No. I am many things — many despicable things — but I am not a coward. Not anymore.

I met with her in her cell the night before the execution. I almost had myself convinced that I was going not to settle the doubt that had been plaguing me since her arrest, but to tell her my story and make her understand all the pain that she had caused. My resolve cracked, however, the moment I saw her.

"Take off that ridiculous dress," I demanded.

Her face turned bright red. "P-pardon me?"

"You heard me. Take it off."

"You!" She was losing her composure, and in her wavering voice I heard just one more confirmation of my suspicion. "You… you insolent, slavish boy—!"

"I am not a boy!" I shouted, cutting her off. I seized her by the wrist and pressed her palm to mine, and with our hands side by side the truth became glaringly, painfully obvious. "But you are."

She — he — pulled away from me and went to sit in the corner and gaze out the window.

"Admit it." He was silent. "If you were to take off the dress — or even just pull the top down — what would I see? A flat chest and the scar from my arrow."

That got his attention. He looked at me in surprise. "Your arrow? But that was—" His eyes widened. "Oh. Oh God. Was he… He wasn't your brother, was he?"

"My fiancé."

"I'm sorry." He sounded earnest to the point of heartbreak, like he meant it from the core of his soul. I could have snapped his neck.

"You're not the who should be!" I said, snapping my tongue at him instead. "She's still out there, and you are going to tell me where."

"I will do no such thing."

"Then…" Something in the tone of his voice and the look in his eye, something I knew I'd seen more than once before and never been able to contend with, made me falter. "Then you will be tortured."

"Are you that kind of person?" he demanded, and in the controlled anger and terse accusation I heard, "Run, you little fool!"

"What do you think?" I asked him. "Am I that kind of person, or the kind of person who would execute an innocent man?"

"How can I be innocent? I am her twin. If her crimes call out for blood, that same blood flows in my veins."

"All the better. Won't a man avenge the girl he loves, whoever her persecutor may be?"

"Are you absolutely certain that is how the world works? Certain enough to sacrifice everything for such an idea?"

He shook his head. "I will sacrifice everything for her."

"Then you are a fool! You're worth ten of her! Just the fact that you would do that—"

"There is something else," he said, somehow cutting me off even though his voice was much softer than my own, "that you would have seen if you had looked beneath my clothes." He fished up a small silk pouch hung on a string around his neck and from it withdrew a scrap of parchment, which he unfolded and held out to me. "Take this and read it. I am sick of holding it secret."

I did. It was a letter. I have attached it here:

My dearest Len,

I must see you one last time. Come find me, I am hiding in the place we first me.

-Your Lady in Green

Love is helplessness, I thought, and at last understood how she could have known that. "You were lovers."

"Yes." He did not look at me.

"You betrayed her."

"Yes."

And I thought you were like him. "You told your sister where she was!

"No. I went myself." I could not respond to that; I only stared in disbelief. "She wanted to see me again, so I thought it would be…" He lifted his hands as though he were about to bury his face in them and cry, but instead he merely looked at them as they began to tremble. "But at the last moment, I froze. She wrapped her hands around mine, this hand that held the knife, and…" His fingers curled into his palms. His arms sunk to his sides, his chin to his chest, and he squeezed his eyes shut as though trying to force tears or memories back into his skull.

"Then it wasn't your fault."

"It was. I could have stopped her. I chose not to. I am no more innocent than anyone else."

I wondered at the time what he meant by that — that "than anyone else" — but I had a more pressing question to ask of him. "And what, exactly, do you expect me to do now?"

"What you must. The people need closure."

"So that is your decision?"

"It's the only way she'll be safe." Which was the last thing I wanted, but what could I do about it?

"I see," I said, and with some effort kept my voice even. "I will keep that in mind when coming to my own."

I left with those words, knowing already that I would make no decision that night. The shock of actually winning followed so closely by the shock of that not meaning what I'd thought — not meaning anything at all, in fact, or else something so dark and heavy I would rather believe it was nothing — was like two blows of a hammer to my brain. My mind felt bruised and broken. All I wanted to do, all I was capable of doing, all I did — was sleep.