by Jeff Seymour
But how did you explain that? How did you know if it was even real?
“Yenor’s eye, you scared me,” Cole said. He squeezed her.
She squeezed back. Almost said she was sorry, but she wasn’t.
“I couldn’t let it hurt you,” she said instead.
Cole just hugged her harder.
***
“Where are we?” Litnig asked. A few moments had passed.
Cole broke away from Dil. “The Cityhall storehouse, I think.” His eyes gleamed in the darkness, darting from left to right like a rat’s.
Immediately, Dil missed the warmth of Cole’s body. The temperature had dropped. Her breath formed clouds in the damp air, and she shivered in the dress that the women who helped her had wrapped her in.
Tyaeva, she thought. And Reista, and Ymel, and Willem. What happened to them? Where are they now?
Cole’s arm snaked back around her. His eyes continued to comb the darkness.
Litnig seemed fixated on the rubble above them.
“We need to find Pyell,” Litnig said.
Cole twitched. “When did you learn to soulweave?” he asked.
Litnig’s eyes turned back to him. He lowered his glowing hand and looked at it, wiggled his fingers, let the light go out.
“Does it scare you?” he asked.
“No,” Cole mumbled.
Dil’s eyes drifted to Litnig’s sword. In the dark it was all but invisible. There were only occasional hints of purple, swirling in its depths like lightning-streaked patches of cloud in a thunderstorm.
“There’s so much to tell you, Cole,” Litnig said. “I don’t—I don’t even—”
Cole left her. She heard him take a few stumbling steps toward Litnig. “Start at the beginning then,” he said. “And don’t leave anything out.”
And, finally, they talked.
***
Cole blinked in the white light.
The white light coming from Litnig’s hand.
From his brother’s hand.
“You’re a what?”
Litnig swallowed. The word, as he repeated it, sounded like an iron-bound door slamming shut. “Duennin.”
Cole sat on a chunk of broken stone.
Duennin.
“No,” he said.
“That’s what I said too, but—”
“No,” he said again. He put his head in his hands. A flood of memories washed over him. Litnig distracting ’Ta when he was mad. Litnig pulling faces when he was sick to make him laugh. Litnig protecting him from the smith’s boy and his gang. “You were always there, Lit. As far back as I can remember.”
But you can’t remember what happened before you were born, his mind said. He wanted briefly to hack it free and cast it into the shadows.
Litnig yanking him from a rock ledge that crumbled under the next boy who tried to climb it. Litnig shielding him from stampeding people and horses.
“They found me, Cole. In the street. I was…”
Litnig at the foot of his bed, asking him to help find Ryse. Litnig in the market, grilling him about Dil. Litnig under the mountains, dragging Len behind him to keep the Aleani alive.
“I’m still your brother, Cole.”
Cole looked up and saw Litnig through a hazy film of tears. In the back of his head, he believed him. But he didn’t understand how, and he didn’t understand why, and he didn’t understand what it meant.
He put his head back in his hands and tried to make it stop spinning.
Litnig on the deck of a ship, bleeding. The skeletons shattering. Their mother dying. Litnig left behind in Sherdu’il. Litnig in his hands, heavy as the water drew the life and the breath and the strength from his body.
Litnig angry. Like he’d never seen him before.
Cole took a long, deep breath. He wrapped his arms around himself, and he dug his fingers into his biceps and squeezed until it hurt.
“Shit,” he muttered.
Litnig was still holding the white light. His lips were trembling. He looked as if Cole had slapped him.
Don’t you fucking touch me.
’Sa, Cole thought. He lowered his head. She knew. She knew all along—knew when she died. And ’Ta. That shithead. Always seemed a little afraid of him.
He looked up. Litnig was still standing there.
I guess that was why.
Cole took a heavy, halting breath, then another. His mother’s face hovered in his mind.
She loved him. Never stopped. Not even for a second. Not even when she was scared. “My sons,” she said. “You will not take my sons.”
It was the last thing she ever said.
The tears stopped.
Cole stood. His legs felt wobbly and weak. His jacket was torn where shards of rock had gashed it. The cuts beneath stung in the cold, dusty air.
Walking toward Litnig, he held out his palm. His brother reached for it with the hand that held the light.
Cole grabbed it and pulled him into a hug.
He didn’t feel the light at all. It was just there, an incidental nothing pressed between their fingers.
Utterly inconsequential.
“I’m sorry,” Cole whispered.
Litnig squeezed him so hard he thought his ribs might pop.
There were more tears.
But it was fine.
They were brothers.
***
Dil had trouble tracking how long the conversation lasted. Litnig let the light go out, and she tucked her knees to her chest and shivered and did her best to stay warm. The strangeness in her heart melted away. The words she heard shifted from things that no brothers should ever have to talk about to things she figured most brothers eventually discussed. To the Duennin named Maia, to Dil herself.
She cleared her throat.
Cole stopped speaking. She couldn’t see his face very well, but she could picture it perfectly. Cheeks pulled up toward his wrinkled forehead in a guilty expression that usually accompanied a mumbled curse and made her smile.
“You can tell him about that later,” she murmured.
“Sorry,” he said.
Dil fumbled for his arm and stroked it softly. He took her hand and pressed it to his lips.
The brothers fell silent.
Dil reached out to the Second River and found the soul of a nightprowler drifting by. When she pulled it in and opened her eyes, the world became a shifting blend of black-and-white shapes and movement—Cole and Litnig sitting cross-legged next to one another; the pile of rubble leading out of the cellar; the long shelves of provisions.
“We need to find Pyell?” she asked.
The Litnig-shape rose to its feet, and she was nearly blinded when the white light flared into being around its hand again. She let the cat go and squinted against the brightness.
“Yeah,” said Litnig. His eyes climbed the rubble. “She was starting to weave something when the dragon went after her. I want to know what it was.”
Dil stood. She shivered as her rising disturbed the layer of air against her skin.
“You think she survived?” she asked.
“Yeah,” the brothers answered as one.
They looked at each other.
And Dil smiled.
***
They found Pyell three hours later.
She was two levels up from the storeroom, sprawled at the bottom of another pile of rubble. She lay near the edge of the scar the falling tower had carved in the austere level that belonged to the serving corps of the Cityhall.
Litnig knelt beside her.
The Magister’s face was pale. Her breath was shallow and crackling. Blood had dried across her mouth, and dust covered her multi-hued robe.
The glow of Litnig’s eyes brightened. His hands slid across Pyell’s body. The Magister’s skin glowed white. Her breathing deepened. Her color normalized.
What did he become up in those mountains? Dil wondered. She knew what it was like to be hated and feared for something you were born to, and she knew
how that could twist you, stunt you. How you could lean too hard on the only person like you, and how losing that person could hurt you.
There was so much to fear, and so little to do in the face of it but muddle on.
Cole wrapped an arm around her shoulders. She needed to find better clothing, and quickly. The sun was probably setting, and there was a cold, crisp bite in the air. She wondered what had become of the people of the Cityhall, of the soulweavers who’d run, of the others left in the city when Sherduan struck.
But the hall kept its secrets, dark and silent as a tomb.
The glow faded from Pyell’s skin, and the Magister’s breathing took on the deep, regular rhythm of sleep.
Litnig sat next to her on the rubble and leaned against a chunk of rock. He peered curiously down at the Magister’s girlish features.
“Now what?” asked Cole.
“We wait for her to wake up,” Litnig said.
“And then?”
Litnig shrugged.
The sound of coughing echoed down the hallway, followed by footsteps and hurried whispers.
Litnig let the light in his hand go out.
Dil found another cat in the Second River, and she opened her eyes with its soul just as a group of human-shapes rounded a bend in the hallway. They were leaning on one another, and one of them carried a fire stick. They limped toward her, and she fell into a crouch and arched her back. The hairs on her neck stood up.
Until she recognized the old, puffy face of one of the humans near the fire stick’s bearer.
Dil let the cat go and stood back up, wincing as her bruises contorted.
“Willem!” she called.
Her voice sounded jarring in the empty hallway. Too loud, too vibrant. She winced.
“Ambassador Lonecliff?”
Willem’s call was tremulous and broken, and Dil’s heart dropped into her feet. The light flared around Litnig’s hand again, and the orange of the torch bobbed through the darkness toward it. She tried to remember how many shapes she’d seen through the cat’s eyes. Ten? Twelve?
“Is Tyaeva with you?” she asked.
The torch replied with silence.
No, she thought. Oh, no.
When Willem and the other survivors reached them, Tyaeva was nowhere to be seen.
Neither was Reista, nor Ymel, nor any of the women who helped her. She counted eleven men and women in the uniforms of the Cityhall’s serving corps, four of them supporting two others. Their suits and dresses were torn and bloodied and smudged with soot. Their bodies looked similar.
Her legs quivered. Cole’s hand touched her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Willem said. He drew a hand across his eyes. “Ambassador, I’m sorry, but your suite—your—” Tears rolled over his wide red cheeks. Hair stuck straight out from behind his ears. “Crushed,” he choked out. “There was nothing we could do. Nothing—nothing—”
Dil’s chest felt cold and tight. She grabbed Cole’s sleeve and twisted it. Help me stand, she thought. I need you.
Reista, the woman with large hands, salt-and-pepper hair always pulled back into a tight bun. Ymel her daughter, the quiet girl who had an unconquerable love for yellow satin dresses. And Tyaeva, auburn-haired and smiling, full of whimsy and ambition and life.
Gone. Gone forever.
She’d barely known them—scarcely scratched the surface of their lives.
But their loss hurt her like little in her short time on Guedin ever had. Her chest constricted. Every muscle in her face pulled tight. She let go of Cole and held her hands over her mouth. She didn’t want to cry. Not in front of these others, who’d lost so much more than she had.
Cole stepped forward.
His back hid his face from her, but he looked bigger that way. Older.
Like his brother.
He wrapped Willem in his arms.
And Willem a’Raes, his powdered wig askance on his head, his impeccably groomed face streaked with soot, his rich boudoir torn and soiled, wept openly on Cole’s white-jacketed shoulder.
“It should have been us,” Willem rasped.
Behind him, the others shuffled, staring at their feet or crying. Dil felt sick. She thought of Quay, dead or imprisoned. Of Ryse, betrayed by a temple she’d sought to save.
It should have been us.
“No,” Cole whispered. “It should have been no one.”
Silent tears crept down Dil’s face. No one, she thought. No one should go through these things. She was seized by an overwhelming anger at the great people of the world, because if only they had listened, so much pain could have been avoided.
The crack in her heart opened again, briefly, and her chest felt warm and fluid.
“It’s okay to live,” Cole said. “It’s best to live.”
Willem’s old hands clutched Cole’s back. His sobs began anew, ragged sounds tearing at the shell of the hall that had encompassed his whole life.
Litnig shifted on the stones. Pyell slept on.
In the darkness, Dil grew angrier.
And then she began to wonder how much about the world she could change.
THIRTY-NINE
Three hours before the destruction of Eldan City
Ryse pulled gloves of wool and leather over her hands.
Walls built from bleached, split wood stood around her like the bones of a starving cow. A roof of sticks and old thatch and cold mud dripped rainwater onto her head. A fire crackled in a small pit before her.
It was the 19th of Leafmonth 7983. She was dressing in the slums of Eldan City.
And once again, she was going to return to the Temple of Eldan.
She shivered. She didn’t want to make that journey. Not after all that had happened.
But she would. Because in spite of everything, the world was still worth saving.
24 Stormonth, 7959
My name is Syamie. I was taken by the man called Aegelden Elpioni in the White Forest on 3 Leafmonth 7959. He brought me to the place they call Bymarsh, and there a council of men dressed in white sent me south, through oceans of grass to a city of stone and three hills called Eldan. There I was taken in chains before the man named Reth, whom they call Yenor’s Highest…
Ryse’s mother’s journal lay at the bottom of one of the backpacks, tucked carefully between blankets and spare clothes. Its black covers had grown more tattered and worn since Ren had handed it to her. Its pages of crisp, gentle writing were more pored over and cried over and beloved.
Its words rarely left her mind.
Ren leaned against the wall next to the dozen planks of wood he’d set up as a door to their little hovel. Three bedrolls sat beside him. So did three beat-up backpacks. In case something went wrong. In case they had to run.
The gloves warmed Ryse’s hands. She flexed her fingers, wiggled her toes. Her stomach growled. That was new—a development of the last week or so and another sign that her health was returning, like the hair on her head and her legs and her armpits, or the patches of dry, cracked skin that were decreasing daily in size, or the muscles that felt stronger and more limber.
Again and again she saw the horrors that Aegelden Elpioni had inflicted upon her mother, her brothers, and her. The journal, the only link she had to her mother beyond a few scattered memories, had become sacred to her, and its words had hollowed an awful pit in the dark places of her soul.
But the world was in danger. She had sworn to protect it.
So she would make Aegelden Elpioni listen to her.
3 Darkmonth 7959
…Aegelden treats me kindly. He feeds me fruits and soft cheeses, offers rich wines and sits near me and asks me to tell him of my home. He frowns when I inform him that the others mistreat me, when I show him the bruises and the cuts. He says he will make it stop, but there is a coldness behind his eyes and I do not believe him.
The wind of early autumn whistled through the planks of Ren’s door. Her brother stood motionlessly, a black-haired ghost with bright blue eyes and a Twelf
thman’s robe, somehow older and younger than her at the same time. He’d spoken little of the life he’d led before pulling Ryse from the dungeons of Division Four. Most of what she knew of him she’d learned from Jen; he was nineteen, and he’d been a captain in Division Twelve since fifteen. Aegelden had been grooming him for something, but Ren hadn’t told either her or Jen what.
Ryse’s scarred lips trembled—they did that now, sometimes for minutes at a time, until her heart glowed with anger and she felt ready to tear the world apart for what it had done to her.
Not the world, she reminded herself. People. The world is still worth saving.
At Ryse’s feet, Jen Ryddych sat hugging her knees. She wore a brown robe, and its folds and her dark hair mingled indiscriminately on her back. She stared motionlessly into the depths of the fire.
She had refused to go back to the Temple.
Ryse’s lips trembled again. Jen hadn’t had anything to say about Ryse’s brother Tomenar. But Ren had. A monster, he’d called him.
It had been Tomenar who’d come to her cell with Aegelden in the darkness and scarred her face.
17 Darkmonth 7959
…I told Aegelden today of the half breeds, and something changed in him. He grew quiet. His eyes flashed, and for a moment he was silent. I changed the subject of our conversation several times, but always he returned to the half breeds. I can see the beginnings of some plan forming in his mind.
I am afraid that I have made a terrible mistake.
Jen’s white robe—the robe of a Temple soulweaver—lay folded at Ryse’s feet. She put it on for what she expected to be the last time.
“Be careful, Ryse,” Jen whispered. She was sitting with her back to Ryse and Ren and her head half-turned toward the door. The firelight danced on her skin. Her fingers clenched and unclenched over the rough wool of her robe.
Ryse swallowed. Her hands shook.
She wasn’t sure what would happen when she and Ren returned to the Temple. Ren had been watching it for weeks, had seen Aegelden return from Menatar. But she didn’t know whether he would be alone, whether they’d have to fight him, whether they’d even be able to reach him.
And she wasn’t sure, when she did reach him, whether she would be able to look past what he’d done.