goddamned right I will,” I said, because the empirical evidence was pretty tough to dispute. “But if I was as hard-core as you think I am, you wouldn’t be walking off this island with your own mind. And maybe not at all.”
Lara narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean by that?”
I threw up my hands. “Hell’s bells, Lara. Look, if I wanted to do something bad to you, I could right now. You’re standing in the wrong place, I have the advantage, and if I wanted to wreak some manner of skullduggery upon you, you aren’t in a position to stop me from doing it.”
Words could not be more rigid than the ones she spoke. “I am aware.”
“No!” I said. “That’s not … Augh! Look, I’m not saying that because I’m trying to leverage you. I’m pointing out that I can do it, but I’m not going to because it’s just … dickish. And I try to avoid acting like that whenever I can.”
Lara frowned. “What?”
“Look, I know you play the game real hard,” I said. “That’s in your nature. But you also understand family.”
She tilted her head, frowning. “What do you mean by that?”
“That Thomas is my family, too,” I said. “I won’t do anything to knowingly harm him. Um, again. And if he needs me, I’ll be there for him.”
“And,” Lara murmured thoughtfully, “I suppose if anything happens to you, terrible things happen to my brother.”
“Not terrible,” I said. “ Just … nothing.” Unless the next Warden decided to free him. I hadn’t yet finished reviewing the inmates of the island. The filing system of the island, such as it was, was a psychic one. Reviewing the inmates meant reviewing the inmates. The first half dozen or so had left me with nightmares for a couple of weeks, and there’s only so much masochism I can keep all to myself.
“He’s trapped there forever,” Lara said.
“No. He’s safe there until we can find a way to cure him,” I said.
She regarded me with flat eyes. “And as a happy side effect, if I wish to protect his life, now I must invest resources in protecting yours.”
That hadn’t been what I’d been planning at all.
And yet … by Lara’s standards, that’s exactly what I’d done.
There is plenty of daylight between intentions and results. Intentions are fine things, but they don’t stanch bleeding or remove scars.
Or heal broken brothers.
Man. I hadn’t planned it like that.
Had I?
Maybe I’d been hanging around Mab too much.
“Lara,” I said tiredly, “I’ll grant you, yes, that’s how things stand. We can talk all night about how they got there. But I swear to you, I didn’t do it to try to get a handle on you. Of every person you have had to deal with, which of them has tried harder to avoid even touching your … handles?”
She stared at me with that unreadable expression for a good minute. Then she said, “Empty Night, wizard. Either you’re sincere, in which case”—she shook her head, baffled—“I feel I do not understand you very well at all. Or you’re a person capable of using even your brother’s misfortune and possible death to secure gain for yourself while simultaneously cladding your actions in such moral armor as to make them practically unassailable. In which case, I suppose … I admire your skill in arranging matters.”
“I figure you can look at this two ways,” I said.
She arched an eyebrow.
“You can write this down in your little black book and remember it,” I said, “because I took a cheap shot at you when you needed help, when you earned it, and when you came to ask for it, you deserved getting it. And instead, I leveraged you.”
“That is one way to look at it,” Lara concurred.
“Or,” I said, “you can take it as a bit of circumstance that happened because circumstances are bugnuts, absolutely insane, and you and I do not have reasonable jobs for sane and rational people. Both of us are making it up as we go along, as best we know how. Both of us look for the knives coming at our backs, and both of us take action to prevent them. That includes being suspicious-minded enough to take out a little insurance even when you aren’t consciously thinking about doing so.”
Something like grudging understanding tinged her gaze for a second. She let out a soft snort through her nose.
“So,” she said. “You agree with the old man. And decided to be a very clever frog with this