He huffed a heavy breath. “The council has their regular a week from tomorrow. I’ll file the request to add me to their agenda.” When Petra didn’t object, didn’t lose her small smile, Ellis merely pursed his mouth and tapped the map against his palm. “It’s gone beyond a nuisance and slid right into a serious problem. If you hadn’t shown me this when you did, it would’ve been too late. I can’t have the whole of Wellech paying for the spanners he keeps throwing into the works, and if we don’t make these new quotas, the agro-boffins will tax us to death.” Ellis wanted to look away, but he kept his gaze even and his chin up. “I’ve been left little choice, yeah?”
Not necessarily asking for reassurance, but… yes, wanting it anyway.
Petra kindly obliged.
HIS TAD found him, unfortunately alone, at the back of the Grange’s common room two days later. Bumble and Bella—Lilibet’s herding dogs, who truthfully were more Ellis’s tagalongs and only deigned to occasionally check in on Lilibet’s goats—stood to happy attention when they spied Folant. Bullish as ever, he swaggered through the sparse crowd, most of whom were preoccupied with sampling the elderflower ale brewed for the upcoming Dydd Duwies festival. There were plenty, though, who paused to greet and glad-hand as Folant made his way by.
It was easy to mark the exact moment Ellis was spotted—Folant’s eyes went narrow, and his politician’s smile turned to a sour grimace. Ellis merely tipped his jar in sardonic salute, sighed out a resigned “Here we go” under his breath, and told the dogs to sit and stay while he subtly adjusted his sprawl from “relaxed” to “bored with a touch of arrogance.” It never paid to give Folant an insecurity to snag hold of.
Bumble and Bella sat waiting at the entrance to the snug, chests out, tails lazily sweeping the floor behind them while they watched Folant fill a jar from the keg and saunter his way over. He didn’t look at Ellis, instead greeting the dogs and giving each a friendly scritch to the ears before he joggled the chair across from Ellis; Ellis slowly removed his feet from the chair, sent the dogs a hissed chh-chh, and kept his eyes on Folant as Bumble and Bella settled once again by Ellis’s side.
Folant didn’t even take a sip from his jar before he leaned his elbows on the table and got right to it: “Baughan came to see me.”
Ellis snorted. “I’m sure he did.”
“So did Taffy.”
It didn’t surprise Ellis, but it did make him have to concentrate so he didn’t clench his jaw. Taffy Leyshon served on the council. Ellis was pretty sure she was also a member of the Purity Party.
“And what did Taffy want your help with?” Ellis lifted his jar. “Some immigrants need threatening? A contract needs forging?” He took a slow sip.
Folant rolled his eyes. “For pity’s sake, boy, I thought we were putting all this bad blood behind us. ‘Sort our relationship,’ you said.”
“We were. Or I was, at least.” Ellis shrugged. “Turns out, though, that if we did put bad blood behind us, we’d have nothing to base a relationship on at all.” He leaned in, mirroring Folant’s pose, elbows on the table and drink between his hands. “You don’t want sorting. You want me blind and docile while you keep chasing a battle my mam refused to fight years ago. You want—”
“Your mam used me for—”
“Of course she bloody did! That’s what conjugal contracts are for!” Ellis sat back and threw out his hands, so bloody tired of having this same conversation and never getting a different result. “And because she didn’t fall in love with you or your cock, you’ve been obsessed with trying to punish her ever since. Except you’re not. Nothing you’ve tried has worked—none of it. Her school still stands, her students are still exempt from your crap regulations, and she still. Doesn’t. Want you!”
He’d got louder. By the time he was done, he was shouting, and it was plain everyone in the place had heard at least some of it. Most merely raised their eyebrows and attended their drinks; some stared until Ellis shot his glance their way, and then they pretended they hadn’t been caught gaping; one man, a stranger, met Ellis’s gaze with a blatantly interested one of his own. Ellis knew just about everyone in Wellech, but not this man. Average looks, average build, clothes not expensive but not cheap. Unremarkable but for the thick white scar down one cheek.
One of the newest refugees, maybe, in which case, it was a little embarrassing to have him hearing something like this, but… probably for the best, in the end.
Ellis dismissed him. He had enough to deal with.
Folant didn’t even bother to turn when everything went quieter. He peered at Ellis with his usual bravado curling his lip, but there was something else there, too, something Ellis didn’t quite ken. Disappointment, maybe, but Ellis was used to that from his tad. Something that looked like melancholy, but Ellis had never seen anything like that on Folant before, so he wasn’t sure he was reading it right.
With a soft, grim chuckle, Folant looked down into his ale, swirled it against the sides of the jar, before he set it carefully down and folded his hands. “I can’t believe you’ve made it all these years, in a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and you still don’t know what your mam really did. What it means.”
It was all Ellis could do to just sit there and not flip the table like an irate drunk. “Tad…” Ellis sighed, already exhausted. “Bloody—” He set his jaw. “You’ve no idea how very much I do not want to have this conversation with you again. She offered you a contract. You signed it. You have no right—”
“She never wanted a cariad.” Folant jabbed a finger at the table with every syllable, apparently determined to dig up the bones of this long-dead corpse and reanimate it once again. “It was her right, I’ve never argued otherwise.”
Ellis willfully swallowed the disbelieving snort, but he couldn’t just let that one pass by unchallenged. “Everything you’ve done since I was old enough to wonder why you two hate each other says otherwise.”
“Oh, I don’t think she hates me.” Folant huffed a dry laugh. “I don’t think I’ve ever warranted anything better than indifference as far as she’s concerned.”
That was… probably true, actually. “Fine, so you hate her. Can we move on now?”
“I thought I could’ve loved her, once.” Folant peered at Ellis, calculating. “And then I found out what she’d done. Why she offered that contract.”
It was that calculation that made Ellis hesitate. Because he was pretty sure that, whatever Folant said next, it wasn’t going to be a half truth to gain Ellis’s sympathy, or a flat lie to try to turn him against his mam. Ellis’d had plenty of experience with both, and he knew what they looked like. This was different. This was Folant offering a truth, or at least truth as he saw it. Those were sometimes harder to hear. The venom that habitually came out of Folant’s mouth was one thing, but to be forced to admit he actually believed the vitriol…
Ellis took a drink from his jar. “All right, then.” He sat back, giving Bella room to lay her head on his lap. He obligingly stroked her ears, and tipped his head at Folant. “She offered a contract because she wanted a child without a cariad to go with it. Why is that a bad thing?”
“Oh, no.” Folant shook his head, one corner of his mouth turning up. He looked like a spider that had just had its web jostled by something big and juicy. “She didn’t want a child, boyo. She wanted you.”
“…All right?” Ellis blinked. “Last I checked, I am, indeed, her child, so if that’s—”
“She Dreamed.” Folant said it with a weird vehemence. “She holed herself up in that great pile of hers with a list of men who could give her what she wanted, and Dreamed for weeks. Watched children she’d never birth grow up, live their lives, and die, one after another. Watched herself raising them, caring for them, loving them, then woke and started it all again. Like they were nothing. Moving on to another contract, another Dream, as though each time she moved on she wasn’t killing some child who’d never even have a chance to be conceived.”
“That’s…�
�� Ellis shook his head. “Stone me, Tad, that’s... really not how it works.”
“It’s what happened.”
“It isn’t, because it’s bloody impossible. That’s not how Dreaming even works!”
“It’s what happened!”
“For the love of—” Ellis wasn’t sure if he was amused or horrified. He was definitely scunnered. “Even if it did work that way—which it doesn’t—what of it? You might as well say every woman who doesn’t conceive every time she’s ripe is killing a child that’ll never be. That’s not how any of it works. You can’t just—”
“She watched babes born, she watched them grow, she watched them die, until she Dreamed you. You, Ellis. She Dreamed you and said, ‘Yes, that one,’ then binned all the rest like they didn’t matter. That’s not love, that’s not a mam, and no one should have that kind of power.”
And there it was.
“Ahhh, now it comes to it.” Ellis huffed a snort, not entirely surprised, but all at once glad Folant’s “grand revelation” was really just the usual bitter refusal to accept rejection in a slightly different wrapper. “It’s always going to come down to the magic, isn’t it?” Ellis shook his head. “And somehow I think that if she’d accepted your cariad offer, you’d be all right with it after all. Because it’s not that you don’t like that anyone has that kind of power—you just don’t like it that you don’t. Not only that you don’t have it, but that the woman who does wanted nothing from you but the son she’d Dreamed, and never had any intention of sharing that power with you. Bloody damn.”
He shooed Bella away and scrubbed at his face, halfway between laughing and snarling. “Every goddess in the pantheon, you actually thought telling me that would make me sympathize with your Purity Party blather, didn’t you? You thought telling me it wasn’t about being spurned as a lover but being denied power was going to, what?—get me on your side? Make me agree that those with magic are less than people and deserve your scorn like you’re someone special?” He threw his hands out. “No wonder the Dewin make you insane. You just can’t—”
“The Dewin don’t have magic—they are magic. D’you know what would happen to a witch or a sorcerer if you stuck them in a cell away from anything they could pull power from? Nothing. They’d sit there and rot. Dewin could just wait until your back was turned, open the door and stroll out.”
It was both hilarious and terrifying.
Hilarious because it was so completely wrong and pathetically uninformed. A Natur witch could pull energy from anything living, right down to a rodent in the walls; an Elfennol sorcerer borrowed from the elements, and unless there was no air in these hypothetical cells, finding a source to draw from wouldn’t be an issue.
Terrifying because the way Folant said it was so sure, so specific. Which meant he’d thought about it. About putting people with magic in cells.
“Unless, of course,” Folant went on, callously oblivious, “you kept them in pain, but we wouldn’t want to be cruel about—”
“You… Sweet Duwies, save me.” Ellis had started snorting—half sincerely and half in horror—by the end of Folant’s tirade, but that last dried up any humor and turned it to shock. “You tried to rearrange an entire parish to hate magic as much as you do, and for years I just didn’t understand it. And then I thought I did, and I actually felt sorry for you, just a little, because loving someone who won’t love you back must be dreadful and near to tragic, and maybe a man can be forgiven, maybe, for letting it obsess and ruin him. Except then—then!” Ellis threw both arms out wide, nearly smacking Bumble in the side of the head. “It turns out it’s all because you want magic and can’t have it. Bloody damn, I admit I didn’t see that one coming.” He propped an elbow to the table, dropped his head into his hands and rubbed at his temples, shoulders shaking, laughing again, semihysterical now and well aware of it, but for pity’s sake! “I can’t believe you’ve nearly run your ancestral land into the ground because other people have something you don’t, and you can’t stand it.”
“I want nothing from any of them.” It came out from between Folant’s clenched teeth, a barefaced snarl, which only made Ellis laugh harder, until Folant said, “And I won’t have them here—d’you understand me, boyo?”
That finally killed the laugh, and made Ellis sit up straight, eyes narrowed, fists balled tight.
“You’d best think,” Folant went on. “And you’d best do a thorough job of it. Because that Dewin of yours? You make him cariad, you’ll be wanting to get used to dragon shite, because you won’t be bringing him to Wellech and letting him call it home. The rest of the world can do what they like with all the witches and sorcerers and mages, but I won’t have them here, and you won’t—”
“I think you’ll find I’ll do what I like. Because the only one who doesn’t seem to understand how badly you’re hurting Wellech is you.”
“I’m making Wellech better! I’m clearing out the—”
“You’re chasing off valuable resources! One of which, though I know you’d prefer to forget it, is me. Because I Dream, Tad. Not well enough to be one of those good-for-nothing witches you want run out of Wellech, but if I could, you’re bloody right I’d do it, and what’s more—I wouldn’t give someone like the you the power of knowing what might be coming either.”
It wasn’t new information. It was just something they never spoke of. And Ellis had allowed it, had participated in the denial, had allowed Folant to pretend, because some tiny part of Ellis had never stopped hoping for some kind of reconciliation he knew now was impossible. He’d just killed it himself. He was going to kill it even deader before the week was out.
It didn’t matter. It wasn’t the point.
Folant went still, disbelieving at first, and then… revolted. Only for a moment, and then it cleared the way for his fallback smirk. “Well, then. Seems spending all that time with Dew—”
“Don’t you bloody say it. I hear ‘Dewin scum’ out of your mouth one more time, I swear I’ll punch it so hard you’ll be shitting teeth for a month. And I’m beyond done, finished, with how much you care, how much you do for Wellech. Forging contracts, queering crop rotations, delaying planting”—Ellis pounded his fist to the table—“and that’s only today! All you’re doing is dragging us into your clumsy, vengeful snake pit with you, and I’m done, Tad. D’you understand? I’m not having it anymore. We’ve got bigger problems now than your pride—Wellech, Preidyn, the bloody world.
“A ferry from Llundaintref with a cracked paddlewheel stranded for hours half a furlong from our shore because Wellech’s bloody Pennaeth heard there were two immigrants on it and tried to have the fishing boats confined to moor and the captains detained so they couldn’t go help—did you think I wouldn’t hear about that? I hear bloody everything, Tad, every malicious word, every moment of pettiness, and the time for all your spite and duff is over!”
“Is it, then?” Folant shook his head, narrow-eyed and still smirking, completely unruffled. “Ah, boyo, you’ve so much to learn yet. You think because I handed over First Warden without a fight, I’ll just—?”
“You handed over nothing. I earned First Warden, and then I took it, despite every single obstruction you tried to throw in my way. You can try to salve your ego with a different story, but that’s how it was, and everyone knows it.”
“And you think taking Pennaeth will be as easy?” Ellis’s clear but as yet unspoken threat had left Folant remarkably unperturbed. His gaze was shrewd, amused, and it didn’t look like mere bluff and bluster. It looked like confidence. Folant sat back in his chair, drained his jar, and set it with a smack to the table. “You need two-thirds of the council. You probably think you have it.”
He stood. With a smug grin and a condescending pat to Ellis’s cheek, Folant gave the dogs a last scrub between the ears before strolling, unhurried, from the table and then the Grange.
It took a while for Ellis to stop rubbing at his temples and gritting his teeth, but when he did, when he risked a l
ook up and outward to see who was still paying a bit too much attention, he found only the stranger with the scar willing to meet his eye. Ellis merely stared back, not in the mood, until the man twitched his lip into an apparent attempt at something friendly, raised his jar, then finally stood.
Coming over to introduce himself, likely, and Ellis should care, should make the time, should offer a welcome. He didn’t. He shoved out of his chair, chirped a sharp whistle to the dogs to follow, and left.
HE’D BEEN home from Tirryderch for just shy of a fortnight when news arrived that the Duchess of Newbrookshire, ambassador to Błodwyl and first cousin to Preidyn’s Prince Consort, had been assassinated. Gunned down, along with her son, in a tearoom in Venetia by a man with ties to the Young Princes and, more damning, Taraverde’s Premier.
It was personal. It was meant to be. Preidyn had led the way in resisting the advances of the Central Confederation, had formed what was now being called the Western Unified Alliance along with several other countries, and though those other countries had yet to enter the fray, the Central Confederation was making sure Her Royal Majesty knew it was not pleased.
Two days later, while the continent was still reeling and only just drawing new and deadlier sabers to rattle, a Verdish biplane dropped, literally, out of the sky, smoking and sputtering and shearing low over a Preidynīg cruiser patrolling the Blackson off the southern coast of Ynys Dawel—one of Kymbrygh’s minor islands only a half-day’s ferry ride southeast of Tirryderch. It struck the water just off the cruiser’s bow, harmless to all but its pilot, but the audacity of its presence so close to Preidynīg shores struck a grating chord across the country. It shuddered especially through Kymbrygh.
“It’s a dragon flight path,” Petra said, thick slice of bread in her hand while she pored over the newspaper and ignored the rest of the breakfast the Bluebell’s holder had delivered moments ago. Petra shook her head, waved the bread around like she’d forgot she was holding it. “What was a plane even doing there? And how’d it get all the way from Taraverde with no one seeing it?” She frowned up at Ellis. “Surely one of the ships in the blockades would’ve done.”
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