I’m thinking a lot about the scene in ‘A Darker Shade of Magic’ Where Kell tells Lila
that he “belongs” to the royal family in the sense of possession not membership, and about the fact that in A Conjuring of Light Kell is consistently the person who can’t bring himself to hate Holland.
Kell has always seen a kinship between himself and Holland because of being (as far as he knew) the only two antari. But I think an element he’s perhaps less consciously aware of is that both of them have had their lives defined by the responsibility that comes with power; their value as people secondary to their value as tools, and their own choices secondary to their duty to their worlds.
Lila, by virtue of being born on a world where ‘antari’ meant nothing, never had that experience. Her trauma runs in the opposite direction - her first experiences were of loneliness and loss, so she avoids responsibility and commitment out of a blind terror of dependence and loss of freedom. And I think it takes her a long time to recognise that the opposite experience exists; all through A Gathering of Shadows I still get the sense that
she doesn’t understand Kell’s choice to stay - doesn’t see why someone
who had the option to seize freedom wouldn’t just take it and damn the
consequences (or perhaps, hasn’t thought it through far enough to realise that there
would be consequences.) Her first moment of real understanding is when she hesitates to bind herself into the spell, and realises that this is what Holland, and to a lesser extent Kell, have been doing all along - not because it costs them nothing, but because they knew the price of refusing.
And I think that’s part of why Kell can’t turn his back on Holland. Because more than Lila or Alucard, he knows that sometimes choice is an illusion and that power can be its own sort of chain. For Holland that reality has been both more naked and more brutal than it was for Kell - but it’s a reality they both experienced to one degree or another, and I think it’s an understanding that relatively few people around them have.
A blog by a slightly ridiculous Canadian chick transitioning into adulthood.