Page 111 of Bitter Burn
“No? No guesses? I suppose we all know well enough. Three years ago, I learned you’d smithed Isolde’s faith and her fear into a knife made to fit your hand. Last year, Tristan had to shoot his friend in the throat because of the little hierocracy you’re trying to build in Carpathia. The three of us have you in common, Your Holiness. We have your schemes and your crimes. How could I blame Isolde or Tristan when they were as much victims of your stupid fucking plans as I was? How could I punish them for what you’d done to me when you were doing it to them too? It doesn’t matter what order love and clemency came in for them, because they did come. I did change. They changed me.”
He moves his stare, a dark, uncomfortable blue, to me and then to Tristan.
“I might resent them for it some days,” he finishes softly, a little bitterly, “but they are forever safe from me. And I am no longer safe from them.”
Tristan’s head dips, like he can’t bear the weight of Mark’s gaze. His profile, with his straight nose and full mouth, is a study in shell-shocked beauty.
I still can’t breathe. I think I believe him. How can I afford to believe him?
“So I’m disappointed that this is all you’ve got. They might never forgive me, they might fear me, but I’d as soon harm them as I’d let you live. That is the difference between me and you, Most Holy Father: I’m not afraid to be known. I might steal and I might lie, and I’ll always live in the falling slant of a shadow, but it’s not because I’m frightened of the light. And I think you are. I think perhaps there was one person left whom you cared about, one person who you could bear to be seen by, and I think perhaps you thought you could have her see all of you. I think you thought she would hear about everything you’ve done and applaud your vision and your cleverness and your tenacity. You thought she’d agree with you that there was a new order waiting to be dredged from the slush of the old and that only you had the imagination and force of will to do so.”
My valves open, my atria fill, and my ventricles release. Suddenly, blood is thrumming through me, hot and vital and laced with premonition.
“But she didn’t react that way, did she? You told her about the saints, and then you told her about the careful, bloody foothold you made in Dublin as a priest. You told her about Ys. And instead of seeing how adroit and ingenuous you’d been, she saw tombstones. Land mines and burned crops and preventable diseases, and you skittering over it all like a spider. And unlike you, she had a conscience. She felt a need to stop you—in fact, she was going to do something rash unless she was stopped. So you stopped her.”
For the first time, my uncle’s eyes move to me. He’s facing the window, which means the sunlight can perfectly illuminate all the uneven blue and green speckles, the heterochromatic eyes that run in the family.
My mother had them too.
“Barbara told me in Albany,” explains Mark. “How you arranged for the death of your sister. That part is a certainty, but I’m guessing a little as to the why. Am I close?”
There’s an expression on my uncle’s face that I’ve never seen before. I think it’s regret—although there’s a flatness to it, a distance, that renders it almost unrecognizable as the kind of regret anyone else would feel in his shoes.
Which means it’s real. Whatever he’s feeling, it’s not performed for anyone else, and however stunted and anemic, it’s genuinely his.
Which means—which means?—
“Oh God,” I whisper, a jagged rift opening up in my chest. I am going to be sick. “How? How? How fucking could you?”
“She was going to the Holy Father, Isolde,” my uncle says, the warped regret in his face deepening. “I couldn’t let her destroy Ys or me simply because she couldn’t see what I was trying to show her! I asked Barbara to make it as fast and as clean as she could, because I didn’t want Inis to suffer.” He adds this last part as if it were a charitable work, a show of deep and feeling humanity, that he wanted his sister’s murder to be quick.
I’m shaking now. I can’t even think. “I lost everything when she died,” I breathe. “Everything. My father and myself, a normal future. Everything died with her.”
“But it was better, Isolde, because I was there,” my uncle says, shifting forward in his chair, all pretense of nonchalance gone as his expression changes into a nightmarish version of itself: his wide grin like a rictus of corruption, his sparkling eyes like the matte and muddy edge of water against weeds. “I was able to guide you and shelter you and help you see. You are so very like Inis, and it felt like a second chance, to take you and mold you and make you a part of the world I was building. I loved your mother, and I love you. Nothing I’ve done has been easy for me.”
Tristan—still stunned from the revelations of the last few minutes—stirs. “Who fucking cares?” he asks, his melodic voice unusually harsh. “Are we supposed to care that it was hard for you to kill your sister? To plan for Isolde’s kidnapping and execution?”
Mortimer twists to regard him with a raised eyebrow. “You’ve come to kill me, Mr. Thomas. Are you going to begrudge me my final confessions?”
I step closer to my uncle—not so close as to be in danger but close enough that I can see the short, reddish lines of his eyelashes. The rolling scars on his cheeks.
“Why?” I ask. It’s a simple question, but it also doesn’t feel simple at all as I ask it. As my voice shakes and my heart jolts erratically in my chest and my thoughts are filled with a laughing, loving woman who was good. “Why do all this? To my mother? To me? You can’t think you have God on your side. You can’t think you’re doing something other people will thank you for.”
My uncle turns back to face me. Like before, I think the expression on his face could be one of belief, but it’s too strange and hollow to mimic belief as anyone else would recognize it.
“God has nothing to do with this. It’s me,” my uncle says. “I won’t let him claim credit for my work. I’m the one ensuring the future of the Church. I’m the one toiling day and night to remake gravity so that the Church survives. And when I’m done, there will be something like what hasn’t been seen in hundreds of years—a pope to be feared. A Church with earthly power once again.”
Mark comes up beside me. Gorgeous Mark, with glinting hair and well-shaped lips and a bruise under a perceptive blue eye. Mark, who wanted to kill me at first. Mark, who lets me fuck the man who killed his husband.
“You are done now,” says Mark almost kindly. “This is the end. There’s no rescue coming, no persuading Tristan or Isolde to help you. There will be a car accident this afternoon, tragically ending in an eruption of fire and making you something of a martyr. You will be dead long before that though.” He pulls out a knife from a harness, and I see it’s my knife, my honeysuckle one, the one he gave me.
But he doesn’t move toward Mortimer.
Instead, he hands me the weapon hilt first, his expression serious.
I meet his eyes. They are still the eyes of the man who’s lied to me over and over again, but the clarity in them right now is a gift.
I take the knife.
