Hope in Hellre
homil hadn’t wanted to activate Sciona’s last spell.T “I’d rather die” had been his first reaction, at which Sciona had blinked her spring-green eyes in surprise.
“That’s…not the response I was expecting.”
“Well, what were you expecting?” he demanded, then darted a glance to the widow’s sitting room doorway, not wanting Carra to overhear this conversation. It looked like she had already headed to bed in the spare room, but he lowered his voice anyway. “Do you understand what you’re asking me to do?”
“I think I do.” Sciona studied Thomil’s face in confusion. “I think I’m asking you to take your revenge.”
“Using the same magic that killed my people?”
“You helped me compose the spell! Honestly, how is hitting the final key any different from writing the damn thing?”
“How is sharpening a stick different from ramming it through a man’s belly?”
“All right, I understand what you’re saying, but—”
“I don’t think you do understand. If I do this, I’ll be a murderer. I’ll be just like…” Thomil swallowed the rest of the thought, realizing how it would sound. But Sciona had already caught the implication.
“Like me?” She raised her eyebrows. “A monster?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Well, I should hope not!” She laughed dryly. “You have a long way to go yet before you’re half the monster I am.”
Thomil almost laughed too. But he couldn’t, not under the weight of what she was asking him to do.
“I’m sorry.” Sciona’s smile faded. “I shouldn’t joke. But Thomil, you can’t possibly think that this plan is comparable to what the High Magistry has done to your people. What I’ve done. It’s not the same, or I wouldn’t be
asking you to do it.”
“How is it not the same?”
“Because this is genuinely what the Magistry deserves. You’ll be an
agent of justice.”
“I’ll be an affront to my ancestors.”
“Thomil, you were a hunter. You killed game. As much as you needed to
survive, right?”
“Yes?”
“And if another tribe attacked yours, you’d fight? You’d kill them if you
had to?”
“Yes.”
“Killing for luxury is Tiranish. Killing to survive…isn’t that the Kwen thing to do?”
Thomil considered her words for a moment, frowning deeply. “Maybe,” he conceded. “Maybe I can logically say that this is the right thing to do.”
Maybe logic and ethics weren’t Thomil’s real problem. Maybe it was all far more selfish than that. “It’s just that…”
Renthorn, Tanrel, and the archmages won’t be the only ones in the coil, he couldn’t bear to say. You’ll be there too. Instead, he swallowed hard and skipped to the next concern gnawing at his conscience.
“This isn’t just about me. If I do this, I’ll be killed, and Carra will have no one. Worse, when this is traced back to me—hell, even if it’s not properly traced back to me—the Kwen will be blamed. You know they will.”
He had the mage there. She hadn’t thought of that. Of course she hadn’t.
“Well…” She shook her head. “And then what? What could be worse than what this city is already doing to your people?”
“I didn’t think you lacked imagination.”
Sciona didn’t. Her shoulders dropped. “Damn it.”
“What?”
“I hate how often you’re right, you know that?”
“Me too.” More than anything, Thomil hated watching that jewel-green gleam dim with his encroaching cynicism, a meadow slowly freezing over.
Just once, he wished Sciona’s enthusiasm could win out. But Tiran’s eternal summers were bought with the blood of those who lived in the cold beyond.
Thomil and Sciona both understood that too well to retreat into the sunshine of denial.
“I really can’t ask you to do this, can I?” she said softly.
Thomil shook his head.
Sciona’s little fists had clenched at her sides, her fingers squirming against one another. “I’m still going to leave the spellograph here in case you change your mind, but…” Her fingers slowly relaxed as she looked up at him. “I want you to know that whatever you decide, it’s all right.”
“All right?” Thomil repeated, sure he must have heard wrong. “So, all this work you’ve done…You’re content with it all coming to nothing?” It didn’t seem like Sciona at all. Thomil had voiced his misgivings expecting a fight to the bloody finish, not agreement.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Sciona sounded as surprised as Thomil but oddly delighted. “I realized…your soul matters to me—whatever weighing system the gods employ in the next life. You matter to me.”
“I…what?” Thomil said blankly.
“If I’m going to die, I want to go knowing I left you safe and right with yourself.”
“Even if it means the ruin of your legacy?” Thomil still couldn’t believe it. “If it means you die a footnote in your own history?”
“Yeah.” Sciona wrinkled her nose and looked at Thomil with the glowing joy of discovery. “Isn’t that odd? I’ve never cared about anyone
that way…more than I cared about my own work.”
“I think you’re overtired,” Thomil said. “You should get some sleep before the presentation. I can walk you to the train station.”
“No.” Sciona knit her fingers together and looked up at Thomil, seeming suddenly self-conscious. “That is—I thought…I wouldn’t go to the
station tonight.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if this is the last night of the world as we know it, I want to spend it with someone who can appreciate that with me. I want to spend it with you…if that’s all right?”
Thomil froze, wanting the suggestion to be genuine, knowing in a deep, painful part of him that it couldn’t be. Sciona cared about her legacy more than she cared about her Kwen assistant, no matter what she might say to the contrary. She had to have ulterior motives for looking at him like that— like he really meant something to her.
“Don’t stay because you’re hoping to talk me into your plan over the course of the night,” he said tightly. “I’ve given you my answer. I’ll have no part of that spell.”
“I know that.” Sciona looked wounded. “That’s not why I…” Her voice hitched, and she paused to clear her throat. “I’ll go, then.” She took her coat from the hook and shrugged into it. “After all, if I’m right, this won’t be the last time. The Council will come around, and we’ll both live to see each other again. Honestly, I don’t know why I indulge your pessimism.”
Misery squeezed Thomil’s heart.
“This is better, actually,” Sciona said, lifting her chin in defiance. “This way, we leave off with a little hope, yes?” She smiled. Gods damn that smile. “Until next time, Thomil.”
The lamplight caught Sciona’s tousled hair, casting a soft halo about her.
In that moment, time collapsed, and Thomil was looking at his sister, his father, and the whole of his clan again, knowing that all this hope was
doomed.
There would not be a next time.
Before Sciona’s hand reached the doorknob, he caught it and pulled her into a kiss.
The instant their lips met, Thomil knew that he had gone insane. Sciona didn’t want this. She was leaving. They were parting ways in conflict, Thomil having denied her both glory and revenge. And all this directly after Cleon Renthorn had tried to force himself on her. There was no way she wanted this from her presumptuous, prickly, uncooperative Kwen assistant.
But a strange thing happened when he tried to abort the movement.
Sciona seized his shoulders, pulling him closer. Thomil hadn’t made a conscious decision to stop cutting his hair after he started working for Sciona—nor had he realized how long it had grown until her slender typist’s fingers clutched his locks tight and pressed them both deeper into the kiss.
They both knew this was a delusion, a precursor to something that could never be. They couldn’t have this—Thomil couldn’t really belong to a Tiranishwoman, and Sciona couldn’t really belong to any man—without losing some vital part of themselves. There was no future here. Thomil would never meet Sciona’s family nor endure the scorn of her archmage father figure. Sciona would never have to shiver through a dark winter in Thomil’s homeland. There was only this moment, and its isolation rendered it invincible.
The kiss broke off and Sciona breathed a soft “Wow!,” her eyes as bright as they had ever been. “What was that for?”
“I don’t know,” Thomil confessed. “It felt right. I’m sorr—”
She leaned up and kissed him again—eager but startlingly gentle in her hunger. With those murderous fingers on his jaw, the self-described egomaniac turned his head so she didn’t press too hard into his split lip.
The crossing had put a sliver of ice in Thomil—a belief that no one he loved would ever stay. Far from refuting that belief, Sciona reinforced it.
But he found her slowly thawing that ice with the hope that someday, for some Kwen, things might be different. Loss might not be so inevitable.
When the second kiss ended, he held Sciona’s face between his hands, desperate to kiss her again, terrified that if he did, he wouldn’t be able to let
her go.
“What is it?” she asked.
Thomil said, “Whatever comes next, however history remembers Highmage Sciona Freynan, I want to remember her this way.” Up on her toes, luminous with hope so powerful it verged on mania. If he was to survive the ordeal to come, he needed to remember this irrepressible energy that death and better judgment could not contain.
—
It was hard to say how long Thomil sat in the widow’s kitchen, staring at the spellograph with his knuckles pressed to his lips where they had met Sciona’s. He didn’t move until Carra found him there in limbo, and he had to explain the dilemma to her.
“Sciona and I have been talking about this like it’s a question of what I want or what she wants,” he said, “but the future we make…You’re the one who has to grow up in it.”
“If I get to grow up at all,” Carra said.
“I should have asked…what do you want, Carra?”
“Is this the ‘Freynan Method’ of asking, or does my answer actually matter?”
“Our answers did matter to her,” Thomil said—as evidenced by the spellograph sitting before him in unbearable stillness, awaiting his decision,
“and your answer matters to me.”
“But I’m just a child.”
“It matters because you’re a child. The future ultimately isn’t mine or Sciona’s. It’s yours.”
“Don’t say that.” A gentleness overtook Carra’s expression, and for a moment, she was Maeva come again. She put a hand on Thomil’s. “It can be yours, too, Uncle.”
Her fingers squeezed his, and Maeva’s absence was suddenly incapacitating. Thomil was that gasping thing on the rocks inside Tiran’s barrier, all his losses raw. The gods were cruel that they could make an old
thing feel so near, that they had sculpted all Thomil’s loss into his niece’s face when she was about to be his only reason left to live. Again.
He pulled his hand away. “I’m too broken to do much with the future, I think. But I’ll see you as far as I can along whatever path you choose to take.”
“Whatever path, Uncle?” Carra raised her eyebrows.
“You’re Maeva’s only child, Arras’s only child.” He tucked a lock of Carra’s fiery hair behind her ear. “You’re the future of our tribe. So, I mean it when I ask: What do you want?”
The answer came without hesitation. “I want those mages to die.”
Carra’s eyes were chips of ice as she unfolded her arms and drew her shoulders back. “I won’t live the rest of my life under someone’s heel. And if there is no life free of the mages, then…well, then fuck that. I’d rather
our tribe die fighting.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Of course I mean it. I swear on my parents’ souls, if you don’t activate that spell, I will.”
Thomil shook his head. “You’re too young to have blood on your hands”—and gods forgive them, it was going to be so much blood —“I’ll…”
I’ll do it, he wanted to say, but the thought of Sciona stopped the words in his throat. He saw her bright green eyes, her springy hair, her perpetually fidgeting hands all coming apart in spirals of blood. Like everyone he had ever loved.
“It’s what she wants,” Carra said softly but with certainty beyond her years. “You understand that, right? She wants to die sticking it to those
men.”
“How do you know?”
“Trust me, Uncle. It’s a girl thing.”
—
The riots had been as inevitable as Sciona’s fate.
Had Thomil been among the Kwen learning of Blight for the first time, rage would have pulled him right into the masses setting the city ablaze.
Though he’d had time to calm himself after learning the truth and to steel himself before the Freynan Mirrors ignited the chaos, he didn’t begrudge his fellow Kwen their fury. He just had a greater weapon against their tormentors than fists or fire.
Before the city descended into complete chaos, he and Carra had packed up Sciona’s spellograph and returned to their old apartment complex. Their high-rise in the Kwen Quarter was certainly not the safest base of operations, but it was the only building they could access that had a decent radio signal and a clear line of sight to the Magicentre. And if Thomil was going to do this, he needed to look it in the face—like a proper hunter.
City guards were patrolling outside the apartment building by the dark morning of Sciona’s trial, ready to shoot any Kwen who tried to leave without permission. But the rooftop was deserted, allowing Thomil the space he needed to set up while Carra stood watch on the stairs. With stones atop Sciona’s notes to keep the breeze from blowing them away, Thomil kept an ear on the radio and prepared the spell to end all spells.
“At this time, the archmages, highmages, and city chairs have all entered the building for the trial,” the reporter’s voice crackled as Thomil worked. “The guards won’t allow our recording equipment any farther, so it looks like there won’t be anything for us to report until the trial has finished. That said, we have been assured that the trial won’t be a long one.”
When the preparation was done and double- and triple-checked, Thomil bowed his head low over the spellograph as he once had over his longbow.
Eyes shut against tears, he prayed. As if the god of the hunt could hear a lost son so far from the plains.
I take that I might live.
I take that, one day, I might give back.
Pressing his knuckles to his mouth, Thomil remembered the feel of Sciona’s lips on his, remembered the hope in her spring-green eyes—and dropped his fist onto the siphoning key.
At first, nothing happened. There’s always a few seconds’ lag on truly expansive spellwebs, Sciona had told him. Wait for it.
Then the barrier expansion spell roared to life.
The Magicentre lit up like a star.
The collective shriek of terror that crackled from the radio was chillingly familiar, yanking Thomil back to that frozen lake ten years ago.
He would have screamed, too, had the sound not locked up in his throat.
This thing—the death of a tribe—was too big a thing to hold in a thousand voices, let alone one. All Thomil could do was kneel and shake before the power that had destroyed his people as it turned on his enemies—and on the woman who had put hope back into his heart.
Even though he had told Carra not to leave the steps, she appeared at his shoulder to bear witness with him. His hand found hers, fingers entwined, and gripped tight, trembling, as they watched the barrier expansion spell consume Leon’s Hall.
Above Tiran, the barrier rippled with the infusion of energy and, for the first time since the Age of Founders, began to change shape. Flowing with the life force of a hundred mages and who knew how many guards and politicians, the translucent dome sluggishly ballooned westward. The siphoning site burned brighter, beams of white slicing through the Magicentre’s every window as the expansion demanded more energy, then more, and more, and more. The spell would keep siphoning until it had consumed every living thing in the building and its vicinity. Sciona had wanted it this way.
This would be Highmage Freynan’s mark on the world: a great red flower in the center of Tiran. And gods help the arbiters of history tasked with spinning lies around this moment. Let them scrub with all their might to clear the horror from public memory. Some inquisitive soul was always going to look back on this day and ask why?
What really happened that day when the heart of civilization bloomed red?
—
It was jarring even to Sciona how instantaneously the men of Tiran’s Magistry and government turned to beasts when they realized what was happening. Mages clawed past one another, kicking their colleagues aside, treading on the fallen as they scrambled for the exits. These last acts of selfishness did them no good, of course, because Blight struck from all directions, stripping their white robes before their flesh, rendering them for the savages they were.
“Witch!” a voice cried out among the screams of the dying. “Kwen traitor!”
But true witches—meidrae of the Kwen—had never practiced such evil magic. They had used their knowledge to heal the sick and watch over those they loved. Sciona was no witch. Her place had never been in Thomil and Carra’s home or even Alba and Aunt Winny’s. She had always belonged here with insatiable men, her brothers in greed and ego.
Sciona’s only distinction among these mages was that she was a more honest monster than any of them. And she would die an honest mage of Tiran: finely dressed and filthy-souled, taking with arrogance what was not hers to take.
I will not turn my gaze, though Light burn me.
By the time the spiraling white reached Sciona in the center of Leon’s Hall, the draught of sleeping death had made her body numb. She watched her skin and muscle unspool in scholarly fascination. Bringham, Perramis, and Orynhel were all fleshless before her, their howls echoing impotently from skeleton jaws. The last thing she saw as she arched back toward Hell was red flying upward to mar the white robes of Leon, Faene, and Stravos.
But her last thought was not for any mage of Tiran, past or present.
Her last thought was the itch of a question: Had Thomil done this because he loved her or because he hated her? But then—no, she decided,
as her blood and being blurred into white light. She hoped this hadn’t been about her at all. She hoped that Thomil had looked inward and found his own peace, his own reasons for moving forward. Carra, too, and Aunt Winny, and Alba…She hoped they all pushed through this horror to better things.
With her soul in the spiral on its way to Hell, Sciona’s last thought was not of vengeance or legacy. It was of love.
