by Rachel Dunne
“I . . .” Keiro fought to find anything intelligent to say to that, anything that was not simply a bitter laugh that sent his innards spilling out through his mouth. “I will keep that in mind. Thank you.”
A sigh. “I wish you wouldn’t patronize me.” It wasn’t said with any malice—a simple statement—but Keiro still rushed to deny it and to beg forgiveness at the same time. A sharp motion stilled his words, Fratarro’s hand chopping through the air. “‘Patronize’ was the wrong word. I wish you wouldn’t just placate me. There’s no joy in a one-sided conversation. And I have no one else to talk to.”
Keiro closed his eye, focused on the steady, sturdying warmth of Cazi at his back. “I was alone for seven years,” he said. “Completely alone for most of that. I know it’s nothing compared to your centuries, but . . . I do understand what it’s like. How the silence invades and twines so deeply around your soul that to speak feels like to kill. That the sight of another face, any face, would be at once the world’s greatest blessing and a punishment to set your very being ablaze.”
He thought of all the people his own lonely life had touched—sharing the road as a wandering preacher, the Fallen who had cast him out, the plainswalkers who had taken him in, mages and broken mages, the mravigi—so many lives he had touched, and he did not know if any of them had been made better by him. He knew some, like the plainswalkers and the disobedient Fallen, were far worse for having met him. He thought of the burning bodies, remembered his dream-self so carefully snapping their necks, and shuddered. Perhaps that was why his throat twisted and his voice grew rough with touches of anger and venom, and why he said something he should not have said: “At least you were never truly alone. You always had Sororra.”
He tried to bite back the words, but it was too late. They’d slipped past all his careful defenses and filled the darkness with heavy acrimony. Knowing the fraught relationship between the Twins, Keiro expected the silence to come alive and grow teeth, to rear back snakelike and swallow him down in smooth, smothering gulps. Keiro gripped the fabric of his robe so tightly that he almost thought his knuckles glowed in the darkness.
But the silence between them slept. “Yes,” Fratarro finally said softly. “There is that.”
Keiro’s held breath left him in a soft whuff at the unexpected surprise of not being obliterated. At still being able to breathe. He held his own silence for a while, wrapped around the shock of such an obvious misstep not having cost him his life. Another low rumble from Cazi shook down to Keiro’s bones, but the mravigi did not take his glowing eyes off of Fratarro.
“My sister will be coming back soon,” Fratarro said. His voice held none of the simmering frustration Keiro had become accustomed to—that had, in fact, been absent from everything Fratarro had said so far—and more of the spiraling despair than Fratarro usually let show. That realization chilled Keiro more than his own brush with mortality, but he couldn’t have said why. “She’ll be proud of you, I think. She always did have her favorites.” Fratarro lifted his eyes, and the red glow softened his face, smoothed out all the lines a god’s eternal worries had put into it. He looked almost like the boy whose body he had stolen. “I worry she won’t be as pleased with me.”
Keiro saw the dagger between his feet again, the sharp edge that would slice him to pieces at the first misstep. It felt like there were more daggers now, more edges to dance along, more ways to slip. “Sororra loves you.” It felt like the only safe thing to say. “She’ll always love you.”
“Do you think so?” The red light shone off tears, gathering, falling. “Truly?”
Keiro’s lips parted, but no words came out—all swept away by the tide of a god’s tears.
Fratarro, still crouching, moved forward on the balls of his feet and the palm of his good hand, a feral thing, uncertain and alien. As Keiro reached out, his fingers only trembled slightly. Fratarro took his hand, and then the boy fell against his side, head buried in Keiro’s shoulder, hands curled against his chest. “I feel so alone,” he said, and the words sounded strangely doubled, as though two voices were speaking them. “Trapped.”
“You’re not alone.” Keiro put a tentative hand against the back of Fratarro’s head and, when he didn’t flinch or snarl, petted his hair as he would a dog’s. Keiro had always understood how to soothe a child’s capricious moods.
Behind them, Cazi shifted with a sigh, moving to bring Fratarro into the curl of his body, draping his tail over Keiro and Fratarro both. Keiro made wordless, soothing sounds, and he thought of how Sororra had done the same as Fratarro had screamed with the pain of the distant destruction of his hand. This was a much softer pain, but that did not mean it cut any less deep.
With his face pressed against Keiro’s shoulder, Fratarro’s voice was low and muffled as he said, “He’s sorry about Cazi.”
“What?” Keiro leaned back, gently gripping Fratarro’s shoulders so that he could search his face by Cazi’s red-white glow.
Fratarro blinked, a small frown on his face. “I didn’t say anything.” There was no trace of deceit in his voice, and Fratarro had never been called anything but honest. He scrubbed at his cheeks with his good hand, twisted his shoulders under Keiro’s hands to free them, and leaned back on the balls of his feet—a boy distancing himself from hurt, and a god pulling his mask back down.
When he spoke again, his voice was firmer and more certain, even if the words were little different. “I’m sorry about Cazi.”
A chill crept down Keiro’s back.
“I wish it could have been different,” Fratarro went on—thinking, perhaps, that Keiro’s silence was anger. “And I wish it could be undone. But it’s so much harder to reshape a made thing.” He reached out—not with his good hand but the bad one, dangling limp from his wrist. He turned his hand and rubbed his knuckles across Cazi’s snout. The Starborn didn’t move, didn’t blink. “I wish I could give you back your wings, but some things can’t be undone. Not even by a god.” He pulled his hand back, fingers hanging uselessly. “I hope you don’t hate me.” It took Keiro long moments—too long—to register that those words were for him.
Still, Keiro did not respond even when he realized he needed to. He had spoken both foolishly and brashly this night, and both had been dangerous steps. He thought, now, before he spoke, turning his words and feelings over in his mind, feeling them crash against the terrified pounding of his heart. A more considered answer did not necessarily make it a better one. Cazi’s tail flicked against his leg—a warning? An encouragement? “I don’t,” he said finally, and the words were at least mostly true.
He had the ancient eyes of a god, but his face, when he raised it beaming to Keiro, was the face of a boy and nothing more. A boy named Etarro, who had been born and raised in the darkness and—the preachers whispered—who had had an unnerving fondness for watching the sun rise.
It didn’t last nearly long enough, the boy’s happiness twisting away into a god’s concern. His hands rested on the ground, the fingers of the good one scraping fretfully at the dirt. Perhaps it was only a trick of the light as Cazi shifted, but the fingers of Fratarro’s bad hand almost seemed to twitch. “What will happen,” Fratarro asked softly, one hand moving against the dirt from a claw to a fist, “when she comes back?”
“Don’t you know?”
The shadows played eerily across Fratarro’s face, lit from below by Cazi’s scales. “Don’t you?”
Keiro wanted to sink into the earth and stone, or to run beneath the stars until his feet bled and hardened. He wanted to sleep, to hide himself away from all of it if only for a short time . . . but there was fire in his dreams, and fire was such a dangerous thing.
“She always said she wasn’t any good at shaping.” Fratarro dug his fingers into the ground, twisting and scraping. “She never understood she was just good at a different kind of shaping. Not all shaping is done with hands and matter.” When he pulled his fingers from the earth, there was dirt caked beneath his nails, streaking h
is skin, and Keiro remembered his dream—how the flesh of the burning dead had clung to his own skin after he had snapped their necks, and how easy it had been. “She never understood herself, and so she never understood her strength. I don’t know if she ever truly will.” With his dirty fingers, Fratarro reached out to cup Keiro’s jaw, fingers boy-small but god-strong. If his other hand worked, Keiro wondered, would Fratarro rest it on the top of his head, waiting for that so-easy twist? “You’re strong, too, Keiro. You have to be.”
A laugh shook its way out of Keiro’s throat, past the press of Fratarro’s palm. If he screamed, Keiro wondered, would that feel any different? “I am whatever my gods need me to be.”
Fratarro dropped his hand and his gaze. “She’ll be proud of you,” he said, echoing his own earlier words and the fatalistic tone. His face hardened to flint, any trace of boyishness sloughing away. “Well. I should be as prepared for her as you are. You’re awake now.” He shifted away and settled, crossing his legs, his back straight, palms upward on his knees. There was no trace of movement in the left one.
Keiro pushed himself away from Cazi, folded himself into a mirror of the boy. His mouth was death-dry, and fire danced behind his missing eye. Still, he made himself say the words, a rumbling intonation plucked from that deep well inside him that had been shaped by careful, cautious, calculating hands: “Power first, for without power there is nothing. Control, mastery, and finesse can come later. First you must regain your power.”
Fratarro’s face creased with effort and concentration, and the world around them trembled. As showers of dirt pattered on his shoulders, as the heavy air thrummed against his ears, Keiro sat motionless, waiting. And he did not stare at Fratarro’s left hand—he didn’t need to look at it to know it wouldn’t twitch, wouldn’t move, wouldn’t ever be what it had been, or what it needed to be. There were some things written so indelibly across the stretch of time that not even a god could change them. Some things could not ever be undone.
“She’ll be proud of you, too,” he said anyway. He did not know if Fratarro heard him, and did not know if the words were his own or if they belonged to the voice that sometimes used his mouth. He didn’t know if there was a difference, anymore.
Chapter Twelve
The house was so much smaller than Joros remembered it.
He’d been young when he’d left his home and family, but a man by any count—old enough to work, old enough to marry, old enough to kill. He’d left and seen enough of the world to begin to understand the shape of power and influence, to understand how a man could move through the world and twist it to fit his designs.
Perhaps that was what made the house seem so small. When he’d lived in it, he’d been little more than a seed, watered by anger and resentment but with no room to sprout. The house had been confinement in more ways than one.
Joros walked the halls of the place he’d lived decades ago, and his feet still remembered the careful steps to avoid the creaking floorboards. Though all the belongings and personal touches were gone, dusty furniture remained. Beds crowded together where he and his brothers had slept piled like puppies to make space for all his father’s wares. The desk in the study where his father had conducted his tedious business of ledgers and letters, and his mother had screeched at him for tracking in dirt, you useless foolish boy. The countless rooms full of now-empty shelves that had always been piled high with whatever next thing his father had been so sure would remake the family’s fortune. The space in the dusty attic where a small body could wriggle through and sit sealed away from the rest of the house, and watch the stars through a peeling section of the roof. He half expected to see memories of the people, too, but those ghosts lay silent.
He’d checked the sad little mausoleum that housed ashes from seven generations of his good, Parents-fearing ancestors, all the way back to the forebear who’d made his fortune brokering sales for fishermen who’d never realized they were being robbed blind. The man had made more than enough to pay for an extravagant house, and an ash-casket too heavy to lift so he could be housed in eternal glory. But he’d left little else for his descendants. The casket stood dull and rust-spotted at the center of the mausoleum that was crumbling around it, as untended as the house. Still, Joros found new names faithfully carved into the wall among the list of interred: his father and mother both, all three sisters, and two brothers. There was no one to bet against save himself, but Joros would have wagered all the coin in his purse that the family’s lingering debts had forced the other two brothers to flee or to prison.
He didn’t wonder where they’d gone. He didn’t care. If any of the pack had asked, he would have told them so, in no uncertain terms.
He’d claimed a room for himself—kicked out the fists who’d been living in it while he’d been trudging across half the world to try to save their skins. This was still his house, his. He hadn’t wanted the room he’d shared with his brothers, nor his parents’ comparatively large room, nor even his father’s office. Just a simple room, fairly small, so unimportant he couldn’t even remember what furniture had filled it so long ago—a room that held no shadows or ghosts. It served its purpose well enough, with a rickety bed taken from a knife who Sharra had ordered to give it up, a wooden chair that smelled faintly of rot, a desk that was too small—a desk whose worn surface felt familiar beneath his restless palms. He’d found the desk squirreled away in one of the other rooms, and a foolish whim had made him drag that one old shadow into his new haven.
Sitting at the desk, he could reach his hand beneath it and his questing fingers eventually found the rough-carved letters chicken-scratched into the underside. A boy had lain on his back under the desk, a dagger held clumsily in both hands, squinting up through the falling wood splinters as he carefully carved the letters of his name. That had been a boy who’d thought all the world was his for the taking, that he could hold power like a dagger and carve his mark on the world.
He tugged open one of the desk’s drawers and stared down at the stone it held. He’d thought, almost daily, about picking it up, even just pressing a fingertip against its smooth surface. Thought of letting the old magic flow through him, to see out of another’s eyes, to let it give him direction. But this seekstone, linked to Etarro, would make him see, now, through the eyes of the god who had stolen the boy’s body, and Joros was not at all sure a mortal could survive seeing through a god’s eyes.
But perhaps he could. Perhaps it would be no different from looking through any seekstone, and he could learn the Twins’ whereabouts and the shape of their plans. Perhaps it was worth the risk.
The stupid, foolhardy, power-hungry boy he’d once been would have done it.
Joros pushed the drawer shut. It had been decades since he’d been that boy, and he’d learned since that power wasn’t something that could be wrested and held like a dagger. Power was more like water in a desert, and if the years had taught Joros anything, it was how to make a waterskin, and that a smart man wouldn’t brave the desert without as much water as he could carry.
Joros prowled through the shadow-touched hallways of his youth, feeling like the walls got a little tighter each time he passed between them, and he was grateful to find Sharra Dogshead watching her fists drill out in the courtyard. Despite the oppressive night, the air outside, at least, didn’t smell of rotting memories.
Someone had brought out a chair for the Dogshead to sit on; with whatever damage had been done to her leg aeons past, she started wobbling if she stood for too long, and it didn’t do for a leader to remind her people of that any more often than necessary. Better to seem lax or lazy than weak.
Joros skirted around the fighting fists and went to stand at Sharra’s side, his hands clasped behind his back, not at all minding the height difference. He stood in silence, waiting, and as he’d known she would, the Dogshead spoke first. “My people tell me you’ve been making the rounds.”
Joros shrugged. “You said you wouldn’t commit them. It might surpris
e you how many of them are willing to commit themselves for hope and justice.”
“Justice?” She raised a hand, palm flat, and tipped it sideways as though dropping something useless. “They already fought a losing war for me. They should be a lot less eager for another one, but they’re young.” She turned an eye up to him, needing to twist her neck awkwardly for even that. Gods, being tall was a blessing. “Too young.”
“Some would say that giving your life in service of the gods is the surest path to eternal exaltation.” A good vocabulary was almost as great a blessing as his height around these people; he never tired of the flicker of consternation when he used a word that was beyond them.
“Would you?”
“I would say it is.”
The Dogshead snorted, and looked back at her fists.
A dark shape detached itself from a wall and stalked over: Tare, Sharra’s second. He was genuinely surprised he’d gotten in more than a handful of words to the Dogshead before her rabid dog had shown up. Tare took up her post at Sharra’s other shoulder, but Joros didn’t spare her a glance as he asked, “Isn’t there a cellar you should be haunting?”
He felt her anger burst toward him like the first breath of winter, and he allowed one corner of his mouth—the one she couldn’t see—to turn upward. Ever since Rora’s health had improved, Tare had made a habit of playing escort to the fists who tended to the captives, bringing food and cleaning filth. When he’d asked, the fists had told him with broad smiles that Tare spent her time threatening to cut more pieces off Rora. The fists seemed to think it a good show of strength on Tare’s part.
“Don’t you have a world to save?” Tare returned, mockery heavy in her voice.
Joros shifted his jaw until it popped. He had indeed been making the rounds, telling anyone who would listen how their dear departed pack mates had martyred themselves so valiantly, and how the Twins could still be defeated. Their eyes always shone with fervor after he was done talking—but Tare had been making her rounds, too. Preaching caution and safety and security, whispering aggrieved reminders of all the members of the pack who had died under Joros’s supervision. Oh, she was always careful not to imply that it had been his fault—she was happy enough to rest that blame on Rora’s shoulders, as he’d intended—but the fact still stood that members of the pack had been given into Joros’s keeping, and he had not been able to keep them safe and alive.