The connection between me and my mass sigil flattened and expanded, until our willpower was a triangular circuit. Addam gasped a little, surprised at the power of the stored spell, and at my willingness to share. Ownership of sigils was a very, very personal thing for Atlanteans. They were rarely co-opted outside families.
“It’s there if you need it,” I said. “I trust you.”
“Rune,” Addam breathed. He shook his head. “There will come a point where my involvement should not be limited. When you’ll want my strength at hand. Yes?”
I stared at him and said, “Yes. Thank you, Addam.”
THE DAWNCREEKS
Addam offered his town car, which glided away from the curb with Brand and me in it. I gave an unseen driver instructions by intercom, and settled back to screw around with the air vents.
Brand went into his bodyguard mode, swinging a critical eye from window to window, never forgetting to look over his shoulder. He liked mixing up our transportation in order to stay unpredictable, which is probably why I got a town car ride without an argument.
After a while, he asked, “Would it be so bad?”
“Yes,” I said, because it was the safest answer to any question Brand would start that way.
He shoved at my arm. “The throne.”
“The throne?”
“Inheriting your throne. Would it be so bad to take a seat on the Arcanum? A lot of them owe you favors. You’re not entirely disliked.” “The problem is that I’d need to depend on those favors to hold the throne,” I said.
“The Tower would always have your back.”
Brand never asked stupid questions, which was why I was caught off guard by his interest. “I’m . . . Arcana courts are . . . Gods, Brand. They’ve got hundreds of sigils. They’ve got compounds. They have household guards and courtiers. We don’t even own a houseplant.”
“Things change. How are you going to get courtiers until you have a court? If you had a seat on the Arcanum, we’d be in a better position to defend ourselves. We’d be able to make alliances.”
“Alliances are about teamwork. Do you remember when we played dodge ball when we were kids? The first thing you did was take out your own teammates before they could stab you in the back.”
“That’s a damned exaggeration,” he said, nearly offended. “And you’re conveniently fucking forgetting that I took out our teammates and then stood in front of you like a human fucking shield. And that was just a game. Our lives aren’t a game. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”
“And I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe, but swimming in the same pond as Arcana won’t do that. I can’t believe you of all people are raising this subject. Where is this coming from?”
“I . . .” He made a frustrated sound and slouched back in his seat. “I’ve always known you were powerful. I’ve always had respect for your powers. You know that, don’t you?”
“You threw away my toast. Right in front of me.”
He gave me a look, something balanced on the razor’s edge of seriousness and nervousness. “Last summer,” he said, “you faced an army.”
“The recarnates? Lord Tower helped me.”
“Lord Tower showed up at the last second and finished them off. But you were the one that marched outside the defense wards on your own and faced an army. There were a hundred fucking zombies in front of you, and you faced them by yourself, and you turned two-thirds of them to ash. You turned them into cinders, Rune. You are not your average fucking bear.” “I had a mass sigil,” I protested. “Any—”
“Anyone couldn’t do it. Anyone wouldn’t have had the fucking balls. It’s the sort of thing Arcana do. Can you honestly tell me you’re not aware of that?”
I let my reply lapse. I couldn’t lie to him, even if I wanted. I remembered what it had felt like, walking onto the battlefield with the explosive energy of a mass sigil leashed to my hands. And I remembered what it felt like to unleash it.
“Maybe you’re not ready for the throne today,” Brand said. “Maybe not this year. But you’re moving in that direction. Right?”
“Sure,” I said. “I just think it will take longer.”
He was quiet for a second, swinging his gaze from front to back. Then, almost suspiciously, he said, “How much longer?”
“I don’t know. I always expected it’d take a century.”
His eyes snapped toward mine. He tilted his head to one side, as if bewildered, and then a flush crept up his neck. “A century. Of years. A hundred fucking years.”
“I sense disagreement.”
Every one of his body parts got bigger—his eyes, his mouth, his waving arms—as he yelled, “Are you shitting me? A hundred years of your dirty socks? A hundred years of finding fucking boxes of fucking ho-hos stuffed in air vents? A hundred years of you getting pissy and blowing holes in fucking walls? A hundred years of you using every new power as an excuse to fucking nap more? Are you shitting me?”
“It almost sounds like you’re in this for the money,” I said.
“Are you—? Is that a fucking—? Rune Saint John, I will turn this back seat into a fucking pinball machine. Are you shitting me? How . . .” His anger fell into loud despair. “How am I supposed to keep you alive for another century?”
I started laughing. What else was I supposed to do? Everyone should have a Brand.
I said, “I really love you.”
He threw himself into his seat and began staring at the ceiling. He even forgot to look out the window to check for missiles or train robbers.
A few miles from the Dawncreeks’ neighborhood, he muttered, “A century.” A mile later, he punched me in the thigh and gave me a Charlie horse. And then, as we pulled up to a curb, he said, “Fine. But I am making some new fucking house rules. And maybe a fucking chore chart.”
It’d started sprinkling while we drove. It had got to the point, these last few months, where people didn’t even bother with weather reports. Temperatures and cloud cover had been schizophrenically uncertain since the events in the Westlands—the last vestige of the weather magic spell screwing up the atmosphere.
I may have ended the weather spell, but I hadn’t been the one to start it, which might have been the only reason I hadn’t been hauled before the Arcanum on charges. Interfering with the weather was forbidden magic. Like all forbidden magic, the potential for creating a global domino chain of catastrophe was a starkly real possibility.
I stepped through a puddle of oily water, which shimmered into a rainbow. In other parts of the world, a neighborhood like this would have been called rundown. Beautiful houses with old paint jobs; heavily subdivided lots; cracked sidewalks held together with weeds. New Atlantis, though, wasn’t the rest of the world. Economic cycles were fixed—the poor would always be sequestered in the same exact blocks, and the rich would always have their same armored rat holes. Nothing changed, except ownership of the corner bodegas.
Brand told the limo driver to turn the car around so that it faced the way we’d come, because that’s the sort of thing Brand thought about. I waited and stared at the narrow Victorian in front of us with itching discomfort. One of the curtains on the second floor fluttered, hiding everything but a cap of shiny black hair as someone ducked beneath the sill.
“The Warrens are down that way,” Brand commented, coming up next to me. “Bad area.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “There are wards in the sidewalks. I can feel them. I bet you’d find a lot of families in this neighborhood are distantly connected to formal houses. Or maybe were once houses, but down on their luck. It’s a smart place to live, actually. You get the table scraps of protection.”
We started up the walkway. The concrete had powdered in places, but the grass on either side was green and mowed. Halfway up the veranda, the front door opened. Someone immediately stepped back into darkness, snatching a brown hand from the knob.
I stopped on the welcome mat and shaded my eyes, until the sha
dows unblurred into the form of a girl. She was maybe eleven or twelve, with glossy hair and strong native features. I didn’t really have an eye for American ethnicities, but I knew a lot of Wampanoag blood had made its way into the Atlantis gene pool centuries ago. I had a fair amount myself.
“Hi,” I said, when it became apparent all we were getting was a glare from the curtain of black hair.
“There are lots of articles about you,” she said.
“Of this I am aware,” I said.
“That’s your Companion,” she said, and raised a finger in Brand’s direction. “Like my aunt. Make him prove it. Tell him to throw a knife and break that ward in half.” She pointed to a scuffed ward nailed above the doorbell.
“Excuse me?” Brand said.
“Go ahead—it’s already broken. I bet I could do it. I bet I’m as good as a Companion.”
“If you were, you wouldn’t be telling fucking strangers that your defense ward is broken,” Brand said.
I slapped a hand over my eyes.
“What?” Brand said.
“We have a swear jar,” the girl told him. “It counts even when you’re on the porch.”
Brand had the sensibility to look abashed. I said, “Try not to put them through college.”
“Okay, enough of this,” he said gruffly. “You’re Annawan Dawncreek. This is Lord Sun. I’m Brand. Get your aunt?”
For a second she didn’t move. Then, hesitantly, she pushed her long hair behind her ears. One side of her face was scarred—no, burned. Those were the long-healed, contractured scars of a burn injury.
I gave Brand a quick look, thinking about the seneschal Jirvan. Annawan misunderstood the glance, because her face fell into an expression of familiar guardedness, like a muscle memory. “I just wanted you to see,” she said. “Now you don’t need to stare. Okay?”
I really did try not to stare, but it was hard, because she was a child, and I didn’t like seeing injured children. But even worse than that, something unpleasant began stirring in the back of my mind. Something not unlike accountability. This girl was the child of one of my father’s people. And she had scars.
Brand walked up the steps and gave her a cool nod. His casual reaction was the right response, because she nodded back and withdrew into the house.
The door opened into a living room. Velvet sofa with threadbare spots; cracked, clean walls; polished mirrors; dusted blinds. The household wards were cheap but working—the allergen ward smelled like pine with a faint undertone of tar pitch. Overall, the room had a patched sort of dignity, which was something I could relate to.
An older woman bustled into the room, shaking water from her hands. “My lord. Sorry, I was doing dishes.” The upper half of her body jerked forward, like she was about to offer her hand, then realized they were wet and wasn’t sure how polite that was. She put her hands on her ward’s shoulders instead, pulling the girl in front of her.
Corinne Dawncreek had blunt nails, and training callouses on the back of her hands. Her eyes were the color of faded denim, milky with cataracts. Her face was wrinkled, but not in the places where you’d expect them—like the laugh and frown lines people spent a lifetime carving. It was deeply unsettling—aged features on a face that should have been young and rejuvenated—and I expected it had to do with the severing of her Companion bond.
Companions grew old when the Atlantean they were bonded with died. And they grew old quickly if they’d had rejuvenation treatments before that point. For all I knew, Corinne had been my age just a couple years earlier, when her scion was still alive. Now she was aging in fastforward.
That thing in the back of my head—that nascent guilt—stretched and yawned and ran claws along my brain.
“Brand,” Brand said. “This is Rune.”
As nervously as Corinne regarded me, the look she gave Brand was much more measuring. Her eyes flicked up and down his body, most likely to size up the number of weapons he carried.
“I’ve made coffee,” she finally said. “Unless you’d like tea? I could find some tea.”
“Coffee is fine,” Brand said.
“Please. Make yourself at home. Anna, come help me. Come, now.” She shushed her ward out of the room, vanishing down a scuffed linoleum hallway that led to the back of the house.
We sat down, side by side, on a sofa that sagged in the middle. My knees came up to my lap. I started to look around the room again—and my gaze caught on a glossy tumble of hair peeking from the archway to another room.
I cleared my throat.
The mop of hair jerked out of view.
Brand and I waited until, slowly, a boy’s face slid back into the archway. He was much younger than his sister, maybe five or six, with coppery skin and straight black hair.
“You’re Corbitant?” Brand said.
“Corbie,” the boy told us. He had a low, hoarse voice.
With inching bravery, Corbie sidled into the living room. He was wearing a florescent purple shirt many sizes too big. Skinny legs stuck out of shorts that came to his shins, and he had a candy necklace wrapped around his wrist.
He stood there and swayed, studying us. “Do you wear socks?” he finally asked.
Brand and I looked at each other.
Corbie said, “I wear socks too.” He stuck out a foot to show that he was, indeed, wearing socks.
Having established common ground, he fled. I heard his muffled footsteps punch up an unseen stairway.
“You see the knife?” Brand asked.
“What knife? When was there a knife?”
“The girl had it hidden up her sleeve.”
“You’re making that up. You’re not? That doesn’t seem like a good thing.”
“I’m pretty sure it was a fucking butter knife. But still.” Only he was Brand, so he said it like it was, in fact, a good thing. Brand’s approval ran in dark directions.
My eyes slid to the fireplace mantle, to the family photos. In younger photos, the girl only wore pigtails, and her complexion was smooth and unmarked. I said, quietly, “Her face.”
Brand sighed. “I know.”
“That sort of burn . . .”
“We’ll ask questions. We’ll listen to the answers. We’ll find out.”
“But—”
“It was my court, too,” he said, unexpectedly. “I was supposed to protect them too. We’re on this ride together, okay?”
I closed my eyes and nodded.
When I opened them again, Corinne was gliding into the room with a bamboo tray balanced on one palm. She moved with trained grace, like Brand; and, also like Brand, her eyes danced around the room as if she hadn’t just been in it, mapping potential new threats. The girl, Anna, wasn’t with her.
“It’s instant,” she said, with a little color in her cheeks. The tray had mismatched mugs and packets of fast-food sugar. A ceramic creamer held something too thin to be cream.
That little pitcher snagged my attention. It came from a formal service: expensive and vein-thin. I lightly touched the rim of it. “This reminds me of something my father used.”
“Does it?” she said. “It must have been a favorite pattern. He gave it to my Kevan when he married, many, many years ago. We kept this piece when the rest of the set was . . . lost.” She busied herself with the mugs, putting one in front of each of us.
When there was nothing more to distract her, she sat in an armchair. Stuffing leaked from its seams, and the cushions, as she settled into them, gave a fat, gusty sigh.
“Well,” she said, and tightened her fidgeting fingers into a loose fist. She looked down at this—at the unguarded display of emotion—and blinked away sudden tears. “I am out of my mind with worry. It’s hard to think straight. I don’t even know where to start.”
“I’d like to know more about you. And the scion you were bonded to. I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t recall your name. I’m sorry.”
She waved away the apology. “My Kevan worked for one of your father’s larger houses.
You wouldn’t have had much reason to know us, not at—well, not at the age you were, before the Sun Court fell on hardship.”
“Hardship,” I said, but smiled to take the sting out of it. “My father’s court didn’t fall on hardship—it just fell. Which of my father’s greater houses did Kevan Dawncreek work for, Corinne?”
“The Ambersons. They managed your father’s magical studies branch. Lord Amberson was the one who elevated the Dawncreeks, and made us a lesser house.”
Memories flared and died like match strikes. A big man with a beard the color of rusting steel wool. A peculiar obsession with home-brewed beer. The Ambersons, as I understood, had not survived the fall of Sun Throne. They were no longer a named house.
“Kevan must have been very talented. That’s not something Lord Amberson would have done without good reason.”
“I suppose that’s part of what I need to tell you,” Corinne said. “We . . . That is. Well. Lord Sun, do you know how it was, after your father’s death? For the houses in the Sun Court?”
The unknown raiders hadn’t just killed my father’s inner circle; they’d drained our bank accounts, and claimed our sigils, and destroyed our artifacts and art. The throne became insolvent, and hundreds of debtors darted in to peck what remained. The greater and lesser houses would have splintered. They would have been bought by other courts; at best solicited into better employment. They would have been extorted, or threatened, or bribed. That was if they had marketable skills. Without any quick and liquid value, they would have fallen themselves.
I said, “If Kevan was talented, other Arcana courts would have pursued him. The Hanged Man, then?”
“The Hanged Man, eventually. But not at first. There is a cutthroat market for unaffiliated lesser houses. Lord Amberson could not retain us, so we joined the swarm. So many houses, at once, cut adrift and jockeying for sponsorship. Alliances failed quickly. Lord Sun had been a good ruler for generations, so for those like us? We were unprepared for the vicious tactics.”
I was trying hard not to get swamped by my reactions. And of course Brand knew that, because he leaned forward and gave Corinne his best glare. “There a reason for all this?”
The Hanged Man Page 7
