Page 25 of Chaos and Crowns

“I’m…so sorry,” Odelle murmured.

Antony jerked his gaze away from the fire to stare at Odelle in puzzlement.

“For what?”

“For the plan going wrong. I— I threw the crown back to the Shadows, and now they have it, and we’re stuck out here in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.” Odelle couldn’t help the bitterness of her tone, so angry at herself that her words tasted acrid in her mouth.

“Odelle…”

The softness of Antony’s tone, the way he shaped the word with his mouth so gently made Odelle’s chest squeeze even more painfully. He was coddling her—he thought her so incapable that he didn’t even want to confront her with her own failures.

“You saved my life.”

Odelle’s head snapped up. Of all the platitudes she had braced herself for from Antony, that wasn’t one of them.

“That Shadow had me at its mercy. If you hadn’t thought quick enough to get it away from me using the crown, I’d be dead.”

Odelle frowned. She doubted that a sorcerer like Antony wouldn’t have been able to dislodge the creature. Still, her chest lightened.

“The Shadows have the crown now. It’s exactly what we were trying to prevent.”

Antony shook his head, the expression on his face combined with the shadows cast by the flickering light of the fire making him look tired again.

“Your plan was the only reason we had a shot at all. And the only reason it didn’t work was because I didn’t realize the crown was already controlled by the Shadow.” Antony scrubbed a hand over his face, the gesture speaking more to emotional fatigue than physical. “That would be why the Shadows hadn’t tried to steal it from the Whitehalls. They gained control of it by warping its power. Corrupting Mrs. Whitehall.”

“Corrupting her? How?”

Antony let out a sigh that spoke volumes to how heavily two-thousand years of life could weigh on a person. “My guess is that it distorted the crown’s power, pulling it back into amplifying traits and pushing it too far. It could intensify her best traits so far that they became her worst, consuming her identity entirely and turning her into a vessel of negativity, ripe for the Shadow to control. It would be easy for the Shadow to do, considering the crown already contained Light.”

“Wouldn’t the Light make it harder for the Shadow to corrupt the crown?” Odelle latched on to the less disturbing part of Antony’s words, not wanting to focus on what the Shadow did to those it corrupted.

“The Shadow can’t exist without Light coming first,” Antony explained. “I suppose it’s the great duality of the Eteria’s existence. Celebrating the Light, the powers of all that is good and positive in the world, it’s how we keep the Shadow at bay. But just like our best traits can be our worst traits, the Light is the origin of all Shadow, as love is the precursor to grief. Káthe fos ríchnei mia skiá. The motto of the Eteria: Every light casts a Shadow.”

Odelle hugged her arms around her torso and frowned. “If the Light creates the Shadow, then where did the Light come from?”

“Where do love and joy come from?” Antony shrugged. “Wherever there is life, there is Light. An unshakeable truth of the universe. And so it also brings Shadow, the two constantly entwined in an eternal dance that defines the experiences of all living things.”

Antony gazed at the fire, but Odelle got the impression he didn’t really see it.

“How long do you think Mrs. Whitehall was corrupted?” Odelle asked to draw Antony away from whatever deep pool of thought he had fallen into. “She was incredibly rude the first time I met her, but I don’t know if that could have come from a good trait.”

“Maybe she was very honest, and it turned into saying things without even considering their effects.” Antony shrugged. “But she must have been corrupted for quite a while. She was very far gone. I’m not sure any of her original essence was left in her body.”

“That’s why she—” Odelle cut off abruptly. For the first time since jumping out of the gallery window, she thought about the fact that Mr. Whitehall was dead. Odelle hadn’t thought it so plainly in all the shock of being stranded. But it was true. Mrs. Whitehall had murdered him. One second, he was alive and trying to protect her; the next he was crumpled to the ground, an inanimate object. She should have been concerned that she and her companions would be blamed for the murder, considering their fingerprints would be all over the scene, but her brain fixated instead on the sick crack of his spine as it snapped.

Bile burned in the back of Odelle’s throat. She barely turned around fast enough to not be sick on her coat as her stomach emptied itself. As she choked and sputtered on acid, a pair of cool hands rested on her head, pulling her hair back from her face. If her eyes hadn’t already watered from the burning in her chest, they would have from embarrassment.

When the heaving subsided, Odelle slumped back once more. She grabbed a handful of snow to scrub the crust from her lips. She couldn’t quite bring herself to meet Antony’s eyes, but she found herself equally unable to not look at him at all.

“I vomited the first time I saw somebody killed too…and the second.”

“But after that it got better?” Odelle questioned.

“It never gets any easier. I just stayed away from battles,” Antony looked away as he responded, as if this were a fact he was ashamed of. Odelle was struck by the urge to pat his shoulder in comfort, but she didn’t know that it would be welcome. Instead, she tucked her hands under her armpits to warm them.

“Did a lot of other people vomit too? You certainly seem to have experience holding back the hair of puking girls, and I know you didn’t get it at college frat parties.” Odelle forced herself to joke, needing to do something to distract herself from what had been one of the heaviest conversations of her life.

“Worse actually, I gained my wonderful experience of holding back hair with Thad.” Antony leaned in conspiratorially, seeming to sense the need for some levity. “When he was in his two hundreds? Total party animal. Went out and worshipped Dionysus more nights than not.”