CHAPTER 12

There was a knock at the door and I nodded toward Elspheth to open it.

Elspheth was here under the boy’s command. He had insisted that I needed someone to help me with my daily tasks, however mundane they might be. I had allowed this on the condition that I did not have to change rooms. I had become attached to my room, and by now, I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving it for another.

“Lilith is here to see you,” Elspheth announced stiffly. She swiftly sat down in an extra chair by the door, all the while keeping an eye on Lilith. She was the only one I knew who didn’t fall immediately under Lilith’s spell upon meeting her. Rather, she looked quite wary of her.

“Lilith!” I opened my arms, as she flew into them. I tried to look as happy and as excited as she appeared, but in the back of my mind, I wondered if she saw the real me.

“I came to visit you!”

“I hope she isn’t too much trouble,” a voice called and then Aurelee’s head peeked in from the door. “She said that she just had to see you. She wanted to spend the day with you.”

“She’s no trouble at all,” I replied. “In fact, I was starting to miss her. I can look after her today and walk her over after dinner if you’d like.”

“That would be wonderful,” she said.

“Bye, Grandmama!” Lilith waved. Turning to me she asked, “Where’s the boy?”

“He’s probably in his own room. Do you want to visit him?”

She nodded.

I looked at Elspheth. “I’m not sure when we’ll be back. If anyone asks, we’ll be at the commander’s quarters.” I was careful not to call him the boy when speaking to Elspheth, due to her stubbornly correcting me every time.

“He’s our leader now,” she would say. “Even you must be respectful.” If only she knew what really was occurring.

When we arrived at his rooms, the boy answered the door at the first knock. Seeing who was there, he swooped a giggling Lilith up onto his back, just like he always did. We played around with Lilith and talked about important things, not important to us or the cause, but important to her. It was nostalgic spending time together like this. I could tell they were both thinking of the simpler times when the boy was not the face of the cause, I wasn’t the leader of the Red, and we were not tense about a conversation happening miles away.

“Sir,” a voice interrupted. We had been so carefree that we had failed to notice a Trigon boy walk into the room. He was holding a candle that lit up the night-dimmed room.

“Is it important?” the boy sighed.

The messenger nodded and handed over a White envelope. Then he lit all the candles in the room. It gave a fantastical glow. Someone else might call it eerie, but, to me, it was like magic.

“It’s too early for the envoys to have reached a conclusion, so it’s probably questions from The Pure One’s delegates,” the boy said to me, as he opened the envelope. I wondered if he was trying to ease my fears or his own.

He squinted at the letter for some time, turning it this way and that. “That’s strange ...” he mumbled. “It’s blank.” The boy pulled the piece of paper closer to the candle on the desk. Then he sucked in a breath and his knuckles turned pale.

I asked the messenger to deliver Lilith back to her grandparent’s house and crouched down next to the boy, as soon as they left.

The boy’s hands were shaking, as he read what looked like White ink on White paper. I waited for him to speak, but he wordlessly lit the page on fire. We stood together watching the flame lick the paper, until it was all gone.

“Killed. Both of them.” He spoke in monotone, but his voice cracked on a note. “The letter, it’s written in their blood, White blood.”

“So they were turned into unfeelings and killed?” I asked softly.

“Yes.” His voice convulsed in agony.

I tried to sooth him, but he wouldn’t listen, not to me, or to reason.

“It’s ... It’s all ... all my fault. It’s all my fault.” He kept repeating this mantra, but his words were broken, just like him.

“No, it’s not.”

“Why can’t you see that it is?” he roared. There was a moment of quiet when neither of us spoke. “I’m sorry,” he eventually murmured. “But it’s all my fault that I mindlessly insisted on having a confrontation with the White. I should have known something like this would happen. You’re the leader of the cause. You trusted me on this and I let you down. I let everyone down.”

“No one knew-” I began.

“You knew. Gerrard knew. Even Devonport and Nalin knew. Why didn’t I? Why couldn’t I have just listened?”

“It’s ... It’s all right,” I said in an attempt to calm him.

“No, it’s not all right. You don’t understand,” he snapped. “I just killed two of my own people. I’m a murderer.”

“You didn’t directly kill them,” I responded, as I tried to reason with him.

“And that makes me any better? Don’t you see that I’m no better than the White is? We’re one and the same. We both have innocent blood on our hands.”

I couldn’t find the words to reply to that. Whatever I thought had flown out of my mind. In that instant, all we had was each other. We were crumpled in the middle of the floor, desperately clinging on to each other in the hopes that one of us had the strength to stand.