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From the very start, you control your sister’s life. You and she are supposed to be the same, except, you ruined it. You find this out when you are five, that you are not the matched set everybody wanted you to be, and so you begin to lie. You wrap yourselves in a falsehood that will control the rest of your lives. That will ruin you both. You make it your home. You were always good at this part. You have learned so well how to play pretend that sometimes, you almost believe it yourself.
The lie is fun, for the first ten days, a secret you and your sister share, something that brings you closer and closer. Then you spend the next ten weeks worried that they will find it out, that they will separate you, give one of you a sword and the other a robe, and ruin everything. The next ten years teaches you to live with the lie, to bury it beneath your skin and spit it back at the world as venom, as blood, as fury, as fear. It teaches you how to bend a conversation away from yourself and toward others. It teaches you to be charming and clever and funny. You learn how to make people afraid of you, how to make them love you, how to make them need you. You learn to bend a conversation away from yourself, from your true talents, and toward others. You learn how to be yourself only when nobody else is watching. It teaches. You learn. It is everything to you.
You become a pair of necromancers, the Princesses of Ida, the two sparkling jewels in the crown of the Third House, and only one other person in the world knows the secret. Naberius. He has to know, torn as he is between two mistresses. He is a cavalier, sworn to a necromancer, and to a crown princess. A crown princess who has less power over him than her necromantic sister. You always have to make everything complicated. You tear him apart, even though you do not mean to. You know, in the end, that his loyalty is with her.
This, of course, leaves you alone, as the lie always has. When you first conceived of it, you did not realise how alone it would make you. After all, friends can only get so close, when you are held down by such a weight of untruths that your whole life, your whole existence, everything you are is bound up in them.
You wait every day for someone to discover it, to realise that this is not right, that it cannot be right. That, though you have the same bone structure, the same height, the same eyes, one of you looks like a necromancer, and one of you does not. But there is a way out of this, too. Flesh magic. Manipulation of fat and muscle and tissue. A way to make a girl with all the necromantic power of a butterfly look like a talented, vain master manipulator of thanergy. It does not take much effort, to ensure that the rest of your house believe Coronabeth’s golden skin and bouncing curls to be a statement of individualism, a way to showcase personalities, and to make sure that the crown princess is as beautiful and as marriageable as she can possibly be. You will need to choose a spouse with care, after all, and as the years pass, you and your sister discuss this more often. You will need to choose someone useful, which means that they will need to be clever. But if they are too clever, they might find the lie. And you will not leave your sister vulnerable.
The lie lives for seventeen years, until it dies a slow death, in the rotten halls of Canaan House, where the truth of what you are and what she is worms its way into the cracks and forces them wide open. For the first time in your lives, your sister is too busy for you. She chases Lyctorhood, pursuing power like a drug she cannot live without, and it is not that you blame her, it is just that she has controlled every step you’ve walked and every breath you’ve breathed since you were six, because you have owed her for gifting you the power you do not have. It is just that without her, you can do nothing.
When Ianthe hurls those words at you, in a room full of everyone left standing, a room that is too empty. After weeks and weeks of her lying to you, and you stepping ever closer to a precipice that there will be no coming back from, she does not even have the decency to say it with cruelty. It does not matter then, that you have been so careless as to be seen with a rapier in hand, wielding it like the cavalier you should be rather than the necromancer you are not. It does not matter that you like these people, the lost fifth and the fiery fourth, the bright and brilliant sixth and the silent ninth. They are impermanent, as everything is. Ianthe has shaped you, built you. She has made you who you are. What you are. You can do nothing.
When you get back to your rooms, you do not shout at her. You do not weep. You can do nothing. Instead, you snap at Babs when he tells her she didn’t need to do that, you order him to apologise, you scold and scorn him. And after that, it is almost as if the decay of Canaan house is not seeping its way into the lie and spreading its decay, leaving it to crumble around you. Ianthe tells you what she has found. You have always been her sounding board, when runs up against a difficult theorem, and it is almost like before when she explains to you the problems she faces, the parts she does not yet know.
And it is you, in the end, that drives the fatal wedge between the two of you, when you look at her notes and tell her what you see. That every challenge is about the bond between Necromancer and Cavalier, that it is about one flesh, and one end, about joining yourself with another soul. You should have known then, that she would not take you, that she would forsake you at last, that the lie would shatter, and your sisterhood with it. But you were a fool. You were always the fool.
The lie of your life ends in a miserable wreck of a laboratory, when your sister turns to Naberius, and plunges his own sword through his chest. It is then that you know. All these years that she has claimed to love you, that she has told you that she will do anything for you, she has lied. If she had loved you, it would have been your heart skewered on the rapier, and she would not have left you alone forever. She would have taken you, and made you one flesh and one body until the end of time, as you had always been supposed to be.
You break, then. You weep and you wail and you barely notice the carnage that rains around you, around your sister. You barely notice, when she leaves you there in the rubble, with the corpses. You let someone lead you away. You do not know who they are. You do not much care. You feel as though you have lost your arm, as though without her you are unbalanced, incomplete.
For twenty-two years you have been a twin. One half of a whole. Now you are adrift. You can do nothing. Until they put a sword in your hand. Until you remember all those lessons you’ve learned, and here, with all these new people, you put them to use. You charm them, you impress them, you make them love you, you make them need you. You have had such a teacher, and you have such power, buried beneath your skin, ready to hurl back at the world as you make it your own. For the very first time, you are without her.
You can do anything.