“I want you to tell me how you wound up at the Coventry, how you got out of Saxun,” I say. The words jumble into one long exhalation.
“Why?” he prompts, seeming to disappear from the conversation. I know he’s upset. Erik distances himself, asking questions, when he feels cornered.
“I need you to tell me the truth,” I say in a quiet voice. He’ll vanish entirely if I push too hard.
“I can’t,” Erik says.
“Why? I promise it won’t change anything.”
Erik turns from me and stares up at the glittering ceiling. His arms spread wide against the the lip of the pool, revealing the sharp sinews of his upper body, built by years of handling fishing boats. “You can’t promise that. It will change things between us, Adelice. There are things in my past that I’m not proud of—”
“You think I don’t have regrets, too?” I ask. “My father was murdered. My mom is a monster. My sister is in Cormac’s clutches as we speak. And that all happened before I got to the Coventry and started messing things up.”
“This is different. Those things happened
“You aren’t going to tell me?” I ask. I swish my feet through the water, watching the bubbles swirl around my toes. I know what he’s hiding, and he has to know that, too. He sees right through my feigned interest. He knows I want to catch him. If Dante’s theory is correct, Erik’s secret breaches our trust completely. If he could be honest now, we can rebuild it.
But he doesn’t want to.
Neither of us speaks, the silence extending so long that my toes shrivel and pucker in the water. “I know.”
“Know what?” Erik asks casually.
“I know that you can see the strands. I know that you can touch them.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Erik says.
“No, I
“I can’t take it back once I tell you, Ad,” he whispers finally.
“I know that, but I need to hear the truth from you.” My voice is a plea, cracking from the pressure of my warring emotions. “Right now I’m betting my imagination is making things worse than they are.”
“I doubt it.” Erik scratches the top of his head and pushes out of the pool so he’s sitting next to me. Our feet dangle under the surface of the water, dangerously close to each other.
“I left Saxun to pursue a career with the Guild,” Erik begins, and I nod to show him I’m listening, that I care about whatever part of his story he’s willing to share—as long as there are answers at the end of it.
“I wasn’t cut out for fishing.”
“The pretty ones never are,” I joke, trying to lighten the mood. Erik gives me a small smile but his face stays serious. “What I’ve never understood is how. How did you get the Guild’s attention?”
“I gambled,” he said. “They brought a friend of mine into service, which is pretty rare, and when they came to Saxun, I approached a Guild official and told him I had something they wanted.”
“Risky,” I comment. “What was it?”
Erik takes a deep breath and speaks slowly. This is what he wants to avoid talking about.
“I showed them I could alter,” he admits.
Somewhere deep down I had known Dante was right, even if he hadn’t tied it up in a neat bow for me. He’d told me to keep Tailors at arm’s length, and I knew he was talking about Erik, but I didn’t want to believe it.
“You’re a Tailor?” I murmur in a voice so low that I’m not sure Erik can even hear me.
“I am,” Erik says.
My hand flies up and slaps him hard across the cheek before I even consider what I’m doing. “How could you keep that from me?”
“How was I supposed to tell you?” Erik says, rubbing the splotch of red left by my hand.
“It’s pretty easy actually,” I say, dropping my voice to mimic his deeper one. “Adelice, I can manipulate strands like you.”
I know it’s not that easy, but I wish it were.
“I wanted to tell you, but you don’t know everything about Tailors. Do you know what they do to us?” he asks.
Dante told me what they do to Tailors. They take them away like Spinsters, but Tailors are controlled even more tightly. The Guild wipes out their families systematically. They imprison them and ask them to do things to people—take away their memories, alter their feelings and personalities—I can’t even imagine what else.
“I wanted out of Saxun,” he says. “Doing alterations was my ticket. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
“Does Jost know?” I ask.
“No,” Erik says quickly. “Ad, aside from other officials and my best friend, Alix, from Saxun, you’re the only person who knows.”
“Not even Maela?”
“You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”
“How did you even discover you could do it?” I ask.
“We don’t have to trade stories about our first time,” he says. “Like so many first experiences, it was an accident. I have no reason to believe the Guild would ever have known about me if I hadn’t approached them. I thought Alix might tell them, but I couldn’t spend my life in Saxun, especially once Alix was gone.”
“So you left and did whatever they told you to do?” I ask. I’m making it sound more dramatic than it was, but the betrayal is still raw, each new revelation stinging the tender, damaged skin of our relationship. Even worse, I know I’m judging him.
“I left without saying goodbye,” Erik says. “I was young and careless, and it never occurred to me that I might not see my family again. Saxun didn’t have a lot of Spinsters, let alone Tailors. There was no one there to guide me, to explain my skill to me. I thought I was special.”
“You thought you would be worth something to them?” I guess.
Erik nods, a far-off look settling over his face. “I thought I would be somebody. Now I know the best thing I ever did for my family was to leave them like I did.”
“They didn’t go after your family because you volunteered?” I ask.
“Alix helped me get access to a grey market Tailor. New privilege card, new last name—no questions,” he says. “They didn’t go after my family because they didn’t know about them.”
“That’s your face though, right?”
“Changed the name, kept the sexy,” he says.
“Why bother?” I say.
“I didn’t want my family to know where I went,” he says. “I was scared that the Guild would reject me if they knew I was the son of a fisherman.” A dark look passes over his face. “I was being a complete jerk, but it may be the only reason Jost is alive today.”
“I doubt he’d see it that way,” I say. Erik left his family without concern over how they would feel, and his recklessness saved them. The night of my retrieval I only thought of my family and me. I was too selfish to warn them, and I destroyed them. Funny how selfishness comes in shades of destruction and salvation.
“He doesn’t,” Erik admits. “Why do you think he hates me?”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
“He doesn’t like me,” Erik says.
I can’t argue with that.
“You need to tell him,” I say, grabbing Erik’s hand. “He’ll understand.”
“No,” Erik barks. He clutches my hand so tightly my nerves gasp in pain. “Promise me you won’t tell him— that you won’t tell anyone.”
“I promise,” I say, and he releases my hand. “But I still think you should tell him.”
“You don’t know Jost like I do,” Erik says, but the second the words leave his lips, he sighs.
