The immigrant Kwen’s greatest vice—graver in my estimation than his predisposition to sloth, slow- wittedness, and addiction—is his slavish attachment to the primitive culture of his origin. In this treatise, I will enumerate my criticisms of contemporary Kwen integration policies, namely their focus on housing and employing Kwen without instilling in them the moral virtues that give rise to an industrious life.
The only Kwen who can hope to responsibly handle gainful employment or civilized living quarters is the one who has first committed himself to good Tiranish ideals. By contrast, the Kwen who holds to the ways of the wild is a wretched creature, a curse unto himself and others. I have in my heart tremendous pity for the lonely and prospectless Kwen who cannot assimilate, and I believe we do him no favors by allowing him to persist in his backward ways.
—Archmage Theredes Orynhel, A Treatise on the Compassionate Assimilation of Kwen Peoples (284 of Tiran)
Cold the Crossing
ciona didn’t know when she had last set foot in the Berald familyS bakery. For years, it had been just another meaningless feature on her walk to the westbound train. But the warmth and the honey-glazed smell took her straight back to when she had been a child, shyly clutching Aunt Winny’s skirts as her aunt told her she could pick out one sweet treat. Just one, so choose carefully.
“Morning, Ansel,” Sciona greeted the baker’s son as she set her basket on the counter. “I’d like some blueberry scones, if you have them.” Those were Thomil’s favorite—or, at least, the ones that disappeared the fastest when Sciona brought baked goods into the lab. It occurred to her that she had never asked him if he’d like her to bring anything in particular. She had just thought he was lucky that she was considerate enough to share with him. Ha!
“Are you all right?” Ansel asked, and Sciona realized that there was an unhinged smile hanging on her lips. Her hair was an unwashed mess, and she likely looked as though she hadn’t slept in days—which was nearly the case. After the doctor had cleared out, she had passed out on her bed for a few hours. Alba and Winny would have liked her to sleep longer, she knew, but after Aunt Winny left for the market and Alba left for her shift at
Kenning’s, Sciona had taken her opportunity to escape into the dark morning.
The sunlight just weakly touching the cobbles outside would linger for only two hours. The final sunrise before the Deep Night was that close.
There was no time to sleep.
“Miss Sciona?”
“Yes.” She shook herself. “Sorry. You asked a question?”
“How many?”
“Huh?”
“How many scones?”
“Oh, right. As many as you have. Or as many as you can fit in this basket.”
“Miss Sciona…” Ansel paused after picking up his tongs. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’ve been better,” she said, knowing she would never sell “fine” with her eyes as puffy as they were.
“Well, my ma always says there’s nothing a delicious bake can’t fix.”
Ansel had a contented look on his broad, simple face as he transferred the blueberry scones from the display case into the basket. Sciona had a vague memory of his big brother greeting customers from behind the same display. Carseth had been even taller than Ansel and just as kind—a big, contented tower, all warmth and strength.
“Ansel, I’m going to ask you a question that isn’t nice at all.”
“Um—all right?”
“Why did your brother kill himself?”
Ansel fumbled, nearly dropping a scone on its way to the basket. “Sorry —what?”
“I told you it wasn’t nice.” But she needed to know.
“No, it—it’s fine.” He glanced around, but there was no one else in the bakery. Having waited so long for Alba to leave the apartment, Sciona had arrived at Ansel’s counter well after the morning rush. “I just…I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me about it quite so bluntly.”
“He was a barrier guard, right?”
“Only for six months. He meant to make a career there. The pay’s good, you know, and he wanted to support our parents.”
“My Aunt Winny says he left home a happy, ambitious man and came back different.”
Ansel didn’t meet Sciona’s eyes as he placed the last scone in the basket and folded the cloth over them. “She’s not wrong.”
“What happened?”
“Carseth wasn’t supposed to talk about it.” Ansel lowered his voice. “He —well, you know better than most of us how government jobs can be.
Confidentiality and all that.”
“I do.”
“So, you know that if I tell you, you have to promise not to share it with
anyone else.”
“On my honor as a mage.”
“All right.” Ansel leaned a little closer. “After Carseth came back home, he talked about refugees—Kwen folk—coming through the barrier torn up,
covered in blood.”
“Torn up?” Sciona repeated.
“I won’t say how he actually put it. Not to a lady.”
“Tell me how he actually put it,” Sciona demanded and then added, “please.”
“Well, Carseth said they had pieces of their limbs missing, skin peeled back from the muscle, muscle peeled back from bone, just…” Ansel shuddered. “The stuff of nightmares. Stuff so horrible you couldn’t make it up if you tried. At first, he thought it was cannibals or maybe wild animals, but after a while, he found out it was something else.”
“What was it?” Sciona already knew, of course. She just wondered how much a simple man like Ansel had been able to infer.
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Wouldn’t or couldn’t?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it was all top secret. He really shouldn’t have been telling us about anything he saw at the barrier. He was just in such a state; I don’t think he even remembered the rules.”
“And you think that was why he killed himself?” Sciona said softly.
“Because of the injuries he saw?”
“No. That wasn’t the thing—or the only thing—that really tormented
him.”
“Then why?”
“Just that…I guess if the injured Kwen couldn’t be helped or if the camps were at capacity, the guards were supposed to throw them back outside the barrier.”
“They what?” Sciona had suspected as much, but hearing it confirmed still made her blood run cold.
“Carseth wouldn’t do it. At least, that’s what he’d say when he woke in a state, screaming. I won’t do it. I won’t do it…But whatever he did or didn’t do, it seems like he watched other guards throw Kwen back through the barrier. And whatever happened to them then, whatever my brother saw… he couldn’t take it. After a year of us trying to get him back into the rhythm of the bakery and Dr. Mellier trying to help him, he still just…” Ansel shook his head and blinked tears from his eyes. Then he sniffed sharply.
“Sorry. God, look at me.” He dabbed at his eyes with his apron, leaving smudges of flour on his cheeks. “Crying like a girl.”
“It’s all right,” Sciona said. “I do it all the time.”
That got a little laugh out of the baker’s son.
“I’m sorry I brought it up.” She wasn’t, of course. She’d needed her suspicions confirmed by a party with no reason to lie. “Sorry” just seemed like the thing to say.
Ansel sniffed. “Miss Sciona, I don’t want you to think my brother was a lunatic or a coward. He—”
“I know he wasn’t,” Sciona said firmly. “He was a good soul, who saw
things no good soul could process.”
“You really think so?”
“I do.” Perhaps what Carseth had done—the way he had ended it—was the only thing a good soul could do faced with the reality of the barrier.
Thank God Sciona’s ego superseded her immortal soul. She needed something more than an impotent end on the cobbles beneath her window.
She needed action. But that certainly didn’t make her a better or stronger person than Carseth Berald. “He wasn’t weak. He was a good man.”
“You sound so sure,” Ansel said thickly. “How are you so sure?”
Sciona answered honestly because she knew the baker’s son would not understand, and she needed to test her own courage—to see if she had the strength to say the truth aloud.
“Because the space beyond the barrier is a Reserve siphoning zone. And the Reserve demands continuous siphoning.” A guard who saw people pushed back through the barrier would have to watch Blight eat them alive.
It was no wonder a simple, kind man like Ansel’s brother had lost his mind.
“What do you—”
Before Ansel could ask any of his own questions, Sciona reached out and touched his hand. It was awkward. But it turned out to be the right move as the baker’s son was struck dumb, their entire conversation seemingly forgotten as he looked down at the hand on his.
“Thank you.” She squeezed gently. “For the scones and for sharing with me.”
—
The absence of functioning streetlamps made the Kwen Quarter alarmingly dark. Sciona had to squint at the slip of paper on which she had scrawled the address from the recesses of the University’s staff directory before gathering her courage to leave the platform.
She had never gotten off the train in this part of town, believing Aunt Winny’s claims that she would be robbed or kidnapped. Walking through the train station crawling with rats and beggars, she saw where people got that idea, as well as where they got the idea that Kwen didn’t bathe. A stinging soup of smells permeated the air—some combination of urine, chemical smoke, and rotting garbage.
Sciona hadn’t worn her best skirts, but she still picked them up high as she made her way among the towering apartment complexes where families lived crushed together in squalor. She had to gather the fabric right up to her
knees to keep it from catching when she climbed the rusting metal stairs up the outside of Thomil’s building.
By the time she reached the door, she was sweating through her blouse, but she smoothed her skirts in an attempt to look presentable before lifting a fist to the peeling faux wood and giving a single, crisp knock.
The moment after the knock lasted an eternity, during which Sciona thought, God, why did I come here? How is this a good idea? What was I planning to say? In fact, she had done a lot of planning for this encounter.
But the words all spilled from her brain like sand from a sieve as the doorknob turned.
The door opened, and she experienced a surge of simultaneous relief and panic. Relief because Thomil looked all right. Panic because, if he wasn’t, it was all her fault.
His expression went cold. Without a word, he shut the door.
“No, wait!” Sciona pushed forward, and the door closed painfully on her shoulder, the edge banging into her head. “Ow!”
“Highmage Freynan, for gods’ sake!” Thomil put a hand on her shoulder to shove her out, and she grabbed on to him in desperation.
“Thomil, wait! You were right! You were right, okay? You were right!”
Her grip was nothing to his, but she had managed to tangle her fingers in his shirt so that he had to stop. Suspicion creased his brow. “What do you mean?”
“I thought about everything you said when we argued. I tested, and you were right. About magic, and Blight, and all of it. I just—I need to talk to you. Please.”
“Last time we talked, you told me my family deserved to die in agony.
You are not welcome in my home.”
“I know,” she said miserably. “I know. I shouldn’t have said any of that.
Thomil, I was confused, and angry, and—”
“I don’t care,” he said, and it was like he had stuck a blade into her chest. But she pressed forward anyway, uncaring how deep the steel cut into her. She had to do this.
“What I mean is, if you’re still angry, that’s fine. If you never want to see me again after this is over, that’s fine. I understand. But if we’ve found what we think we have, we need to get to the bottom of it. I don’t know another Kwen immigrant, and you don’t have access to another highmage, so if we’re going to figure this out, we need to do it together. Please. You can hate me the whole time. We just need to talk.”
“You really want to talk about this?” There was that skeptical, scathing
eyebrow.
“I really do.”
Thomil’s expression was still hard and cold all the way through. “Well,” he said finally, “you are bleeding.”
“I am?” Sciona touched her forehead, and her fingers came away wet.
“Oh.”
Thomil muttered something with the cadence of a curse, then stood back. “You’d better come in and let me look at that, so I don’t get jailed for attacking a Tiranishwoman.”
His tone stung. “It’s not like I’m going to report—”
“Just come in, Highmage.”
Sciona stepped into the apartment with a breath of relief—and found herself inhaling a familiar scent, blessedly distinct from the acrid air outside. A ring of dried woody-stemmed plants hung from the inside of Thomil’s door. Highmage Jurowyn had written of hags and hunters meticulously braiding herbs for their religious rituals. But having never been inside a Kwen home, Sciona hadn’t thought that modern city-dwelling Kwen would still go to the trouble—especially when she remembered that displaying Kwen religious symbols was illegal under Tirasian law.
Although, glancing from the wreath to Thomil, Sciona realized that this was where his distinctive scent came from and felt that she understood the choice. In a place like this, that breath of wild sage had to be worth any amount of trouble.
“Sit where you like,” Thomil said as he closed the door behind her.
There seemed to be just the one place to sit, an impossibly ragged couch that looked like it had been green once upon a time. Sinking onto the faded
cushions, Sciona set her basket of scones on a tea table that, upon closer inspection, was not really a tea table but a pair of wooden crates with a board nailed onto the tops.
The apartment was tiny, even for just one man. A sink, a cupboard, and a sliver of countertop clung to the far wall by way of a kitchen, and a single door led off the main room. Sciona supposed it was a bedroom, which meant that Thomil must share a washroom with other apartments in the complex—a grim prospect that made her wonder how he kept himself so clean.
“I am sorry I closed the door on your arm, ma’am,” Thomil said as he went to the minuscule kitchen area and wrestled with a sticking drawer.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sciona said, though she did feel a burgeoning bruise on her brow. “I know you didn’t mean to.”
“Still happened, though, didn’t it?” Thomil returned to the couch with a cloth and a bottle of clear alcohol.
“Should I have you thrown in jail, then?”
“I’d rather you didn’t, ma’am,” he said and leaned in to work on the cut, “but you’ll do what you want.”
Sciona fought a flinch, but those rough hands were shockingly gentle as they brushed her hair out of the way and put the cloth to her brow to protect her eye as he applied alcohol to the cut. She pressed her lips together against the sting, but it wasn’t as bad as she’d anticipated. And Thomil’s gray eyes were suddenly so close that she couldn’t see or think about anything else. The silver threads of each iris moved subtly with the contractions of Thomil’s pupils as he focused on his work.
“You’re good at this,” she said to break the intensity of the silence.
“Practice, ma’am.”
“You get hurt a lot while mopping floors?”
“No, ma’am, but, like most Kwen, I’ve moved between a lot of different jobs over the years—and you wouldn’t believe the scrapes my clumsy daughter gets on the job.”
“Wait!” Sciona blinked up at him in shock, making him pull the cloth back and click his tongue in annoyance. “You have a daughter?”
“I do.”
“You never brought that up!”
“You never asked.”
“Oh.” Was that true? Sciona tried to remember as Thomil withdrew from the couch again to dispose of the bloodied cloth. All these weeks working beside Thomil, had she really never asked about his family once?
When Thomil came back to the couch, he was bearing a cup on a saucer.
“It’s mostly bruising. The cut should heal on its own as long as you leave it alone. No stress-picking.” He offered her the saucer. “Tea?”
Sciona eyed the slow curls of steam from the cup, feeling sick, and Thomil’s expression softened just slightly. “Heated over a fire, which I lit with a match, if that’s important to you. The noon shift knocks the stove conduits out at least every other day, so most of the time, I don’t bother.”
“Oh.” Reserve spellograph shifts sometimes affected Sciona’s block, but it was worst in the poorest parts of the city, where magical systems were rarely maintained correctly. “Thank you.” She accepted the tea but set it down on the makeshift table before her. “I just…I didn’t come here so you could wait on me. I came to tell you what I looked into after you left and the conclusions I reached.”
Thomil drew a long breath into his chest as if to steel himself, then dragged a kitchen chair up to the tea table to sit opposite her. “I’m listening, Highmage.”
Sciona had rehearsed this in her head, but it all came out in a disjointed jumble, broken up by tears. She pushed the words out anyway—because she had said she wanted to talk, and she owed Thomil the truth.
“I, uh…” She paused to wipe her eyes on her sleeve. “I double-checked what you said about the Forbidden Coordinates against my maps at home, and it holds up—perfectly. The Forbidden Coordinates do line up with Tiran, and the Reserve siphoning zone numbers line up with the area two Leonic miles beyond Tiran’s barrier.”
Thomil’s eyebrow twitched. “What does that mean?”
“You…” You know what it means, Thomil, she thought, but he was going to make her say it. She swallowed. “The Reserve is Tiran’s fallback
energy pool, so Reserve coordinates represent a space of continuous automated siphoning.”
Thomil’s quiet “Oh” didn’t register any emotion, but he put his head down for a moment, hands clasped together and pressed to his forehead.
Sciona ached, knowing that her unfailingly clever assistant was putting the pieces together as she had. Those two miles around Tiran were what the Kwen called “the crossing.” It was where Thomil had lost his sister.
“Are you all right?” Sciona whispered when she could bear the silence no longer.
“No.” Thomil lifted his head, his calm restored but for a watery shine in his eyes. “But continue.”
Thomil listened, expressionless, until Sciona had finished relaying everything she had seen and deduced. When she got to the part where she had tested a siphoning spell on a girl, his clasped hands went white with pressure, and the furrow between his brows deepened, but he didn’t interject. At last, she finished recounting her conversation with Archmage Bringham, which brought her to the end of what she had to say to Thomil.
He didn’t need to hear about her subsequent journey into madness and only partway back.
There was a terrible silence as Thomil digested her story.
Then, finally, he spoke. “So, Archmage Bringham said it was all a trick
created by dead mages?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t believe him?”
“I can’t. I mean, I see where his claims come from and why he might be sure of them, but the evidence doesn’t bear them out.”
“So, you think he lied to you?”
“No, no. Archmage Bringham doesn’t lie to me. He just doesn’t have access to all of the information we do.”
“Really?” Thomil said. “He’s an archmage. Shouldn’t he have access to all the information we do and much more?”
“Well, yes, he has higher clearance than we do, but he’s not a mapping specialist, and, as we’ve discussed many times now, no mage has ever
produced a mapping spell that actually showed the Otherrealm. The Freynan Mirror we produced in that lab was a landmark revolution in magic. No one—not even an archmage—has all the information that we do.”
“Are you sure? They could all be using this Sabernyn curse story as a cover.”
“Keeping secrets isn’t Archmage Bringham’s forte,” Sciona said. “If I had a copper for all the things he’s told me that he wasn’t supposed to…”
“All right.” Thomil still didn’t look convinced but didn’t seem interested in arguing the point. “So, after speaking to Bringham, you decided to come to see me?”
“Well, not directly—obviously. For a while, I was sick, and crying, and I didn’t know if I…” Sciona looked down at her hands, realizing how pointless it would be to describe her suffering to Thomil. He couldn’t understand what it was to plunge from towers of light into the dark terrors below. And as someone born among those terrors, why would he care to understand? She shook her head, deciding to skip to the end of her ordeal.
“I only came back to myself when I decided something: all emotions are just energy, just potential fuel for action. Everything I felt about what I saw —the guilt and the terror—wasn’t poison. It was power.” She pressed a hand to her chest and repeated the refrain that had kept her moving since leaving the apartment. “This feeling is energy. And I’m going to do something useful with it.”
Thomil had just started to ask “What—” when the front door banged open.
Sciona’s heart nearly jumped from her chest as a girl stepped into the apartment. She was a grimy, wiry thing, with auburn hair spilling in messy, magnificent waves past her waist and her boys’ trousers black with soot.
She would have been quite beautiful—was quite beautiful—but for a crescent-shaped scar twisting the right side of her face.
“Hey, Uncle Thomil, I…” The girl paused in the doorway as her eyes fell on Sciona. “Oops.”
“Carra!” Thomil stood, looking flustered and vaguely panicked. “Um— this is Highmage Sciona Freynan—from the University. Highmage Freynan, this is my…This is Carra.”
“Carra…” Sciona stood to find that she and the Kwen girl were just about the same height. She extended a hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Right.” The girl had Thomil’s suspicious silver eyes—only wilder, more dangerous—and she took the offered hand without warmth. Her palm was heavily callused and altogether rougher than any child’s hand should be.
“But, um—shouldn’t you be in school?” Sciona asked for something to say.
“She’s Kwen, Highmage,” Thomil said. “She doesn’t go to school. She works.”
“Oh,” Sciona said awkwardly. “What do you do for work?”
“I work nights in a warehouse, milady,” Carra said flatly. “In the daytime, I pull dead rats out of the storm drains.”
“Oh—” Sciona withdrew her hand.
“She’s joking, Highmage,” Thomil said with an admonishing look at the girl. “In the day, she cleans chimneys uptown. Carra, my heart, could you give us a moment? We were in the middle of something.”
“Sure,” the teenager said and slunk off through the apartment’s only door with a last sullen glance at the two adults.
Sciona looked after her and then back to Thomil. “You said she was your daughter.”
“I did.” Thomil rubbed a hand over his face as he sank back into the
kitchen chair.
“But she called you ‘uncle.’ ”
“I can explain, ma’am…just don’t tell anyone.” He looked up at Sciona, anxious. “I know we’re not…exactly on the best of terms right now, Highmage. But please?”
“Sure.” Sciona sat back down opposite him. “If you don’t want anyone to know, my lips are sealed. But why?”
“The crossing into Tiran was the last gasp of the Caldonnae.” Thomil looked away. “Carra and I are just…the death rattle.”
“What do you mean?” Sciona asked, disconcerted by the impossibly morose phrasing.
“I mean we’re the last. I told you that I lost my sister to the crossing, but with her went the rest of our tribe, including my brother-in-law, Carra’s father.”
“Arras?” Sciona said, surprised she had remembered the man’s name from the brief mention Thomil had made days ago.
Apparently, Thomil was surprised, too, because his eyes flicked up to meet hers, his brows raised slightly as he said, “Yes. He died while he ran with Carra in his arms. That scar on Carra’s face…that’s where the Blight that killed him clipped her. My sister, Maeva, went through the ice less than a mile past where he fell. When Carra and I were the only two of our tribe to make it through the barrier, I had to tell the guards I was her father.”
“So they wouldn’t separate you,” Sciona realized.
“Healthy Kwen orphans get taken straight to the workhouses. The ones who are visibly injured like Carra was…”
“The barrier guards throw them back to the Blight,” Sciona realized.
“Obviously, Carra’s not the helpless tiny thing she was ten years ago.
She can work for herself, fend for herself, but she still relies on me for housing and, if I’m not registered as her father on our paperwork—Carra!”
Thomil’s attention abruptly snapped upward. “No!”
Sciona had no idea how Thomil moved so fast, but in the blink of an eye, he had shot past her to jump clear over the back of the couch. When she whirled to her feet, she found Thomil restraining his niece, one hand clamped hard around her right wrist. There was a knife in Carra’s hand, poised in an overhanded grip—right over where Sciona had been sitting.
“Have you lost your mind?” Thomil demanded.
“Let me go!” Carra thrashed against him with animal fury that made Sciona back up until her legs hit the table, spilling tea over the unfinished surface. She instinctively grasped for her cylinders—only to find that they weren’t there. She had left them at Aunt Winny’s as a peaceful gesture. But
Thomil was immovably strong and held his niece through all her feral attempts to pitch free.
“Calm down!” he commanded before switching to a rolling, deep language Sciona was certain she had never heard before in the mouth of any Kwen—because it wasn’t a language that any other Kwen spoke, she realized after a moment. It was Caldonnish—a nearly dead language ferociously alive on these two tongues here in a dingy apartment in the poorest part of Tiran.
When she couldn’t twist free of her uncle’s grasp, Carra snarled back in those same wild, ancient sounds what Sciona could only take to be a barrage of curse words.
“She’s a killer!” The animal girl glared past Thomil at Sciona. “A mass murderer! You said so yourself!”
“Wait—you told her?” Sciona looked to Thomil in horror. “God, Thomil, she’s a child!”
Sciona’s mind had nearly splintered from the truth. Thomil had been in so much pain he had physically collapsed. Sciona couldn’t imagine laying that burden on someone who hadn’t even come of age.
“We’re Caldonnae, you bitch,” Carra spat, as though this should mean something to Sciona, “not a bunch of slimy, lying leeches! We keep nothing from each other!”
“Look, Carra, I—I didn’t know.” Sciona scrambled for the words to explain, to ease that rage dagger-pointed at her. “I had no idea what our magic was doing, where the energy was coming from. I didn’t know any of it.”
“But you had to!” The knife was still clutched in Carra’s right hand, shaking against Thomil’s iron grip. “Someone in that damn Magistry has to!”
“I know it seems that way from the outside.” Sciona held up her hands, placating. “But some of these men”—or one specifically—“I’ve known for years. They’re not the sort of people who would intentionally hurt innocent people. They’re not evil.”
“They’re either evil or they’re the stupidest people who ever lived!”
“All right, listen.” Sciona felt her ire rise. “You can’t hold all highmages to account for what a few of our Founders did—or tricked the rest of us into doing. And you shouldn’t speak so ill of the current Magistry. They have no knowledge of the Otherrealm, and they’re the reason you have a home here!” she admonished and only then caught Thomil’s gaze. Ice cold.
“We had a home, Highmage Freynan,” he said in a voice far quieter than his niece’s but no less furious, “before Blight took it away.” In a short, fluid movement, he disarmed Carra and put himself between the two women, knife held tense at his side. “And don’t take that tone with my sister’s daughter.”
Sciona’s hand twitched toward her cylinders, which again weren’t there.
“Are you threatening me?”
Thomil’s eyes went to the hand by her hip, then registered her belt, devoid of any conduits. His bearing softened just slightly. “No.”
“Thomil, I know I shouldn’t have said the things I said to you. But surely, you don’t think that I would knowingly—that I could ever—”
“Of course not,” he said stiffly as Carra glowered daggers at Sciona from behind his arm. “I watched you find out. I know you didn’t know.
Why should that matter to me? To Carra? We suffered. You benefited. Your
guilt is useless to us.”
“But—I wasn’t trying to—”
“I know you Tiranish aren’t used to being told you can’t have things, but you won’t have our forgiveness for this. No matter how much crying and complaining you do.”
“Then why don’t we kill her?” Carra demanded, sooty fists still clenched at her sides, still very much ready for a fight.
“Yes,” Sciona said quietly, meeting Thomil’s eyes. “If you can’t forgive me, then why not kill me? Hell, you have access to the fourth floor of the High Magistry. You could probably take out half the mapping department before you were caught.”
“Because you thought about what I said…and I thought about something you said. The content of a person’s soul does matter—even to my gods. It matters that a person’s soul can inspire them to change their
actions. So, Highmage Freynan, where is your soul taking you? What are we going to do to change this?”
“What kind of question is that, Uncle?” Carra said, incredulous. “She’s one of them! She’s obviously not going to change anything!”
But, for the first time in days, a genuine smile had spread across Sciona’s face. “I have a few ideas.”
Carra hissed something Sciona didn’t understand. For a heartbeat, Sciona was sure the wild girl was going to lunge for the attack again. But she just turned in a swish of red locks and stormed out. The apartment door slammed shut behind her, extending one of the cracks in the wall.
“Is she…?” Sciona trailed off, unable to decide whether to ask “Is she going to be all right?” or “Is she going to come back with a bigger knife?”
“Please don’t worry about her,” Thomil said. “She’s more Caldonn than I ever was, fiercer, more stubborn. It can be hard to change her mind about anything. If you could just…not mention that”—he gestured after Carra —“to any authorities, knowing it would get her put in a work camp for the
rest of her life.”
“God, of course not!”
“I won’t let her attack you again, Highmage, I swear,” Thomil said, and Sciona was disturbed to register a note of fear in his words. He didn’t trust her not to use this information against him. It hurt, but she was aware that it shouldn’t. After the things she had said to him in that stairwell, why should he trust her?
For her part, Sciona didn’t have full confidence that Thomil could control his feral niece, but she had bigger concerns than a homicidal teenager. “Assuming you can keep her from stabbing me for the next three days, I think I can approach the High Magistry about this problem.”
“Really?” Thomil looked profoundly unimpressed. “That’s your plan of action? Go running to the men responsible for your evil magic system?”
“Unknowingly responsible,” Sciona corrected him. “Just hear me out.
The High Magistry will be interested in the clarity of my new mapping methods. That isn’t a question. And, once they put my spellwork into broader use, all mages will be able to see which potential energy sources are
human and which aren’t. We can find sources that don’t hurt anyone—and this is to say nothing of alchemy! There will be so much less waste when alchemists can see the physical material they’re siphoning. Things will get better in the Kwen.”
Thomil’s cold wall of skepticism hadn’t budged an inch. “Your optimism is cute, Highmage Freynan, but I think you haven’t slept in a few days, and you’re grossly oversimplifying the problem.”
“How am I oversimplifying?”
“Well, for one thing, Kwen don’t just die from Blight hitting our bodies.
During my lifetime, about a quarter of the deaths in my tribe were from direct Blight. The rest were from starvation because resources on the plains are finite, and when all the game and crops are also dying of Blight, it’s hard to find enough food to go around. But, setting all that aside, I think the more pressing question is why would your precious highmages care about any of that? Why would they give up a good source of energy—human or otherwise?”
“Because it’s obviously wrong to siphon human beings! It’s horrific!”
“So is forcing five-year-old children to work until their fingers bleed.
But your mages don’t have a problem with that so long as those children have enough copper in their hair to set them apart from civilized Tiranish children.”
“All right—but…” Sciona started but found that she had no response.
It hurt to think, but it was true that if the Magistry cared at all about improving the lot of the Kwen, they probably could have done so many times over. Sciona was ashamed that the thought had never crossed her mind. When mages thought of improving Tiran, it was only for their fellow Tiranish. The Tiranishmen thought about their fellow Tiranishmen. Sciona very occasionally thought about her fellow Tiranishwomen. But the Kwen?
The Kwen were the last of afterthoughts, if they came up at all.
“I know Carra lacks tact,” Thomil continued, “but I think she’s right about one thing: you figured this out within a few months of starting your research in the High Magistry. Yes, you’re a prodigy, but you can’t have been the only mage in history to uncover this.”
“Oh, I wasn’t,” Sciona said. “That’s one of the things I put together when I was thinking back through my research. The traitor mage knew.”
“Sabernyn?”
“Yes. Remember how he mysteriously murdered all those people in their homes? The reports from the murder scenes describe total carnage with no discernible bodies. Just blood, and hair, and bone.”
“So, he killed using the Forbidden Coordinates?” Thomil grimaced.
“Which we now know to mean that he siphoned directly from his rivals’ homes?”
“That’s my theory. I mean, it seems like he wasn’t perfect at it. He definitely didn’t have the mapping abilities I do.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because if he’d had access to anything like the Freynan Mirror—the ability to see his prey in color—he wouldn’t have flubbed his assassination so many times. He was an experienced manual siphoner. But he missed his mark so many times that he killed a dozen family members and servants— even some unrelated neighbors—before getting to his actual targets.”
“I see,” Thomil said. “He’d pieced together that the Forbidden Coordinates corresponded to locations in Tiran, but he was still using fuzzy traditional mapping methods to find his targets.”
“Exactly,” Sciona said, “mapping methods by which one human body would be indistinguishable from another. But my point isn’t that I’m a better mapper than Sabernyn”—although that was gratifyingly indisputable.
“My point is that he was put to death for what he did. The High Magistry at the time called it an ‘abomination against God,’ so it’s not as if they condone the use of that magic against people.”
“Not against their own people.”
“All right, maybe mages do treat the murder of their own more seriously than the deaths of Kwen, but—”
“That’s not a ‘maybe,’ ma’am,” Thomil said impatiently. “The sentence for killing a Tiranish citizen is life in prison. For killing a Kwen, it’s usually a few months—or a cushy retirement, if you’re important enough. That’s
what they gave your Highmage Kamdyn when he dropped a bridge on my friends, is it not?”
“Fine,” Sciona conceded in frustration. “I’m not going to argue with you on that”—even though Highmage Kamdyn’s blunder had clearly been an accident, not intentional murder. “All I’m saying is that I doubt a whole Magistry of scholars could go about for generations disregarding mass slaughter. And thanks to Leon’s spellwork and Faene’s rules, they don’t need to. The nature of the Otherrealm is pretty well concealed.”
“Is it, though, ma’am? I had my suspicions before your breakthrough, and I’m a half-literate Kwen.”
“You’re more than half-literate and you know it,” Sciona said. “You’re exceptional.”
“No, I’m not!” Thomil said with an anger Sciona didn’t understand.
“I’m not smarter than other Kwen, or stronger, or more virtuous. I’ve just been luckier than most. This is what I don’t think you understand. Tiranish just like you kill Kwen just like me all the time—if not by siphoning, then by our treatment at the barrier, in the factories and construction sites—”
“All right, but this…what you and I have seen is a far cry from unsafe work conditions. The whole point—the whole mission statement—of Tiranish magic is to make life better. Adherents to that magic system wouldn’t do these things if they knew there was such a high human cost.”
“But I’m not human, am I?” Thomil’s voice went bitter. “Carra isn’t human. We’re an unclean, parasitic race, fit only to serve.”
“Come on. Who would say something like that?”
“Your founding texts!” Thomil returned. And, after a moment of searching her memory, Sciona realized he was right. Damn it. She had always skimmed those parts like she did everything not pertaining directly to magic. “And I wonder what we’re good for if we’re not serving?”
“I think the writers of those texts—the Founding Mages—have tricked us all. Thanks to the restrictions they’ve placed on mapping spell compositions, even the archmages don’t know the truth.”
“Well, the barrier guards certainly do.”
“The barrier guards know what the carnage of Blight looks like,” Sciona said, “and yes, some of them are cruel enough to throw people to their deaths. It doesn’t mean they—or the mages—know where that carnage comes from. They can’t know…” Sciona supposed it was arrogant to think she had discovered something that had eluded all but a few mages in the last few centuries. But ego was what had kept her alive for these last few days, and the alternative was unacceptable. “I’ll prove it.”
Thomil raised an eyebrow. “Will you?”
“This will be a good thing,” she assured him. “Once the archmages know what I’ve discovered, they can use my Freynan Mirrors to avoid killing humans in the future.” Sure, it might not solve the other problems Thomil had raised about the crops and game, but it was a start.
This would be her legacy, she decided. Sciona Freynan, not just the first female highmage, but a mapping revolutionary who saved tens of thousands of lives through her work. She wouldn’t just pave the way for women into the High Magistry. She would be the vanguard for a new era in which magic truly was the force for good the public imagined. She would make Tiran into the inherent good the Founders had promised but not delivered.
She stood. “I’m headed to the University.”
“What? Now?”
“Yes.” Having made up her mind and stated her purpose to Thomil, Sciona couldn’t wait another moment. “Thank you for the tea—and for listening.”
She had just reached the door when Thomil said, “Sciona…”
Something in his tone was strained, and she turned back. She didn’t recognize what had changed his voice until she saw it in those storm cloud
eyes. It was fear.
“Thomil?”
“I…” The words seemed to take a moment to push past Thomil’s pride.
“I don’t want you to do this.”
“What do you mean? People in the Kwen are dying every moment this goes unaddressed. If there’s a way to save what remains of your home, this is how it starts.”
“I know!” Thomil growled, then shoved a hand back through his hair to clutch it in uncharacteristic distress. “I just…”
“Just what?”
He shook his head, eyes cast down.
“Honesty, Thomil,” she said. “After everything, I don’t think we need to keep secrets or mince words with each other. Out with it.”
“I’m afraid they already know.” When he looked back at her, his expression was cold with dread. “I’m afraid of what that will mean for you.”
“For me?” she said in surprise. “Thomil, the other mages wouldn’t— well, sure, some of them would hurt me”—Renthorn would almost certainly bludgeon her to death with The Stravos Collection if he thought he could get away with it—“but I’m not going to the ones who hate me. I’m going to Archmage Bringham. He’s put his reputation on the line for me more than once. I can guarantee you, I’m not in any danger from him.”
Thomil nodded. He had seen her interact with Archmage Bringham enough times over the past months to know how close they were. But for whatever reason, he didn’t relax.
“You have a better idea?” Sciona pressed, impatient with Thomil’s lack of enthusiasm. These were his people she was trying to save.
“No,” he conceded, still disturbingly fearful. “Just promise me one thing.”
“Sure.” She supposed, for all she had put him through, she owed him one promise.
“If you bring everything you’ve told me to Archmage Bringham and he
already knows—”
“He won’t.”
“All right, but if he does, you have to play along. Pretend to buy his cover story. Whatever he wants you to believe, act like you believe it and go about your business like nothing is wrong. Don’t ask questions. Don’t antagonize.”
She gave Thomil a wry smile. “Does that sound like me?”
“Sciona!” His voice was so raw with emotion that it wiped the smile from her face. “These mages flay human beings to heat their tea in the morning! If they do this knowingly, will they think twice about disposing of one mouthy junior member of their order?”
Sciona chewed on his words for a tense moment. She couldn’t find fault with his logic. And yet everything in her rejected it.
“Swear to me on your god and your parents’ graves,” Thomil demanded.
“All right.” She sighed and pulled on her best reassuring smile. “I swear by God and my mother’s grave: if Bringham and the other archmages are covering the truth, then I’ll play along with them. Happy?”
“I’ll be happy when I see you alive and whole tomorrow morning.”
Sciona smiled for real then, taken aback at Thomil’s words and the earnest note in his voice.
“That’s sweet,” she said, and it didn’t come out as jokingly as she had
meant it. “Until tomorrow, Thomil.”
“Until tomorrow, Highmage.”
—
Thomil found his niece on the roof, perched on the ledge beneath the water tower, staring out into the sunless afternoon.
“Carra,” he said, wishing for the hundred thousandth time that he had an ounce of Arras’s gravity. “What you did back there was incredibly stupid.”
“I’m not apologizing.” She turned on him, glaring arrows. “I didn’t survive Blight and the camps to bow and scrape to a mage.”
You’re only alive because I learned to bow and scrape for you, Thomil should have said. Neither of them would be here today if Thomil had given his rage the voice it demanded—the voice it deserved. But Thomil didn’t want to hold that over Carra’s head.
“I want you to be safe,” he said, “and that involves compromise.”
“So, you want me to lie still and let a mage step on me?” Carra demanded, bringing her legs back over the edge to stand and face her uncle.
“No.” Thomil wanted her to be able to scream her heart out above the wind. He wanted to tell her she had nothing to fear from Sciona Freynan or any mage. She was the descendant of hunters, and the world was hers. But this was Tiran, and he loved her, and he couldn’t.
“Then what do you want from me?”
Thomil didn’t know how to answer. As always, Carra’s defiance had him caught between pride and total crushing fear. There was the relief that she hadn’t ended up like so many girls of the Kwen Quarter, dressing Tiranish, sanding down her accent with hours of practice, and hoping desperately to move up in society by marrying a Tiranishman who would treat her like a servant in exchange for tenuous protection. At the same time, if she didn’t learn to quiet her anger, she was going to end up on the wrong end of a city guard’s rifle, and the Caldonnae would be gone. Of course, if she made herself small, she wouldn’t really be Caldonn—and the tribe would be gone all the same.
“I just want you to be smart,” he said impotently. “Be careful. Acting on your every emotion the way you do is going to get you into trouble.”
“You always said that girls like me were the only ones who survived the hard winters out in the Kwen.”
“Yes, but…” At times like this, Thomil looked at Carra and felt himself standing again at that shoreline between Blight and starvation. As always, there was no winning for their people. “In this city, girls like that get themselves killed.”
Something twitched in Carra’s glare—hurt—and Thomil realized he had been too blunt.
“Daughter of Arras, do you think your father was a great hunter because he charged at his mark shouting his head off? No. He knew when to listen, when to wait.”
“So, what are we waiting for?” Carra demanded. “For that mage to betray you again the second things don’t go her way? For her to turn her magic on us?”
“I know it’s hard to believe—and I won’t ask you to believe it—but Sciona is genuinely trying to help us.”
Carra’s face twisted in disgust. “Sciona? I didn’t realize you two were on a first-name basis. That’s rather bold of you, isn’t it, Uncle? Not very deferential.”
“She’s on her way to talk to her mentor, to gauge how much the archmages of the city really know, and—” Thomil took a breath, realizing his voice had gone slightly unsteady. “Hopefully, she’ll come back with an idea of what must be done next.”
Carra was peering at him with stormy eyes, as penetrating as her mother’s had ever been and so much more judgmental. “You’re worried.”
“Yes. I am.”
“Because you still like her?”
“So accusatory!” Thomil chuckled to cover his nerves.
“That’s not a no.” Carra grimaced. “Gods, Uncle, what is wrong with you?”
“I don’t know.” Thomil was starting to think that something inside him was broken. He had made exactly two attempts at courtship in Tiran’s Kwen Quarter. Brodlynn, the friendly Endrasta secretary who had worked the desk at his previous job. Then, years later, Kaedelli, the textile worker with a laugh like bells, who had briefly lived with him and Carra. Both romances had quickly deteriorated. Both had been Thomil’s fault. Because he knew— or he feared?—that whatever happiness he found in companionship, he wouldn’t be able to keep it. It could never grow into a family or a future.
Somehow, it would all end in blood and the icy void of loss.
Thomil didn’t want to be such a pessimist; Maeva would have said that was a wretched way to live. But, given his experience, it was hard for him to be anything else…At least, it had been until Sciona Freynan and her impossible notions of changing the world.
“Have you completely lost your mind?” Carra demanded. “She’s a mage.”
“She’s…” Different? Was that the word Thomil wanted? It seemed falsely simple. Sciona was just like any other mage in so many critical ways —her fanaticism for her cruel god, her blindness to those beneath her, her
arrogance, her devastatingly damaging actions. But in the one way, she was distinct from anyone Thomil had ever known.
“She’s hope.”
“Hope?” Carra repeated.
“She’s proven that she can change her mind,” he said.
“So?”
“So, if there’s one person who can take that change of mind and use it to change this skewed world—one person with the power and the mind to do it
—it’s that woman.”
“Huh.” Carra didn’t sound convinced.
“You don’t have to agree with me,” Thomil said. “Just don’t stab her, all right?”
“Fine,” Carra said, “but only because I won’t have to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, you just sent her to spill her little heart to the other mass murderers, right?” Carra pressed her hands mockingly to her chest. “That’s why you’re up here babbling all your usual lines to me, yeah? ’Cause she wouldn’t listen to them?”
Thomil shook his head. “My usual lines?”
“You know,” Carra said impatiently. “In this city, girls like that get themselves killed.”
