… A beautiful blond boy, maybe twelve, sitting on a brick wall. My dad makes me go back. He’s seen that Elias had his head on my shoulder when he picked me up after lessons, and he tells me I have to go back and punch the sissy in the nose. I don’t want my dad to know I’m like Elias. I walk back. My throat feels tight, but I hit him.
You don’t have to show me anything you don’t want to, Caleb.
… The sachem walks across the room quickly. The meeting is over. The sachem stops and holds his hand out to me. He says I’ve grown. The way he says it makes me laugh. I’m as big as two of him, and I’m not even fifteen. Elias sees the sachem notice me. I’m so proud. Someday Elias will notice me again, too. He’ll forgive me for what I did. Forgive me, Elias.
I wasn’t there for him, Lily.
… Elias lies in the alley. He’s not moving. They tried to take him to get to me, to make me submit. Help me, Rowan. There are too many of them.
I’m so sorry, Caleb.
It’s happened to both of us, you know.
… Rowan is bucking and screaming. I try to hold him back, try to pull him away through the crowd. Curses fling out of him, every one of them for Lillian, standing stock-still on the scaffolding next to the hanged body of his father. River Fall is dead. Rowan’s voice shreds through the silence of the crowd as he screams how much he hates her. None of it will bring his father back, but his vows to kill Lillian with his bare hands might just get him the noose, too. Tristan comes. Together, we drag Rowan away. I’m scared he’s going to hurt himself, so I don’t leave him all night, even though he struggles to get away. But no matter how hard I hold him down as he sobs, I know it won’t hold together everything that’s broken in him.
Lily dropped Caleb’s stone as if it had burned her. She looked over at Rowan.
“Hey!” Rowan exclaimed, stepping forward to catch Caleb as he fainted. Lily put up her hands just in time, and together, she and Rowan guided Caleb’s slack body to the floor. “You can’t just tear yourself away from that kind of deep contact with someone, Lily.”
“I didn’t know,” she said, avoiding his eyes. She couldn’t look at him. “I didn’t know,” she repeated, seeing a black-haired man dangling lifeless from the end of a rope.
* * *
Lily and Caleb sat next to each other on the floor of the kitchen. Caleb didn’t want to be healed, he just wanted to sit in the dark with his back up against the refrigerator for a while. There was a lamp on in the next room, sending cutouts of light and shadow through the legs of the kitchen table and chairs toward them. Neither felt like getting up and joining the others.
“They need us to love other people,” Caleb said, breaking the long silence.
“Who are they?” Lily asked quietly.
“The Citadel—the Council, the Covens, Lillian and her army. And I almost allowed myself to be a part of it.” Caleb shook his head bitterly. “You know I was accepted as a mechanic when I was seven and given citizenship? When I was eleven, I dropped out. I didn’t want to be claimed and become a puppet. A witch’s fist. That’s what we Outlanders call mechanics.” Caleb glanced at Lily, smiling sadly. “The Citadel needs another way to control people like me. Lillian needs our permission in order to take over our willstones and rummage through our minds until she get names out of us. So she finds out who we love the most and hurts them until we submit. At least, Elias didn’t have to go through that.”
“No, he didn’t,” Lily said, squeezing Caleb’s hand. “Is that what happened with Rowan and his father?”
“That was different.” Caleb looked at Lily. “Did you know he was a doctor?” Lily nodded and Caleb continued. “River Fall was in my father’s tribe. That’s how Rowan and I know each other. We’ve always been friends, even after I left the Citadel and returned to my people. Everyone respected River Fall. Loved him, even. Lillian didn’t have to kill him. He wasn’t a rebel. All he wanted to do was help sick people who couldn’t afford a witch’s magic. But when she outlawed being a doctor, she went after River first.”
“Why?” Lily asked. She remembered the elders’ bowed heads at even the mention of River Fall. “Why him first when so many loved him?”
“To make her point,” Caleb said. “She did it so everyone in the Thirteen Cities would know that no one, not even the father of the person she loved most in the world, would be spared. And for the most part, it worked,” he said with a sad shrug that rolled his gigantic shoulders. “When people heard that she’d hanged River Fall, everyone in the Thirteen Cities fell in line. The other Covens, the Council, everyone.”
“In line?”
“With her doctrine. No science. No research. No inquiry. Witchcraft is the one true way.” Caleb laughed bitterly. “In a way, killing River Fall was the dumbest thing Lillian ever did. It left a lot of people with no choice but to join Alaric. All the Outlander tribes, city-bred teachers and doctors, and a lot of people who were just plain angry or scared, came from all over to pledge their lives to Alaric’s cause. Including Rowan, Tristan, and me.”
“Is that when the three of you touched stones?” Lily guessed.
“Right after Rowan had bonded with his second stone,” he said, nodding. “We became stone kin that night.”
Lily’s mind was still entangled with Caleb’s from their claiming ceremony, and she caught glimpses of Tristan and Rowan from over the past year. Tristan and Caleb had worked hard to keep Rowan from falling to pieces after losing his father and Lillian, and they were there for him when he smashed his first stone. Lily saw a skinny body sweating under a sheet as Rowan wasted away for weeks in agony. She saw Tristan helping Caleb as the two of them brought Rowan back to health slowly, lovingly. Like true brothers.
That time together had brought the three of them together quickly. Lily had always known the bond between the three men was strong, but now she understood just how strong. They would die for each other. And they had grown that close because of what Lillian had done to Rowan.
“How can Rowan think I’m anything like Lillian?” Lily asked. “She’s evil.”
Caleb’s eyes narrowed in thought. “You have her strength of mind, Lily. When you believe in something, you follow through, whatever it takes. He loves that about you. And it scares him to pieces.”
Lily rubbed Caleb’s meaty hand in hers and let her head tilt back and rest against the refrigerator, thinking about why Lillian had chosen her out of the infinite number of versions of them available. She decided that there was one thing Lillian must not have considered—that strength of mind works both ways. If Lillian would do anything to follow through with her beliefs, so would Lily. And what Lily believed now was that Lillian had to be stopped.
“She’s dying, Caleb. I’m sorry it wasn’t in time to save Elias.” Lily’s throat caught as one of Caleb’s memories of Elias, laughing on a summer day by a lake, flashed through her mind. Elias. He shone like the sun. Losing him cut into Lily as if she’d loved him her whole life. As Caleb had. “But trust me. It’ll be over soon.”