the night before my wedding. You were late, and when you came, you were quiet and pale. Sick. I worried it was because you still loved him, but Vivi insists that isn’t true. She says you got hurt.”
I nod. “I remember that night.”
“Did Locke … do something?” She isn’t looking at me now. Her gaze is on the tiles, then on a framed drawing Oak did of Heather, brown crayon for her skin bleeding into pink for her hair.
I grab the body wash that Vivi buys at the organic store, the one that’s supposed to be naturally antibacterial, and smear it liberally over the dried blood. It smells bleachy and stings like hell. “You mean, did he try to kill me?”
Taryn nods. I catch her eye. She already knows the answer. “Why didn’t you say something? Why did you let me marry him?” she demands.
“I didn’t know,” I admit. “I didn’t know it was Locke who’d led a hunt for me until I saw you wearing the earrings I lost that night. And then I got taken by the Undersea. And soon after I got back, you betrayed me, so I figured it didn’t matter.”
Taryn frowns, clearly torn between the urge to argue and an effort to stay quiet to win me over. A moment later, arguing triumphs. We’re twins, after all. “I just did what Dad said! I didn’t think it mattered. You had all that power and you wouldn’t use it. But I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I think I prefer Locke and his friends chasing me around the woods to you stabbing me in the back. Again.”
I can see her visibly stopping herself from saying anything more, taking a breath, biting her tongue. “I’m sorry,” she says, and slips out of the bathroom, leaving me to finish my shower alone.
I turn up the heat and take a long time.
When I come out, Heather has left, and Taryn has gone through the fridge and constructed some kind of nervous-energy tea party out of our leftovers. A big pot of tea sits at the center of the table, along with a smaller pot of the yarrow. She has taken our last half sleeve of gingersnap cookies and arranged them on a tray. Our bread got turned into two kinds of sandwiches: ham and celery, peanut butter and Cheerios.
Vivi is brewing a pot of coffee and watching Taryn with a worried expression. I pour myself a mug of the healing tea and drink it down, then pour myself another. Clean, bandaged, and dressed in new clothes, I feel a lot more clearheaded and ready to deal with the news that Locke is dead and that my twin sister murdered him.
I pick up a ham sandwich and take a bite. The celery is crunchy and a little weird, but not bad. Suddenly, I am aware of how hungry I am. I shove the rest of the sandwich into my mouth and pile two more onto a plate.
Taryn wrings her hands, pressing them together and then against her dress. “I snapped,” she says. Neither Vivi nor I speak. I try to crunch my celery more quietly.
“He promised he would love me until he died, but his love didn’t protect me from his unkindness. He warned me that the Folk don’t love as we do. I didn’t understand until he left me alone in his great, awful house for weeks on end. I cultivated hybrid roses in the garden and commissioned new curtains and hosted month-long revels for his friends. It didn’t matter. I was sometimes louche and sometimes chaste. I gave him everything. But he said that all the story had gone out of me.”
I raise my eyebrows. That was an awful thing for him to say, but not necessarily what I expected to be his last words. “I guess you showed him.”
Vivi laughs abruptly and then glares at me for making her laugh.
Taryn’s eyelashes sparkle with unshed tears. “I guess so,” she says in a flat, dull voice that I find hard to interpret. “I tried to explain how things had to change—they had to—but he acted as though I was being ridiculous. He kept talking, as if he could talk me out of my own feelings. There was a jeweled letter opener on the desk and—you remember all those lessons Madoc gave us? The next thing I knew, the point of it was in Locke’s throat. And then he was finally quiet, but when I took it out, there was so much blood.”
“So you didn’t mean to kill him?” Vivi asks.
Taryn doesn’t answer.