Chapter 36

Someone had done a number on the elf.

She was dressed in rags that hung off her emaciated form like a funeral shroud. So much of her skin was purple and mottled with bruises, it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. She shuffled forward, one ankle bent and twisted and refusing to support any weight on its own. It was roughly splinted in place, or else she wouldn’t have been able to do that much.

Someone had shaved her hair down to the scalp, and they were none too gentle about it. Patches of scab the size of my fist dotted her head where the top layer of skin was removed with the hair. Her hands were bound in chains, the skin underneath festering and torn. Even from a distance, I could see her fingernails had been ripped out, and recently at that. The wounds were raw and weeping.

“P-please,” the elf moaned. “You have to…please. Oh gods.”

She tripped and fell on the blood and steam-slicked cobbles, her knees hitting hard enough that I was sure something had to have cracked.

It was a sign of how much Kaze hated her former second in command that she didn’t rush to her side. She could sense the trap.

“What are you doing here?”

Her voice came out flat and sharp, so full of fury that I winced, and I was a hundred meters away, listening to the exchange through my earpiece.

“You have to stop this,” Deela moaned. “Oh gods, I was a fool. I should have never…I should have stayed…please, you have to stop this or he’ll kill me.”

“I will kill you. You think I feel anything like pity for you? Bah.” Kaze spat on the cobbles. “For a decade, you made my life hell. You did everything in your power to make Lady Flir kill me so you could take my place, and when that didn’t work? When I needed you most, you abandoned me. Traitorous, treacherous filth. The only reason I don’t kill you where you crawl is because I can’t think of a way to do it slowly enough to balance the weight of your sins.”

Two things dawned on me in that instant: that Deela hadn’t truly recognized Kaze until that moment, and despite treating Kaze like the lowest form of beast, she loved her.

Tears streamed down her cheeks as she looked up for the first time.

“General Sagar? Oh, dear. Where’s your veil? Silly cat, you need your veil or they’ll never…they’ll never…oh no. This simply won’t do.”

She was delirious. Her rambling semi-apology wasn't aimed at Kaze. She was scolding herself for her own stupidity. When she saw her former boss, truly saw her for the first time, her eyes were filled with nothing but love, and her tone immediately changed from desperate and pleading to, dare I say, motherly.

Pieces started to fall into place.

Love is not always a positive thing. Even evil, twisted things can feel it in their own evil, twisted ways. Instead of kindness, compassion, patience, and gentleness, it looks like possessiveness, jealousy, control, manipulation. Instead of building up, love born of evil seeks to tear down, to convince the object of its love that it isn’t deserving of anything good and wholesome. It rips away confidence and replaces it with dependence.

I wish I could say that this form of love isn’t true, that it’s simply a mockery of the real thing, but that would be a lie. It’s not any less real because it comes from a place of darkness. It’s not any less sincere.

It’s not any less human.

We all carry both sides within us. The side we choose to nurture is the side most often expressed. That doesn’t erase the other side of the coin. There can be tenderness in jealousy, control in kindness.

When Deela looked up at Kaze with love in her eyes, I saw the darkness. To her, Kaze was a lesser being, a child that needed to be protected from herself. When she tore at Kaze’s confidence, when she sabotaged her plans, when she stole her army, she wasn’t trying to get Kaze killed. She was trying to make Kaze realize that her natural place in the world wasn’t at the head of an army, it was at her feet, safe and protected from a world that saw her as less than a person.

I saw the darkness, aye. I saw the kindness, too.

And, I saw Flir’s hand in all this.

It made me sick.

“Don’t kill her,” I said. “It’s a trap.”

Kaze hissed into my earpiece.

“I. Don’t. Care.”

“I do,” I said. “If you kill her now, you invite in the darkness that made her. That’s what Flir wants. She wants you to be like her, to see the world the way she does. She’s tried all these years and it hasn’t worked. If you kill Deela now, you’re giving her exactly what she wants.”

What followed isn’t something I can easily translate. Catspeak has no human analogue. They learned words from humans. Among themselves, they convey their thoughts and feelings whole, not broken up into discrete sounds.

The short version? She was working through some stuff, and she needed to vent. I did my best to listen, all the while watching the sally port she was no longer paying attention to. Whoever was on the other side was waiting to see what happened next.

Kaze knew I was right. She wasn’t happy about it. In fact, she was furious. At me, at Deela, at Flir. At Soeh for demanding that she be a light in the darkness. At the Crown for pussyfooting around and letting a rebel run free. At the sun for rising and the wind for blowing.

Mostly, she was mad at herself. She knew the right choice. She knew what it would cost her to give up her revenge. She knew it would cost even more to give into the temptation.

Finally, she turned her back on Deela.

“I can’t kill her,” she said. “You can.”

I didn’t hesitate. I lined up my sights and put a bullet through the elf’s skull.