To hide what it looked like to see him sob, she thought. Though she didn’t know why. The sound he made broke through just fine. It made her think of something being wrenched out of a person. A hoarse and brutal thing, that hit her so hard she felt her eyes sting.
She almost swiped at them, before he could see.
Then she remembered. She didn’t have to do things like that anymore.
He wouldn’t mock her for it. He’d never even meant the mocking he’d done. It had all just been an act, a show, and now it was over. And he was simply this. “I’m sorry,” he blurted out, from around that hand. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do this. I didn’t mean to drag you back to this hell. I thought it was just a myth, an old ordinary human tale, something to scare their children with. If you do this, a witch will return from the grave and come knocking at your door. But I should have known.”
“You should have known what?”
“That the soul of a witch never dies. And so, if you call out her name enough times...” he said, trailing away into something he obviously found endlessly dark and awful. Even though she knew the end. She remembered it from her childhood, and her one much loved book full of fairy tales.
The picture in the middle, of the girl falling from the tower.
The bell of her dress, billowing up. Her prince with his hand reaching for her.
Then the last page, with her in his arms, once more.
“She will come back to you,” she whispered.
And now he looked at her. Begging for understanding.
“Yes. Yes. But IswearI never intended it.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“It was an accident.”
“I can see that.”
“Buthowcan you?”
She thought of her version of the story.
The one she’d drawn in her notebook, as a kid, of the prince being the one to fall.
“Because if you were gone, I would cry out for you all the time, too,” she said, voice so thick with longing and unshed tears that every word came out strained. They split down the middle. She wasn’t even sure he would understand her.
But as soon as he abruptly stood, she knew he had.
“For god’s sake, Mina, you shouldwantme away from you. Can you not at least see that now? Surely even you, who endured every misery I could throw at you and came back for seconds, can grasp that actually killing you is enough to want me gone? Or to be gone from me? You shouldloatheme,” he said, so furious suddenly it should have been scary.
But of course she knew why that fury was there.
“How can I, when I know why you did all of it now? Like trying to force me to leave, repeatedly. Oh, that was horrible indeed. I hated you so much for doing it, I really did. Suggesting I didn’t belong, mocking me for doing the wrong things, and going to the wrong places, and terrorizing me with tall tales of what would happen to me if I would stay,” she said and knew he would seize on it.
He had spent too long doing it to stop using it as a prop.
“Yes. Precisely. I was hideous.”
“You were. But you see, now I can understand every bit of the motivations behind it. I can grasp each step you tried to take. And the first one was targeting insecurities you knew I had, to make sure I didn’t stay in a place I wasn’t safe.”
There, she thought.Get out of that one.
And it did seem to take him a second. He jolted on the last word, then simply stood there, flummoxed. Thrown, she thought, by the fact that she’d guessed. Before something seemed to click behind his gaze, and a brand-new argument jumped to the tip of his tongue.
“Does that somehow make it anything other than cruel?”
“Of course it does. Because now I can see every single way you couldn’tstandto carry on. Like when you saw how much it hurt me in the hall of headmasters, and changed tactics there and then. Instead of insisting that I should go, you started doing things to help me stay. Like sending me back to the beginning of the maze, so I wouldn’t end up in some terrifying tier I couldn’t cope with.”
