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You are ten years old when you help your eldest sister bury her husband in the garden. The moon is full that night—so cliché you would laugh if your hands weren’t soaked in blood. It clings to your skin in tacky rivulets, warm and awful, and you’re old enough, and have been kidnapped from your bed enough times by people with little regard for your life, to know what death smells like. Rukshana’s hands shake as she uses the shovel, her breath ragged, her knuckles raw. You copy her motions, mimicking the steadiness you know she doesn’t have.
She doesn’t cry, so you make sure not to either.
It’s the kind of night that should be filled with jasmine and laughter, not blood and silence. But fate, you’ll come to learn, doesn’t care about shoulds. It only cares about what is.
Your sister’s hands are slippery with red. Your small palms blister around the shovel handle. The hole is shallow, the dirt is hard, and your breath is too loud. The garden, overgrown and wild, claws at your arms as if it wants you to remember. As if it knows something awful is happening beneath them.
It started with his hand across her cheek. You saw it, the moment that would fracture your life down the center. Then the yelling. Then the knife—hers. Then his hands around her throat. Then yours—small, shaking, but strong enough to grab the nearest thing with weight. A vase. The good one from the sitting room, the one your aunt gave Rukshana as a wedding present. You bring it down on his head, once, twice, only stopping when he slumps. She finishes it. You don’t talk about who killed him. You just talk about what to do next.
You bury his head beneath the rose bushes he hated. He used to complain about the thorns catching his robes.
You’re the heir, and they told you that means something. That you’re born for responsibility, for legacy. That you are to inherit the empire of trade your ancestors build from desert sand and steel and sheer spite.
No one told you that being heir would mean this.
You tell her it’s okay. She looks at you like she’s trying to believe you.
Neither of you speaks of it afterwards. Of his rage, her scream, the snap of bone. The blade. The vase. His blood pooling across the marble floor like spilled wine.
For weeks, your bathing habits go from “good” to “fastidious.” You’re sure they’ll smell it on you, see the stain of it. Not so much blood and gore as it is the mark of what you’ve done.
When they ask you about Rukshana’s husband, you say he left to buy something that same night. You tell the story to your parents, and the detectives, and your siblings, and to everyone over the years that asks. She is a beleaguered widow to a disappeared husband, who left her with a house too big and a too small life still forming on her belly. People ask, and you lie. You scrub at your scalp and use brushes on your skin until it’s pink and raw, and even so you’re still not clean.
The years go on. You smile a lot. No one suspects the boy who smiles, who throws parties with open arms, who laughs too easily and speaks too brightly. You think maybe you learned to smile that night, when Rukshana turned to you with blood on her face and said, “Don’t you ever let them see you afraid.”
So you don’t. You become joy incarnate, a glittering gem in the Asim family crown. You throw money at everything and everyone. You are generous, thoughtless, open, a prince of silk and honey. You turn every ache into a celebration, every silence into a song. Your father beams. Your mother preens. Rukshana watches.
Your siblings see you as soft. Charming. A nuisance, when you are particularly loud. Useful, when you play the fool and distract others while they work. Rukshana, though—Rukshana knows. Her eyes linger on you too long when you’re quiet. She sees it in you, the thing you unearthed when you buried him.
Sometimes, you think she almost seems proud.
Rukshana marries some years later. This one is gentler. Quiet, respectful, loves her son as if it were his own and more. You watch him like a hawk the first time he visits her. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t touch her without asking. You try not to clench your fists when he looks at her too long.
After dinner, Rukshana finds you curled up beside the marigolds. “I know,” she says, sitting beside you. “I thought I’d never be able to do it again either.”
You don’t ask what it is. Love? Trust? Letting someone close enough to hurt you and hoping they won’t?
She presses a piece of candy into your hand, the kind you liked as a little boy. Her fingers linger on yours. “I still dream about it,” she whispers. So do you.
You are fifteen the first time someone calls you dangerous.
It’s meant to be a joke—Jamil says it under his breath during a flying lesson gone wrong—but it roots inside you like a weed. Dangerous. You think of the vase. Of the way your hands didn’t shake. Of how quiet the garden was after.
It was your idea to chop him up and scatter the pieces like confetti, to split him open and burn the parts that couldn’t be hidden. Rukshana listened as she always did, and nodded, and didn’t tell you no. Sometimes you think the smell of burnt flesh will haunt you until you die. Dangerous, Jamil says. He thinks it was a joke. Maybe you are.
Rukshana stops writing for a while. She has another child now—a daughter. You’re an uncle once again. You send gifts, too many. You want her children to have everything. You want them to know only softness, to be cradled by hands that never hurt them.
You, for your part, choose Night Raven. You go because of Jamil, but you also go because you see Cater and Lilia play music and it stirs something inside you, something that wants to be in the middle of that. You want the energy and the noise and the joy, want to wrap yourself in sound until you drown out everything else. You want to lose yourself, just a little, and have a reason to smile that is not a lie. You want to live, so deeply, so vibrantly, that the ghosts of dead men won’t follow you there.
You throw the best parties. You never say no to a favor. You give more than you take, always. You build a life of laughter and brightness, of noise and abundance. They don’t love you, because you’re sure that would require anyone to know you at all, but they like you, and they’re amused by you.
The first time you fall in love, though, you nearly tell.
It bubbles in your throat like the need to scream. You want someone to hold it for you, to look you in the eye and not flinch. Maybe it could be Leona, no stranger to cruelty as he is. But how do you start? Hi, I killed a man with my sister when I was ten. We chopped him up like meat and burned away all the waste and I’ve never stopped dreaming about it, not really.
So instead, you laugh. You throw another banquet. You give them gold and trinkets and attention. You press the truth against Leona’s lips when you kiss him, mold it against the sharp edges of his teeth, the curve of his hip, and wish you could make it something beautiful.
There are times when you look at your own hands and see him again. His blood. His face. His open mouth, gasping. The way your sister’s shoulders shook as she hacked him apart.
You never blame her for it. You’re not sure if you can extend that sort of grace to yourself.
Most of the time, you manage. Your mind does as it always has when it comes to situations that should leave you frightened and crying, folding the memory into neat squares, smoothing out the creases, and tucking it away in the place where you put all the ugly things inside of you. Neatly compartmentalized so you never have to think about it again.
There’s some moments, though—when someone gets too angry, when fists slam on tables, when someone’s voice sharpens into cruelty—that your body remembers before your mind does. Your smile tightens. Your ears ring. You see him. You see her. You see yourself. I could do it again, you think. And then, no.
But the urge lingers, the one you feel when someone grabs you, when someone yells too loudly, when someone mocks or threatens you. I could do it again. Instead, you do little things. A cutting remark. An unkind smile. The right words at the right time. They think you’re just a fool too careless with his tongue, and perhaps that is true, but they still flinch when you turn on them. Biting the hands that tolerate you.
You’re not a good person. The least you can do is own up to it.
Rukshana writes to you on her birthday. Her second husband is fine. Her son grows into a kind young man, her daughter is the most wonderful thing in the world, and another baby grows in her. Life, it seems, is perfect. And then, right at the bottom: The roses are blooming again. I think he’s still feeding them. You write back: Good. Let him be useful for once.
It didn’t start with his hand across her cheek. It started with a thousand tiny things, the sum of which would be a million different ways to die. He would hide her away from the rest of you. He would grab her arm too tightly to be anything but a cruel and possessive vice meant to mark. Rukshana told you the bruises were nothing. A simple misunderstanding. She said, again and again, it’s fine, he is a good man.
But no good man would do this. You were a child, not a fool. Rukshana tells you not to worry, but she is not as convincing as she thinks. Her words are strained. Her face is pale. When you hug her, she feels brittle, a fragile bird made of glass. You are a child, not a fool, but also not a fighter. You are a boy of silks and smiles, not a warrior. If you were a hero, a man in shining armor, you would have saved her. If you were a better brother, a better friend, you would have taken her far away, to some place where her husband could not find her.
But instead, you are just a boy, a child, and when she says, again and again, it’s fine, he’s a good man , you listen, because maybe the fault is in you, not him. Then, one day, you catch him looking at your sister. Your older brothers look at their wives like they are treasures, beautiful and precious, gifts given by fate. Your father looks at your mother like he can never get used to the fact that she is his, and he hers. But your sister’s husband does not look at her like she is his. He doesn’t look at her like he’s awed by her beauty, or grateful for her love. He doesn’t even look at her like she’s something he owns, a prize. It’s the way people have looked at you before, when they know no one is around to stop them. When they can’t see anything except what they want, and how much they can take.
The truth is, when you take the vase and strike him, you aren’t even thinking about her. You are thinking about yourself. You are thinking of the way people look at you, like you’re a thing to be used and taken. You’re thinking about all the times you’ve begged for someone, anyone, to help you, and no one did. The truth is that there’s no grand, heroic reason. It is simply that he is not a good man, and no one will stop him, and maybe no one will ever stop someone from doing those things to you, and you can accept that; but you cannot live with someone you love being as small and weak and helpless.
So, yes. You take the vase and swing, and your sister takes the blade and stabs, and you burn and bury him.
Afterwards, when your hands are sticky with his blood, Rukshana tells you, Don’t ever let them see you afraid.
So you don’t.
The best part of Malleus trapping all of you in a dream is when you realize it’s a dream, breaking through the haze of an ideal world where you’re safe, and the world is bright and beautiful, and Jamil is your best friend. You’ve never had a best friend before, and the price for it seems to be getting a version of Jamil that smiles vacantly and speaks only of the things you want him to. It’s a beautiful, awful thing. You wonder, briefly, if the real Jamil would have been like this, had things gone differently.
It’s a lovely dream, but a dream all the same. When your mind starts to clear, and the reality of the situation sinks in, you are glad for it. Because the best part is when you find Jamil in this strange dreamscape, and you beat the shit out of him.
In this fake world, you’re the better fighter, not because he’s not talented or he’s weak, but because you have at your advantage the long simmering fury you’ve held inside yourself. The rage you’ve swallowed and tucked away, the rage of a child who has been looked down on, and taken for granted, and laughed at, and ignored. You let the fire of your fear burn hotter, brighter, until you can feel it in your veins. Until it’s the only thing keeping you going.
In dreams, the bruises don’t last for longer than a second. Your gold jewelry cuts his cheekbones and your teeth draw blood, but it's gone by the next time he turns. His fists break your nose, split your lip, leave the taste of copper and iron. It’s not the same as the real thing. In the real thing, your bones would be shattered, your teeth would be knocked out, and the fight would be over in seconds. But here, in this dream world, it’s a fantasy. It’s the thing you’ve wanted since the first time Jamil called you useless.
You laugh once you’ve both exhausted yourselves. You’ve known Jamil your entire life, and you two have never fought like that.
When you all awaken, it’s like nothing has happened. Except you swear you can see it—the cut on his cheek, the swelling around his left eye. Jamil tips his head back, and you can see the ring of bruises around his neck, the vise-like grip you had. The memory of his breath wheezing past the fingers around his throat makes you shudder.
Maybe this is what being good is. Knowing you can be terrible, knowing the ugliness and rage inside yourself, and choosing not to act on it. Maybe, by doing so, you’re still good.
Or maybe it’s being terrible, and trying to be better. Having it not be enough, but trying anyway.
Or maybe you’re not good, and you’ll never be, and nothing you do can make up for that.
In the end, none of that matters. You wake up every morning, and you put on your best smile. You offer your best self. You will always do so. You will be the best thing you can be, not for anyone else, but for you. Because, sometimes, you deserve the best too.
Being good, you decide, is letting Riddle get away with only a scathing comment that you know will keep him awake at night, rather than a knife between the ribs. It’s letting Vil berate you in front of his entourage, and only smiling back, rather than biting his throat out. It’s thinking that your classmates would make rather fine wooden puppets, and still deciding to turn to the man keeping you all captive and fawning in the way that’s kept you alive thus far.
Being good is knowing everything Jamil loves could come crashing down if you wanted it to, and never doing a damn thing.
It’s making a thousand tiny decisions not to hurt, every single day. And every day, every single time, you will choose not to. You will never stop choosing.
You are twelve years old when you come closer to death than you’ve ever had before. You vomit up blood and wine and food so old you’re not sure when the last time you ate it was, and even then, you keep coughing, until it’s all over your mouth and hands, and your vision swims. Doctors pump your stomach and force liquids down your throat, and you’re convinced you’re going to die, that this is the end, but it’s not, and when you wake up, Rukshana is there, watching over you.
It’s not the first time, nor the last, but that’s the one you remember the most. You will always remember this, how Rukshana howled like a wounded animal when you woke up, gathering you in her arms and refusing to let go, even when the doctors told her it was time for her to leave.
“You horrible, horrible boy,” she hisses into your ear. “You don’t get to die before me. I won’t allow it. Don’t ever scare me like that again.”
You don’t think you could ever live with Rukshana gone. When you were ten, you decided that for her, you could become the monster. For her, you could do anything. But if she were gone, what would you do then? Who would you become? You’ll both have to die at the same time, you think. Otherwise, you won’t know what to do.
She curls up next to you on the hospital bed and holds you as you absentmindedly watch news reports and hear the steady hum of machinery and the chatter of the hospital staff, and think about death and dying and what it means.
You’re almost asleep when Rukshana whispers, “Why did you do it?” into the crown of your head.
Instinctively, you know she didn’t mean for you to hear it, thinking you’re asleep. Perhaps a better brother would pretend he didn’t hear and leave her with her secrets. Perhaps a worse one would demand an explanation.
You run a thousand answers through your mind: I didn’t want you to go. I couldn’t let him hurt you. I was scared he’d go after me next. I hated him all this time and finally took the chance to do something.
There’s only one answer, really. “Because I wish someone had done it for me,” you whisper.
Your sister’s arms tighten around you. Rukshana holds you as if you are a precious, priceless treasure, and not the monster she knows you can be. You are many things, but most important of all, you are her brother.
“I’m glad it was you,” Rukshana says, and the truth is, you’re glad too.
You’re in the botanical gardens, using your magic to water the plants. Nearly-dead buds, parched and cracked, suddenly perk up and open as the magic water touches them. You can’t help but grin at the sight.
Leona watches, and you can feel his gaze on you. He doesn’t speak, and you don’t know what he’s thinking.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” you say, gesturing to the flowers.
His only response is to kiss you in that way he does, the one that leaves you breathless and wanting and not caring at all if the whole school sees. Your magic goes from a careful rainshower to a monsoon, water pouring out from everywhere. The garden floods.
When Leona pulls back, you’re both dripping wet. There’s a smirk on his face. “That magic of yours is downright dangerous.”
Dangerous. Your magic is dangerous. You are—can be, could be, won’t be—dangerous.
You wipe the dampness from his cheek and give him a smile. “Only when I want it to be.”
You wonder what kind of man you’ll be when you’re older. Not your father—his hands are relatively clean. Bloodless, at least. Not like yours. But you think you’ll still be kind. You hope so. You think kindness matters more when you know what you’re capable of.
You know what’s beneath the garden. You walk over it every time you go visit, and compliment the orchids and magnolias. The rosemary and the oranges. The mango and the musk melon. The roses.
You were ten years old when you buried a man. You don’t think you’ve ever stopped being ten years old.