Page 60 of A Dark and Drowning Tide

“I speak the truth of the dead. Death is maybe the only time we get to speak the truth about a person. She wasn’t always good. She used us both.”

Lorelei closed her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

Sylvia made a soft, frustrated sound. “Then how can I ever hope to make amends with you?”

She leveled Sylvia with a flat, impassive stare. “You can’t. Our worlds are too far apart.”

“You’re so dramatic. Do you know that?”

Lorelei laughed bitterly. Coming fromher, that was rich. “You have no ability for self-reflection. Let me help you, then. Can you honestly say that speech you gave the other day was harmless?”

“They’re just stories, Lorelei. Saint Bruno likely didn’t exist, but of course my family likes itbecause—”

“Ah,” Lorelei said. “So you do understand. Stories are tools.”

“Precisely! Ones that hurt, yes, but ones that could finally bring people together.” Sylvia’s eyes blazed in the darkness. “You weren’t there on the front lines. You did not grow up in a land eager for revolt. You have never seen a day of war. If we can make people understand that we’re not so different, then Brunnestaad’s soil will never be drenched with blood again.”

“Tell me a story, then.”

Sylvia seemed startled by the harshness in her voice and the abrupt change of topic. “Very well, then. Which one? Ah, all right.” She cleared her throat. “Back in the days when wishes still held power, there was a girl with a redcloak—”

“Not that one. What about ‘The Bright Sun Brings All to Light’?”

Sylvia’s expression shuttered.

Feeling vindicated, Lorelei said, “What about ‘The Yeva in Thorns’?”

“I don’t want to tell those,” Sylvia said, almost too quietly to hear.

“And do you think I do? Do you know how many times, how many ways, I have heard stories like those? Those stories are who you are, just as much as your red-cloaked girl. I have transcribed them, illustrated them, and sent them to the publisher. I’ve done this to myself in the hope I might have a chance to do something good.”

For the first time in her life, Sylvia didn’t have anything to say. She looked utterly overwhelmed, as though she had not thought Lorelei capable of such passion. But Lorelei was too far gone to hold back now.

“I have no place in the Brunnestaad you’re building.” Her voice trembled. “We Yevani are rootless. We belong in the city, flourishing there like vermin. We’re nothing but a blight on this pastoral fantasy your silly little travelogues are helping create.Thatis why I despise you. We would never have been friends. Wewillnever be friends. There is no crossing this gulf between us.”

“I don’t hate you,” Sylvia whispered.

Somehow that of all things wrecked her. Raggedly, she whispered, “Liar.”

Sylvia smiled wanly. “I thought I was a terrible liar.”

Lorelei rolled onto her back again and let out a humorless note of laughter. “You say I know nothing of war, but I do. I’ve fought one for years. Death haunts me, and I don’t know how to banish it.”

“Death happens. There’s nothing you have done to invite it and nothing you can do to banish it.”

Lorelei stared up at the canvas roof of their tent. Branches scraped against it as the wind gnashed its teeth.

“I have found,” Sylvia continued tentatively, “that the only thing that closed those wounds was forgiving myself. I can’t bring them back, and neither can you. The only thing you can do now is live.”

Sylvia would never understand. When you were Yevanisch, you were alive for the dead as much as you were for the living.

Sylvia sighed quietly and turned onto her side. Back-to-back, Lorelei felt an ocean of distance filling the bare centimenters between them. She listened to the unevenness of Sylvia’s breathing, the whispering laughter of the eschenfrau in their trees.

Over and over again, she repeated to herself,I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. Like anincantation—likea fairytale—repetitionmight make it true.

In her dreams, she slipped into cold, dark waters. Her hair and her coat billowed behind her. Her lungs burned. And all around her, suspended, were the pale, haunted faces of the people she had abandoned in their final moments. The people whose souls she had damned to walk the earth forever, barred from the afterlife.

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