Page 29 of Better in Black
“Because I know you.”
“I didn’t send it. But the temptation grew. So did the loneliness. I wrote another letter, and another. I didn’t send any of them. I thought writing it down, expelling it from my head, would help. And it did…”
“Until it didn’t.”
“Until it didn’t. I’d heard you could send letters to the Citadel through the Silent Brothers. I sent every letter I’d written, all at once. Then I waited, hating myself for my weakness. How selfish, I thought, to make my mother break her holy vows, just to prove she loved me. Would she be angry, when she came home?” I laughed, bitterly. “Imagine my surprise when she simply never did.”
Valentine didn’t say anything. He knew better than to try to brush away pain. He was the one, after all, who taught me how to bear the marks with ease. To acknowledge pain as a friend.
“She never even wrote back. It was hard, those first months she was gone, wondering if she loved me enough. But it was harder knowing she didn’t.”
“That’s why you won’t risk it with Jocelyn?”
“The only people who say it’s better to know than not know are people who’ve never had to suffer through finding out.”
I waited for him to tell me I was being an idiot. That of course you loved me the way I loved you.
Instead, he nodded. “I always say you’re smarter than peoplerealize. There’s nothing romantic about opening yourself up to humiliation.”
That was when I stopped hoping. Valentine saw everything, saw through everyone—if he thought I had no chance, it was true.
After that, everything was simply evidence proving the case. When I asked you to be my witness for theparabataiceremony and you said that didn’t feel quite right, I thought:She thinks I’m not good enough for him.
I know, now, that that was not what you meant.
The surprise came when Valentine suggested you serve as his witness as well. None of us expected him to be bound by tradition; what did he care if the ceremony called for two witnesses? But why you?
“He doesn’t even like me,” you said, when I told you what he wanted.
“Of course he does.”
“Okay, then, what about the fact that I don’t like him?”
But I could never quite believe it.Everyoneliked Valentine.
“Lucian and I are going to be brothers, and I know what you are to him, Jocelyn,” he said, when he finally asked you directly. “Like it or not, that makes us family.”
And so we descended to the City of Bones, and took our places in the circle of Silent Brothers, and spoke our oath to each other as you watched, your hands clasped in front of you. So tightly your knuckles turned white.
Entreat me not to leave thee,
Or return from following after thee—
For whither thou goest, I will go.
And where thou lodgest, I will lodge.
I swore it to Valentine, but I was also swearing to you. I was confessing, the only way I knew how.
Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Angel do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.
By ceremony’s end, my gaze had drifted away from myparabatai.I was looking at you. Always, when you were near, I was looking at you.
When I wrenched my focus back to Valentine, I discovered he was looking at you too.
Maybe there’s a reason the ceremony calls for two witnesses. Four is a stable number. Safe.
Three forms a shape with a much sharper point.
