Every head came up at the sound of his voice, just as deer startle when they catch the scent of a slavering wolf. His hand crept along the curve of my waist like a crawling poison. There I stood, caught between the man who had used my ignorance and fear to take advantage of me in a most intimate way, and the aunt and uncle who had raised me from childhood so they could sacrifice me to save their daughter.
Uncle Jonatan leaped to his feet. “Cat! Fiery Shemesh! Is Bee with you? Where is she?”
“Cat!” Aunt Tilly rose, grabbing onto the back of her chair for support as she swayed.
I was the one whose legs gave out. Camjiata neatly peeled me away from Drake’s unwanted embrace and hauled me to a narrow bed placed along one wall. He set me down like a sack. I sat there numb, handless and footless, floating as if I no longer had body or will.
The other clerks hurriedly vacated the room. The click of the door closing behind them made me jump, as if all my skin were flayed and my heart laid out on the table to be carved into pieces by the knives of betrayal.
“I thought you loved me,” I whispered. “All those years, I really thought you loved me.”
Aunt Tilly’s shame twisted her face, and I did not want to see it there.
Uncle Jonatan pressed a hand to my shoulder. “Cat, of course we loved you, it’s just…”
“Don’t touch me!” I shrieked, leaping up. Blindly tearing away from him, I slammed into the wall. Pain burst down my shoulder, and erupted in my heart. I sobbed until I thought my lungs would be ripped from my chest.
For there was no comfort. They had knowingly raised me and nurtured me and prepared me, so I could all willingly and innocently take their daughter’s place as the sacrifice the family had to make to appease the angry mages.
“The mansa tried to kill me,” I said hoarsely, not looking at them but rather at the burning lamps, the flame that consumes the oil that feeds it. “Would it have been a worthwhile sacrifice, if you had saved Bee knowing I was dead?”
“I explained this all to you already, Cat,” said Uncle Jonatan. “But in the end, we lost Bee anyway, so we lost you both. We’re just glad you’re not dead.”
“Only because of my own actions, and the decency of the man you forced me to marry! Did you never think you could have asked me to do it and I would have gone willingly? That I would have done anything to save Bee, at whatever cost to myself? How can any person embrace a child and then throw her away into the cold to die alone and abandoned? How can you live with yourself?”
I was shouting, hands clenched, tears streaming. How could all this rage and grief find an outlet? They could live with themselves: They had and they did! I pounded a fist into the wall over and over until the general caught my arm and held it, held me.
“Is Beatrice with you? Is she well?” Uncle asked.
A part of me wanted to claw his face by refusing to answer. But my mouth opened and I said, “She is well. Let her sisters be told so, for I know she misses them.”
“Cat,” said Aunt Tilly.
I shuddered to hear the voice that had soothed my childish hurts and warmed my orphaned heart with its affection.
Camjiata murmured, “Be brave like your mother.”
So I looked up to meet Aunt Tilly’s gaze.
Sorrow and shame had washed her skin to an ashy pallor, but she did not flinch from my accusing eyes. “Cat, I’m sorry for what happened that day. It took us by surprise. We did not know what else to do.”
Her tender look scoured me, like an acidic bath thrown over my skin.
She did love me. She had loved me then.
And she had done it anyway.
I said, “At least the mansa never lied to me.”
I turned my face into Camjiata’s shoulder. I wanted to forget the terrible moment when she had given me a precious kiss on the forehead and, with that offering, released me to a fate whose end she could not guess except that the mages would be furious when they discovered the truth.
I wanted to forgive them so I did not have to live with this weight on my heart.
But all I could do was weep.
When I closed my eyes, a vision of my grandfather’s malicious glare was chased by the light of flames as he spoke: Begone. Begone. Begone.
The door opened. I glanced up as Camjiata shook his head. Aunt and Uncle left the room. Aunt Tilly’s face was streaked with tears. Rory stood in the attic looking ruffled and annoyed; behind him hovered a pair of young fire mages bouncing on their toes, as if they expected a fight.
“Why don’t you kill them?” Drake asked, and in the wrinkling of his brow and the softening of his tone I read pity. “It would be fair recompense for what they did to you.”