We Are Blood and Thunder

by Kesia Lupo

  After half an hour, she felt like the first time had been a fluke; she could barely muster a puff of vapour, let alone force it towards the target. She felt hot and achey, and long strands of flyaway hair stuck to her sweaty cheeks. As a little wisp dissipated barely an inch from the palm of her hand, she stamped in frustration.

  ‘For Ancestors’ sake, why can’t I bloody do it any more?’ She fumed at her hands, as if they were to blame.

  ‘Let’s have a break,’ Emris suggested calmly. ‘You’re just tired. With practice, drawing on your power for longer will get easier.’

  They moved to the side of the room, where a bucket, ladle and a couple of cups offered some refreshment. Lena gulped down her first cup of water and poured a second, hoisting herself on to the table, her legs dangling over the side. ‘Did you find it this hard – you know, when you were a Rogue?’

  Emris glanced across at her, sipping from his cup while he leaned against the battered wall. ‘Yes, it was difficult for me too. It’s always difficult, but especially for Rogues. We’ve developed our own methods of coping, not all of them healthy, whether we realise it or not. This whole process is unlearning, as much as it is learning.’

  A darkness had passed over his scarred face. Lena found herself wondering for the hundredth time what creature had left those silvery scars – but she couldn’t bring herself to question him.

  Emris spoke again. ‘You know, I should tell you something … because I’m not sure if I’ve made it clear, and I wish someone had told me when I was starting out.’

  ‘What is it?’ Lena asked a little warily.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Even when you gain control of your powers, even when you can prove it … because you’re a Rogue, they’ll never really trust you.’ He sounded bitter. ‘How can you ever really trust someone who lived so long with Chaos? I mean, it’s more than that. Up until fifty-odd years ago, there was no distinction at all between Rogue and Radical. Some people still think it should be that way.’ He sipped his water. ‘I just think you should know … it’s not going to be easy.’

  ‘The First Huntsman mentioned this too,’ she said.

  Emris smiled slightly. ‘But he doesn’t understand what it’s like. Not really.’

  Lena nodded. Although the information itself was no surprise, it felt different hearing it from Emris. ‘You’re the Third Huntsman though. Isn’t that a position of trust? I thought it meant you were third in command?’

  Emris shook his head. ‘It’s not quite like that. Like many of the other temples, Faul’s is a meritocracy up to a point – I’m the third most powerful huntsman in the temple. But even if one day I’m the most powerful mage in the temple, I’ll never be allowed to make decisions. I know that now – although I didn’t in the beginning. For years I aspired to a position of leadership. But it’s never going to happen.’

  Lena sat silently, the sweat cooling under her clothes. Unlike Emris, she hadn’t imagined herself staying here. She hadn’t really imagined her future at all – not since Vigo’s version of it was laid to rest forever. But now she had to start imagining it, didn’t she? She looked across at Emris. She longed to be accepted for who she was, to find her place in the world – but it didn’t seem like that’s what he had found in the temple at all.

  Maybe I won’t find it here either. Lord Chatham’s card flickered in her mind.

  She shook the image from her head. She was growing to like Emris, and now that he’d told her something difficult, something true, she was even starting to trust him a little. If he said she should be afraid of Chatham, perhaps he was right. Besides, she couldn’t shake off the memory of how the man had looked at her before he’d known she was a Rogue, the mingled disgust and dismissal in his eyes, so familiar from her life in Duke’s Forest. ‘Where were you before you came here?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘The First Huntsman said you were old for a Rogue. He said it was impressive you were still in control of your powers.’

  Emris nodded. ‘I lived in the north – the wildlands. I was an outlaw by the time my magic surfaced – like my father. I never knew my mother. I had to use my magic to survive, especially when my father was captured by the authorities. I was fourteen at the time. I spent nearly five years fending for myself until the temples followed the rumours of a Rogue in the wildlands and captured me too.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Lena softly.

  ‘Sometimes I think it was necessity that kept Chaos at bay, for me,’ Emris continued. ‘I had no choice but to control it, in order to survive. And so I did, even though I felt its call and sometimes longed for its oblivion. Pure will is a powerful thing, Lena. You should take comfort from that – you’ve got a lot of will too.’ He glanced at her, and she felt the conversation shift – as it always seemed to – away from Emris and back to her. ‘I think you’re going to be fine, Lena.’

  She forced a smile, feeling uncertain. ‘How many Rogues are there exactly?’ she asked, gulping again at her water.

  ‘Among the five thousand or so mages currently in the city’s temple system, only forty of us arrived as Rogues. The rest were whisked off to the Binding at the first glimmer of magic.’

  Lena nodded slowly. Forty. It wasn’t many in the grand scheme of things – half as many as the cryptlings she’d grown up with in Duke’s Forest – but it was something. She liked the feeling that there were other people in this city like her and Emris. She liked feeling that she was a tiny bit closer to normal. Cryptlings had been banished, hidden, controlled – to be merely mistrusted, she thought, was something of a luxury. But is that enough?

  ‘Constance … she was a Rogue too,’ Emris said quietly. ‘The first in centuries to arrive here from Duke’s Forest.’

  ‘Did you … know her?’ Lena pressed. ‘I mean, before she committed … her crime?’

  ‘Necromancy,’ he whispered. ‘She was a necromancer. And yes, I knew her.’

  ‘What’s necromancy?’

  ‘The Chaotic magical arts associated with death.’ She frowned and was about to ask for more explanation when a pained expression flashed over his face, quickly smothered. ‘Finding out what she was truly studying … well, it changed everything,’ he continued. ‘The thing is, Lena, Constance and I … we were close. Friends, at first, and then something more.’

  She hesitated, feeling awkward at the revelation, blood rushing to her face. She couldn’t imagine what it might be like to be close to anyone in that way. Vigo had been married, had even had a child, but he’d been a qualified mortician. Cryptlings weren’t allow to touch anyone, let alone marry – and it took years to qualify as a mortician, if you were lucky enough to be as clever and skilled as you had to be in order to pass the tests. Lena had never considered a relationship to be a part of her future. But we’re not talking about me, she reminded herself. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said a little stiffly, after a silence. ‘It must’ve been awful when she did what she did.’ Emris didn’t seem to notice her awkwardness.

  He shook his head sadly. ‘It was awful. I always knew she was different. I think part of the reason we were drawn together was that we understood what it was to be set apart … mistrusted.’ He paused, sighed. ‘But it turns out she was more different than I could have guessed. In fact, I didn’t know her at all.’ He turned to Lena, his face a touch lighter, as if the confession had lifted a weight from his mind. ‘Come on. Let’s try again.’

  TWELVE

  Last Rites

  Gong.

  A low bass note thrummed in the centre of Constance’s chest. She turned in her sleep, her brow twitching. Nightmares trembled under her eyelids.

  Gong.

  A storm cloud. A rumble of thunder and a surge of blue-hot pain. Nausea. The touch of burning metal against the skin of her arm. She tried to scream, a whimper escaping her lips.

  Gong.

  Her father’s broken body pooling blood. Father. The thought jerked her awake and she sat up abruptly. She was alone in the bed, the sheets beside her cold – a
nd suddenly Constance felt cold too. Xander had gone. The whole thing felt like a strange dream.

  Gong.

  And then she remembered: the bell of the dead. Her father’s Descent. She was late.

  She scrambled out of bed, felt a flash of anger that no one had woken her sooner – that she hadn’t woken by herself. It wasn’t like her to sleep late.

  She threw on clean clothes and a fur-lined grey cloak and stared at herself in the mirror. A mess. Darkness shadowed her eyes as she pulled her hair into a severe bun and splashed yesterday’s water on her face. No mask today. It wouldn’t be respectful.

  Constance took her cane and walked quickly downstairs and into the courtyard. Already a crowd spilt into the great hall. Everyone had dressed in their finest, the colours sombre but the fabrics rich and strangely luxurious against their ashen faces and downcast eyes.

  Xander caught her near the door, resting a hand softly on her right arm. ‘I was worried about you. I thought I was doing you a favour by letting you sleep, but …’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, suppressing her annoyance and forcing a smile. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  He squeezed her arm.

  ‘You’d better leave me before people start talking,’ Constance added. Xander’s face grew respectful. He nodded at her and took his place among the other Wise Men.

  The crowd parted for her, murmuring, as she entered the hall. She nodded as she passed, trying to appear stately and unhurried, as if she shouldn’t have been the first inside.

  She approached the platform that had been set up in the centre of the hall, in front of the large trapdoors, whispers gradually falling to silence. Her father had been dressed in the black robes of the dead, his limbs straightened out, the mess cleaned from his face. The wound on his head had been bound in black bandages. Constance drew closer, remembered the pool of blood soaking into her boots, shivered. The Duke’s face was as pale as marble, his cheekbones prominent, his brows furrowed and his mouth set in a hard line. His eyes had been replaced by glittering sapphires and were fixed on the ceiling far above. He didn’t look like himself at all. He didn’t even look at peace. He looked enraged.

  Winton stood vigil on the other side of the platform, dressed in dark purple: composed, silent and very pale. He shot her a wavering smile, and she noticed his fingers were trembling. She felt a stab of guilt as she remembered promising to visit him. Xander’s visit had … distracted her. All around the hall’s periphery, the city guard stood vigil, short cloaks shifting in the subtle breeze from the open door. Weapons were forbidden at sacred ceremonies, and their belts looked curiously naked. Cryptlings in cowled grey habits waited at the entrance to the crypts, kneeling, their heads lowered.

  The ceremony began, the mourners touching their heads, lips and hearts in the old sign of reverence as they started to pray. The words sounded distantly familiar, but Constance remained silent and still. She was pledged to another kind of divinity. She followed, however, as the bearers lifted the Duke’s broken body on its plain wooden plank and carried him to the trapdoors. As the doors opened, the stale, cold air that had grown so familiar in the past five days rushed into her face. She looked at Winton. His eyes were brimming with tears as he faced the dark steps downwards.

  Below, the chamber was deep and cavernous, each Duke’s resting place surrounded by gorgeously decorated screens, each wife and child laid out upon a sarcophagus. This was different somehow from the underworld she’d visited after the feast, alone and by the light of her magic – everything felt more alive now in the yellow torchlight. The warm flames flickered over grimy statues, old clothing, elaborate carvings and the rich and rotting carpets adorning the walls, blooming with colour – the opposite of the monochrome world she’d entered by pale mage-light. The shadows leaped and multiplied, as if for every living soul at her father’s funeral there were another ten of the dead. The people of the castle shuffled into the wide chamber, each finding a place to kneel.

  Constance knelt at the front of the procession, the cold floor hard against her knees, and watched with detachment as the cryptlings carried the Duke towards the long tomb reserved for him since birth. The family motto was prominently displayed across the arched screen: Without its roots the forest withers. The tree sigil on the screen doors was inlaid with gold leaf – and as the doors were opened, the metal glinted in the firelight. Within, her father’s last resting place: a bed of stone. The cryptlings laid him down with extreme gentleness, as if they were afraid to wake him.

  On either side of the tomb, the Duke’s two wives – her own mother and Winton’s – lay in state, their bodies illuminated by the torches. As the old prayers wafted through the air, the incense burning to a thick and dizzying smoke, Constance felt her eyes drawn to her mother’s grave again, flickering over her angular form. She’d been born in a land of sunlight and warmth, her family’s palazzo in Scarossa, a great island city at the southernmost point of Valorian, its lands stuttering into aquamarine. She remembered her mother dimly, remembered the brightly coloured pictures, like jewels, in the atlas she’d kept in the secret place beneath her window. Remembered the other secret books she’d found after her mother’s death, the magical and the foreign, the glittering and the gorgeous. Had she truly wanted to spend eternity here in the dark and cold, among strangers?

  Constance knew she did not.

  Eventually, the cryptlings started to administer the last rites. The hush grew deeper as the black-robed mortician handed one of the younger cryptlings the holy oil. Everyone was remembering the Duchess’s funeral, Constance knew – including the cryptling. The poor boy’s hands were trembling. She glanced at her brother – his hands were clenched, his breathing short and fast. She rested her hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently in reassurance as the cryptling touched the oil hesitantly to their father’s forehead, lips and heart.

  Nothing happened. Of course. That girl was probably the only mage to be born in Duke’s Forest since I was.

  Tension drained from the tomb, the cryptling visibly relieved as he stepped away respectfully, handing the oil to the mortician, who set it aside and helped him shut the beautiful carved doors of the tomb forever.

  The ceremony had ended – the golden tree whole and guarding the entrance to her father’s final place of rest. Constance knew she had to be the last to leave, even though she felt like running away. As the crypt emptied out, only one figure remained with her by the tomb: Winton, kneeling to her left.

  Her knees were aching. She stood up – and Winton touched his forehead, lips and heart one last time, rising to his feet.

  ‘Come,’ she said, ‘let’s talk. You’ve waited long enough.’

  Together, they walked up out of the tomb, through the great hall and into the courtyard, leaving their father behind in the dark.

  In her chambers, Constance was surprised to find a cat waiting on her bed. It was enormous and ginger, and it had left a dead mouse on the dressing table. Wasn’t it the same cat she’d seen that first night in the crypts?

  ‘Whose is that?’ Winton asked, hesitating on the threshold.

  Constance shrugged. ‘Looks like I’m his. Cats like magic – he was bound to find me sooner or later. Come in, Winton,’ she added, when she saw he was waiting to be invited.

  Her brother stepped inside and quickly sank into the armchair in front of the fire, which someone had tended in her absence. The flames danced and flickered in the iron grate, casting a warm glow over Winton’s face. For a few moments, she leaned on the mantelpiece and watched the flames.

  ‘You must be angry with me,’ she said, when he didn’t speak.

  ‘My mother is dead. My father is dead. Constance, you’re all I have left,’ he said. ‘I don’t care if you’re a mage. I don’t even care that you lied.’

  ‘You … don’t care?’ His words stunned her.

  ‘Of course not.’ He gazed up at her. ‘Don’t you know how much I love you? I admired you even as a boy. I think I sensed you were
different from everyone else, even then. I used to follow you around when I was very small.’

  ‘I remember that,’ she said, a smile quirking her lips. The Duchess had hated it.

  ‘And I think it’s because I knew that … I’m … different as well.’

  Constance blinked, uncertain of what she was hearing. ‘You’re a mage too?’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I mean … I’m different.’ He blushed. ‘The thing with Lord Irvine is … I … ah … I … tried to …’

  And suddenly Constance understood why Winton had stopped training with the Swordmaster, with no explanation. She understood how Irvine had played along, skirting around the subject, a clumsy attempt at sensitivity.

  ‘I’ve known for a long time,’ Winton said, his voice low and full of pain. ‘My mother was keen to marry me to some Duke’s Forest girl. I’ve had to sit through countless dinners and dances and ridiculous formal meetings – even through the Pestilence. It felt so pointless, with so many people dying, but Mother just said that the dynasty was the most important thing in the world. It’s our link to the Ancestors, she said, and it’s the way we carry their blood to the next generation, and the next …’

  She had heard the Duchess say so too, glaring at the young Constance as if she were the poison in the bloodline. ‘But you didn’t want to marry a girl.’

  Winton shook his head sadly. ‘I liked them, sometimes. It wasn’t always a chore. But mostly I felt like the quarry in a strange kind of hunt. Mostly, they would smile at me with their sharp white teeth and I would feel trapped.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It was only when Mother got very ill that those meetings stopped. And my feelings for others … in particular Lord Irvine …’ He dropped his head into his hands – his next words muffled and ashamed. ‘It was a childish adoration. I’m so embarrassed.’