I am never going to forgive Cristabel for what she did to Mercymorn. Inflicted on her the same “cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you” that Gideon did on Harrow, but without the same pressures. No one was banging down the door threatening to kill them both. She didn’t have to choose between watching Mercy die and dying for her. When Cristabel violently manipulated Mercy into lyctorhood, she did it with fore-thought. She planned it. Fuck her.
Thinking of how the way Cristabel’s death is framed in HtN is one of the MOST narrative choices of the series. It’s all: She died. It made everyone around her very sad. It’s presented as something that happened to her instead something Cristabel did on her own volition, because everyone who knew her has long ago decided how they were going to remember it and crystalized into those roles. Augustine blames her loudly and often but it’s all oblique; he doesn’t explain his reasons in a way that can be picked up at first glance, because to him they are bitter old news and he’s not having that fight again. For the reader is just a scavenger’s hunt in unreliable narrator land.
I think a core trait of Mercymorn’s character is that she has been pissed off at Cristabel for millenia and has never been in a position where she could admit it to herself. Augustine is free to hate her, but he does it in a way that he puts Mercy in the position where she has to defend the person who traumatized her, because if she doesn’t speak up for Cristabel who will? It’s a betrayal. John is John; he’s the kind of person to put ‘she had good intentions’ ahead of ‘she did actual harm to people’ and go along with Mercy talking about what a tragedy it was. Mercymorn has never had the possibilty to just yell at Cristabel because she made herself keeper of her memory; she carries the title of saint but it’s Cristabel she santified. I do think part of her envies how loud Augustine is about his hatred, and I also think she channelled a lot of this in how she feels about John, whom she worships and resents and hate at the same time. When she breaks down telling John that none of them had to die, she is taking out her anger at Cristabel. I mean, John deserves it! But so does Cristabel and Mercy never lets herself deal with that.
It’s all about the survivor’s guilt, innit?
It’s a uniquely helpless kind of grief, when someone you love is their own murderer. Who does the poet judge?
I will never tire of this theme in particular being explored through literature.
