Evil Twin

His reaction was not at all that she expected. Rather than angrily defending Sapphira—as he had when her father had insulted her—Bane grinned. “She is still latched to your mother’s teat?”

“Her blood likely runs red,” Echo had to admit, “but there is not a thought in her head that my parents did not put there. It is a different sort of suckling dependence.”

“And she is nice but not kind? Tell me the difference.”

So he could mount a defense of her twin’s character? Echo had no wish to hear it. “I don’t want to speak of Sapphira any longer.”

“We’re not speaking of her. We are speaking of the difference between nice and kind.”

Frustration clipped her voice. “It is simple. Both ask that you treat people well. But kindness is done out of respect for others, and requires that someone does what is right. Niceness is done for the comfort of oneself, and lets someone do what is easy.”

“That’s not simple. Explain.”

So they’d speak of Sapphira after all. “My sister is only nice for her own sake, so that the people she meets are impressed by her sweetness and she can claim that she treats everyone well—not because she truly cares about how that person feels, but so that when they speak of her, they say good things. She would let atrocities pass by uncriticized so that even a monster might think well of her. If Geofry the Child-Eater were still alive, she would be nice to him.”

“She would not be merely polite to him out of fear?”

“No. She is welcoming to everyone so that people can say she is fair. So they can say that she treats everyone the same no matter who they are or what they’ve done. But a welcome shows respect—and at times, we might have to tolerate the presence of people who we cannot respect but we don’t have to welcome them. And if she invited someone who suffered under the Child-Eater’s rule into the same room with him, she would be nice to that person as well—never understanding that her welcoming that tyrant with a smile must be so incredibly hurtful and disrespectful to the person he’d tortured.” She drew a deep breath, calming her tone. “And the very worst thing for her would be if someone pointed out the harm she’d done. Not because Sapphira would actually care the person was harmed, of course—and she wouldn’t change whatever her behavior was that caused the harm. No, the horror would be that someone said she’d done something harmful. So instead she would defend herself by reminding her accuser of how nice she always was, so she couldn’t possibly be in the wrong.”

“You were often that accuser?”

She shrugged. For all the good it did. Sapphira called her mean and evil and then went on being the same nice person that she’d always been.

“You said nice is easier than being kind, too.”

He’d truly listened? “Of course it’s easier to be nice, and to let cruelty pass by unchallenged. It is easier to smile at everyone than to take someone to task for harmful behavior or to enforce consequences for their behavior.”

“But for someone to be kind, they must expose what is cruel—and refuse to let the abuse continue,” he said with deliberation, apparently following what she’d said of niceness to its logical conclusion. “In the face of suffering, someone who is truly kind must take sides.”

He understood, then. But of course he did. Never would General Bane leave cruelty unchallenged.

“Just so,” she said quietly.

“Your sister did not take your side. But she was also not nice to you.”

“Yes, well—Sapphira’s niceness ends where a threat to her position and her own comfort begins. And I am a threat to that, I admit. But beyond that, my evil nature means nothing to her—except that the comparison puts her in a better light, and she can bolster herself by claiming to protect others from my scheming. ‘Oh, the poor guards! What have you done to them, you cursed slut?’” She mocked Sapphira’s reaction of the night before. “But she will never seek out the guards or discover for herself how they fare, because she doesn’t truly care about them. She only asked because you and your brother were in the room with us, and so that her audience would believe she cared. And she did it for the same reason that she is nice to begin with: she wants people to think well of her. Did you check on the guards?”

“I did.”

Echo knew he would. “And they were not harmed.”

“The worst they seemed to suffer was embarrassment,” Bane agreed, his lips twitching—perhaps he’d heard one of them bleat. “And what of you, my queen? Are you nice?”

“I care little of what people think of me. So I am not.”

“Are you kind, then?”