New excerpt from 'Tell the Wind and Fire'

Tell the Wind and Fire, Sarah Rees Brennan's Young Adult novel based on A Tale of Two Cities, isn't due out until April, but today we have an excerpt for you! 

First, a bit of background: Lucie and her boyfriend, Ethan, live in a future New York City divided into Light and Dark sections. Carwyn, Ethan's secret doppelganger, has saved Ethan's life and is now in the Light city with them. But as a doppelganger, he is considered an inferior being and treated badly; no restaurant will even serve him a meal. Like all the rest, Lucie fears and dislikes Carwyn, but out of gratitude and pity -- and at great risk to herself -- she removes the collar that marks him as a doppelganger, and takes him to get some food. This is where our excerpt picks up:

 

Carwyn put about half his cupcake directly into his face. I breathed in the night air deeply. It was getting easier to relax. It was difficult to be scared of someone who might soon have pink frosting in his eyelashes.

“Do the buried really think that they’re going to start a revolution in my name?” I asked. “They think I want one?”

Carwyn nodded, licking frosting off his hands. “Some of them think you’re part of the revolution. Some of them think you still need saving. There are people who believe you seduced one of the Strykers to take them down, and there are people who think one of the Strykers seduced you as part of a plan to silence your campaign for justice. The sans-merci, those psychos who wear red and black and talk about taking over, say that the Strykers captured you and your father to keep you from telling their secrets.” He arched an eyebrow. “Imagine the Strykers having a terrible secret. Isn’t that silly?”

I’d thought that I had seen weird stories about my personal relationships already. I’d been used to having no privacy before I even met my famous Stryker boyfriend. There had been brief columns about Ethan and me, photographs of us attending parties, sometimes reports that we had broken up or one of us was cheating with somebody we’d never met. I’d winced at a truly embarrassing picture of me in a blue string bikini on a yacht with Ethan.

That was bad enough. I hadn’t dreamed people thought I was acting a part with Ethan. He was the last true thing I had, the only thing unsullied by all that had happened to me in the Dark.

“You seem to know a lot about what the people involved in the revolution think,” I snapped.

“I’m a very knowledgeable guy,” Carwyn agreed. “They say that doppelgangers can read human hearts and see all the fear and darkness in them. Pale companions of humanity, with their faces pressed up against the windows of the world. Seeing humans’ pain and laughing at it.”

The swing gave a tiny metallic shriek as he swung.

“Okay,” I said. “You could probably also hang around in dive bars and talk to people. Doppelgangers have a lot to gain from a revolution.”

“It’s true a revolution might make the world a better place,” said Carwyn. “But I’m not really the world-saving type. Lots of risk, very uncertain reward -- you know what I’m saying? And even if the reward came . . .” He swung and shrugged. “A reward wouldn’t stay a reward, not with me. You don’t know me very well yet, but you’ll see. Everything I touch turns to ash.”

“What?”

I’d been worried that he would look too much like Ethan without the collar, but his hair was still shorter and his mouth crueler. He bowed his head, and his nape looked bizarrely uncovered, with an indentation below his hairline where the collar had been.

“This is how I think doppelgangers work,” said Carwyn. “The doppelganger is created so the other, the first image, can live and prosper. But there has to be a payment. I think that one of us has to suffer. Dark magicians make doppelgangers to be living versions of those dolls people used to stick pins into. We usually die young, instead of them, but we don’t simply die. We come to nothing, with none of our actions meaning anything, and none of our goals ever reached. We are those who might as well have died young: all our lives might have been. All our lives are lived elsewhere, by someone else.”

Carwyn glanced over at me, and a smirk was born on his mouth, dark as ink spilled and spreading.

“Of course, sometimes the doppelganger can get its own back. Sometimes the doppelganger can make his mirror image be the one who suffers.”

Legends say that a doppelganger will cause their original’s death in the end, and try to take their place. There are records of doppelgangers who killed their doubles, their doubles’ families, the magicians who made them, and innocent people. Doppelgangers are lethal. Making a doppelganger is illegal because it is making a weapon that will kill of its own volition.

I had listened to the stories but I had never considered, before this moment, how much a doppelganger might resent their original.

Except Carwyn had not killed Ethan. He had saved him.

“You know,” I said, “you’re right. You do talk an awful lot.”

“Hmm.” Carwyn flicked an eyebrow sardonically. “You were right as well,” he said, and seemed to be chiefly addressing the remnants of his cupcake. “This is much too sweet for me.”

“Someone should have warned you about that,” I said, and ate the last of my own delicious cupcake with deep satisfaction. “Oh, wait. I did.”

(Copyright 2016 by Sarah Rees Brennan. Special thanks to Rachel Wasdyke and Lauren Cepero at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.)

Comments

[Selenia]

I am really excited for this book, I love the cover.
Have you read The Last of the Spirits by Chris Priestley? I am currently starting it: "In a twist on one of Dickens's classic stories, young Sam vows revenge against the miser Scrooge, who refuses to help him escape the cold, but when he takes shelter in a graveyard, Sam gets a ghostly warning about the perils of his bitterness."

[Gina]

I'm not familiar with it. But I'd love to have a review of it for the blog, if you'd like to write one! :-)