by Rachel Dunne
Scal shifted his weight to one foot. Back to the other. “I have not.”
Aro laughed, and it was the last thing Scal had expected. It almost sounded like his old laugh, though the differences crawled spider-light down his back. “Then maybe I have, too. Maybe we’ve both changed so slowly that we can’t see it from the inside.”
Scal did not like this direction. “Where is your sister?” Joros had not spoken of her, beyond to say that she was safe, and waiting for them.
“She hasn’t changed. Not at all.” Aro stared at the ground once more, but he was not looking for sticks. “Joros is so hard to face without her . . . everything is so much harder alone. I didn’t think it would be. I’d been alone before, I could make it on my own. But I was wrong . . .”
Starlight showed tears on his cheeks. Scal reached out, and put a hand to the younger man’s shoulder. “What has happened?”
“You left, and Rora couldn’t protect us alone. You left, and it all had to change.”
Scal was not the same man who had left them—it had been a different life, and he had changed. But he still felt the weight of responsibility, of blame, as heavy on his shoulders as the sword strapped to his back. One could crumble from the weight. Or one could learn to bear it. Vatri had told him once, We all carry things with us we don’t want to. He said to Aro, “I will not leave again.”
Aro stared at him, and there was something in his eyes that was familiar and frightening. Not from Scal’s last life, but further back—to his second life, when he had been a boy plucked from the killing snows. When he had lived inside high walls and slept to the sound of clanking chains, and to the snores of a red-robed priest whose face he could not remember. He had lived with the prisoners of Aardanel, and they had all had haunted eyes. Eyes that knew death, and were themselves half dead. Aro’s eyes looked like their eyes. “I want to help,” Scal said.
Aro looked away. “I think it might be too late.”
And Scal believed him. He bowed his head. “I am sorry.” He had never known how to talk to the dead.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Joros had to trust Harin when she said they were getting close to the estate; in the darkness, he couldn’t tell the difference between one field and the next, but he knew the pack, in their boredom, had done a great deal of exploring the surrounding lands while the Dogshead refused to let them do anything worthwhile. If Harin thought she recognized one particular rock, or the bend of the road spoke to her of home, he’d have to take her word for it.
He called the group to a halt, and for those who gave him resentful looks for daring to assume leadership, he glared right back. If they could accept a disfigured merra as a leader, they could accept him. “My people back home,” he said, ignoring Harin’s raised eyebrow at “my people” and how it went higher at “home,” “can be . . . overeager. They value their safety above all else—they’re truly a pack, and like wolves, they will protect what’s theirs. If they see a force of our size approaching, I worry they will take action before they know what they’re doing. A group should go ahead.”
There were nods of agreement, and Edro smiled—he seemed to like the idea of a pack of overeager killers on his side. Joros couldn’t blame him, though he’d eat his boots if Edro managed to mobilize the pack into anything useful.
For the last hour, since Harin had started to point out what she thought were familiar landmarks and what were in actuality nothing recognizable, Joros had been juggling whether it was better for him to lead the warning party, or to stay with the main group. If he went ahead, he’d be able to oversee things, lay the groundwork to cover up that terrible, maddening, impossible emptiness in his pocket where the seekstone had sat secure. He didn’t know who to blame for its disappearance, but the only certainty was that no one could know. If anyone found out that it was gone, that he no longer knew for certain where the Twins were, before he had his replacement plan in place, this fragile alliance would fall to pieces. On the other hand, staying with the group gave him control over his new allies, and kept them from conspiring against him in his absence. In the end, that was what swayed him—he trusted Vatri little enough as it was, and he was loath to give her any time to begin unraveling all the work he’d done. He would have time later to talk to Anddyr, to shove as much skura down the damnable mage’s throat as necessary to get the mage to somehow find the Twins. He’d done it before, when they were sleeping lumps below the earth. He could find them again. He had to.
Vatri proved his choice to stay right when she regarded him with suspicion and said, “Deslan can lead some of our people.”
He nearly snorted at her transparency, and at the idea that if he did have some grand ambush in mind, Deslan’s presence would deter him. “Excellent,” he said. “Harin can lead the way.” He’d already given Harin her instructions, and trusted her as much as he could to see them through.
He’d debated, too, sending Aro—a show of faith for those pack members who so coddled their precious wayward son—but that would leave Joros without any real protection. Though Aro had little of Anddyr’s strike-before-thinking impulsivity, having a mage at one’s side should make any would-be troublemakers think before any striking was necessary. So he kept Aro, and sent Harin with two of the other pack to lead Deslan and her three charges. They ranged ahead, moving quickly, lost to the shadows in little time.
The rest of their group continued forward at the same steady pace, walking in relative silence. At length, dim lights emerged from the darkness ahead of them, and when it became clear that the lights were torches, all stopped in silent agreement. Scal and Edro both drew their swords, the Northman’s devoid of its flames, and stood ready at the head of their group. Behind him, Joros could hear other weapons being drawn, bows being strung, all readying for any attack that might come. At his side, Aro stood gawping until Joros drove an elbow into the boy’s ribs. Aro darted his eyes around and then raised his hands hip-high, as though ready to fend off some short attacker. He likely thought it made him look prepared for spellcasting, the poor fool.
The torches moved closer, and from the pools of light they cast Joros could pick out Deslan’s face, and the two pack who’d gone with, and a new face in the form of Tare, the ear-cutter. Harin wasn’t with the returning group, and that was good—she would hopefully be tending to some of Joros’s last-minute business at the estate.
“It’s a safe place,” Deslan called ahead. “They’ll take us in.” Their approach was accompanied by the sounds of weapons being sheathed and sighs of relief. As they drew closer, Deslan raised an eyebrow toward Joros. “They seemed surprised to hear you’d come back.”
“We were that,” Tare growled. Joros wondered how exhausting it was, to be so perpetually joyless.
“I found the answers I was looking for more quickly than I expected, and Aro has shown great improvement in his health. But he missed his family, and there are things here I still need. There are plans still to be made.”
“So you thought you’d bring more mouths for us to feed, when we can barely keep our own fed.”
“That’s a matter I’ll discuss with Sharra.”
Tare laughed. “Oh, will you?” Her eyes lit on something behind Joros, and a frown creased her face. “I know you.”
Joros twisted to see her staring at Vatri, who sneered. “And I you. I see we’re all keeping fine company these days.” Joros had worked so hard to block all memory of Vatri that he’d forgotten she’d been there when they whisked the sad remnants of Whitedog Pack out of Mercetta and installed them in Joros’s old estate. And she’d been there, too, to see the truth of how the pack members they’d taken to Raturo had died—that was a tricky spot he might need to dance around. He couldn’t remember Tare and Vatri interacting, but he would have been genuinely surprised to learn they’d liked each other. Neither of them was the sort who made friends easily or well.
“When times are hard,” Tare said, “even a bad friend is better’n none.”
Vatri
’s silence conceded the point—she was, after all, keeping company with Joros to a greater extent than Tare was. Limited room for judgment had never stopped the merra from spitting vitriol in the past, but perhaps she’d learned to pick her battles.
“Well,” Tare said, turning her scowl back to Joros. And then, alarmingly, the scowl turned to a smirk. “We should go back. A lot’s happened since you left. I’m sure you’ll want to hear all about it.”
“Happened?” Joros demanded.
Tare’s smirk deepened. “I think those are matters you’ll discuss with Sharra.”
She offered nothing more, and he wouldn’t demean himself by begging, so Joros fumed in silence as they resumed the journey toward the estate. Deslan dropped back to his side, pulling him into the circle of her torch’s light. “You’ve got a curious collection of allies,” she said, to which Joros grunted. He felt her subsequent frown. “All right, then,” she said, and added with no trace of malice or anger that he could detect, “I hope your thoughts keep you company well enough.” She moved to walk beside Scal, and didn’t expect any conversation from him.
The estate was as sparsely lit as it had always been before Joros and Aro had left: enough light to not need to worry about bumping into comrades, but not enough to turn the place into a beacon. There were more torchbearers at the gate, watching them with cold faces and curious eyes as they passed through.
And standing at the center of the courtyard with crossed arms, in what appeared to be a carefully well-lit position, was Rora. Her smirk matched Tare’s.
Joros felt his mouth hanging open slightly and quickly snapped it shut; with its closing, he could feel his anger rising, as though his mouth had been a vent that, now sealed, threatened to burst. He stepped forward, fists clenched, ready to start throwing threats—
And from the corner of his eye, he saw Harin at the edge of the shadows, making sharp silencing motions.
Joros halted, and uncurled his fingers. His glare stayed in place, and he gritted his teeth hard enough to make his eyes ache, but he gave them no ground. He supposed he should have been like Vatri, and anticipated an ambush.
“Welcome back,” Rora said with tight, forced cheer. If she heard the choked noise her brother made behind Joros, she gave no indication.
Joros had been gone less than three months, and somehow in that time, mortal enemies had managed to patch up their wounds. Tare strolled past him to Rora’s side and rested her arm companionably against the younger woman’s shoulder, their matching smiles giving him the same spine-shivers that the bloody spooky twins inside Mount Raturo always had. This, though, had the flavor of barely contained rage—the kind of all-consuming, illuminating anger he hadn’t felt in so long.
The old Joros had always been able to accomplish anything he wanted to.
He pushed past the smirking bitches, and ignored Harin when she scrabbled to his side with hurried whispers—Twins’ bones, but he was surrounded by too many damnable women. He marched into the main house, the merra and the Northman and Edro and Aro on his heels, Deslan’s voice dimly calling out for her people to rest while the leaders discussed things, but he didn’t care. There was just one last damnable woman to face.
Sharra Dogshead had taken Joros’s parents’ old room and turned it into an office his father would have loved: sparse and no-nonsense, with his father’s abominably heavy desk dragged into the room and set at the very center, facing the door. The room had a single chair, the same chair his father had done all his business out of, which Sharra had claimed for herself. It did feel a great deal like being marched into his father’s study to recite whatever minor wrong he’d been caught doing, and he let that comparison fuel his anger.
Joros marched toward the desk, enjoying the muffled curse Tare made behind him, too far away to do anything if Joros had had murder on his mind. He wasn’t there—yet. He simply planted his fists on the desk and leaned forward, looming over the Dogshead, letting her feel his radiating fury. “We had an understanding,” he snarled.
Joros’s frame completely blocked the room’s one lantern from her, throwing the Dogshead entirely in his shadow. She looked up at him with an infuriating calm. “So nice to see you again, Joros.”
Joros lifted one fist and slammed it down, making the desk shudder, sending a few papers skittering to the floor. A hand grabbed his shoulder and wrenched him back—Tare, finally having shoved her way through the cretins filling the doorway. Joros let her pull him out of his looming stance before he twisted out of her grip.
“Understandings can change,” a different voice said, and an eyeless specter stepped out of the shadows that had collected at the back of the room, “when you understand more.”
“You?” Joros sputtered. Eerie, irritating Neira, who had thought herself the gods’ will made manifest and had haunted the halls of Mount Raturo worse than the young twins. Whispers had always followed her, surrounding her like the shadows she conjured, which were unlike any magecraft anyone had ever seen. Joros, preferring to keep his distance, had never joined in the whispering, but he had heard them well enough—he’d led the Shadowseekers, had been the effective spymaster for the Fallen, after all. He’d heard of the strange noises coming from Neira’s chambers at all hours, and the cloud that seemed to overcome one’s memories when trying to remember anything seen beyond the dark door of her room . . . Joros had always avoided her as much as he could, and the few times their paths had crossed had done nothing to change his opinion on her. Dirrakara had always praised the woman . . . but Dirrakara had been wrong about so much.
Joros swung back to the Dogshead, to Tare and to Rora still hovering in the doorway, and couldn’t help a peal of mocking laughter. “If you’ve been listening to anything she’s said,” he told them, “you should know she’s a compulsive liar. She’ll say anything to get what she wants.”
From her position behind the Dogshead, Neira went utterly still, and her empty eye sockets fixed unsettlingly on Joros. Dimly, he could make out her surrounding shadows, beginning to writhe furiously. “What did you call me?” she asked softly, and there was a tilt to the words that filled Joros’s core with ice.
“Enough.” The Dogshead stood, which was a mistake—her bad leg gave out, and she had to catch herself on the desk, glaring Tare away when she moved to help. Sharra righted herself, and treated everyone in the room to that glare before saying, “This is my home, and if any of you hope to stay in it, you’ll behave civilly.”
Joros barked another laugh—her home? Had she spent her childhood tiptoeing through its halls, or staring through the shrinking crack of every closing door, or studying at the huge painted map of Fiatera and imagining what else lay beyond the crumbling walls? Her home, indeed . . .
“Those of you I haven’t met,” she went on, to the fools still hovering in the doorway, “I assume you’re the ones wanting to help him. Come in, then. You’re welcome here just as long as he is.”
They all filed in to stand in a rough ring before the Dogshead’s desk: Vatri and Edro and Scal, Rora who went to stand near Tare who stood near the Dogshead, Aro who had been utterly ignored and likely thought his frequent glances to his sister were subtle.
“Well,” Vatri said to Joros, in some feeble attempt to lighten the mood, “isn’t this nice. We’re all back together once more—your whole merry band of lackeys.”
“All except one,” Rora corrected—she’d never miss an opportunity to point out when the merra was wrong.
Joros snorted and said stiffly, “I trust Anddyr is still enjoying his new flock?”
Tare spread her hands, grinning. “Like I said . . . a lot’s changed.”
Joros sat among the wreckage of a vicious storm made of his own hands and fury. The destruction had brought him no joy—only left him feeling the same dull sadness he’d felt while trudging away from the Plains and his failure there.
Surrounded by all the smirking women—Rora and Tare and Sharra and Neira and Vatri, damn bleeding hells, there were too ma
ny of them—he had had no reasonable outlet for the blinding rage within him. He’d stormed from the room as Rora explained Anddyr’s absence, lest he be further tempted to kill them all, and had found himself in the room he’d claimed. His room, but one of the eyes had taken it over in his absence, and the man wisely fled before Joros was forced to commit bodily harm. He’d proceeded to smash everything in the room he could—it was that or scream his throat bloody. If anyone had dared enter the room at that point, he likely would have smashed their face in, too. But they were all wise enough to leave him to his anger.
Joros sat now in the middle of the debris he’d made and couldn’t even muster up enough energy to want to be angry. He’d managed to build some small life in this place—a new room in his bleak childhood home, some vestiges of happiness and comfort despite the world continuing to fall apart around him. But it did keep falling apart. He had no way of finding the Twins now. The staircase had crumbled beneath him, his plan shattered like the furniture he’d destroyed.
Anddyr had always been more trouble than he was worth, but that was more a reflection of how much trouble he caused than how useful he was—the mage had been a scatterbrained idiot, but he’d been damned useful, and Joros didn’t like admitting that he’d come to rely on him. But Anddyr was gone now, and he’d taken with him Joros’s last bargaining chip: if he didn’t have the seekstone linked to a god, at least he had a mage with an uncanny connection to both the god and the boy whose body the god had stolen. But no—it was all gone, all ruined.
“I did try to stop him,” a voice said from the doorway, and Joros looked up to see Rora leaning there. The smirk was gone, her face as hard and unforgiving as he was used to. She didn’t seem surprised by the destruction he’d wrought.
“That must have been terribly hard for you,” Joros said flatly.
“I could’ve had them kill you, y’know? I thought about it, and they would’ve done it if I asked. Put a dagger right through your eye soon as you stepped foot in the courtyard. I thought about it for a long time.”