“You could kill me,” he said, “but you won’t. I bet you think about it every single morning when you send me my bread. I could poison this, you think. I could just not feed him, you think. But you can’t. You don’t have it in you. You know, Gavin, you’re right. You don’t. But I do. If our positions had been reversed, I’d have killed you as you lay unconscious at Sundered Rock. I would have cut off your head and filled your mouth with your own feces and put you on a pike. Because that’s how you win, Gavin. That’s how you show you can’t be crossed. Peace through terror, Gavin. That probably doesn’t even make any sense to you, does it? No, you were always like mother, all sweet manipulations and bullshit. She-”
“Mother’s dead,” Gavin said. He didn’t want Dazen to slur her in his moment of anger.
“Fuck her,” Dazen said. “As good a liar as she was, she never even bothered to pretend she didn’t love you more.”
What?
“You killed her?” Dazen asked, seeing a chink in Gavin’s armor in the shock on his face. “You shrive her first? What’d she tell you? Do you think she was honest with you, even then? Or was she angling you to do what she wanted, even then? She might be dead, but I bet she’s not gone, is she? Little spider bitch.”
“That’s your mother you’re talking about, you sick bastard,” Gavin said.
“So what’re you going to do, little brother? Make me stop? You’ll do nothing, like always. You’re going to wait for me, and have your nightmares. I got out of the other prisons, and I’ll get out of this one. You know, I was worried at first, when I fell into the green. I thought that blue was the only one, and green-that was cruel, brother, brilliant. I thought then that there must be seven prisons, one for every color. But there aren’t, are there?”
Gavin said nothing.
“You couldn’t make a cell of superviolet. There’s no way you can make one of sub-red. I don’t think you could make one out of orange or red either. I think this is the last cell. I think I’m a hair’s breadth from ending everything you’ve ever built.”
“You might be surprised,” Gavin said quietly.
“You’re a failure, little brother. An embarrassment. An empty shell.”
Gavin stood looking at his brother in the pitiless yellow light.
“Karris never told you about our night together, did she?” the prisoner said.
“You’ve regaled me with your sexual prowess before. I’m not interested,” Gavin said. The prisoner wasn’t in his right mind. He’d just fallen into the yellow prison in the last twelve hours, doubtless thinking that this time he was really going to escape. The disappointment, the heartbreak would be enough to make anyone lash out. But Gavin didn’t want to hear it.
“So she didn’t.” Dazen laughed, an edgy, grating laugh unlike any Gavin had ever heard from him. “I used to be kind of ashamed of it, really. But I’m past that now. She wasn’t quite so eager as I might have made out before. We were at dinner, my men and her and her father, and I was telling these outrageous jokes, and even her father laughed along, and I had this moment, Gavin, when I realized just how different I am. How I can do whatever I want. I put my big cock in the world, and the world shuts up and takes it. I talked about fucking Karris all night long and making sure she was up to my standards and that coward laughed along. Can you believe it? And Karris, little coward Karris, she just got drunk.
“Sad to say, it was nothing special. She didn’t give me much of a ride after I got mounted. You ever try to finish while the woman’s bawling? And I know it wasn’t because I took her maidenhead. You took care of that, didn’t you?”
“You sick piece of-”
“I didn’t think I was going to be able to finish. I was drunk and she wasn’t doing much for me, with all her tears. But then she said your name, and I knew I had to. To show you that you couldn’t take what was mine. And do you know what’s mine? Anything I want. Anyone. She kept crying afterward so I kicked her out. I was kind of embarrassed, to tell you the truth.” He shrugged. “I got over it.” He leered at Gavin, saw how aghast he was. “She never mentioned it, huh?”
Gavin couldn’t speak.
“You never married her, did you?”
Gavin felt gutted. He’d told his brother a hundred lies about his happy little life and his happy little wife. “No.”
The prisoner’s face contorted. His eyes darted to the side, then back to his gaoler. “Sixteen years of lies, crumbling, huh? You’re probably better off without her anyway. You think while she was making the rounds of the Guiles she slept with father, too?”
Begging his brother to stop or commanding him to stop talking about Karris would be equally ineffectual. “I thought… I always thought you were the good brother,” Gavin said.
“Good brother?” the prisoner barked. “Like we’re the good twin and the bad twin? We’re not twins, Gavin, and neither one of us is good.”
“Have you always been like this, or have you gone mad down here?” Gavin asked.
“You made me, little brother, just like I made you.” Dazen tossed the shattered pieces of the lux torch away. “Now why don’t we end this farce? Open the door. Release me.” He spread his hands wide and leaned against the window, intent on Gavin.
Gavin could see blood trickling down his brother’s chest from a thickly scarred wound, torn open in his fall. He could see another trickle of fresh blood from the little spikes of hellstone he had rigged to take away all of Dazen’s luxin when he fell into yellow.
Dazen was thin, ragged, unhealthy. He was furious, as he had every right to be. Doubtless he was lying about Karris to hurt Gavin. Or exaggerating at the least. But though Karris had never meant anything to him, their mother should have.
I was mother’s favorite? Of course I was. Maybe first she’d lavished more attention on me because she saw how much father’s abandonment hurt me, how much I needed a parent. But we were kindred souls. She’d probably felt guilty that she loved me more. She’d certainly felt relieved when she learned Gavin was actually Dazen. He’d seen that in her face, sixteen years ago, and tried to deny it since.
I’m like the dog with a bone who crossed a low bridge in the fable. I see another dog passing beneath me carrying a bone, and I snap to take his bone-and drop my own into the water, into my reflection.
He looked at the prisoner, who was glancing at one wall of his cell repeatedly, as if in conversation. It might well have been Gavin’s fault that his brother was mad. After all, he was the one who’d kept the man caged, alone, for sixteen years. But it wasn’t the kind of transgression he could fix.
Gavin leaned against his own side of the window, hands pressing the immaculate, unbreakable yellow luxin opposite his big brother’s hands. “I’m sorry, brother. I’m sorry if I drove you mad, and I’m sorry if you were always like this and I never knew it. But I don’t think I can let you out. Not like you are. My world is falling apart. I won’t lie to you about that. I murdered a girl. I’m losing my colors. I’ve lost the woman I love. I… I’m losing everything. But I haven’t lost my mind, and in that, I’m up on you.”
He felt a sudden wave of peace roll through him like a tsunami, obliterating everything in its path, burying his objections, smashing his protests. His brother deserved to be here. Maybe they didn’t get to simply switch places-maybe Gavin didn’t get to be the good brother in his own mind now that he’d determined that the prisoner was the bad brother. But his brother was a bad brother. A bad man. A danger.
If the seed of megalomania had already been sprouting when he was nineteen years old, what would boundless power have done to him if Gavin had let him walk free all those years ago?
Maybe he’d even done the right thing, not just the least bad thing. Maybe locking his brother up had been just.
Maybe not. It didn’t matter. He took a deep breath.