The sun set on five and rose on four.
Four friends fast, one betrayed.
Faith keep the dark at bay, at bay.
The sun set on four and rose on three.
Three wives home, one astray.
Faith keep the dark at bay, at bay.
The sun set on three and rose on two.
Two minds whole, one a’fray.
Faith keep the dark at bay, at bay.
The sun set on two and rose on one.
One body sound, one decayed.
Faith keep the dark at bay, at bay.
—The Counting Song
Feast and Family
ciona’s heart pounded in her temples as she mounted the steps of theS Magicentre.
“You wanna stop breathing so weird?” Carra hissed at her shoulder.
“Am I breathing weirdly?”
“Yeah, you sound like you’re about to pass out.”
“I might be.”
“And keep your head down,” Carra said. “I know your hair’s covered, but your eyes are a dead giveaway.”
“Right.” Sciona was used to holding her head high when she walked into the Magistry. She was also used to it feeling like home, not the mouth of a monster that might snap shut on her with one misplaced foot—or gaze, she reminded herself, training her eyes on her boots. Well, not actually her boots. They were Thomil’s, three sizes too big for Sciona, laced as tight as they could be around the ankles and stuffed with paper at the toes.
Fortunately, an ill-fitting uniform wasn’t at all unusual for a Kwen boy working a man’s job. Carra had shown Sciona how to pin her hair under the cap, and the janitor’s garb was baggy enough to hide anything particularly feminine about Sciona’s shape.
Under the eyes of the Founding Mages, a pair of Kwen cleaning boys shuffled through the Magistry doors in Thomil’s clothing and made their
way to the interior halls totally unnoticed. They had to make five trips— Sciona carrying one bucket and the stronger Caldonn girl carrying two—to transport all the copies of Sciona’s spellwork into the first-floor janitor’s closet. Then, with the spellpapers loaded onto a cart and carefully concealed under various cleaning supplies, the pair made their way to their destination. Carra had insisted that she could push the cart herself, but even she struggled with its weight.
“Just a little farther, I think,” Sciona said.
“You think?” Carra grunted.
“I’ve never been in this wing,” Sciona said, gripping the bar beside Carra to help her push, “but I’ve read plenty about the towers, and archmages have a certain way they like to arrange their buildings.” Arms straining, the pair pushed the cart into the maintenance lift, and Sciona hit the topmost button. “They just can’t help putting their treasures on the highest floor of the tallest tower, even when more subtle placement might
help with functionality.”
“Why?” Carra asked.
“Symbolism?” Sciona shrugged her burning shoulders. “I think it makes them feel like Leon on the Mount, conquering the natural world to touch divinity.”
“Oh.” Carra frowned. “When you said ‘symbolism,’ I thought you were going to say it was a penis thing.”
Sciona let out a snort of laughter and clapped a hand over her mouth as the lift creaked to a halt. “I suppose you’re right. It is a bit of a penis thing.”
“You Tiranish have problems,” Carra muttered, then braced a heel against the back wall of the lift to push the heavy cart forward as the doors opened.
Sciona was astonished that Thomil had let Carra come with her, but he couldn’t re-enter the Magistry with the guards keeping an eye out for him, and this plan was a two-person job. Luckily—or perhaps on purpose—Mr.
Dermek had yet to deactivate the janitor’s badge that granted Thomil access to all floors of the Magistry. It was ridiculous, upon reflection, that the only person with as much clearance as an archmage was a janitor. But Sciona
supposed if one didn’t consider the cleaning staff to be fully human, it didn’t seem like much of a safety hazard.
Sciona had consulted the master schedule in Dermek’s office to make sure she and Carra arrived within the window of time that the normal cleaning staff would have, so their presence raised no suspicion. The two highmages conversing on their way out the gates for the day didn’t pay Sciona and Carra a moment’s notice as they pushed their cart in the opposite direction.
The janitor’s badge allowed them through a pair of magically powered gates outside the lift, then another, and another, and Sciona knew they were in the right place. Archmage Orynhel’s domain would be the only place in the Magicentre behind three separate gates. The hum of siphoning was palpable, vibrating the floor underfoot as they reached the oldest and final gate. Here, Sciona had to take out her copy of Dermek’s keys and manually open the lock as mages and maintenance workers would have done a hundred years ago.
Sciona had read all about the Reserve siphoning towers and their construction, but like most people, she had never laid eyes on their interior.
She had been prepared for the size and quantity of the siphoning barrels— two hundred of them, each three times the height of a grown man, standing in rows like the pipes of a great organ. She had not been prepared for the vibration of so much energy barely contained in layers of steel.
“What are they?” Carra whispered, staring around at the towering cylinders.
“These are the master spellographs that siphon the Reserve.”
“Does that mean…?”
“Yeah.” Sciona pressed her lips together. “These are the machines that killed your parents.”
Something went wild and hard in Carra. Her grip tightened on the cart handle. “How do we destroy them?”
“We can’t,” Sciona said. “Not directly. If we’d brought a cannon with us, we might put a crack in one, but the resulting explosion of energy would blow us to bits before we got to vandalizing the others. That’s why we have
these.” Sciona uncovered the buckets of spellpapers. “With any luck, they’ll do better than tear down the machines. They’ll tear down the men who made them.”
Carra turned to Sciona with pure hunger in her eyes. “Show me how to do it!”
“Take these”—Sciona handed the girl a stack of paper—“and follow me.”
The master spellographs were massive in order to withstand the amounts of energy they siphoned through to Tiran’s public utilities. Sciona and Carra had to climb a set of stairs just to reach the paper rest of the first one. Even with all the thick layers of steel and absorbent springs in place to contain the siphoned energy, the steps shook beneath Sciona’s oversized boots.
“So, what is this machine doing exactly?” Carra asked, clearly feeling the thrum as Sciona did.
“The label is here.” Sciona ran a thumb over a plaque on the master spellograph’s steel exterior. “This machine siphons electricity to Sector
Thirty-Three.”
“What’s Sector Thirty-Three?”
“A part of Tiran,” Sciona said as they reached the steel grate platform at the top of the stairs. “The city is divided into a forty-sector grid for the purposes of electricity distribution alone. Hence the number of copies we had to make.” She gestured to the laden cart on the floor below.
“I wondered about that,” Carra said. Once Sciona and Thomil had finalized the spellweb, Carra had been the one to run all over town making copies, going to six different printers to avoid suspicion.
“Watch closely.” Some primal thing in Sciona thrilled as she ran a finger along the humming platen of a master spellograph. “You’ll need to do this
perfectly many times.”
“I’m watching.”
“All right, as you can see, there are actually two spellographs for every one of these barrels.” Sciona indicated the active spellograph hungrily indulging the continuous siphoning spell on its paper rest and the idle one
beside it. Unlike the composition spellographs Sciona used in her lab, these machines had no keys, mapping coils, or type wheels. Their only purpose was to process pre-written siphoning spells and withstand the amount of energy that came through, meaning they had massive steel and spring bases instead of keys and house-sized energy barrels instead of mapping coils.
But even the most robust machines could fail.
“Any spellograph that runs continuously like these is at risk of malfunction,” Sciona went on. “So, every siphoning spell in this chamber has a backup spellograph ready to pick up if the main one fails or when it’s time to switch.”
“When it’s time to switch?” Carra repeated.
“Every day at the stroke of noon, the master spellographs rotate. This spellograph will go idle”—Sciona laid her hand on the active spellograph —“and the other will activate. It’s the reason the lights sometimes flicker or the water sputters at midday. Now, you can see that the backup spellograph already has its spellpapers in place for tomorrow at noon. The mages responsible for these machines will have put them in place before leaving for the day.”
“But we’re going to change the papers,” Carra said in understanding.
“Change the spell.”
“Not change the spell, exactly.” The siphoning would still run as normal come noon tomorrow. “We’re just adding our own on top of it.”
She took a copy of the spell from the stack Carra had brought up the stairs. Thomil had clipped each copy into a bundle, then checked and rechecked that the pages of each were in order.
“First, you’re going to remove the clip and insert the papers onto the rest on top of the existing spell like this.” Sciona demonstrated on the idle spellograph. “Now”—she handed Carra a clipped packet—“you do the next one.”
Sciona hovered and watched Carra insert the papers into a few of the master spellographs before asking, “Are you all right on your own, then?”
“I was fine after you showed me the first time. It’s not that hard.”
“Good,” Sciona said. “I’ll be back to help you finish here, but there’s
something I need to take care of.”
“The other tower?”
“What?”
“From outside, it looks like there are two siphoning towers,” Carra said, “this western one and an eastern one.”
“Right.” The twin siphoning towers bracketed the dome of Leon’s Hall, giving the Magicentre its distinctive silhouette. “Both towers siphon the Reserve. But this one siphons for public utilities—electricity, running water, trains, all that—and the one on the other side siphons energy for private use.
That’s if some rich businessman pays out of pocket for magical services or a mage gets a grant to use Reserve energy for a research project. Although most research mages will just employ a good sourcer, like…well, like me.”
Sciona looked at the toes of her too-large boots so she wouldn’t have to endure the shame of Carra’s gaze.
“So, are we hitting both towers?” Carra asked flatly.
“It’s not worth it to cover the other tower.” Sciona had considered it only briefly before coming to this conclusion. “Private energy use is contained to specific spaces, most of them—well—private. Public energy
use is everywhere.”
“Okay, so where are you going?”
Sciona took a deep breath. “I’m going to rob the Archmage Supreme.”
—
It wasn’t hard to deduce the location of Orynhel’s secret office: right at the steepled top of the tower above the siphoning hall—the Mount, the pinnacle, a penis thing.
Sciona’s copy of Dermek’s keys came in handy once again when she reached the ancient door, which was a relic from before the invention of locking and scanning conduits. She kept her head down to hide her green eyes as she cracked the door open and slipped into the office, but after a heart-pounding moment of nerves, it became clear that she was alone. The
silence was absolute—no shuffle of papers or click of spellograph keys; even the hum that should have radiated from the siphoning hall below was conspicuously absent, neutralized by some spell—and Sciona cautiously lifted her head to look around.
The circular chamber wasn’t larger than any other archmage’s office, but it was ostentatious to the point of parody. Every chair, cabinet, and desk was gilded and intricately carved with the curling flourishes characteristic of early Tiranish script and artwork. Enormous effort had clearly gone into preserving the original moldings on the walls, though they were past their prime. There was a staleness to the splendor that matched the eerie stillness of the air. Magic held this chamber in dignified stasis above the whole of Tiran. As the wheels of innovation turned, power stayed the same.
It took Sciona a moment and a few deep breaths to gather the courage to disturb that stillness. But once she took one step forward, she didn’t slow down. After a few minutes spent rifling through antique cabinets behind the desk, she found a file containing several variants of the barrier expansion spell that various experts had sent Archmage Orynhel for review. There wasn’t time to copy them all. After speed-reading several of the action spells, Sciona picked the two she liked best—not that the fiddly details really mattered—and set about manually copying them on Archmage Orynhel’s spellograph. With her fingers racing in anxiety, she had no doubt that she’d made errors. But that was all right. She would look the spells over carefully later, and between the two variants, she’d be able to compose
something serviceable.
Serviceable was all she needed.
When she had typed up her two copies, she slipped the stolen spells into the single bucket she had brought with her, arranged some rags to hide the papers, then set about restoring everything to its place on Orynhel’s desk.
She was trying to remember where his set of gold pens had been before she moved them when a key scraped at the lock.
She froze.
There was no place to hide.
The lock clicked as she dropped to the floor beside the desk. She was on her knees with a rag in her hand when a trio of white cloaks swept into the office. Sciona recognized Archmage Gamwen first by his voice—deep and touched with an accent characteristic of the Leonite working district of his birth. “I’m just asking to be absolutely sure.”
“When I decide to task the highmages with sourcing, you must trust that I know what I’m doing.” The ancient, wavering voice was Orynhel, the Archmage Supreme himself.
“It’s not the highmages I doubt,” Gamwen said. “It’s the limits of our mapping zone.”
“Careful how you speak about this, Gamwen,” said the third man— Archmage Justice Capernai. His voice was nearly a stranger’s, he had spoken so seldom during the exam, where the subject at hand had been magical application rather than law. “That mapping zone is God’s Bounty and His promise to us. Is ‘doubt’ a word you want to use in connection with that?”
“Not publicly, no,” Gamwen said. “But we all know what it truly—” He cut himself off and sighed. “Archmage Supreme, I’m just imploring you to consider my research into the expanded siphoning zone.”
Sciona’s eyes widened in horror and fascination, even as she kept them trained on the floor before her. The expanded siphoning zone was a theory she had read about, but she never would have imagined that an archmage would be researching it seriously. The theory was that God’s Garden did not end at the known boundary—and, consequently, that entering numbers higher than two thousand or going into the negative numbers for coordinates could unlock new sources of energy in the Otherrealm.
Knowing what the Otherrealm really was, it meant Blighting more of the foreign world for magical energy—places beyond the Kwen, beyond even the edge of the ocean.
“Gamwen,” Orynhel said calmly, “this is something we can consider further after our plans for the expansion are in place.”
“If we consider it further,” Archmage Justice Capernai said. “I don’t mind telling you, Gamwen, that I am not personally willing to clear such an
undertaking until we understand all the risks.”
“I’ve explained the risks, Archmage Justice,” Gamwen said impatiently, “which are not as great as you imagine. The introduction of negative numbers won’t automatically mean the critical failure of Tiran’s machines any more than changing dates at the turn of the first century made the clocks all—” Gamwen started as he nearly tripped on Sciona, which was the first he seemed to notice she was there.
She ducked her head as she felt his eyes turn on her. Only then did she realize that she had been holding the cleaning rag unmoving in her white- knuckled hands—on a carpet. Who used a rag on a carpet? God, he was about to ask what on Earth she was doing, and she would have to answer him, and he would clock her accent, and— “Boy, out” was all the archmage said.
“Yes, sir.” The moment the words were out of Sciona’s mouth, she knew they were wrong. Too breathy. Too high.
She snatched up her bucket and fled the office like a rabbit bolting for cover.
After the door had clunked closed behind her, she waited with her back to the wall outside the office—unable to breathe, her heart hammering against the bucket clutched to her chest like a spellograph pumping terrible energy through a siphoning barrel. And like the machines below, she couldn’t seem to stop shaking.
Any second now. Any second, Archmage Gamwen was going to throw the door open and say, You! What are you doing here?
But one terrified beat passed, then another, and the door stayed closed, the hallway utterly silent thanks to the soundproofing spell around Orynhel’s office. Had she been on her own, Sciona might have stayed frozen there, with the copied keys clutched in her hand and the bucket pressed to her chest. It was the thought of Carra that shocked her body back into motion. Sciona getting caught on her own was one thing, but if her getting caught prompted a search of the tower for an accomplice, if Carra was caught…Sciona wouldn’t entertain the thought. She simply wouldn’t let it happen.
Pushing from the wall, she ran back to the siphoning hall, tripping over the oversized boots and nearly falling on her face several times as the bucket of spellpapers banged into her knees.
“Carra!” Relief flooded Sciona when she reached the siphoning hall and found the little figure in Thomil’s clothes arranging buckets on the cart.
“Leave the rest.”
“Huh?” Carra looked up.
“Leave the rest of the spellographs,” Sciona gasped, barely able to speak between labored breaths as she staggered to the cart and grasped the handle for support. “Whatever you got done is fine. However many papers you laid—it doesn’t matter.” The plan was less important than making sure Carra got out of here safe. “We have to go.”
“Well, I’m done, so…”
“Done!” Sciona exclaimed. “You lay papers that fast?”
“Nope. I’m that fast up and down the ladders.”
Sciona could have hugged her. “You’re amazing! Absolutely wonderful.
Now, let’s get out of here.”
“Did someone see you?” Carra asked, taking the bucket from Sciona and placing it among the others on the cart.
“Yes. Well—I’m not sure if they saw saw me, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
Nodding, Carra took hold of the cart and pushed it toward the exit.
Sciona was dizzy with fear as they left the siphoning hall.
“Slow down,” Carra kept reminding her as they returned the cart to its closet on the first floor, took the bucket of barrier expansion spells, then made their way to the front doors. “Walking isn’t suspicious. Scurrying is suspicious.”
“Am I scurrying?” Sciona asked and found that her breath was still coming far too fast, even though it had been several minutes since her sprint away from Orynhel’s office.
“Yes. Here.” Carra handed Sciona the bucket of spells, which was just heavy enough that Sciona had to slow to keep it from knocking into her throbbing knees. “That’s better.”
Sciona didn’t breathe as they crossed the vast lobby to the front doors— right where anyone could see them. Someone must notice something off; someone was about to shout, Halt! What’s in the bucket? But again, astoundingly, not a soul in the building noticed them beneath their janitor’s caps. Not even the security guards chatting about their Feryn’s Feast plans on the front steps.
It wasn’t until Sciona and Carra were a block from the Magicentre that Sciona rediscovered the ability to breathe normally. And it wasn’t until they had walked a few blocks more—well away from the well-lit walkways of the campus and into the darker residential area beyond—that Sciona could finally speak.
“Thank you for doing this with me, Carra.”
“I didn’t do it for you.”
“I know that. I’m just glad I didn’t have to go alone. Whatever your reason for coming along, I’m thankful.”
“Well…” Carra removed her cap and unpinned her hair to let it unfurl like flames around her shoulders. “I didn’t get to grow up with my mom. If I had, I’d like to think this is the kind of thing we’d have done together.”
Sciona let out another snort of laughter—something Carra seemed uniquely good at drawing out of her. “That’s your idea of a nice day out with your mother? Plotting the destruction of a government?”
“Why? You have a more fun idea?”
“I guess I always imagined that I’d go to the bakery with my mother if I could see her for a day. Maybe dress shopping? Something a mom might find fun.” Although Sciona herself had never been terribly excited by dresses or baked goods.
“Well, I think insurgency is fun. So, thanks for tonight. It was— Gods, are you crying again?” Carra said in horror. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” Sciona laughed as she wiped her eyes on the sleeve of Thomil’s jumpsuit. “I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to
me.”
“You’re so weird.”
Sciona scrubbed her hands over her face and sniffed. “I know.”
—
Snow was falling beyond the barrier, casting a deep mist over Tiran that made the lights from the streetlamps fuzz. Thomil had agreed to stick to the shadows between those lamps well outside the campus and act inconspicuous. But as the hours stretched beyond bearing, he started pacing.
The hunter’s patience, which had once kept him still for hours in wait for prey, seemed to have deserted him completely. Waiting to see if he would have a kill to bring back to Maeva was not the same as waiting to see if Carra and Sciona would come back out of the heart of evil, and he could not be still.
It was only when two figures turned the corner that Thomil froze in place. Then he recognized the red of Carra’s hair, and he was falling forward, running. Caught in the surge of pure relief, he wrapped Carra in a hug. And not just Carra. It took a moment—soft brown hair against his cheek, a breath of ink stains and Tiranish tea—before Thomil realized that he had one arm wrapped around Sciona. The little mage had stiffened in surprise but hadn’t pushed him away.
“Sorry.” Thomil released his boss as Carra looked up at him in incredulity and deep, scathing judgment. “I didn’t mean to. I was just…”
“Stupid?” Carra offered.
“Worried.”
“It’s all right.” Sciona looked flustered but not displeased. Pale cheeks touched with pink in the streetlights, she smoothed her fidgety hands over the front of the janitor’s uniform where her skirts should have been.
Realizing belatedly that there were no skirts, she awkwardly hesitated and then shoved her hands into the pockets of the jumpsuit like that had been
her intention from the start.
“How did it go?” Thomil asked.
“Fine, obviously,” Carra said. “You really think we’d have left without
getting the job done?”
“And no one saw you?”
“They saw but they didn’t notice,” Sciona confirmed, “just like you predicted.”
“Thank Mearras!” Thomil hadn’t realized the toll the wait had taken until he heard its release shaking his voice. And he was touching Sciona again, a hand on her slight shoulder, squeezing to assure himself that she was real. For now, at least, she was here.
Again, Sciona didn’t pull away. She just looked down at the hand, then up at Thomil with an oddly shy, utterly captivating smile.
“Okay.” Carra broke the moment. “I’m going to walk ahead if you two
are being weird.”
“Carra—”
“Bye,” she cut her uncle off and sped into the dark toward the train station.
“Sorry about that.” Thomil withdrew his hand from Sciona’s shoulder and clutched it into a fist before clearing his throat. “After you, Highmage.”
He nodded for Sciona to go ahead, expecting her to hurry to catch up with Carra, to break the awkward tension he had created. She didn’t.
Instead, she strode ahead without urgency, setting their pace at a casual stroll as Thomil fell into step beside her.
Instead of getting on the train at the University stop, where someone might recognize Thomil or Sciona, the three had agreed that they would walk to the next stop to catch a train back to the widow’s house. There, they would do a final round of strategizing before Sciona left them for the last time.
The thickening fog should have made it harder to draw breath. But Thomil found himself breathing more easily in the knowledge that the work was over—not the trouble, to be sure, but all the work that would set it in motion. For this moment, he, Carra, and Sciona were safe. The mist seemed to blot out the wider world, leaving only the flame of Carra’s hair ahead.
“You should be very proud of yourself,” Sciona said, and Thomil turned
to her, uncomprehending.
“About what?”
Sciona nodded to Carra. “You’ve raised an exceptional girl.”
“Oh…” No one had ever told Thomil that. It was always, You let your daughter speak like that? From other Kwen, the tone was as fearful as it was judgmental. From the rare city guard who terrifyingly chose to comment on Carra’s conduct, it was an implicit warning: That little rat’s going to get herself in trouble.
“Whatever parts of Carra have impressed you, I doubt I can take credit for them,” Thomil said. “My sister and her husband were exceptional.”
“But a fire can’t burn on nothing,” Sciona said. “You’ve fed her energy.
That’s not easy. I know—” She stopped herself and rephrased: “I mean, I don’t know how it is for Kwen, but I figure it’s not easy to raise a daughter anywhere in this city without suffocating her. So many parents will try to kill everything brilliant about a girl in the name of giving her a good life, a safe life, a chance at happiness. Whatever you’ve done…you haven’t done that to Carra. It’s—” Sciona swallowed, and Thomil was shocked to realize that she was near tears—and not tears of distress, but the kind she cried when she beheld wondrous spellwork. Whatever she saw in his little broken family, it had moved her. “It’s beautiful.”
“I’ve done her a disservice.”
Sciona turned piercing green eyes on Thomil in surprise so intense it was nearly accusation. “Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s true! I’ve done a terrible thing!” And suddenly, Thomil was spilling the unvoiced torments of a decade. “I learned to crush the hunter, the man, everything that was Caldonn in me because I knew that was the only way for a Kwen to stay alive in this place. But, when it came down to it, I couldn’t find it in me to have Carra do the same.”
“That’s a good thing,” Sciona said.
“No, it’s not,” Thomil insisted. “It’s a dangerous, dangerous thing for a Kwen to be as wild and outspoken as she is. I knew that from the beginning.
I just…” He swallowed. “I missed my family and our language too much. I couldn’t bring myself to force Tiranish over that last vestige of my people, even to spare my niece a life of anger and hardship.”
These were things Thomil had never been able to articulate to anyone else, not even to Brodlynn or Kaedelli. After all, if he had been a little better
at explaining himself, maybe they wouldn’t have left him. Maybe they could have understood. It helped that with Sciona, the relationship had begun by discussing theory, then arguing about it. With her, he knew how to give his worst thoughts voice.
“Everyone knows assimilated Kwen suffer less Tiranish hostility. They have hope, even if it’s an illusion, that they can succeed on this side of the barrier. I could have let Carra have that. Instead, I was selfish. I didn’t teach her the restraint to keep herself safe—because I couldn’t bear it.”
“But it sounds like there’s a good reason you couldn’t bear it,” Sciona said softly.
“My gods and my ancestors won’t care for my reasons if my failings get her killed.”
Sciona made a thoughtful sound and turned her eyes forward, seeming to chew on Thomil’s words.
“What?” he said, surprised at his own impatience—at how much he needed her response. It was silly. She was Tiranish. She knew nothing of Caldonn customs, nor Kwen girlhood in this city, nor the tensions between the two…Yet she was the only person who had told him he was doing right by Carra. From a woman of such power, that had to mean something. Gods, he wanted it to mean something.
“The deities of your tribe don’t just care about life and death, though,”
Sciona said after what felt like an interminable silence. “At least, that was how you framed it to me. When your gods weigh the evil a man has done, they also factor in nonlethal damage. Suffering.”
“What’s your point?”
“Just that, if suffering counts as damage…is it better to be safe and broken than it is to be dead?”
“I don’t know,” Thomil said honestly. Not for lack of contemplation.
Because Sciona’s conundrum was hardly unique. Is it better to be safe and broken or dead? This was a question every Kwen had to ask themselves.
Now was the part where he should berate Sciona for comparing her plight to his, for thinking she could ever understand. But when he drew a breath to voice the thought, he considered the little mage at his side and
found that he couldn’t do it. Because Sciona would need to kill herself to be what Tiran demanded of its women—a doting wife who tempered her every ambition and put some man’s career before her own. From what he knew of the irrepressible innovator at his side, the effort alone would kill her. Or at least, it would kill everything that made her Sciona. In her own sheltered, Tiranish way, she also faced a choice between death and authenticity.
“You never thought about having your own?” she asked.
“My own what?” Thomil said, having lost the thread of the conversation in his thoughts.
“Children,” Sciona said. “I mean, obviously, you’ve had your hands full supporting Carra for all these years, and that’s wonderful, but she’s almost a woman, and you’re still young…” She trailed off, seeming to realize she had hit on something raw.
Thomil had learned to hide his emotions from Tiranish so well. Damn him, when had he become so unguarded with this particular mage?
“The woman I courted before—” Gods, had Thomil almost said before you? “Before I started working for you…She wanted children.”
“The one who worked in Bringham’s factory?” Sciona said.
“How did you know?” Or, more important: “How did you remember?”
It had been months ago that Thomil had mentioned Kaedelli. And Sciona, by her own admission, never remembered small talk about other people’s lives.
“I don’t know. I just remember you looking…”
“What?” How had he looked? Because, thinking back on Kaedelli now,
he knew how he felt.
“Broken.”
Feeling suddenly far too visible, Thomil looked away. But even as he trained his eyes on the pavement before his feet, he wanted Sciona to know.
For whatever reason, it was important to him that she understand what no one else had.
“Kaedelli wanted a baby more than anything. I couldn’t be that man for her. That is to say, I…I wouldn’t be that man. One night, we argued about it.
I told her this city wasn’t made for people like us, for our families, for our
children; it was made to feed on us, and we would be monsters to bring a child into lives like ours. She didn’t speak to me again. I had to hear from Raehem a year later that she’d found someone else to get her pregnant. It
was a stillbirth, unsurprisingly.”
“Why is that unsurprising?”
Thomil was quiet for a moment, regretting the decision to bring up the last part. But if he had wanted to spare Sciona the pain of his honesty, well, it was rather late for that, wasn’t it? What was one more twist of the knife?
“I think Archmage Bringham is the leading employer of Kwen women because no mage would ever want a Tiranishwoman working with those particular dyes. Not when her role is to bear children.”
“No.” The word was a mourning cry more than a denial. She already knew Thomil was telling the truth. “No.”
For some time, Thomil had felt a vicious sort of satisfaction watching horror dawn on Sciona as she came to understand the tortures that had plagued him for his entire life. The satisfaction had been hollow and fleeting, even in the beginning. Now it was completely absent. The two of them just walked together under the weight.
“I worked in the building where those dyes were developed,” Sciona whispered at length. “I probably sourced the energy—”
“You didn’t know.”
“But you did.” Sciona looked up at Thomil, her green eyes brimming with pain. “You knew what Bringham was—what his factories did—and he visited for tea all the time. We spent that week in Trethellyn Hall. I just…I had you stand there and be quiet while we chitchatted about his work. I made you serve him.”
“I’ve been in this city a long time,” Thomil said. “I’ve served a lot of men who don’t care for the lives of Kwen. And, when it comes to Bringham, I’m not the one who should have your sympathy.” As someone who had done his own part to hurt Kaedelli, he did not deserve it. “I just wish…” He sighed into the mist. “I wish Kaedelli could have been right about the world, and I could have been wrong.”
“So you were right about Bringham,” Sciona said, “and maybe you’re right about everything else too. But you’re wrong about yourself. You’re a good father.” She said it with such conviction. Thomil looked at her, on the verge of begging her to stop. Did she know what she was doing to him? Did she understand how badly he wanted to believe her?
“You’ve been good for Carra,” Sciona went on, “and you would be— will be—for any children who might come along in the future. Honestly, if Carra’s life—even these last ten years of it—is your only legacy in this world, then you are the greatest of all men.” She met his aching gaze in what looked like total sincerity. “I mean it, Thomil Siernes-Caldonn. If more fathers were like you, the world might not be so terrible and cruel.
Hell, if more men were like you, I might not be so…”
“So what?”
“Vehemently opposed to them.”
Thomil laughed, the pain lifting momentarily.
Far ahead, Carra looked back at them. Unable to hear any of their conversation but seeing that they were walking leisurely together, she rolled her eyes—or rather rolled her whole head to make sure they didn’t miss her exasperation—and resumed walking.
“That seems unfair to your own father,” Thomil said, “considering you
never knew him.”
“Oh, I know him. In a way.”
Thomil turned to Sciona in confusion. He distinctly remembered the mage sullenly referring to a dead father when the subject came up. Had he
misunderstood?
“My father is Perramis.”
“The city chair?” Thomil exclaimed.
“Yes,” Sciona said tightly. “Keep your voice down.”
All this time, Sciona’s birth father had been one of the most powerful politicians in Tiran! And it had never come up? “But you said—”
“I tell people he’s dead because it’s easier than the truth.” Sciona fidgeted uncomfortably, her mouth smooshed into a pout-like frown and her gaze fixed ahead. “It’s probably how he prefers it.”
“What makes you assume that?”
“He sent me to stay with Aunt Winny the day after my mother’s funeral.
He didn’t want me.”
“Why?” Thomil said, truly uncomprehending. “Why wouldn’t he want you?”
Sciona shrugged the question off without Thomil’s emotion. “I have my theories. Maybe I wasn’t really his, and he tolerated my presence in his house only out of love for my mother. Aunt Winny swears up and down that that’s not true. Her story is that I just look so much like my mother that my father couldn’t bear to see my face in his grief.”
“That can’t be,” Thomil said fiercely. He didn’t pretend to understand what went on in the head of an affluent Tiranishman, but he had to imagine that there were some things so fundamentally human that they came stitched into any man’s soul. When you saw a woman you had loved and lost in the face of a child, that child was the most precious thing in the world. “Perramis is a monster and a fool.”
“Is he?” Sciona smiled. “I mean, I did end up being rather difficult as daughters go.”
Carra was “rather difficult as daughters go.” Thomil would die before he gave her up.
“He’s an idiot,” Thomil insisted. “He’d have to be to give up a girl like you.”
Feryn’s Feast decorations lit up the train station—clusters of five lights that mimicked candles, each set representing the staffs of the five Founding Mages holding the line against the Horde of Thousands and the darkness of the Deep Night. The symbolism may have been pointedly anti-Kwen and the rituals infested with the usual Tiranish opulence, but the Feast itself was the most Kwen thing the Tiranish still practiced. The holiday predated Tiran by at least a thousand years. At its roots, it was not a celebration of any specific god or mythic figure. It was a celebration of family—the one thing that got all peoples through the Deep Night.
As he and Sciona joined Carra beneath those mist-softened lights, Thomil let himself wonder, for a moment, what it would be like to have a
family with these two and to let that family grow. He was about to berate himself for the thought, which was as naïve as it was presumptuous, until he caught Sciona’s gaze and had the strange feeling that she had just imagined something similar. Her cheeks were flushed, her green eyes full of affection.
It was a beautiful thought—for a different world that was just, and kind, and not about to collapse.
