Ashes And Grave

by Aiden Bates

  I rubbed my neck, and looked aimlessly around the shack. “Perhaps,” I said slowly, “now is not the time to have whatever discussion may be left to have—”

  “I can’t just forget who you are,” he said, silencing me with fierce eyes. “It isn’t going to just go away. I won’t wake up one day and be over what happened. There’s nothing you can say that will change that.”

  Well… I deserved that, perhaps. So I only inclined my head. It would have been dishonest to argue the point.

  “That said,” he went on, somewhat more softly, “I also can’t forget… other things. What you’ve done for the weyr. How you put up with me when I treated you poorly.”

  “I would not say that I ‘put up with’ you,” I pointed out. “I had a great dislike for you, and believed that your weyr was only somewhat shy of savage.”

  He blinked at me, and a tiny hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his lips. “Fair enough,” he said, “but my point is that… we’re mated. That’s never going to go away. It’s forever. And when it first happened, I… I sort of liked that? I figured, if we had differences left to work out, we would have to just do that. And we’d get around each one, one at a time, until all that was left was something nice. Something that would never rust and decay. That I’d have you, and you’d have me.”

  “I also had these feelings,” I admitted, barely a whisper. “Nix… I know that it is not an excuse—not an acceptable one, in any case—but the reason that I did not tell you, at first, was because I believed that it would get in the way of doing the work here that I needed to do. At first. Then, as we came to see one another… then, it was selfish of me. I did not want you to hate me. More, I mean.”

  “I didn’t—”

  I held a hand up. “It is okay. You had a powerful distaste for me, for mages, for necromancers in particular, and if I were in your shoes I would most likely feel the same way. At times, I do not especially like what I am. I sometimes wish that the magic had chosen someone else. I wish that I did not know the things that I know, that I had never had a brother who could become such a monster. I wish that my master was more the father that I did not have as a child. I cannot change these things, though. Instead, I must act on what I can change. Defend what I can defend. Save who I can save. Try to atone for the sins of my blood. Because I do bear guilt for them.”

  “What Ivan did wasn’t your fault,” he said. “I know that, and it may still take me some time to… to look at you and not think of him but I can get there. I can get there, eventually, and I will try to, I promise.”

  I wanted to smile at him, but could not. “I always saw the monster that my brother was. I was his first victim. I knew that he should not wield magic, but I said nothing because I was afraid of him. My nagyi, I think, was afraid of him as well. All of us who see the monster, but turn our eyes the other direction, are responsible. But those closest are most responsible. Those who can, but do not. Perhaps I did not harm your brother, perhaps I did not kill him myself. But I failed to act when I could have. And for that I will forever atone. I do crave your forgiveness, Nix. But I do not ask that you ignore my complicity. There would be no truth in that. And I want always, from now on, to have only truth with you, if you will have it.”

  The way he looked at me, as if I had cut him to his soul, I thought that perhaps I had changed his mind. That he had come to me willing to forgive, and to try to make something of what we were now stuck with. “Maybe it would be best,” I said, “if we address the problem before us first, and then discuss this when and if we have the chance, afterward.”

  “Yeah,” he said, almost breathless. “Uh… there’s something that I think I have to do. That truth thing… do you mean that?”

  “Of course I do,” I said. “What is the point of lies now?”

  At last, he moved to sit down, sinking onto the small, uncomfortable sofa. He left enough room for me, and when I approached, he did not glance meaningfully at the only other chair available or otherwise withdraw so I took the seat and he allowed my knee to rest against his. “To get your people permission to come in,” he said, “I… I have to get my father out of the way.”

  “You must usurp him?” I wondered. “Can the leader of a weyr not be voted out? The charters indicate—”

  “We never signed them,” he said. “After the Census… well, we didn’t want to be told how to run our lives. As you can imagine. We still vote, we still adhere to the general letter of the Charter Treaty, but technically we work by the old system. The Old Codes.”

  I whistled. “That is…”

  “Savage?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “They were somewhat brutal laws.”

  “They still are,” he said. “The council could vote him out, but it would have to be unanimous, and it won’t be. And anyone who did vote for it if the vote was called would show themselves to be… less than supportive. So, they won’t vote at all. And they also won’t vote collectively to bring the other mages in. And even if they did, my father would have the power to overturn it.”

  It was not difficult to place all of these numbers in the proper order to come up with an accurate result. “And because of the Old Codes,” I finished for him, “you have the choice to take his position by force.”

  He nodded, and put a hand to his forehead, resting what was restless. “What you said about seeing the problem and turning away—”

  “Oh, Nix, I did not mean that you should have to kill—”

  “I know,” he said quickly, and even touched my knee reassuringly. “I know you didn’t mean that, but that is kind of what it means. Everyone here is at risk. There’s a solution. There’s a man who, let’s face it, is historically a monster standing in the way. I’m worried about how it will look, what people will think, whether they’ll follow me afterward—whether I’ll be worth following after, and what I should be doing is making the choice that’s best for all of my people now, while the choice can be made.”

  As someone planning to kill my own brother—more than kill, in fact—I was not sure that I was in a position to argue against patricide for the sake of saving lives. Still, it was clear that it plagued him. That it gnawed on his heart to imagine having to do such a thing. “Have you asked him to step aside?”

  He laughed. “Gods… I can just imagine. No, I haven’t asked him. He would laugh in my face, if he didn’t go for my throat to make sure I didn’t get ideas.”

  “Then,” I said with some small degree of caution, “maybe the third path, as it is often called… is to try that. Offer him the chance to step down. Make your case to him, and if he refuses or, worse, attacks you… it will be a matter of defense. I do not think it would pain you less to have to kill him in such a circumstance, but it would at least absolve you of some sin.”

  “I wish he had just died,” he breathed. “That’s awful, I know.”

  “I often wish the same for Ivan,” I muttered. “It would be ideal if some divine justice simply struck down those who deserved it, or who stood in the way of progress that is necessary. But this is not the way of the gods. They leave it to us to manage our affairs. Theirs is the turning of the world, the fall of the rain, the rising and receding of the tides. If we wish to have justice, it is ours to make. If you liked… I could accompany you to speak with your father. Perhaps it would lend you strength.”

  He smiled, and finally looked at me again. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe it would. At the very least, I could tell him I mated a necromancer, and the apoplexy might kill him on the spot. Save me some effort, and a very difficult conversation.”

  I chuckled, and experimentally put my hand on his knee. After a short hesitation, he placed his hand on mine. “We have each other,” I said. “That is a good start for anything which we will face.”

  His fingers wove into mine. He squeezed, and then lifted my hand to his lips and kissed a knuckle. “That’s what I was hoping for.”

  23

  Nix

  We needed to be prepared, and
I really did believe that Mikhail’s presence would only make the conversation more difficult, and more prone to become violent—so I reassured him that I would handle it myself, and let him go to meet with Basri, after I made sure that Rezzek could go with him. Rezzek didn’t know of Mikhail’s connection to Ivan—and I wasn’t sure it was information anyone but us would ever need to know—and I trusted him to do whatever he could to keep Mikhail safe. Whether that was from an angry, super-powered, murderous necromancer or just from the ingrained hatred that Emberwood dragons had of mages, both were important.

  And with that part started, what was left was for me to approach my father.

  It took some time to find him. He wasn’t at the Emberin house, which was alarming at first—but when I followed his scent from the door, and traced it through the weyr, I discovered him in the next place I might have thought to look.

  I was careful to circle around from the side rather than approach him from the back when I found him in the burial grounds. He’d been bedridden for weeks, and not generally up to going out for almost a month before it got that bad. So, he hadn’t been to visit Mother's and Pendrig’s graves.

  He stood before Pendrig’s now, still and in silent contemplation when I took a place beside him. For a while, we were silent. Him still in whatever thoughts arose when he did this, me trying to think what words would sway him so that this didn’t turn to violence. If we fought, I could win. I knew that. That wasn’t the issue. It’s that I didn’t want to add his final moments to my memories, to my nightmares. If I regretted what we’d done to Rav-Ivan, or at least how we’d done it and how I’d comported myself when we did, then I imagined my father’s last baleful expression would follow me to the grave. Maybe beyond it, for all I knew.

  “He would have made a good leader one day,” Pop said. He had a cane in one hand, and used it to tap on the edge of the mound of red acorns piled where Pendrig’s ashes had been buried. “He had a strong will, a good heart. Knew right from wrong. Knew how to tell the difference between a friend and an enemy. Mostly.”

  “Mostly,” I agreed.

  “Only takes one mistake,” he said. “Just the one, at the wrong time. And then it all goes to hell. And only if you’re very, very lucky… can you get it back.”

  The only way to start the conversation was to start it. “Pop… the weyr is in real trouble.”

  “Well aware,” he said. “You’ve done a damn fine job steering the ship, it seems.”

  I had to unclench my jaw. “We’re facing a problem that we won’t be able to solve with our talons. Or our fire. And for a long time, the weyr has been slowly dying. This is just the latest example. When Pendrig was taken, if we had allies, we could have—”

  “You want me to step down,” he spat. “Hand you the reins permanently. Let you run things like we’re in some hippie commune, all peace and diplomacy. That it? Just say the damn words, boy. If you had half the spine Pendrig did—”

  “Pendrig is dead,” I snapped. Pop turned toward me, his face implacable except the one eyebrow that had slowly risen. No going back now. “He’s dead because you killed him. You… you never talked to us about Mom’s death. You never expressed any grief or emotion, and you acted like we weren’t supposed to. And if you had, then maybe he wouldn’t have fallen for Rav’s tricks, wouldn’t have fallen under his spell, and wouldn’t have ended up his slave. Because he’d have had some kind of closure, some sense that his family was there for him, that his father had a gods damned heart and soul that was in pain like his. Like mine. But if driving him out of the weyr to get that closure wasn’t bad enough, then you had to actually murder him.”

  “That was a mercy,” Pop said quietly, “and you know it.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “It was a mercy. He was in agony in a way we can’t have understood, and still can’t, and he was relieved, I think, when he finally was allowed to die. But if we’d had friends at the cabal, if the whole country didn’t see us as this unpredictable powder keg that might go off any second, then maybe we could have gotten him help. We could have led the mages to Rav, let them deal with him, maybe… restored Pendrig’s soul, and then we wouldn’t be facing Rav now, ten years later, wondering what he’s going to take from us next.”

  Pop just stared at me, that one eyebrow up, as if waiting for more.

  So I gave it to him. “You’re past your time. I’m sure that your leadership was useful to keep the weyr together after the Census and the relocation, but now it is strangling us. We’re going to choke on our own blood if we can’t repair our connection to everyone else. We don’t make the same food we did before, we don’t have the same game. We’ve overfarmed and overhunted because you didn’t want to open trade. Now we’re facing a magical threat that we aren’t equipped to deal with and we need help from the Cabals.”

  “Plus,” he said casually, “now you’re fucking one of them in the ass on the regular…”

  That he was so unmoved, and that this was the one response he made, briefly shifted my vision as my dragon reared up to meet a perceived threat to our mate. I took a step toward him. “I’m not just fucking him,” I whispered. “I claimed him. He’s mine.”

  That got a reaction. His lip trembled toward a snarl. His nostrils flared, and his eyes narrowed, flashing golden red. Smoke curled from his nostrils. “You would shit on your brother’s memory,” he said, “just to spite me? Because I never kissed your boo-boos and coddled you the way you wanted me to? Because I dealt with my grief differently than you and your brother did?”

  “We didn’t,” I shot back. “We didn’t grieve at all, Pop. Because you wouldn’t let us. And yeah, I want you to step down.”

  “And if I don’t?” he demanded. “If I think maybe a traitor doesn’t belong at the head of this weyr that I laid down my life to defend? That I picked up from the wreckage of what those mages did to us, and nursed back to life like it sucked on my fucking teat—if I refuse, what then, boy? You gonna kill me? Is that what Vilar told you to do?”

  How did he know? Maybe he just knew Vilar well enough. Or maybe…

  I sniffed, and my ears picked up heart beats. I looked over my shoulder, to see two of Basri’s men posted some distance away, watching.

  Vilar hadn’t set me up. I knew that. But Pop had outplayed him. Tested the man, to see if he’d suggest this, and to see if I’d take him up on it.

  “Now,” Pop said quietly, leaning on his cane. “You've got three choices, boy. You make your challenge formally, and you and me duke it out because those men won’t interfere with a legally sanctioned challenge by the Old Codes. You take your necro fuck-toy and you get your ass out of my weyr and never show your pathetic face here again on pain of a swift death. Or… you and your fuck-toy can be executed, right now, as traitor and invader. If you think for one second that I will ever shake hands with some fucking mage, or make friends with the turncoat bastards that left us to rot as we were pushed out of our home, away from the Mother Sea to slowly languish away in this backwoods piss-hole, then you haven’t been paying attention.”

  Basri.

  Basri was loyal to my father. Loyal as a dog, even when he disagreed with him. Mikhail was with him now. Rezzek too, and Rezzek would pull his claws out if Basri made a move on my mate. Which would mean both of them dead.

  “You’re going to force my hand on this,” I said. “Why? You know you can’t win, Pop. You know that I’ll kill you. Why would you push me to this?”

  His jaw worked. His lip curled in a sneer. “So damn sure of yourself,” he muttered. “But maybe if you can grow the spine and stones you need to stand in my shoes… maybe you’ll finally deserve them.”

  “I have to kill you to make you proud of me?” I asked.

  He just gave the kind of snort that said I was weaker than he thought just for asking.

  “Why?” I asked anyway. It didn’t matter. There was only one answer to his ultimatum. I wasn’t going to leave and let everyone here suffer, and I wasn’t going to put Mikh
ail’s life in danger, or Rezzek’s. “Why have you always made it so hard to earn your approval? This is insane, Pop. Roland. It’s fucking madness. You know that.”

  He tossed his cane aside. “Because,” he said as his old black and silver scales slipped out to take the place of his skin, “you don’t deserve what you don’t earn, Nix.”

  I hung my head as he took on his half-form in full, towering a foot and a half over me. “Okay,” I said. “If you have to have it that way. Roland Emberin, I challenge you to a fight to the death, as I hold myself worthy of mind, body, and virtue to lead this weyr. Do you accept?”

  His chest heaved, showing the effort it took just to maintain this form. “I do.”

  I glanced at the guards, who took a step back as if indicating that they understood what was happening, and that it wasn’t their place to intervene.

  I looked back up at Roland. “I want you to know,” I said as I shed my shirt, and began to shift, pulling away my track pants to drop near Pendrig’s cairn, “I will hate you for a long time for making me do this. And then I’ll forget you.”

  “Good,” he growled.

  And then he came for me.

  Even if he wasn’t recovering from a sickness, he would still have been much older. An old dragon was often stronger, cannier, but they were usually at least a bit slower. He swiped for my throat, and I swatted the attack aside. He clawed at my belly, and I stepped out of range. He opened his jaw to belch fire that wouldn’t harm me, but could blind and distract all the same, and I stepped in and struck him in the jaw, then the throat to close his mouth and stun the muscles that controlled his fire.

  He staggered, growled and snapped at me, and then dove for me to take us to the ground.

  I met him, one arm under his shoulder, and twisted, throwing him aside and toward the outer edge of the burial ground. He hit hard, rolled, and struggled to his feet.

  “Concede,” I offered. “At least live out your life.”