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Somehow she looks more comfortable there with one leg tucked under her skirt and the other dangling casually, her hands set by her hips as she leans slightly back on them.
I’ve started to treasure moments like this—glimpses of the real Ivy who isn’t pretending noble airs and manners. The way she should always get to be.
It was so obvious from my very first glance when it wasn’t her moving her body at all, when Julita was molding Ivy’s shorter and wirier figure to the flirty poise that came so naturally to her in her own frame. It was like watching a contortionist manipulating someone else’s limbs, twisting them into shapes they weren’t meant to form, almost more horrifying for how subtle the shifts were.
Ivy let Julita’s ghost play with her body like it was a puppet forme. Because I bungled things so badly she thought I’d want that—that I cared more about getting time with Julita than having Ivy be Ivy.
It doesn’t matter whether she wants to kiss me again. If I can at least convince her of how much she matters to me—as she is, without needing to bend herself to anyone else’s whims—that will be more than enough.
I rest my hands on the top of one of the chairs. My fingers curl around the ornately carved wood, grounding me.
Where to start but at the beginning?
“I’ve told you a little about how I grew up,” I say.
Ivy nods. “Weapons merchant parents, brothers who joined the army, none of them appreciating how smart you are.”
The corner of my mouth kicks up at a bittersweet angle. “You might revise your opinion of my intelligence once I’m done.” I run one hand back through my hair, gathering myself. “I suppose you’re aware of the provincial schools some temples run?”
“You started your education at one of those?”
“Yes.” I suck in a breath. “There’s a temple of Estera that has a school a couple of towns over from where I grew up. When I turned thirteen—that’s the youngest they’ll let you enroll—I convinced my parents to let me travel there to apply for entrance. I think by that point they were glad to have me out of sight and out of mind. When I was accepted and came back to gather my things, they barely bothered with good-byes.”
“Better off without them,” Ivy mutters.
I can’t argue with her there.
“I thrived at the school,” I continue. “I quickly started earning top marks, and that only made me more eager to continue my success. The fact that I could achieve so much without any gift seemed to impress people even more. My teachers offered me exclusive opportunities, my classmates wanted to collaborate with me. I even had a few brief flirtations, as far as those ever go at that age.”
Ivy gives me a smile soft enough to tug at my heart. “You must have been pretty happy.”
I wish I could remember the happiness in all the vividness it must have had at the time. Every bright moment I think back on is soured by what came after.
I look down at the chair I’m still clutching. “I was. But then, about a year and a half after I began my education, a boy and his twin sister enrolled. They were late arrivals, around the same age as me, but right from the start, the teachers started fawning over him—they graded his work even higher than mine, let him in on the same opportunities.”
“It makes sense that you’d find that hard,” Ivy says.
“In some ways, maybe, but…” I grimace. “A lot of my frustration was pure prejudice. They were from a lower-class family—pig farmers, I think. At least a few steps down from most of us there and several from me. He’d made a dedication sacrifice, and it rankled me that he might only be besting me because of his gift. And he barely even seemed totry.He was always going off to play sports or cards or what have you rather than studying. Over the course of a few months, I convinced myself more and more that it simply wasn’t fair.”
Ivy is sharp enough to recognize where my story is going. Her voice comes out quiet. “What did you do?”
I push myself away from the chair, too restless in my discomfort to stand still. But pacing to the bookshelves and back doesn’t make me feel any better. It only reminds me of the long nights I spent poring over books on subjects that had nothing to do with my usual areas of scholarship, my eyes burning from concentration and my shoulders twinging from hours spent hunched.
“I told myself it was only right that I leveled the playing field. The strategy I came up with was to dose him with a botanical chemical that’s considered a ‘berserker’ drug—in a few countries in the past, it’s been used by warriors to fuel their ferocity and stamina in battle. At the proper quantity, it lowers your inhibitions and sparks your aggressive urges for a few hours. I thought he’d act out a little, insult some teachers and get in trouble, and people would stop seeing him as such a shining star.”
“I’m guessing it didn’t work out that way.”
“No.” A lump clogs my throat. “Neither botany nor chemistry are areas I’ve spent much time delving into, and less so then than now. I don’t know… Either there was something about him that altered the effect, an extra sensitivity, or I gave him too high a dose. He went on a violent rampage, stabbed a classmate, punched a few teachers who tried to subdue him… and he never fully recovered. His temper remained frayed; he couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork. They had to expel him. I ruined his entire life.”
My voice has gotten rough by the end. Ivy sits silently, absorbing my words.
I keep going before she feels the need to comment. “Obviously I felt horrible. But not horrible enough to confess what I’d done, because I felt even more horrible about the idea of getting expelled myself. Still so fucking selfish… But my rival’s sister did have an interest in chemistry and suspected what I’d done. She brewed a potion meant to test my guilt—it would only burn a person’s skin if they were guilty of whatever the person applying it accused them of.”
Somehow, after everything I’ve told her, Ivy still winces in apparent sympathy as the implications must sink in. “She threw it in your face?”
At the memory of the searing pain and the acrid smell that flooded my lungs, I have to suppress a shudder. “Yes. In the middle of the dining hall at lunch time, yelling what she thought I’d done so everyone would see and hear. And the proof showed plainly. I’m lucky I flinched to the side and jerked up my arm, or the stuff would have splattered my eyes andeverybit of my face.”
“Couldn’t the medics do anything about it?”
