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“Why?”
“I—what?”
“It is a simple question, is it not? You are proposing to risk much for him.”
“He would do it for me.”
“Would he? They are self-serving creatures, demons—”
“You could say the same about humans—or gods.”
An eyebrow rose. “Perhaps. But we are not talking of them. But of a creature who is struggling against his very nature. Sooner or later, he will give in to it. Perhaps it is best if it is among his own kind.”
“They aren’t his kind! They’re—” I thought about the demons I knew, from the mostly benign to the frankly terrifying. None of which reminded me in the slightest of the man downstairs. “He’s human.”
“He is part human. It is his other half about which he has yet to learn.”
“I don’t think he wants to learn about it,” I said dryly. Pritkin had been pretty clear on that point.
“That is not his choice. We are who we are. All of us are governed by that, to some degree.”
“And all of us choose to what degree—except him. The choice was made for him. He was taken—”
“From you.”
“Yes.”
“And you resent it.”
“Yes!”
“Because he is yours.”
“Y—” I stopped, suddenly confused. Until I remembered: the gods had always taken humans as their servants, or playthings, or whatever, without a second’s thought. Before her epiphany, Mother probably had, too. But I wasn’t a god, and that wasn’t what had happened here. “No. He’s his own person—”
“Then should he not decide this for himself?”
“You don’t understand. He wasn’t given a chance—”
“But he was. To save you and be damned, or to let you die. He chose the former.”
“No! He—that wasn’t a choice! It was forced on him by . . . by his father, by circumstance, by—”
“By fate?”
“Yes—I guess.”
“And you wish now to remake his fate.”
“If you want to put it like—”
“Be sure,” she said, suddenly urgent. “Fate has many strings, Cassie, and when we pluck another’s, our own often resonates.”
Okay, I was beginning to think that maybe I wasn’t keeping up with this conversation. I was also starting to understand the problem people used to have with oracles. “In English?” I said hopefully.
“When you change someone else’s fate, it often changes your own.”
“For the better?” I asked, already knowing what the answer was going to be.
