Sabre de Valois stared at him, face pale as a sheet, hand clenched tight around Eli’s.
What are you missing?
Eli took a step back, but Sabre held on. “Wait. Don’t run, please.”
Eli twisted to look for Rey, but the crowd had closed in around him and Sabre, trapping them together. He was shaking. What aspect of the Harvest Mother had done this?
“Please,” Sabre said again. “I’m not here to take you back to Duciel. I just want to know who you are.”
Names had power. Eli could feel it, like magic building within him. If he told Sabre, that meant Sabre’s life would be turned on its head, and for what? For a brother who betrayed him on impulse, desperate for his mother’s approval? He must alreadysuspect. Perhaps Emile and Isiodore hadn’t told him, but he wouldn’t have searched for Eli if he was just some strange fellow who’d whipped Olivier in a duel and gotten on the former king’s bad side.
Still, there was a difference between suspecting and knowing.
Maybe the Harvest Mother was right. Maybe Eli was missing something, but plenty of people went around with empty parts of themselves rattling around. Sabre had already grieved the sibling he thought he had. He didn’t need the real one ruining his life a second time.
“I can’t,” Eli said. Sabre’s face fell, and Eli rocked forward, unable to bring himself to move close enough to comfort him. “I’m sorry. I’m…cursed. I know that sounds like a lie, but I am. That’s why I came to Duciel. I thought you might be the one to break it, but I was wrong, and now I’ve dragged you into a mess you shouldn’t be a part of. You should go home.”
“Cursed?” Sabre pushed his hair out of his eyes. Eli remembered how their mother was constantly telling him to “put that mess away,” and wondered if Sabre kept the style simple just to spite her. But no, he wouldn’t. Eli was the spiteful one.
“It’s a long story,” Eli said, “but I’ll handle it.”
“How old are you?” Sabre asked. Eli bit his cheek. That was dangerous, too. “You’re too young to handle it, if you don’t mind my saying so. I was older than you when I was sentenced to the pleasure houses, and I certainly couldn’t have handled it on my own.”
“I’m not alone. Spirits, don’t be so stubborn.” Dancers moved around them, forming lines, weaving around Eli and Sabre as though they were just a stone in a stream.
“Stubborn? You’re the one rejecting my help. Why did you think I would break the curse in the first place?”
“Because you’re good,” Eli shouted. “You’re loyal! Even when your family was standing on the gallows, Sabre, you were kneeling for the king. You were always better.”
“Wait.” Sabre held up a hand. They were so close, his fingertips almost brushed Eli’s chest. “I didn’t kneel for the king.”
“Of course you did,” Eli said. He’d seen it. Sabre had gone to the king, and just before the trapdoor dropped beneath Eli, he’d knelt at Emile de Guillory’s feet.
“I knelt to save my family,” Sabre said. “It wasn’t the king I was showing loyalty to.”
Eli’s breath caught. He’d always thought some small part of Sabre must have known that Eli and their mother were beyond saving. Neither of them had treated him lovingly. There was no reason he should care for them. Adrien had always been more of a brother than Eli.
Still, he asked to hold Eli’s hand at the gallows.
“I’ve been loyal ever since,” Sabre said. Stripes of color flickered around them, garlands held by the dancers, all leading to the platform where the Harvest Mother stood. A girl with a garland in her hands danced between them, and the rope of braided flowers brushed against Eli’s cheek. Sabre lifted it and ducked under it, and Eli took a step back, heart drumming fast. “Maybe not to Mother. But to Elis—to my—I wanted to make sure it never happened again, that the Staria I leave behind is one where no children are hanged.”
“What if they were wicked?” Eli asked. “What if they deserved it?”
Sabre tipped Eli’s chin up with a knuckle. His voice was so low Eli almost didn’t hear it. “No, you didn’t.”
When Sabre drew him into an embrace, it wasn’t with the fierce desperation of a man holding someone back from the grave. It was gentle. Sabre lay Eli’s head against his chest almosttenderly, and his touch in Eli’s hair and at his back was light. It reminded Eli of the way his father used to hold him, before his death had led to the collapse of everything that had been soft and sweet in Eli’s life. Eli’s hands hovered over Sabre’s back, unable to hold on.
“What’s your name?” Sabre asked again.
Flower garlands shivered above them, shaking flower petals loose over the dancing crowd. Fire licked up the platform, and the Harvest Mother writhed in ecstasy in the flame. Sabre breathed in, and Eli could feel his heartbeat through his fine linen shirt. Eli closed his eyes to the warmth of the Harvest Mother’s fire.
“It’s Eli,” he said. “Eli de Valois.”
Chapter
Thirteen
Ashes blew over the trampled festival field. The last of the revelers stumbled toward the distant lights of the village, and the air was thick with smoke and the scent of damp earth. Rey sat by the ruined platform where the Harvest Mother burned, running the beaded necklace over his palm.
