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“This is different. Those things happened to you, Ad.” Erik hesitates, pausing to look at me for a fleeting moment before he turns away again. “The things in my past—they’re choices I made. I can’t blame anyone else for them.”
“You aren’t going to tell me?” I ask. I swish my feet through the water, watching the bubbles swirl around my toes. I know what he’s hiding, and he has to know that, too. He sees right through my feigned interest. He knows I want to catch him. If Dante’s theory is correct, Erik’s secret breaches our trust completely. If he could be honest now, we can rebuild it.
But he doesn’t want to.
Neither of us speaks, the silence extending so long that my toes shrivel and pucker in the water. “I know.”
“Know what?” Erik asks casually.
“I know that you can see the strands. I know that you can touch them.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Erik says.
“No, I know it does, and I’m hoping you respect me enough to tell me what it means.” I wait for him to rise to my challenge, but he stays silent.
“I can’t take it back once I tell you, Ad,” he whispers finally.
“I know that, but I need to hear the truth from you.” My voice is a plea, cracking from the pressure of my warring emotions. “Right now I’m betting my imagination is making things worse than they are.”
“I doubt it.” Erik scratches the top of his head and pushes out of the pool so he’s sitting next to me. Our feet dangle under the surface of the water, dangerously close to each other.
“I left Saxun to pursue a career with the Guild,” Erik begins, and I nod to show him I’m listening, that I care about whatever part of his story he’s willing to share—as long as there are answers at the end of it.
“I wasn’t cut out for fishing.”
“The pretty ones never are,” I joke, trying to lighten the mood. Erik gives me a small smile but his face stays serious. “What I’ve never understood is how. How did you get the Guild’s attention?”
“I gambled,” he said. “They brought a friend of mine into service, which is pretty rare, and when they came to Saxun, I approached a Guild official and told him I had something they wanted.”
“Risky,” I comment. “What was it?”
Erik takes a deep breath and speaks slowly. This is what he wants to avoid talking about.
“I showed them I could alter,” he admits.
Somewhere deep down I had known Dante was right, even if he hadn’t tied it up in a neat bow for me. He’d told me to keep Tailors at arm’s length, and I knew he was talking about Erik, but I didn’t want to believe it.
“You’re a Tailor?” I murmur in a voice so low that I’m not sure Erik can even hear me.
“I am,” Erik says.
My hand flies up and slaps him hard across the cheek before I even consider what I’m doing. “How could you keep that from me?”
“How was I supposed to tell you?” Erik says, rubbing the splotch of red left by my hand.
“It’s pretty easy actually,” I say, dropping my voice to mimic his deeper one. “Adelice, I can manipulate strands like you.”
I know it’s not that easy, but I wish it were.
“I wanted to tell you, but you don’t know everything about Tailors. Do you know what they do to us?” he asks.
Dante told me what they do to Tailors. They take them away like Spinsters, but Tailors are controlled even more tightly. The Guild wipes out their families systematically. They imprison them and ask them to do things to people—take away their memories, alter their feelings and personalities—I can’t even imagine what else.
“I wanted out of Saxun,” he says. “Doing alterations was my ticket. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
“Does Jost know?” I ask.
“No,” Erik says quickly. “Ad, aside from other officials and my best friend, Alix, from Saxun, you’re the only person who knows.”
