The Diminished

by Kaitlyn Sage Patterson

  “Swinton!” A woman as tall and twice as broad as Swinton himself barreled into him, wrapping him up in her arms and pressing his face into her ample bosom. “I’ve been beside myself with worry. Get yourself inside and tell me everything. Be quick about it.”

  It wasn’t until she’d shuffled her son inside and went to close the door that she saw the rest of us standing by the garden gate. Shock registered on her face, followed closely by a wide smile. “You’ve got to forgive me. Come in, come in, and welcome.”

  Swinton’s mother, Bethesda, sat us all down at the long plank table in the kitchen, which was groaning under the weight of enough food to feed a small army. After the initial surprise at seeing Curlin, Bethesda hardly looked at her. Instead, she busied herself pouring hot cups of tea for each of us.

  I held my mug between my hands, jumping at every sound. I needed to see Bo. I had to know that he was in one piece.

  “She’ll need tending,” Swinton said, nodding at Curlin.

  “Surely, surely,” Bethesda said. “Though I’ve no idea why you’d bring her here with the temple down the road.”

  “Don’t worry yourself about it, Ma. Has Bo made it back?”

  My heart quickened in my chest as I turned to look at Bethesda. Quill, sitting beside me on the long bench, squeezed my knee. I leaned into him, stealing comfort from his presence.

  “I sent him upstairs for a bath and a change of clothes. He’ll be down shortly. Poor ducky looked half-starved, and I hadn’t a thing ready to feed him.”

  I let out my breath, relieved. He was fine. He was alive.

  “And you must be Vi, my dear.” Bethesda shifted platters around on the table, making space for plates in front of each of us. “My Swinton and Bo’ve worked so awfully hard to find you. And you two, as alike as twins.”

  Curlin stiffened and sent a suspicious glance at me from across the table.

  Bethesda shot her a strained smile. “I didn’t happen to catch your name, dearie.”

  “I’m Shr...” She faltered and looked down at her hands. “I’m Curlin.”

  “Of course you are. Eat up, everyone. You’ve had a long night, by the looks of it.”

  Before I could say anything, boots clopped down the stairs. I clambered off the bench and to my feet.

  He strode through the door, shirt untucked and dark curls dripping water. He’d made no effort to hide the gold cuff he wore around one wrist, shaped like the crown of the empire. Without sparing a glance for anyone else in the room, Bo went to Swinton and took him in his arms. They pressed their foreheads together, grinning at each other with their eyes barely a quarter inch apart.

  “You’re safe,” Bo said, emotion choking his deep baritone. “Thank the gods. You’re safe.”

  Swinton laughed, though the sound didn’t seem jolly so much as relieved. “You didn’t think I would let anything happen to me, did you? I’m far too wily to be taken down by a few ragers with knives, even if they are Shriven.”

  A noise burbled from Bo, half sob, half laugh, and a tumbling sense of love and relief and happiness tangled into my own anxious joy at seeing him whole. I wished I could see his face, but it was buried in Swinton’s shoulder.

  “I’m glad you got out of there, Bo.” Swinton planted a tender kiss on Bo’s lips. “I seem to’ve grown awfully fond of you.”

  Bo drew back, one arm still firmly wrapped around Swinton’s waist, and caught my eye. He watched me, cautious, like he was bracing for a strike.

  “You’re well?” he asked.

  I crossed the room and flung my good arm around him, crushing him to me. He may’ve been a pretentious, bumbling oaf who needed the whole truth beaten out of him, but he was mine. My twin.

  He wrapped his arms around me, and hot, happy tears welled up in my eyes.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  BO

  My breath caught in my throat, and had Swinton not been at my side, steadying me, I would have been knocked flat by the thundercloud of love and anger and pain and fear and happiness rolling off Vi. When she finally let go, I saw, to my great surprise, one of the Shriven in bloodstained robes at the table, staring blankly into a cup of tea. I automatically went to roll my sleeve down over my cuff, but stopped myself. If she hadn’t already seen it, she would when I went to cover it. The scent of the philomena bushes came back to me in a rush, and with it, heartache as heavy as the golden net the Suzerain had settled on my shoulders so many weeks before.

  “I’ve words to say to you,” Vi said, a demanding note in her voice.

  Her irritation cut through my memory, searing away my thoughts of the Queen and bringing into sharp focus the list of names Swinton had found in my aunt’s study. “Why’s there one of the Shriven here?”

  “She needed saving. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “What’ve you done to your arm?” I asked.

  She waved her good hand dismissively. “Fell off a roof. That’s nothing to do with anything. Stop dithering. Where’ll we not be overheard?” she asked, turning to Swinton.

  He looked at his mother questioningly, and Bethesda shrugged. “We’re near about full. There’s your room, and one other due to come empty ’round noon. If you’re fussed about being alone, try the garden. There’s not likely to be anyone about at this hour.”

  Vi jerked her head at the Shriven and addressed Quill. “See that one doesn’t run off.”

  “As you wish, milady,” Quill said, laughter in his voice.

  Vi stared daggers at the grinning young man before stomping out the back door. I followed her, sparing a moment to kiss Swinton on the cheek.

  “Watch your back,” he whispered. “She’s ferocious.”

  I found Vi in the farthest corner of the garden, perched on the fence, kicking morosely at the long weeds growing between the posts. The dawn had only recently broken, and dew still clung to the garden’s explosion of plants. In her drab, dirty clothes, with that dark tangle of curls and smudges of sleeplessness beneath her eyes, she looked like nothing more than one of Gadrian’s firebirds sent with a message to the garden of life. Fierce, misplaced, defiant.

  “You owe me answers, Bo.”

  “I know.”

  Her eyebrows knit together as she studied me with her stormy eyes. I wondered briefly if I looked half so fierce when I was angry.

  “Why don’t you want anyone to know that we’re twins? Seems to me it would’ve been twice as easy to buy my contract off the Laroches if they knew I wasn’t a dimmy.”

  I hefted myself onto the fence on her good side, half to give myself time to gather my thoughts, half to avoid seeing her reaction to the story I had to tell her. The smell of roasting meat drifted out of the inn’s chimney, and I heard Vi’s stomach growl. I wondered how long it had been since she’d had a meal.

  “Spit it out,” she said. “Your scheming and shuffling’s loud enough to give me a headache.”

  “No one can know that I’m a twin.”

  Her kicking feet stilled, and she tucked one ankle behind the other. When she spoke again, she bit off each word, spitting them out as though every one was a bitter taste she wanted out of her mouth. “No one can know that you’re a twin, or no one can know that you’re my twin?”

  “It isn’t—”

  Her fingers, the nails crusted with blood and dirt, reached out and brushed the cuff on my wrist. “It’s to do with this, isn’t it?”

  A blush crept up my neck, and I forced the words out in an inelegant stream. “Almost everyone in the entirety of the Alskad Empire, with very few exceptions...” I paused and took a breath. “They know me as the singleborn heir to the throne. The crown prince. The only people who may not believe I’m singleborn are the Suzerain, and they’ve sent the Shriven looking for you. It’s a horribly long story, but I believe that they plan to use you to control me when I sit on the throne. I don�
��t mean to let that happen. I mean to wear the crown one day, and I mean for you to rule beside me.”

  Vi let out a long, low whistle. “Magritte’s tongue. Why? Why d’you want a thing like that? Why d’you think I’d want a thing like that?”

  I pushed through the waves of discomfort and doubt rolling off Vi. I had known this question was coming, and in the silences of my journey back from Southill with Swinton, I had shaped an answer as honest and whole as I could manage. I wanted... No. I needed to be completely honest with Vi. I would never tell her another lie.

  “When I came of age, I swore that I would serve the people of the empire. I promised to put their needs before my own, to uphold justice. What I’ve seen here, Vi...” I shook my head. As if that could erase the list of dead children’s names burned into my memory. As if shaking my head was enough to magically transport me back to the more innocent version of myself. “Until I find my way to the bottom of this mess, until I’m the King, you’ll be safer if you’re not my twin. Quill has agreed to help me arrange passage for us back to Penby on his uncle’s ship. I’ll see to it that you’re safe, that you want for nothing. There’s a house our father owned on the northern shore of Alskad. It’s very beautiful—”

  “Bo?” Vi took my hand in hers, and the energy she put into suppressing her frustration shocked me. Behind that, though, was love. Wave after wave of intense, bewildering, irritated, proud, complicated love. This, I supposed, was what it meant to have a sister. A twin. “Why, by Dzallie’s teeth, would you think for a second that I’d be content to hide away in some forgotten cottage, waiting for you to save the world while I sit on my thumb?”

  Birdsong and the nonsense chatter of the bright mimic birds filled the silence between us. In my own drive to find a way to fulfill my oath to the empire, to save my sister, to become the kind of man who ought to be King, I’d forgotten to consider what Vi might want. I hadn’t thought that she, too, might want something more than a dull life.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I just thought...after everything you’ve been through...it would be nice for you to be comfortable. Safe. You can study, learn about the workings of the empire. Learn how to be Queen alongside me.”

  Vi’s fingers squeezed mine. A rough chuckle, like ice over stones, came from beside me, and I turned to look at her. Tears were streaming down her cheeks and into the creases of her sad smile. I hopped off the fence and, biting the inside of my cheek to keep my own tears at bay, offered her my handkerchief.

  “We’ll have to save the conversation about my being a queen for a much later time, given that it’s sure to end with a fight, and I’m not about fighting you as soon as I’ve found you.” She gave me a wry grin and swiped at her face. “You know, up until a few weeks ago, I would’ve given my left arm for just what you’re offering. Safety. A place of my own by the northern sea. But now...” She took a deep breath. “Tell me about this mess of yours.”

  I told her what I knew. About the philomenas growing on my estate, the deaths of the perfumers and the novitiate priests. I told her about Swinton’s brother and my aunt’s attempt to have me killed. Once I’d started, everything—my whole life—threatened to pour out of me. As I spoke, Vi’s face betrayed nothing, though the tides of her emotions flooded over me.

  I told her about Gerlene, about Claes and Penelope and their deaths. About my mother. About Queen Runa and her plans for me. By the time I’d finished, the sun had risen above the trees, and the air had gone from bearably warm to the heavy daytime heat that seemed to have shape and heft.

  “Do you see?” I asked. “Do you understand why I must keep you secret? Safe? The empire deserves the truth, and that means someday, we’ll sit beside one another, ruling together. But I need time to find a way to make it happen.”

  Sweat prickled my forehead, and I waited, anxious, for her response. She took her time, staring at the orange blossoms hanging heavy from the trees over our heads. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth, and I could almost see the thoughts spinning in her head.

  Finally, she looked at me and said, “The Suzerain. The Suzerain and the anchorites, I mean. They aren’t just killing folk for the joy of it. They’ve found a way to make us lose our grip on our tempers, to make us wildly, unstoppably violent. They’re creating dimmys, Bo.”

  “Us? Vi, you’re not one of them. You’ve never been diminished. It was all a lie.”

  Vi gave me a look hard enough to shatter diamonds. “We’re twins, yes. I see that plain as the freckles on your face. But one doesn’t take away the other. I’ve been a dimmy my whole life, and even if I didn’t know that it was the temple making folk fear me, making me fear myself, I have been diminished, Bo. I am one of the diminished.”

  I took a deep breath, rebuttals already taking shape in my mouth, but she put up a hand to stop me.

  “They made me a dimmy, but I’m going to make certain sure it stops with me.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “I don’t quite know yet,” she said, and eased herself off the fence, cradling her bandaged arm. “But I think it’s an awfully good thing my twin—” she stopped and winked at me “—I mean, my half brother’s set on being King.” Her brows knitted themselves together, and a dark look shadowed her face. She didn’t say anything about becoming royalty herself.

  “Probably a good thing I didn’t let Curlin die, either.”

  Vi took my hand and led me back toward the inn.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  VI

  Back inside the kitchen, Curlin and Mal were bristled like alley cats, stubbornly glowering in opposite corners of the room. Swinton and Quill lounged at one end of the long table, picking at the crumbs of what looked to’ve been a fair substantial meal. The pair of them hardly paused their gabbing for a second when we came through the door. Swinton looked up at Bo, a question on his face, and when Bo settled on the bench beside him and squeezed his shoulder, Swinton relaxed into him, smiling. I leaned against the door frame, trying to decide which storm needed handling first.

  Curlin’s wound had been freshly bandaged, and half of her face washed. She held a rag limply in her good hand. Mal had washed away the soot and dirt of the night before, and his tight curls clung damply to his dark, clean scalp. I took a seat at the table, ravenous, but before I’d managed to swallow my first bite of spiced duck pillowed inside a sweet roll, Quill flourished a stack of papers in front of my face.

  “What’s this?” I asked, stuffing another bite into my mouth.

  “Freedom,” Bo said. “Quill had Phineas’s signature on another document. Swinton traced it on to your contract, signing it over to me. I marked the term as completed, and Quill will file the documents with the proper authorities before the end of the day. You’re free, Vi.”

  Curlin scoffed, and I shot her a hard look. For the first time in hours, I thought of the Laroches. “What happened to them? Phineas and Aphra?”

  Bo’s face tightened. “She killed him. Slit his throat.”

  A wave of cold raced through me, and I forced my face to stillness. “Not to say he didn’t deserve it, but...” I took a breath. “You saw it?”

  Bo nodded.

  “And her? Where’d she go?”

  “She disappeared after that. She left the barn, and I saw no reason to wait around to learn her fate.”

  “She was kind to me,” I said. I was glad it had been her. Glad that Phineas’s life had been taken by someone he’d hurt. I blushed. I didn’t want Bo to see this side of me—didn’t want him to see what a lifetime of fear and anger had made me. I wanted to be the best version of myself for him. “Murderer or no, I hope she’s all right. I hope she finds herself a place in the resistance. She was helping them, you know.”

  Bo shot me a look so pointed, so expressive, that I knew he’d read every feeling that’d flashed through my mind. He smiled, and a little of the anger, a little of t
he hatred that’d followed me my whole life, melted away.

  Quill laughed. “You’ve had the shortest contract on record, so far as I know, Vi,” he said. “What’ll you do with your new freedom?”

  I touched the pearls in their pouch beneath my shirt and looked at Curlin. Screams echoed in my head, the terrifying ranting of the little boy in the temple’s basement. Tobain. I thought about the Shriven, dressed as rebels.

  “Curlin, who cut your arm?” I asked.

  Her chin trembled, and she refused to meet my eyes. Bethesda stood behind her and wrapped an arm around the shaking girl.

  “Leave her be, Miss Vi. She’s had an awful time of it. This one needs a bath and a rest, and then I’ll see her back to the temple.”

  Curlin’s good hand shot out and gripped Bethesda’s hand. “No! No. You can’t send me back there. You’ve no idea what they made me do. What they did to me. I’d rather die.”

  “The temple?” Bethesda asked, looking alarmed.

  Swinton eased his ma into a chair, murmuring softly to her.

  Bo shot me a questioning look. I could almost feel the pieces clicking into place in his head.

  “What you showed me in the basement of the temple,” I said. “Did you want that, or did they?”

  “I didn’t want to tell them, Vi. I know you won’t believe me, but I did everything I could to keep your secret safe. Anchorite Sula and Anchorite Bethea made me swear before I came that I’d never tell a soul that we’d grown up together. They made me promise to watch out for you, Magritte only knows why. And I tried. I really did.”

  “But?” Bo asked. The single word held depthless menace.

  Curlin looked at me, pain and tears clouding her eyes. “You saw. You saw what they can do. They’ve given me three doses that I know of. I only wanted to stop them watching me, stop them waiting for me to turn. I only wanted to be normal. They said that if I did as they said, I would be safe. That they’d keep me from losing myself.”