Page 21 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

I expect anger to bubble in my stomach, but it doesn’t. I laugh instead. He’s seen me clearly, I’ll give him that, but he can’t see in himself the horrible qualities that we share.

I give him a hard, ironic look. “You’re one to talk.”

We stare at each other in silence for a moment, Neirin’s brows pulling together slowly. It drags on just long enough for me to think I’ve finally been rude enough to break him, until he throws his head back and laughs. He has a lovely laugh.

“There’s the real Habren.” He waves a hand in my direction. “Rude, jealous, vindictive—and all that directed at people she likes!”

“When did I ever say I like you?” I retort.

Neirin gestures to the bed. “Drop the whole morality act and sit here. I know that bench is uncomfortable, just like I know you couldn’t really care less what anyone thinks of you.”

That’s where he’s wrong. Unfortunately, I care a great deal.

I haven’t always been like this, so aggressive and vile.

When I was small, I was all smiles and utter desperation to be liked.

But it never worked, and something about me, whatever it is, turned everyone away.

After a while, I stopped trying—learned to revel in the discomfort my very presence seems to bring to a room, the way I jar every conversation, how I put people on edge.

I tell myself I do it on purpose. I tell myself I’m proud of their distaste, but I think we all know that isn’t true.

Everybody wants to be liked. Some people are just better at it than others.

In this room, though, there’s only me and Neirin—and Neirin seems to like me well enough. Maybe he has his own mercenary reasons for being in my company, but I so rarely get to talk easily with anyone who isn’t a part of my family.

From my window seat, he feels awfully far away.

With slow, deliberate movements, I rise from the bench.

I stand in the no-man’s land between us for a moment, staring at him, daring him to make some sudden move that I can say scared me off.

He doesn’t. He remains perfectly still save for the necklace swinging against his chest as he leans forward.

A storybook heroine is supposed to deny this sort of thing.

It’s what makes her good and decent. While we’ve already established that I am generally neither of those things, if it makes you feel better I can pretend that I put up a little more resistance, and that I didn’t sit far closer to him than necessary.

Arms and thighs brushing, I still refuse to look at him. I even cross my legs again, but I can’t ignore the bed, or how soft the pillow is, or how tall and warm Neirin feels at my side.

The window lets in a pale streak of moonlight that just misses the bed, casting both of us in darkness save for our socks.

“I think we might be rather alike,” Neirin says. “Despite our… vastly different circumstances.”

“That’s a polite way of calling me common.” I keep my eyes straight ahead, trained on the window. “How are we alike?”

Neirin laughs quietly. “We have a very similar temperament, though I can hide mine with manners. I even have a sibling—a brother.”

I stare out into the dark. “Older?”

“How can you tell?” he says, his voice smaller than I’ve ever heard it.

“You’re childish. A bit of a brat, really.”

“But you’re the younger sister, and you seem very old.”

“My sister has been ill; I had to grow up quickly. What’s your brother like?”

Neirin’s fingers furrow into the blankets, brushing against mine, between our hips. He makes no attempt to avoid me. When he shrugs, he can’t quite convince me that he doesn’t care about whatever he’s about to say.

“Brilliant, of course. Smarter than me, though it hardly matters.”

I arch a brow. “Why?”

“I’m better looking,” he replies with a grin. “And everyone always liked me more, apart from our mother—but she didn’t much like him, either. She left me with him when she got bored of playing house. He raised me, I suppose.”

I toy with the idea of calling him a burden and sympathizing with his brother, but something stays my tongue.

His knuckles are white on the blankets. I finally turn to look at him, but his eyes dart away.

We are rather alike, I’ll give him that, and every miserable thing we share just makes him feel a little more human.

I think that should scare me. It doesn’t.

“Do you see your brother often?”

Neirin gives a dry laugh. “Mercifully, no. And don’t ask about my mother—she’s long gone. All she left behind was her pet goshawk. My brother took the hawk into his care, along with me.”

“What happened to the bird?”

He’s tight-lipped, rigid. Neirin’s brother has left a mark upon him. It’s strange, knowing that he has a family somewhere, and he hasn’t simply been molded from perfect clay.

“My brother lavished it with food and a cage so fine that even a thinking creature wouldn’t have complained. He loved it wholeheartedly, but he still cut its wings.” Neirin’s smile is solemn. “The moment it grew new feathers, it flew away.”

“Good for the hawk.” I stare up at the ceiling. “Some creatures are too proud to be caged.”

“Have people tried to cage you, Habren?”

“I’m already trapped. By money and mining barons back home.” I pause before adding, “And by you, here.”

He fidgets with the sheets. “We’re partners. Equals.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. “No, we’re not. You’ve never been inside a cage. You wouldn’t ask if you had.”

“Why?”

“Because you’d know,” I say, “that people don’t try to cage you. You’re born in the cage, and no matter how hard you fight, you aren’t fighting for freedom, not really. You’re fighting for a better view between the bars.”

“I thought we were talking about our families,” he says, and I can hear the smirk in his voice. “For someone who loves hers, you’re thinking an awful lot about cages.”

I try to shrug it off and fail. “I am trapped, but I love them too much to leave.”

Neirin pulls a face. “I can’t imagine living like that. I barely remember my mother, and the less said about my brother, the better.”

“That’s very sad,” I tell him. “I’d give my right arm to hug my mam again, and when I was small I used to cry just thinking about the day Ceridwen would get married and leave me.”

A gentle smile plays on his lips. It’s perhaps the first genuine smile he’s ever given me, and, small and sad as it is, it makes my heart stutter.

“What rotten luck,” Neirin says, “that a human like you, who has so little time with her family, can love them so very much, while I have an eternity with mine and not even a kernel of affection to spare them.”

He’s made me sound like a saint, but I’m far from it.

My family test me. Gran is ever disapproving; Dad is so like me, so angry, that it got him sent far away.

Mam was flighty and near unreliable, but I’ve canonized her so well that I’ve almost forgotten how frustrating she could be, while Ceridwen knows how to maim me like no other.

Whenever Gran told me about her sister, how she’d wandered off one day and never come back, I liked to fantasize about the pain of it.

I’d make myself quite sick at the idea. But in my dreams, I was always the one leaving.

Always battling homesickness and the brilliant terror of remaking myself into the person I so badly wanted to be.

I never thought that it could be me worrying at the threshold, watching the garden path each night, carrying that kindling of hope in my chest that my sister would come home.

“I pitied my gran,” I say. “For having lost so much. For being old.”

Neirin lies back down, staring at the ceiling. “Old is worthy of pity. You lose any beauty, lose control of your body—even your own mind.”

I remain upright, not daring to follow him, and I think about Richard downstairs, who lost all three along with his name.

“That’s true,” I admit after a beat of silence, “but there’s more to it than that.”

“What else is there?”

I used to think that my gran was the loneliest person in the world.

Trapped in her house with all those ghosts and unanswered questions—everything she once wanted to be and now doesn’t even dare say aloud.

And yet she would always be at the table when I came home from school, and she would listen to me recite facts everyone knows as if I were the first to discover them.

She loves me. She’s loved a great many people. Half of them are dead now, or they left her behind. And still she loves. She lived through all that, and still she loves me.

“Aging can be a privilege sometimes,” I say.

Neirin stares at me blankly. He can’t see the life lived beneath the paper-thin skin or the stories etched into the wrinkles.

Imagine your gran, I want to tell him, but I don’t know if he ever knew his gran. So I will tell you instead.

Imagine your gran. Imagine her favorite chair and how she bleeds into it, book or knitting or teacup in hand.

Think of how big her eyes are behind her glasses, of how they grow even bigger when she sees you.

Remember the costume jewelry around her thin neck, and how it rattled in your fist when you were small.

Remember everything she told you about herself: the street she was born on, the shop where she worked, the name of her own gran, the weather on her wedding day.

Then remember the things she never told you.

Never told her husband, her children. The things she carries in the cloud of her hair and ties up in her string of beads.

How the bad things happened, and how she lived through it all to have you sit in her lap—think of how happy she was to have you there.

Imagine it. Just for a moment.

I let out a rattling breath, and any resistance left in my body goes with it. I lie down beside Neirin, my hands flat to the blanket, one brushing against his. We turn our heads at the same time, staring at each other across the small divide we keep. His black hair is stark against the white sheet.

“It’s just something I’ve been thinking about since meeting you,” I say instead.

Neirin nods, oblivious. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to age.”

“Of course you don’t; because you don’t have to. The rest of us just make do.”

“You can have forever, too,” he reminds me, his voice a dim light in the gloom.

I’ve only thought as far as rescuing Ceridwen.

Ceridwen would ask for immortality. It’s simple for her—but I know little about how it works.

When I look at Neirin, as beautiful and fascinating as he is, I can’t ignore the storm of worry that covers me as I wonder what such a gift as immortality might do to me.

I don’t know what a normal life will do, either.

“I’m considering my options,” I lie.

In reality, I can’t think about the challenge or the reward any more.

Let it stay an idea for as long as it can, and I’ll deal with the choice when there are no other paths left.

Mere days ago I’d have taken any road to get away from Llanadwen, but now that the dream is almost real, I realize there’s no way I can abandon Gran, forget about Dad, leave the house empty for him to return to when—if ever—his sentence is up.

I’m not Ceridwen. There’s no Sabrina at home to pick up the pieces if I run away.

That makes me sound terribly selfless compared to my sister, and I wonder what all the gossips at home would think of me if they heard it.

I almost feel smug, but I know it would change no one’s opinion.

Somehow, I’m sure I’m still in the wrong.

“What’s there to consider?” he says. “Your forever is my tomorrow.”

I laugh. “Then I’ll see you in the morning, Neirin.”

He laughs too, low and sweet, and we fall silent, lying side by side, staring at shadows of tree branches cast on the ceiling. My eyes start to droop, and my body sinks into the mattress.

“You’re really not going to offer the bed?” I say, just to be a nuisance.

He groans and chucks an arm over his eyes. “You’re the one being difficult, Habren.”

“You, sir, are no gentleman.”

He scoffs. “I never professed to be.”

“Well,” I say primly, “I’m not moving.”

“Neither am I.”

I snort. “So, we’re both going to stay like this all night?”

“If needs be.” Neirin shrugs.

“I thought you were terribly concerned for my human fatigue?” I counter.

“And I thought you had a sister to catch. Can’t do that tired.”

I think I mean to argue back, but I never do. I’m already asleep, dreamless, and oblivious to whomever lies beside me.