was, that anyone else would see it as.
“Fear sits on many thrones,” I said, looking at him. “It is crowned king over and over again. The greatest tyrant you will ever know in this life.”
“Do you have a throne in the city, too?” he asked, and I sensed a mocking tone in his voice. The implication was, seemingly, that I was a fool to claim peace could be made with that. That I had mastered any of it. If I thought that, I was clearly delusional.
“Anything can be a throne.”
He shook his head. “To claim that any of that death-heap is a throne to be sat upon is an insult to those destroyed by it.”
Do not talk insults with me, Tanen of Cathwade.
Yet, of course, his perspective was one of decency. I granted him that.
Until I remembered that he would not say the same thing if darkskins had been the majority of the casualties.
After all, I may sit on a throne and make the best of the world that I lived in, but I would never watch from a window while children were being mauled.
I told myself: That wasn't real, Vant.
But it was real to me. It was not born of nothing. I'd seen the pattern of this man's thoughts.
His decency was one-sided.
As for me, the fact that I had perhaps become two-sided did not occur to me. The seeds had been planted in me. Tanen could not help it; every time the tree that was his person grew, it was irrevocably born of the roots that I had already named. Quick-spawning roots that tore up the pavement of their groundwork before I could walk down that road.
But that's how things went in Dar'on. Pavement buckled, and roads were never traveled the way they were meant to be.
Thus was born a forest of obstruction around the person that was Tanen of Cathwade. And since I was not entirely malicious, I would never take an ax to those trees, regardless of how I wanted to be.
No. I would have to discover Tanen's true colors another way.
S I x t e e n –
The Ravine
One thing was certain, I decided as I looked in the mirror before departing for my next trek into the city – I was no longer an Albino. Of course, I never started as one. It was a transformation that took place as the day went. But now, not even the thick powder of the city could override the vibrancy of my cuts and bruises. I was a smattering of blacks, blues, and crimson stripes.
“Tanen will go, minda,” Letta tried to convince me. She was recovered from her fever now, and only plagued by turmoil in her throat and lungs.
“Like the gates of hell, Tanen will go.”
“I've wrapped his hands from the glass. He is in far better shape than you. Please, Vant, let him take your place today.”
“Hasn't he already done enough, saving my life?” Take my place? I don't know why, but those words lodged. Like swallowing something sharp, they went down slowly, and, inwardly, I hunched.
“We would not want to see that wasted by sending you to your death because you are in no shape to handle yourself in the city.”
“He doesn't need to go.”
“Neither do you. And he's the better choice of the two of you.”
“I'll be fine.”
“You aren't fine. You are alive. Breathing. Not 'fine'.”
“As long as I'm alive and breathing, I can do my job.”
There was a blur of motion and the plunking of footsteps, then, and the next thing I knew I had been wrestled to the ground by a mass resembling Tanen Nysim and sat upon.
My first reaction: confusion.
My second: resistance. It was little use, though.
I was on my back, but my hips and legs twisted onto their side. Tanen had himself a seat on my hip, which saw the other one digging into the floor. It precisely upset one of my worse bruises. I wriggled in protest, trying to get my wits about me to voice a more vehement objection, but Letta was already objecting.
“Tanen Nysim!” she scolded, but in a tone that blamed it as being unnecessary, rather than anything truly unacceptable.
“You can't do your job,” Tanen countered my claim.
I had dreams of snapping him in two with a flick of the legs that he sat on, proving him wrong, but my crushed bruises would not allow my nerves more than a twitch. They were seared.
He stood, freeing me, but his point was made. “Or is the floor