Free Unveiled by Courtney Milan Page B

Smite on his return, pale and thin, alone on the streets of Bristol. It had made so much sense to leave them. But nothing he did could repair what had happened to them in his absence. They wouldn’t even talk of those years, not to him.
    And that hadn’t been the only time he’d abandoned Mark. Just the first.
    â€œVery well,” he said stiffly. “You are quite in the right. I should never have left. I failed Hope. I failed you. ”
    A puzzled look flitted across Mark’s face. “How is it that we are talking about me, then?”
    â€œEvery time I look at you, I recall how I’ve failed you. There. I’ve admitted it. Are you happy now?”
    â€œHappy that you look at me and see failure?” Mark’s voice was tending towards scorn now, and his lip curled. “Hardly.”
    Christ. He was cocking it up again. “I know you’re not a failure. You took a first at Oxford.”
    â€œIn case you hadn’t noticed,” Mark said hotly, “I’m a good deal more than that. Granville himself said I was the brightest student he’d seen in the thirty-five yearshe’d been in philosophy. And this—” Mark gestured at the pages that lay on the table in front of him “—this will show everyone what I can do. Even you, Ash. Even you. So don’t look at me and see failure. I haven’t failed anything.”
    This had all gone horribly wrong. “Don’t get so upset, Mark. I’m not questioning your intelligence. Or your capabilities.”
    â€œWhat are you questioning, then? It can’t be my principles, seeing as how you have none of your own to speak of.”
    â€œOh, it’s my principles you object to, then?” Ash felt the whole bitter weight of his responsibilities shift restlessly. He’d done everything for his brothers— everything . Mark was his principle. And if Ash’s hands were a little dirty, it was because he’d wanted to keep his brothers’ clean. “They’re a hell of a lot more honest than your own,” he snapped.
    He wished he could take the words back as soon as he’d said them, because Mark actually gasped in surprise.
    â€œWhat do you mean by that?”
    Ash didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to let Mark know that there was yet another barrier between them, another one of Ash’s many failures. But Mark gestured, and the words tripped out anyway.
    â€œMaybe you’re too young to remember what it was like before father died, or what happened in those years afterwards. You might not remember the day Mother decided to take to heart the Biblical command that one should sell everything one had and give it all to the poor. Nice, in principle; in practice, it leaves your own children starving, housed in rat-infested penury. We lost everything we should have had—modest comfort,education. She traded a secure competence for some stupid words she didn’t even understand.”
    â€œYou’re the one who never understood Mother,” Mark said.
    â€œAs if I could. She was mad, Mark. Plain and simple.”
    Mark’s lip curled. “There was nothing plain or simple about her insanity.”
    â€œMaybe it doesn’t seem that way to you. But I was supposed to protect you—all of you. Her principles killed Hope. They almost killed you and Smite. And throughout it all, Mother clung to dead words in a dead book, paying no attention to the living around her. Maybe you can understand why I mislike the notion of my youngest brother clinging to more dead words. Maybe you can understand why I wince, knowing that my little brother, who spent his childhood with a woman who quite literally went mad with her principles, is spending the summers of his youth practicing the same sort of abstemious insanity that he grew up with. Do you want to know why I’ve failed you? Because I haven’t been able to save you from a woman who has been