The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  His father said to the guards at the doors, “Show him in.”

  They opened the doors, and—

  Loukas would never forget the sinking feeling of dread he’d experienced watching Tannour stride into his father’s hall.

  His breath fled. His face drained of color. He strained desperately to imagine some justifiable reason for Tannour to be there. And why was he dressed like...

  Well, he wasn’t dressed, really.

  Barefoot, Tannour wore only a pair of fitted leather pants slung low at his hips—and his tattoos, mercuric armor bonded to his flesh. His dark hair hung loose, his arms open at his sides, palms forward, innocuous, conveying surrender.

  Suddenly Loukas reasoned out at least part of what must’ve happened. For some unfathomable purpose, Tannour had requested an audience with his father. The guards had surely told him no, so he’d handed them their asses on a silver platter until they’d reconsidered.

  But whipped or not, they wouldn’t have let Tannour approach the Furie armed, and...well, stripped down was likely the only way they’d know he wasn’t hiding weapons. Knowing how Tannour could fight, Loukas reasoned they probably would’ve preferred him to come naked.

  Loukas’s father confirmed these suppositions when he growled, “So you have your audience, Vestian.” His deep voice fulminated the word. “What is it you want?”

  Tannour stopped halfway between the guards and the Lord n’Abraxis. His air of confidence dwarfed the room and everyone in it, yet Loukas saw tension in the brace of his shoulders and dread in his gaze.

  “I am Prince Tannour Valeri of Vest,” his eyes flicked to Loukas and away again, a split-second apology, an instant of warning, “and I claim ring rights of your son.”

  Oh, Fiera, no!

  Loukas suddenly couldn’t breathe.

  After a certain number of moons together, a Furie could give his lover a special ring to claim him as his own. No other Furie could then compel the man to become his paramour. The rings were not worn on a man’s finger.

  Tannour shouldn’t have even known of such things, much less be speaking of them in open court. Worse, his father would think Loukas had been the one to tell him.

  For some reason, the most important of these points—that Tannour was claiming ring rights of Loukas—took longer to register, but when it did, Loukas nearly lost his dinner.

  The room shouted with shocked silence.

  “Ring rights.” His father barely managed a rough whisper, his fury had such tight hold of him. “Ring rights. Of Loukas.”

  His father’s disbelief echoed Loukas’s own for very different reasons.

  Tannour said without looking at Loukas, “We’ve been lovers for eleven moons.”

  “Eleven—” his father choked on the word. He swung a furious glare at Loukas, then looked back to Tannour. “What proof have you of this, Vestian?”

  Tannour shifted a burning gaze to Loukas. It was indescribable, that look; a culmination of every black and bloody thing they’d forced him to do, all rolled into a single devastated glance.

  “What’s the phrase?” He pressed a finger to his lips. “Women are for breeding, men are for fething. That’s how Loukas described it.”

  Loukas really thought he was going to be sick. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t fathom why Tannour was betraying him like this.

  The Lord n’Abraxis swung his stare to Loukas. “Is this true?”

  Wordless, shaken, Loukas could only stare at Tannour.

  But his father hadn’t been addressing him anyway; his gaze was on Ianver, who was standing beyond Loukas. The baddha satya replied, “The Vestian speaks truly, en Furie.”

  Loukas felt cold and hot and sick and spinning, all at the same time. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to stand up much longer. Not that it would matter, where he’d be going.

  The Lord n’Abraxis was gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. His expression was livid. He looked from Tannour to Loukas and back to Tannour. Then he stood with hatred violent in his gaze.

  “Kill them both.”

  Loukas gasped, “Father!”

  Tannour danced into a fighting crouch.

  Ianver grabbed Loukas by his hair and dragged him towards the side door. Loukas clawed ineptly at the Adept’s hands. All of his combat training went by the wayside, trapped in the unreality of the moment.

  Some vague awareness told Loukas that if Ianver succeeded in dragging him from the hall, he would never see daylight again, but he was too shocked, too hurt, too disbelieving—totally unable to make sense of any of it. His mind was just...frozen.

  He heard shouting, bodies falling, and then something whizzed past him and into Ianver, the force of which dragged Loukas to his knees as Ianver fell, still clutching Loukas’s hair. The baddha landed in a smear of blood with the butt end of a sword sticking out of his gut.

  That one moment stood timeless in Loukas’s memory: the pain in his knees, the smear of blood across the floor, the horror captured in the baddha’s colorless eyes, the blood pouring over his hands, his utter incredulity...

  Loukas had never seen a man die right in front of him.

  Then the life fled Ianver’s gaze, and time started again. Loukas pushed to one knee and turned to take in the chaos behind him.

  His father stood on the dais protected by four guards. He was waving his fist and shouting with rage while Tannour fought—

  Fiera’s ashes, at least twenty men!

  Before Loukas’s eyes, Tannour sidestepped a blow and ripped the sword from a guard’s hands, which he speared into another guard while dodging the blade of a third. A knife swung for his throat. Tannour caught his assailant’s hands and spun them back to shove the knife into its owner’s chest.

  He seemed to anticipate every weapon that came at him.

  Tannour shoved a man onto the stabbing blade of another, sidestepped a sword to let it pierce the guard behind him instead. He broke noses with elbows and the flat of his palms, and crushed throats with a scything hand. His bare feet broke knees; his knees broke noses. It was a massacre.

  As the last guard fell, the Lord n’Abraxis finally went silent.

  Tannour left a circle of the broken and dead behind him and ran over to Loukas. Blood covered the Vestian, not a thimbleful of it his own.

  “We need to go.” Tannour slipped a hand beneath Loukas’s arm to help him up.

  Loukas shrugged him violently off.

  Tannour’s lips formed a grim line. “Loukas...don’t do this.”

  “Don’t do this?” Loukas hissed. “What the fethe, Tannour!”

  Tannour’s gaze was grave and full of warning. “Loukas,” he said, low and fiercely protective, “there’s nothing for you here now.”

  But Loukas wasn’t seeing that the future which had meant so much to him had already been lost. He looked to his father. “Furie—”

  “Do not speak to me!”

  His father roared so mightily that Loukas cringed.

  “Get out!” The Lord n’Abraxis flung a finger towards the doors. “Out! You are not my heir, not my son, nor any son of Avatar!” His eyes bulged with rage. His face was aflame with it. “No house will have you! The Fire Courts will know your shame! Out! OUT OF MY SIGHT!”

  Tannour grabbed Loukas’s arm and dragged him from the room—the house, the estate.

  They cantered through the night to reach the coast. Loukas had no idea where Tannour had gotten the horses. He never asked him. He didn’t want to ask him. He didn’t want to speak to him, listen to him, see him. Yet who else did he have now?

  Losing his father’s sanction meant losing everything he’d ever held dear—every desire, every hope, every vision of his future, years of aims and goals, his dreams of changing Avatar...

  Shattered in a single act of betrayal.

  In the month-long ocean crossing from Avatar to Tal’Shira, Loukas might’ve spoken two words to Tannour, and those only under extreme protest.
<
br />   They took apartments in Tal’Shira, expensive ones overlooking the sea. Loukas had no idea where Tannour got his money—he wasn’t speaking to him, after all—but he did his best to plow through their reserves, especially of spirits. He spent his days staring out to sea in a wine-induced haze, feeding himself a toxic cocktail of resentment and condemnation, too furious to eat, too betrayed to speak, unwilling even to be in the same room as Tannour.

  Months had passed this way.

  Until Tannour had shown up one night, broken and bloodied—near death in fact. After which Loukas had learned that the betrayal that had shaken him to the core was only the tip of a very large iceberg.

  %

  Loukas was causing it.

  Tannour decided this as he airwalked through the skies towards the fortress of Ivarnen, which still felt uncomfortably distant to his perception. The only thing he could think was that somehow, in tethering Tannour, Loukas had aligned their thoughts to the same wavelength and was forcing him now to recall the worst days of his life.

  Absurd. Ridiculous. Loukas could not have tethered him.

  But the truth was, Tannour had no idea how any of it had happened.

  %

  When the first two months in Tal’Shira passed without incident, Tannour dared hope they’d gotten clean away. It was the best-case scenario.

  Of course, Loukas wasn’t speaking to him—fethe, Loukas wasn’t speaking to anyone. Or sleeping. He was barely eating, but at least he was alive and out of the Sorceresy’s immediate reach.

  Tannour had expected Loukas to be upset, but he’d never imagined he would find it impossible to forgive him—that he wouldn’t even listen to his side of the story. He felt a stabbing loss every time Loukas turned away from him with his gaze so full of condemnation. Worse was watching Loukas sit for hours, staring despondently out to sea, body and mind befouled by the wasting sickness of shattered dreams.

  Tannour had tried a hundred times to explain things to him. Loukas only turned away, or walked away—stormed away—and left Tannour twisting himself in knots over when he would return. Or if he would return at all.

  That Loukas stayed with him in Tal’Shira was Tannour’s only consolation, the flimsiest, most meager hope that the thread binding them hadn’t been completely severed, that he might mend it with time and patience.

  Every morning he asked Loukas if there was anything he wanted, anything he could get for him. Usually Loukas either silenced him with an excoriating stare or ignored him completely, but when Loukas did answer, Tannour made every effort to fulfill his wish. He would leave whatever had been asked for on the table during the night, along with a red-fletched arrow.

  When he checked later, he would sometimes find his gifts had been accepted, sometimes not. Always the arrows were broken.

  In the third month, they found him.

  He’d been on his way back from the market when the Sorceresy operative appeared. It was impossible for operatives not to recognize each other. Tannour caught sight of him among the ebb and flow of the crowd and knew because he’d spotted him that the operative was there seeking him.

  He’d followed the man into a shadowed alley, whereupon the latter shoved an envelope into Tannour’s chest and vanished back into the crowd.

  Tannour had stood staring at the black envelope with its distinctive mercuric seal for longer than he cared to admit. All the while his heart pounded and his stomach turned agonized somersaults.

  He finally shoved the envelope inside his coat and made his way back to their apartments. Loukas was on the patio with a wine glass caught within the drape of his hand, staring out to sea. For once, Tannour was glad he wasn’t paying attention to him.

  He closed the door to his room and bolted the lock, then sat down at a table and stared through a panicked haze at the envelope.

  The moment he broke the seal, the Sorceresy would know he’d received their orders, and he would be bound to the mission. Leaving the missive unopened wasn’t an option. They’d only send another operative, who would definitely not be as cordial as the first one had been.

  Tannour spent the better part of an hour trying to think of any possible way to avoid opening that envelope, and another trying to work out some way to keep from acting on whatever was written inside.

  But every idea just turned to sludge until he was scraping up useless sediment. Finally, he placed his wrist against the seal, felt the mental click that was the magical lock releasing, and the wax melted.

  Beset with foreboding, Tannour read the particulars of his next mission.

  Forty-eight hours later, he barely made it back to his apartments alive.

  %

  He’d lived for nearly a decade without access to any of his powers. Then he’d met Trell and suddenly found he could commune again. With a new tether in Trell, Tannour had no reason to doubt he had regained all of his abilities. Which was the crucial problem.

  Ten years ago, he’d failed his mission by refusing to kill his own uncle—once a Sorceresy operative himself. In retaliation, the Sorceresy had severed his tether while he’d been riding air above the city. He’d fallen out of the sky. If Loukas hadn’t helped him, he would’ve died.

  Now, Tannour feared doing anything that could alert the Sorceresy to the fact that he’d built a new tether. They maintained that if he didn’t work his powers for them, he wouldn’t work them at all. If they learned he could commune again, they would very likely do whatever they’d done a decade ago and sever his tether—likely at the most critical and inopportune time.

  Moreover, if he worked too much of the lifeforce through his tattoos—if he was forced, perhaps, to use some of his more elaborate skills—the tattoos on his neck could activate and bind him forever to their will. Those tattoos were still lying in wait for him to use the wrong power. The worst part of it was that he still didn’t know which skill would activate them.

  Tannour had knowingly sacrificed his powers to stay free of those bindings—fethe, he’d sacrificed nearly everything!

  Yet now, as he neared the fortress of Ivarnen, Tannour faced the very real possibility of losing himself to his former masters so that he might not lose the A’dal.

  It wasn’t a palatable choice, but he didn’t hesitate in making it.

  Fifty-one

  “Ever its doctrine of envy and ridicule

  appeals to little minds.”

  –Errodan val Lorian, Queen of Dannym and the Shoring Isles,

  on the Book of Bethamin

  Stefan val Tryst, Duke of Morwyk, stood at the peaked windows of a highland castle, staring out over a lake of fog. Steep mountains sliced upwards through the furtive grey mist, their sides darkened with fir and pine, only to vanish again into the higher band of clouds cloaking the day. The world wore a mantle of ash.

  “What is grand in mortal man is that he lives to die.” Sitting on a couch across the room, Eugenia val Tryst lowered The Book of Bethamin to look up at her husband. “Are you listening, Stefan? This is the passage I was quoting to you in the coach last evening. The Prophet says, ‘What is grand in mortal man is that he lives to die. This is his divinely invested purpose. In following the divinity within, mortal man becomes not an end but a conduit, a bridge between the corporeal and the static unbeing.’”

  A vein twitched beneath Stefan’s left eye.

  Eugenia continued reading, “‘It is through the pursuit of purpose that mortal man may know my truth. I embrace those who know not how to live, save by seeking death, for they are fervent to ken the bliss of unbeing. I embrace those who despise, for the despisers long for the betterment of all. The happy man, craver of life, betrays a gluttonous insanity.’”

  Stefan’s grown son, Darren, gave an enormous sigh of protest synchronized with his changing of position on the couch. “That book never makes any sense to me, Mother.”

  Eugenia shifted her pale eyes to him, sharp with reprimand. “That’s because you’re stupid, Darren.”

  “Maybe I’m just too smar
t to believe such drivel.”

  “Oh, darling...” Eugenia contemplated Darren with a sad little smile, “if only that were true.”

  Darren clenched his jaw and returned his gaze to the book he’d been reading.

  Stefan wished that his youngest son did not look so much like himself.

  “And yet...what is the lure of intelligence when we only live to die?” Eugenia still had her blue eyes fixed on her son. The effect was not unlike a viper watching its prey through the verge. “One day you may find yourself grateful to be possessed of such imbecility, Darren.”

  She shifted her gaze back to Stefan. “Do you now see the point I was making yesterday, Stefan? You’re going to become that conduit for all of Dannym, a bridge to the great unbeing. Think of it!”

  Stefan thought Eugenia exemplified every reason why women should not be taught to read.

  Beyond the windows, mist drifted in tattered shreds, clouds flayed by the scourging fir trees. Somewhere beneath that lake of fog, his army was marching towards the River Yves and, eventually, Calgaryn city.

  Stefan would’ve rather been riding alongside his men—the better to see Gareth val Mallonwey’s face when his army poured over the Calgaryn hills; too, it would’ve spared him the unending, torturous hours trapped in a coach with his wife—but he had business with a specific woman at that specific highland manor, not to mention the Adept upon whose arrival he’d already been waiting an hour too long, and such matters required his personal attention.

  “...ridiculous to think we have no choice in our actions, Mother.”

  Darren was still trying to reason with Eugenia. He didn’t understand that reason and his mother had long ago parted ways, even before she’d found a voice in The Book of Bethamin.

  Eugenia gave an exasperated sigh. “As usual, you are entirely missing the point, Darren. Since our only striving is towards death, all action comes of inevitability. The Prophet explains that our destinies are set. Our choices, our actions...we cannot guide these things any more than we can compel the sun upon a different course through the heavens.”

  “So, if I stabbed my dagger into your thigh right now...” Darren’s blue eyes were malevolent spears, “you’re saying it would be inevitable? I should have no responsibility in the matter?”