The Hanged Man

by K. D. Edwards

  After a long minute, he sighed and kissed the curve of my neck. “Hero,” he said.

  “I didn’t know this would happen.”

  “Of course not. But it has. And as Corinne said, this is not something you are allowed to face without us. I would have your promise on that.”

  “My promise on what? That I’ll drag your entire court into my fight?”

  Addam pulled away until he could meet my eyes. He said, simply, “Yes.”

  “Have you talked with your mother?”

  “I have.”

  “She can’t be very happy about this.”

  “She is not. But she also understands the choice I made.”

  “I didn’t give you much room to make any other choice, though, did I? The Hanged Man—”

  He made a sound like chha, and waved me off. He looked around, spotted two metal chairs, and unfolded them for us. He kicked them close, so that our knees would touch when we sat down.

  “Pay attention,” he said closely, after we’d taken our seats. “Try not to interrupt.”

  “Okay.”

  “Such as that.”

  I smiled at him.

  He picked up my hand, and wrapped his fingers around it. He frowned at how cold I was, and breathed warm puffs into my palm. As he rubbed my fingers, he said, “I was not speaking of the choices we have made, or must now make, regarding Lord Hanged Man. I am speaking about us.You insist on behaving as if I am dragged unaware into your troubles. Like a child with his eyes closed. But I am not a child, Rune Saint John. Nor are my eyes closed. I know what it means to be with you. To be honest, I’m surprised you haven’t pieced it together by now.”

  I forgot I wasn’t supposed to interrupt. “Pieced what together?”

  “My brother is a prophet, Hero.”

  “Prophecy,” I sighed. “Let me guess. Quinn’s warned you that there’s a really high probability that I’ll keep dragging you into emergency after emergency.”

  “Quinn knows me better than anyone in my life. He knows what I want. He knows what I want from existence. I want to help people, Rune. I want my living to matter. I have struggled for so long to find an identity apart from my family. My work with”—and here he paused, only to make a sour face—“Ashton, Geoffrey, and Michael was a poor outlet for that. My charitable works—those were better. Those were satisfying. But I still struggled to matter.”

  “You matter,” I said.

  “And then one day,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, “I was kidnapped. Thrown in a dungeon. Saved by a hero.”

  “And almost killed after the hero dragged you into more danger.”

  “And then saved the city. We saved the city, Rune. We did that. We stopped Rurik.”

  “But I’m not sure this is the same. I’m not asking you to save the city. I’m asking you to get involved in court warfare. This isn’t—”

  “Hero,” he said, not loud but firm, and he squeezed my hand. “You act like this is the end of your story. I would remind you again: my brother is a prophet. I once asked him, not long ago, if you and I would be good together.”

  Addam leaned close and whispered the next bit in my ear.

  “And the prophet said—while picking chewing gum off his shoe, as it were—he hogs the covers, but most of the time he makes you very, very happy, especially when you help him save the world.”

  Addam leaned away. “And so my mother accepts the choice I’ve made. Not to drag my court into the fight, because, in many ways, I have already stepped away from her. My mother understands the alliance I have made. And she will offer her support to the court that you and I are making.”

  He kissed me on the lips. I didn’t respond, because my brain wasn’t responding to anything right now.

  But I didn’t pull away.

  And I didn’t tell him he was wrong.

  After I had the doctor Heal my ribs, Brand and I went to the roof.

  The security of the hospital extended there, and I needed the fresh air. I needed to be alone with Brand. We sat down on a parapet, looking out at the stillness of the scarlet-skied morning.

  Finally he said, “Nothing good ever happens when you say we need to talk. Either you forgot to pay the cable bill, or you’re going to try to tell me you need to go tearing off on your own.”

  “I paid the cable bill.”

  “Did you notice the part where I said you’re going to fucking try to do something on your own? Because we’ve been over that shit before.”

  I looked him straight in the eyes. “I’ll need you at my side. More than ever before.”

  “Oh. Well fucking okay, then. What else do we need to talk about?” “Back home, in my room, is a folder. I found it in the attic. At Sun Estate.”

  “Okay,” he said, again, drawing it out.

  “It’s a file on your biological family. It has the names of your biological mother and father and brothers.”

  Brand stared at me. Then he said, “And?”

  Now I stared back at him. “And what? I mean. This is big, right?” Brand bristled, swinging around to face me, with such exaggerated movement that I grabbed his sleeve to keep him from falling. He said, “Is that why you’ve been so fucking weird the last few days?”

  “It’s . . . well. Yes? Sort of?”

  “Rune, I’ve known that for years.”

  I blinked. “But . . . How did you find out?”

  “Are you shitting me? The first time it even occurred to me to be curious, I just looked it up on the Internet. Back when we had fucking dial-up. When I was, like, eight. Do you have any idea how easy it is to figure that shit out?”

  I gaped.

  “Why are you so stupid about these things?” Brand demanded in genuine exasperation. “Why do you think it would even matter to me? I thought we dealt with this when we were kids.”

  “When did we deal with this?” I asked, exasperated myself.

  “You were five. Remember? Your father explained to you what a Companion was, and how he’d bought me. You got all weepy and ran to me and told me you were setting me free.”

  “You punched me in the nose!”

  “And it was dealt with. Why are we having this conversation again?”

  “But . . .” I trailed off. I scratched an eyebrow. “This is a different conversation than I expected.”

  “Goddamnit, Rune. You always act like this is something bad that happened to me. It happened to you, too, you know. You didn’t have any choice either. You didn’t get a vote when a strange baby was plunked down in your crib and stole all your toys. Are you mad they did that to you?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Well, I’m not mad either. What is it you think I missed out on? Growing up to be a thirty-year-old American with two-point-five kids and a nine-to-five job?”

  “But—”

  “And that’s ignoring the whole fucking fact that any parental urge I have is satisfied by dealing with you every damn day!”

  It’s possible too many things had happened in too short a time. There are only so many acrobatics you can do when rug after rug is ripped away. So I turned my eyebrow scratching into an eyelid rubbing, and tried to hide the fact that I may have been crying.

  “Hey,” he said. I felt him nudge me. “Hey. Stop it. I’m trying to say . . . I love our life. This isn’t a thing to be worried about, Rune.”

  “It’s not—” I said, and had to stop to take a breath. “It’s not just that. I don’t even know why I mentioned this. I tell Addam I feel like shit because I’m dragging him into this, and he says it’s a choice he already made. And this . . . you . . . I don’t . . .”

  His hand curled on my shoulder. A fixed point against the spin of gravity.

  I took another, shuddering breath. “Brand, I know what I need to do. Tomorrow. I think my plan will work, but if it doesn’t, we lose everything.”

  “Shit. We’ve been friends with those odds for a long, long time.”

  “This is different. The more and more we
get swept up into the affairs of the Arcanum, the less and less options I have.” It was like a stone cracking in a dam. Words poured out, a spray of water backed with the force of a river. “I’m scared. I am so scared. There are landmines everywhere, and it’s not a question of finding a path through them—it’s a question of how well I can protect us when I set one off.”

  “Hey,” he said, and shook my shoulder. “Come on now.”

  “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can be what I need to be.”

  “Hey,” he said, again, and I felt his own worry thrumming along our bond. “Look at me, damnit!”

  I opened my eyes. Saw the blue of his. One of my first memories ever: those eyes, narrowed at me, right before he slapped me with a rattle.

  Brand said, fiercely, in a breaking voice, “You’re my boy. You can do anything. Anything.”

  We stayed like that, and stared at each other, and I finally nodded. He put his arm around my shoulder and held me close.

  We stared off the roof into dawn.

  THE ARCANUM

  The hospital administrator, in a fit of politically motivated charity, gave us a suite of rooms in the coma ward. I didn’t complain. Coma patients were unlikely to get out of bed and hover outside our door and snitch on our plans.

  Diana turned out to be frighteningly competent in emergencies. She arranged for food and napping quarters; sent a security team to Half House to retrieve weapons Brand wanted; and, most unexpectedly of all, brought in tailors and seamstresses with a rack of clothes.

  Addam, Brand, and I were changing in one of the rooms, while Corbie played with plush centaur dolls on the ground.

  For clothes, I’d opted on a simple, clean look. Black business slacks, a black button-down shirt. They went well with my boots, at least. Brand was struggling with a tie—“And not another fucking word about it”—because most Companions wore suits and ties to the Arcanum. Addam had settled on actual court clothes, which included a burgundy shirt that showed a long V of chest, along with tight gray pants. Very tight gray pants. When he bent over to pick up a boot, my jaw dropped so fast I almost dislocated it.

  Brand caught me staring and mumbled, “You’re fucking shameless.”

  “But,” I said, and flicked my eyes to Addam, as if to say I wasn’t wrong. Brand rolled his eyes back at me, as if to say that Addam was fucking shameless too.

  On the other side of the room, Addam sighed. “You both seem to believe your spooky telepathic bond is quieter than it actually is. It is not. Do you need assistance with that tie, Brandon?”

  “Fuck you,” he said. He glared at us, untangled his tie, and started again. The problem was that the only knots he knew required piano wire and someone else’s neck.

  Quinn came into the room, clutching a piece of notebook paper. He gave me a serious look and handed it to me. I scanned the list of family names he’d written, folded the paper, and put it in my pocket. A secret ace, which I’d reveal at the right opportunity. “That’s amazing work,” I said quietly. “But I’m sorry you had to go through it.”

  “It was important,” Quinn said, cutting his eyes at Addam.

  “It was,” I said. “Is Max ready?”

  “Yes. Diana got limos. The scary ones, that can stop bullets and tornadoes.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” I said. “Are we going to be driving through a tornado? Even some of the time?”

  “Oh no,” Quinn said seriously. “I don’t see that. Most of the time it’s quiet until later, when there’s fighting and booms and icicle screams.”

  “Ice cream?” Corbie said, perking up.

  “No. Icicle screams. I’m not quite sure what it means. It’s hard to see things that happen in the Convocation building. They made it that way on purpose.”

  We took this prophecy in stride, because it always came down to screaming, fights, and magical booms. That’s why I’d spent hours in the hospital’s public sanctum, storing an arsenal of aggressive magic. It hadn’t been easy—it was never easy to store spells in sigils outside your own personal sanctum—but I’d been motivated.

  “But is there ice cream too?” Corbie asked doggedly.

  Quinn stared at the ceiling. “Maybe?”

  “While we’re looking at the future,” I said, “Does Brand ever let someone tie his tie for him?”

  “All of you stop encouraging him,” Brand said. “Quinn, when it comes to prophecy, I’ll be pretty fucking happy if you just let me know when the blades are so close that they’re whistling. Got it?”

  “I’ll try,” he said.

  Corinne came into the room with a cardboard tray full of coffee. I decided, right there, that I loved Corinne. She angled the tray toward me, and I descended on it like a rockslide.

  “Is Layne doing okay?” I remembered to ask.

  “Better,” she said. “He hasn’t woken up yet. But his powers are working. He’s . . . feeding . . . off the infection.”

  I cradled the hot cup between my hands, and peered at her. “You know there’s nothing bad about his powers, right? Necromancy isn’t evil. There are just evil people. And he’s not one of them.”

  Her mouth—that unsettling blend of new wrinkles against smooth skin—pursed. “It’s Kevan’s magic. That’s what worries me, not whether it’s good or evil. I saw how it made him a target.”

  I took a sip of my coffee, swishing it around my mouth under the potentially inaccurate biological assumption that my saliva ducts would inject the caffeine directly into my bloodstream. I needed to have a talk with Corinne soon about Anna. She thought Layne was the biggest thing to worry about? Wait until she learned Anna—who’d fallen into an exhausted sleep in the chair by Layne’s bedside—had the power of a principality.

  Corinne was still speaking. “ . . . which is the most ironic thing.”

  “Sorry, what is?”

  “That the magic that fascinated the Hanged Man in Layne is what’s actually keeping Layne alive, and making him a threat to the Hanged Man.”

  I dropped my coffee. Straight up dropped it.

  I retreated into my brain, putting pieces together. I was barely aware of the activity around me—Brand’s alarm, Addam’s confusion, Corrine keeping Corbie from running his stuffed animal through hot coffee puddles.

  “I know how to kill him,” I whispered.

  I blinked and came back to myself.

  Corrine cut her eyes toward Corbie, whose own eyes had gone wide. Was there a murder jar? I shouldn’t be talking about killing people in front of children.

  I hurried over to Quinn. “Do you see a mass sigil filled with healing magic in my future?”

  Max and Anna came into the room behind me. Corinne put a hand on their arms and kept them to the fringes. She’d been a Companion. She knew enough to let moments like this play out.

  “Quinn,” I said again. “Do you see anything like that? Me with a Healing spell?”

  “Why a Healing spell?” Addam asked. “Rune, what is this?”

  “His Aspect. It’s his own magic. I . . . can’t explain. I need to think it through. Quinn? A Healing spell?”

  “I can’t . . . it’s hard to see. The Convocation makes everything fuzzy, and I’m . . . It’s . . .”

  “Think,” I said anxiously. “It’s important.”

  “Don’t ask like that,” Max said from across the room. When everyone turned to stare, he blushed. “It’s those stupid drugs. The ones that don’t work. The ones that just make him sick all the time and make everything blurry.” And for just a second, Max shot a quick, dirty look at Addam, whose face went slack with shock.

  “All the time?” Addam said. “Quinn? They make you feel ill all the time?”

  “Max!” Quinn shouted. “You promised!”

  “Don’t use that tone with me, Quinn Saint Nicholas,” Max said. “You threw up in my new loafers. Addam needs to know. And that’s not even important right now. You need to do like we practiced. Rune is talking about a big Healing spell. Is Brand proud?
Or is he rolling his eyes?”

  “Is Brand what?” Brand demanded.

  “The stupid drugs make it harder to make associations,” Max said, “but it’s easier if he ties it to things that are really, really important. He watches everything you and Rune do. He may not understand what he’s seeing, but he always seems to remember what makes you happy, and what doesn’t make you happy.”

  There was a lot happening right now. I tried to shelve everything except what I needed to survive the next few hours. I looked at Quinn, who was giving Addam a mournful look. “Quinn?”

  “Brand’s not rolling his eyes,” Quinn whispered. “He wants to crack a joke because you’re puffed up and clever, but he doesn’t, because you were clever. That happens now. It’s suddenly . . . there. It happens now. You’re going to try something.”

  I turned to Brand. “We need to find Diana. I need another favor.”

  “Are you going to explain whatever this is about?” he asked.

  “Do you trust me?”

  “You’re playing that card an awful lot. And, see, that’s never what you mean when you say that. What you mean is, will I follow you through the great big fucking mess you’re about to make.” And then, to my surprise, he smiled. “Stop fucking asking.”

  Atlantis is, on the surface, bicameral. The general populace elects people to serve the Convocation, which passes rules and codes and regulations, which presents the perfect mimicry of representative democracy.

  But at the heart of all power in the city is the Arcanum—the collective body of Arcana.

  The Arcanum uses its power sparingly. They allow the passage of laws they have no intention of following; they allow elections and appointments of everyday Atlanteans in much the way they’re amused by parades and beauty pageants. But at the end of the day, when it comes to the future of our people, their whispers are reality.

  At that time of the morning, the public levels of the Convocation building were a frenzy of bureaucracy. As my party wound its way to the more private layers of government, we passed a constant throng of people and groups looking to press their agendas. I paid attention only haphazardly, as a way of distracting me from the audience ahead.