Blood Over Bright Haven — Chapter 22: Hope in Hellfire

THOMIL HADN’T WANTED to activate Sciona’s last spell.

“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 for a moment, not wanting Carra to overhear the 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 activation key any different from writing the damn thing?”

“How is sharpening a stick different from ramming it through a man’s belly?”

“Alright, 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.”

Sciona shook her head. “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.

And 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 whispered.

Thomil shook his head.

“I’m still going to leave the spellograph here in case you change your mind. But I want you to know that whatever you decide, it’s alright.”

“Alright?” Thomil repeated, sure he must have heard wrong. “But this… all this work you put in… 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. “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 alright?”

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 shook, 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,” she 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 moment their lips met, Thomil realized 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 shirt, 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.

He and Sciona 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.

They broke apart, 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.

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 presence slowly thawing that ice with the hope that someday, for some Kwen, things might be different. Loss might not be so inevitable.

Thomil 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.

“Whatever comes next,” Thomil said, “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 days to come, he needed to remember this buzz of 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 features, 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 in whatever direction you want to go.”

“Whatever direction, 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.”

“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. 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.”

Before the inevitable riots broke out, the two Caldonnae 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 Main Magistry. 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, but the rooftop was deserted, allowing Thomil the space he needed to set up while Carra stood watch on the stairs leading up to the roof. 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 further, 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 eyes—and dropped his fist onto the activation key.

At first, nothing happened. There’s always a few second’s lag on truly expansive spellwebs, Sciona had told him. Wait for it.

Then the barrier expansion spell roared to life.

The Main Magistry building lit up like a star.

The collective wail 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 elbow to watch 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 glittering dome sluggishly ballooned westward. The siphoning site burned brighter, beams of pure white slicing through the Main Magistry’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.

This would be Sciona Freynan’s mark on the world: a great red flower in the center of Tiran. And god 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 their fellows, kicking them aside, stepping on their fallen colleagues 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 animals they were.

“Witch!” a voice cried out among the shrieks 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 with Thomil and Carra or even with Alba and Aunt Winny. She had always belonged here among these insatiable men, her brothers in greed and ego. Her 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 white spirals reached Sciona in the center of the chamber, the draught of sleeping death had made her body numb. She watched her skin and muscle unspool in 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 bursting 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 inside himself and found what he needed to move forward. Thomil, Carra, Winny, 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.

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“She is, in my estimation, the greatest mage of her generation. I have confidence that, given time, my colleagues will come to see what I do in her: innovative spirit and determination the like of which Tiran has not seen in a century. She embodies all the virtues we value in the Magistry and lacks the weaknesses common to her sex. Thus, it is my firm belief that her induction into our ranks will herald a new era of magic and expansion.

Feryn tells us that the role of a mage is to shape history where the lesser mind is not equal to the task. I stake my credibility as a mage when I say here is one worthy of that responsibility. Here is a mind equal to the task.”

— Archmage Bringham to the Mage Council, Letter of Recommendation on behalf of Sciona Freynan (333 of Tiran)

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