“To my knowledge,” Solan said, “there has never been anyone else like me.”
“I like the confidence,” Evander said.
Another possible smile from Solan.
“I was born a rook and a seer,” he told them. “Over time, I developed the skills of a diviner and a sentient as well.”
Silence.
“That’s impossible,” Alys said at last, but she didn’t sound certain. That was uncharacteristic enough that Cassa began to feel nervous, though she wasn’t sure why.
The rook-seer-diviner-sentient shrugged.
“You don’t have to believe me,” he said. “I know how strange it all sounds.”
“Wait,” Cassa said, her mind finally catching up to the conversation. “You said you’ve been stealing people’s memories. Not just prisoners’. Why?” And why was he admitting it to them?
“Do you think that the threat to the council’s power ended with the rebellion? It’s only been four years since the last rebel was executed. The wealthy and entitled in the citadel might have cloistered themselves away from the fight, but they are very aware of the council’s lingering vulnerability. The councilors surround themselves with the most talented diviners and sentients in the city. The moment a member of the nobility—or anyone at all—starts to contemplate that vulnerability, the council knows, and they are swift to act. Though, of course, they are also careful to keep their hands clean of it.” Solan stirred, a faint expression of sorrow and regret flickering across his face. “Not every condemned in the citadel receives a trial, and I am the citadel’s executioner.”
“Why?” Cassa asked again. She cast her eyes around the room again, around the trappings of civilization that had been so carefully collected. She was beginning to feel a new sense of unease. “Why are you helping them? Why are you down here?”
Solan hesitated. He set his cup down on the table between them and folded his hands in his lap.
“I’ll tell you the story,” he said. “I can’t promise you’ll believe me, but I promise it’s all true.”
Cassa swept a glance over her friends. They were all staring at Solan with varying expressions of suspicion and uncertainty. None of them replied.
“I told you I was born a rook and a seer,” Solan said. “When my powers became evident, I was still a young man. Foolish. I stole some memories. Not always on purpose. You have to understand how difficult it was for me—I was the only one of my kind. At night I dreamed the future, and by day I felt people’s thoughts like thick webbing, closing around me. I was only trying to gain some control.” He sighed and shifted in his seat.
“When I was discovered, the council had me arrested. Even then they were corrupt, desperate to keep the power that prophecies gave them. When they realized what I was capable of, they wanted to use me. They knew the number of seers and rooks were dwindling with every generation, and now they had someone who was both—someone completely under their control. As my punishment, they locked me down here, told everyone I loved that I was dead. In the past a different rook was chosen for each execution, but now I’m the only executioner. Another punishment. But it was my prophecies they really wanted. They know that without genuine prophecies, they’ll lose their hold on the city. At first I resisted, but soon I was so desperate down here in the dark that I started trading dreams for comfort.” He looked around at the shabby furniture and ornamentation surrounding them—a useless attempt at turning a prison into a home. “I’d already done so much evil for them, I couldn’t bring myself to care about what they would do with the prophecies once they had them.”
“Why haven’t you tried to escape?” Newt asked, nodding in the direction they had come.
Solan looked down at his hands.
“Over the years, all the memories I’ve been forced to take have grown unbearable. The council provides an elixir.” He gestured toward a dark shadow on the ceiling, across the room. Cassa squinted and realized it was a hole carved into the rock, only a couple of feet wide. “They lower it through there, and I have to take it every four hours to maintain my faculties. Without it my mind breaks apart. I become little more than a slavering, helpless animal, with no thoughts or feelings but pain.”
He spoke with a gentle cadence that belied the horror in his words.
“Mirasma,” Alys said. “They give you mirasma to suppress all the memories you’ve absorbed.”
Solan nodded gravely. Cassa had heard of mirasma before, though she wasn’t entirely sure how it worked. A long time ago, Vesper had explained to her that rooks could give and take other people’s memories but not their own. Once they took a memory, even if they gave it back, they still remembered it themselves. Over time those memories from other lives could grow overwhelming. The capacity of the human mind was vast, but it wasn’t limitless. Mirasma was an artificial element that the citadel’s alchemists had developed centuries ago as a remedy, though it wasn’t a cure.
“I’ve tried to leave before,” Solan said. “Many years ago, when I couldn’t bear this prison a moment longer. I made it across the valley and into Eldrin Wood before they found me. I’d lost all control by then. All I remember is the chaos of it. The boundless pain of my mind being shredded to pieces, of being consumed by every memory I’d ever consumed. They tell me it took almost a dozen guards to finally subdue me. Everyone who came near me found their memories draining away. I never meant to hurt anyone. I was just trying to be free.”
“Rooks have to touch people to take their memories,” Alys said, as if the only thing she’d taken from the miserable tale was the factual inconsistency.
“That was true for me once, a long time ago.” Solan picked up his teacup, then set it back down. The story had taken a toll on him. There was no hint of a smile in his features anymore, only a grim despair. “But I’ve had a lot of practice through the years.”
“The people in the citadel whose memories you take,” Newt said slowly. “The council doesn’t even have to bring them down here, do they?”
Solan shook his head gravely. Cassa’s breath hitched. If that was true, if he could really steal all of a person’s memories without even laying eyes on them . . .
“It’s why I can’t risk leaving here again,” he said. “At least not until I find a way to cure my dependence on the mirasma. If I lose control again, I don’t know how much damage I might inadvertently do to the people above.”
Cassa’s unease was growing steadily into anger—at what, exactly, she wasn’t sure. As if summoned, there was a light scraping sound from the hole in the ceiling and a wooden tray came into view, fitted perfectly to the hole and suspended by four ropes. Smoothly, it was lowered to the ground. Atop it sat a clear, corked bottle. The effervescent blue-green contents seemed to swirl like liquid Alchemist’s Fire.
She wasn’t sure she believed Solan Tavish, though everything he’d said about the council matched the cruelty and corruption she’d always known was hiding behind their fancy robes and fake smiles. Nothing he’d said explained the way his features rippled agelessly, like he was somehow outside of time, like he wasn’t entirely human. He definitely wasn’t telling them everything, but did that mean he was lying?
She realized Solan was watching her, his eyes flickering between the elixir and the gun in her lap, as if he expected her to shoot him the moment he turned his back. Without really knowing why, Cassa set the pistol on the side table, a tentative truce.
Solan smiled at her, but it was that sad smile again.
“Cassandra Valera,” he said, a little wistfully. “The daughter of greatness.”
It took Cassa a few seconds under the strange intensity of his gaze to realize that if he was a sentient, he could intuit her past in her features. She turned her face away, scalded by the thought of her history laid bare.
“I’m sorry,” he said with faint mortification. “I have been down here alone for such a long time that I fear I’ve lost touch with common courtesy.” Letting out a long breath, he crossed the room to the t
ray. He drank down the mirasma in four gulps and set the bottle back down with a shudder of relief. When he returned to his seat, he sat a little straighter.
“You led us here,” Alys said suddenly. Her voice was tremulous. “I heard you inside my head.”
Cassa blinked and looked at her. Newt and Evander were staring at her with equal shock.
“I did,” Solan said softly. “I can speak into any mind that’s near enough, but it’s easier when they have rook or seers’ blood, like you do.”
“You said you saw the way in the coins,” Cassa said to Alys, unable to keep the accusation from her voice.
Alys crossed her arms and refused to meet her eye.
“I never said that, and anyway, I didn’t know what was happening at the time. I thought maybe it was the coins.”
“Coins don’t talk,” Cassa snapped. “For seers’ sake, are you telling me that you led us down that tunnel because a strange voice in your head told you to?”
“Cassa,” Evander said warningly, but his sister cut him off.
“You’re the one who put me in that position,” Alys said, leveling a glare at Cassa.
“Because it was the only way.”
“Because you couldn’t be bothered with an escape plan!”
“Stop it,” Newt said, with such uncharacteristic force that Cassa and Alys both stopped and looked at him. He seemed genuinely surprised that they had listened and unsure of what to do now that he had their attention. “There’s no point in arguing about whose fault it is.”
Cassa wanted to reply that he was right, there was no point in arguing, because it was clearly Alys’s fault, but Evander, who always seemed to know when she was about to say something unwise, was giving her a look. Begrudgingly, she held her tongue.
“There is one thing I haven’t told you,” Solan said into the awkward silence that followed. “The reason I’ve been waiting for you. Four years ago, only days after the last rebel was brought down here to die, I dreamt a prophecy. It came to me so vividly, in such detail, that I knew—I knew—it was infallible.”
Cassa’s mouth went dry. A fifty-first infallible prophecy. There hadn’t been a new one for hundreds of years.
“What was it?” she asked, when Solan didn’t go on.
He looked at each of them carefully. It was a keenly discerning look, as if he’d known them their whole lives.
“It was the four of you,” he said. “It was the way to my freedom. And it was the council’s downfall.”
Solan looked Cassa full in the face. Perhaps he was mining her history again, studying pieces of her past. She wouldn’t look away, wouldn’t let herself drop her gaze. It felt important somehow, in this moment of all moments. Her heart was pounding so hard in her chest that she was certain everyone could hear it. Maybe this was what her father had meant all those years ago, when he told her she had to know each of the infallible prophecies by heart because it was the only way she could see what was missing. Maybe was what missing was an ending.
Suddenly she didn’t care if they could trust Solan Tavish. She didn’t care what he was hiding from them, if only this one thing could be true. She’d been born a rebel. She’d carried a fire inside her for sixteen years. Now was when it finally meant something. Briefly, Solan’s shifting features stilled, and Cassa felt she was seeing his true self. A man who had weathered years of solitude and torment to stand against the council. A man who had been waiting for them to come.
THIRTEEN
EVANDER
While Solan was promising the council’s demise, Evander couldn’t look away from Cassa. Her joy was incandescent, as if each of Solan’s words were feeding something ravenous inside her.
Evander had never seen her this way.
“You want our help,” Cassa said.
“I need your help,” Solan said. “After all those years I had given up hope. I reached a point where I would rather die than go on serving the council’s agenda. But then I saw the prophecy, and I saw what you have done to make it this far, and I knew that if I gave up now, without helping you dismantle the council once and for all, then all those years would have been a waste.”
Evander’s breath hitched in his chest. He couldn’t help it. If they could succeed where the rebellion had failed, then maybe all those who’d died, all the years his family had suffered, all the sacrifices they had made to get this far—maybe it would be finally worth it.
“You want us to help you escape?” he asked, still a little breathless.
“After a fashion.” Solan glanced at the empty bottle on the tray. “While I am dependent on the mirasma, I cannot leave here.”
“There are ways to get it in the city,” Cassa said. “If we had enough money.”
Solan shook his head.
“Only the council has access to the doses I need to stay in control of my mind.” He paused and glanced at Cassa. “And they keep their store too well-guarded for anyone to steal.”
Judging from the look on Cassa’s face, Solan had plucked that last thought straight from her head. Maybe he was telling the truth about being a sentient, which meant maybe he was telling the truth about the rest. Even if he wasn’t—even if there was no infallible prophecy—having someone on their side with knowledge of both the past and the future could be invaluable. They would no longer be fighting uselessly against the council’s near-omniscience. Their attempt to uncover the council’s secrets had been disastrous, but now Solan Tavish was giving them the answers they needed—and a chance to overthrow the council for good.
“If you really are both a diviner and a seer,” said Evander, “I’m guessing you already know a way to escape.”
A smile was briefly visible in Solan’s shifting features.
“I need to visit the Blacksmith.”
Evander stared at Solan, trying to work his mind around what he was saying.
“A bloodbond?” he asked. “With what?” The Blacksmith could forge a bond between a person and a liquefied element—usually metal, like Evander’s bond with silver—which gave them control over that element. But what good could any bloodbond possibly do Solan?
Alys, as always, had the answer.
“With the mirasma,” she said. “You think if you’re bonded with it, you won’t need the regular doses.”
“It may very well be impossible,” said Solan, leaning back in his chair. “But I have to trust the prophecy. It’s all I can do.”
Evander looked to Alys. Cassa and Newt were eyeing her too, waiting for her opinion. Her face was screwed in concentration.
“It is a pure element,” she said. “There’s no reason why the Blacksmith couldn’t use it the same as iron or silver or any other metal. It’s probably even more likely to work than a bond with glass. And if the mirasma was bonded with your blood, theoretically its effects would be permanent in your brain.”
“Just because the Blacksmith can do it doesn’t mean he will,” Evander said. If they showed up at his cottage with Solan in tow, he was fairly certain the Blacksmith would turn them in to the council—he was in their employ after all. Or maybe he would just shoot them.
“We could talk to him first,” said Cassa. “Maybe we could convince him.”
Which Evander took to mean that she expected him to do the convincing. Unlikely. It was true that the Blacksmith didn’t always need official papers. Sometimes all it took was the right price—or in Evander’s case, the right debt. His fingers drifted absently to the scar on his arm. The debt was paid now. He didn’t have any more favors to call in.
“None of this matters if we can’t escape the guards,” Newt said. “They’re probably swarming the tunnels by now.”
Solan nodded sagely, as if he’d been anticipating the concern. Evander had the unsettling thought that maybe he’d foreseen this entire conversation. Maybe he already knew if they would help him or not. If so, did they ever have a choice in the first place? He could feel a headache coming on.
“You don’t have much time,” Solan
said. He scattered his bone runes across the table at his elbow and studied them for a few moments. “The guards will be leaving the city by now, trying to cut you off in the valley. If you go now, you can still make it.”
He climbed to his feet and moved across the room to a ratty tapestry with a design that was faded past recognition. He pulled it aside, and beyond there was another dark passage. A way out.
“So if we help you, you’ll let us leave?” Alys asked, her voice tight.
Solan might have frowned. His vacillating features were impossible to read.
“I’m not keeping you here,” he said. “I only ask that you’ll consider all that I’ve said. If you decide to help, you know where to find me.”
“That’s it?” The words spilled out before Evander could stop them. “You’re just going to let us go?”
Solan stared at him for a long moment before nodding.
“I have been a prisoner down here long enough that I would never force it on another,” he said. He gestured toward the tunnel. “I’ve made my plea. The decision is yours.”
Evander rose to his feet. Deciding whether or not to commit treason again was a conversation they could have later, away from the insufferable closeness of this decaying sanctuary.
“We’ll think about it,” he said.
Cassa did finally break her gaze away from Solan, if only to shoot Evander a resentful glance. She was used to being the one to answer for everyone. He wasn’t sure he trusted her to do that right now, not with the way she had been watching Solan. She might very well offer up all their firstborn children if she thought it would hurt the council. After all she’d been through, Evander couldn’t blame her for her tunnel-visioned tenacity, but a part of him had always worried that one day she might go too far. It was better to get aboveground first, to weigh their choices without the citadel looming over their heads. Evander tried to avoid the lurking suspicion that the choice wasn’t really theirs. Solan was eerily calm about the fact that his freedom rested in the hands of four people he’d never met before. Maybe that was because he already knew what they would decide.
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