by Sarah Chorn
A few years of building trust gave them not only connections to important ministers and officials who sympathized with their cause, but the ability to plan a night such as this. When they’d acted they’d been ready, backed up by the army; the entire military counsel; the chief of police; ministers of finance, agriculture, and trade; as well as a host of others. They had been backed by well-placed people who were tired of the abuses of an absolutist monarchy. It had taken a lot of work to get that far but Eyad, with his mind talent, could talk anyone into anything.
An image blazed to life, of the night he and Vadden, just months after their marriage, had snuffed out the flame of a sprawling three-hundred-year-old dynasty. When Eyad had attached the pulsing, scarlet end to a sentence that had run on for far too long. When he had both gained, and lost, absolutely everything.
“You killed a baby,” Vadden hissed in a horrified whisper, gesturing at the once sleeping infant, now dead between the bloody bodies of the Lord and Lady of the Sunset Lands, the child’s parents.
“I had to,” Eyad replied, his hand still warm with innocent blood, covered in a stain that would never wash off. “He’s got the blood in him, Vadden. We cannot be truly free until that line is cut out! You know that!” The baby hadn’t been part of the plan. Babies usually slept in the nursery, but the royal couple had tried to have children for years and finally the lady had managed to produce a son, and was quite attached. Eyad hadn’t been aware that they shared the bed with the child. All he saw was another heir to the throne, another person with royal blood. He was an individual with the birthright to oppress.
He wasn’t a baby; he was a threat.
“I can’t…” Vadden had gone pale. He was shaking, backing away from Eyad. He looked sick. The scarlet-edged knife fell from his hand, dropping to the floor with a thud that filled the tense gasp between words. “You’re a monster,” he breathed.
“No change is bloodless,” Eyad stated, cold and affirmative. Those words might as well have been his personal motto. How many times had they said them to each other, whispered them through candlelight, after lovemaking, over dinners?
“This is too much. He was a babe, Eyad. We could have given him to someone to foster. Put him on a farm somewhere. He wouldn’t have known any better, neither would anyone else, but he’d be alive. This child committed no sin other than being born.”
“I did this for us!” Eyad roared.
Around them, the castle was waking up. Soon, the staff and servants would discover their dead lord, and Eyad would step into his new position, with Vadden as his co-counsel. Already they’d forged the signatures on the proper documents. The power had transferred to him, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
The army would be busy rounding up the rest of the nobles, killing those who didn’t submit willingly to their new government, and imprisoning those who posed a threat. Now, Eyad gained control of the military, all of the ministers that mattered, the police. He had the proper paperwork, and a dead royal family. The transfer of power, the balance of the Sunset Lands, was shifting. It made him feel like the earth was tilting under his feet.
“I did this for our future, for the people we love, for the land we believe in and the serfs who work it—”
“I saw your eyes,” Vadden snarled. “I saw how they lit up. You liked killing that child. It wasn’t a job, and there wasn’t a goal, not in the moment, Eyad. You enjoyed it. You liked making him hurt, and the feel of his blood on your hands. You are a tyrant. What kind of monster kills babies?”
“You are an ignorant fool if you don’t understand what that baby represented,” Eyad roared, his voice sounding like thunder in the room. “What he could have become. You know what we were doing here, Vadden. You knew the risk. You knew this was a possibility. You are not pure. You are not innocent.”
Vadden turned his back, made his way to the door.
“You are a coward! You can’t leave me! We did this together!” Eyad shot after him, the words echoing down the years. “I’ll have you thrown in the dungeons!”
“No,” Vadden whispered, hand resting on the doorknob. “No, beloved, you won’t.”
And he hadn’t. He’d watched his husband leave, listened to the door close behind him, and assumed the mantle of Premier while Vadden disappeared into the countryside, subverting his rule wherever he could. And Eyad let him, because it was impossible not to. He couldn’t hurt the man he’d never stopped loving, impossible to harm the person who still held his heart.
He was cold-blooded, a ruthless bastard. The price the Sunset Lands paid for his vision was high. He had made awful decisions for the greater good. It had to be done to bring the empire into the future. He had no false, romantic notions of what he was. He was cold, but someone had to be. However, no matter how many years passed, this was the one part of his heart that never stopped beating. He could mercilessly wipe out just about anyone, and rationalize it easily, but whatever heart he still had, beat Vadden’s name. This was part of him that refused to die.
He hated his husband as much as he loved him. This tear down the center of his soul held a universe in it.
But Vadden kept evading him, kept escaping, and they had matters to discuss, the two of them. He was tired of this game, this tug-of-war where the Sunset Lands was the rope pulled tight between them. His secret police were sure they knew where Vadden was, and that Neryan, Seraphina’s escapee brother, was with him. They weren’t far. He would release Seraphina and after that…
It would all fall into place.
He wondered if Vadden realized he’d done all of this for him? Unlikely.
There were so many different ways to love a man. He dropped the ring back into his pocket and shook his head. The past was a graveyard. He turned his face toward the future. Somewhere down in the city, people were dying necessary deaths, paving the way for everything that would come next. A sacrifice of blood and pain. Events were in motion. The future was full of tomorrows just waiting to be shaped.
Neryan
Amiti’s Inn had once been one of the busiest places Neryan had ever frequented. Usually it was stuffed full of people at all times of the year, but these days it was mostly empty; populated only by a few brave travelers hidden in the shadows and abnormally quiet, almost somber. Frequent passes by soldiers on the road and the not-so-secret police had driven the clientele away. The empty countryside didn’t help.
The main room smelled of food, the good stew that Amiti’s husband spent years perfecting, still available thanks to the inn’s proximity to the city. It was close enough to the Reach to benefit from a good supply of grain and meat, but it appeared they’d begun to run low on salt. The food was bland, and the stew was runnier than it had ever been. Even the bread was different. Grittier. Harder. Soon, this place would feel the pinch that was squeezing the life out of the rest of the country, but in the shadow of Lord’s Reach they were still holding on, barely.
Amiti and his husband, Kabir, both branded with the large empty circle on their cheeks that marked them as null talents, had held out longer than most. Perched on the main road between the Reach and the Red Desert, the inn made most of its money off people looking for luck in the city, or fleeing hard times to the Desert. It seemed to Neryan that nobody was staying put anymore, and while Amiti barely had enough to go around after seeing to his dwindling patrons, he still set his best aside for his friends. The man’s soul was cast in gold.
Neryan pulled a hunk off the bread on the table and dunked it into his stew, taking a big bite. He wiped the juice from his chin and glanced around.
He almost felt normal.
Almost.
The door opened and his heart leapt, just to sink again when two men sauntered in with their wife, the similar pattern of the shawl tied around her head and the cloth belts around the men’s waists giving the relationship away. Communal farmers, by the looks of them, halfway to starved. These atypical family groups had been popping up more and more recently. The state awarde
d larger collectives to bigger families, so peasants had started creating their own family groups not only for more land, but to pool resources and protection as well.
“She will come back from Lord’s Reach,” Vadden’s deep voice broke through his anxiety, urging calm. “You have to give her time. Mousumi goes at her own pace but she gets the best results.”
Neryan grunted and swallowed another mouthful of stew. “That’s easy for you to say.”
Mouse and Neryan had adopted each other. Their relationship had grown from friends to something rivalling father and daughter. He loved her intensely. She was ten years younger than he, but she was an unmarked wind talent, which put her in constant danger and had awoken protective urges in him he hadn’t expected.
Somehow, she’d avoided the overseers and police who rounded up the urchins and had them tested for talent, then shipped off to labor camps or slave schools like where he and Seraphina grew up. Mousumi’s wind talent was strong, if common, but being unmarked meant she was unaccounted for, and that made her very existence criminal. Even null talents had null marks branded into their cheeks, like Amiti and Kabir. It would be death or forced labor if she was caught now at her age.
Currently, she was poking around Eyad’s palace, trying to get word of his sister, and the plight of both women was driving him out of his mind with worry. He could feel himself unraveling, his bouncing leg betraying his anxiety.
Vadden let the conversation lull. He looked around them warily and then leaned in. “At the risk of sounding insincere, Seraphina has been there for five years now. And you know Mouse. She can get in and out of anywhere. It’s kind of her thing. She will be okay.”
Vadden met his eyes and fingered his cheek in silent signal. Neryan jerked his head forward, letting his red hair fall over the bright blue water droplet branded into his cheek, hiding it. He and Mouse had tinkered with makeup to conceal the mark, but eventually discovered that his skin was too fair and the brand too bright for any of it to work. A waterfall of hair did the job better than any amount of concealer.
Water talents were rare and that, coupled with his pale slave skin, gave him away. Anyone who saw his mark would instantly know who he belonged to, and everyone knew that Eyad never freed his slaves. Mouse kept a black slash inked across his right palm, the sign of a freed slave. Usually it was branded into the palms of freed men and women, but having a mark he could erase and wear at will was far more convenient.
He tried to stay out of public view, but sometimes it couldn’t be avoided. He’d learned that if he stayed in the freed-pale areas only, those dingy, dark corners no one went to, he blended in. Freed slaves didn’t ask questions, or look for information they didn’t need. Occasionally, if he was desperate enough, Neryan would erase the mark off his palm and wait outside with the other slaves, pretending Vadden owned him. They rarely did that, they both hated it, but desperation drove people to do incredible things. Amiti’s Inn, however, had no freed-pale area, and was one of the very few establishments that let slaves come indoors; so here he relied on his long hair, bent head, and people not asking questions or looking too hard.
His thoughts drifted back to his sister. Neryan knew what was causing his rising sense of urgency. It was his magic. The strengthening, uncontrollable tide of his water, and the way it was reaching out, needing the balance of Seraphina’s fire. It worried him, this increase of his element, but he didn’t let himself dwell on it. He was poised on the edge of a knife—one push, one misstep, and he’d fall into an unknowable abyss he might never escape. If he had her fire there, easy to touch, he’d balance and everything would be fine. Without her, his element was too much to contain. Too much water, not enough man. And if he was feeling this, chances were, she was too. Somehow, they were changing and his self-control was beginning to slip, and what then?
A storm was looming on the horizon and it threatened to swallow them both. He felt the bond between them, a thread that had always connected them, thrumming like the plucked filament of a spider’s web, and he simply knew. They needed each other, and he felt like time was running out.
It was impossible to voice any of this, or explain it to Vadden, so he just shrugged.
“You know I’m on your side, don’t you?” his companion finally asked, shifting in his chair so his dreadlocks covered the white lightning bolt branded into his cheek.
“I know,” Neryan replied simply.
They ate in silence for a time until a signal was exchanged between Vadden and Amiti and they moved to a quieter, more private room. Amiti’s Inn was a huge, sprawling place with a front room that served as both restaurant and bar, quiet guest rooms, stables, a bath house, and even a library. It was to the library that they went, closing the door softly behind them.
It was little more than a small room bordered by bookshelves, with two chairs, a fireplace and a tiny table in the center; but it held more volumes than most people would ever see in one place, so the name was fitting. Amiti had spent his life collecting them, buying them from travelers, and keeping them neatly ordered and free of dust, tending to them like roses in his own personal garden.
Amiti was already there, waiting, his hands clasped while he watched a shielded candle burn like it held the answers to all the riddles in the universe.
“Travelers came through here earlier today,” he said as soon as the door closed behind Vadden, his voice deep and rough from years of shouting in crowded rooms. Neryan loved how Amiti never minced words, never made them wait or dance around the conversational bush. He just dove right in, trimming off all the fat and leaving all the meat.
“Who were they?” Vadden asked, sitting down in a chair facing Amiti. Neryan paced out his nervous energy across the library, then spun on his heel and paced the other way, listening to the two men talk.
“The Red Desert.” Amiti waved his plump hand in the air. “They’re taking on more and more of the Sunset Lands’ refugees. Apparently, they were sent by their government to speak to the Premier about the border.”
There was a thick pause.
“They had news,” Amiti finally said.
Cold dread stole through Neryan and forced him to a stop in the center of the room. It was the sort of foreboding that could bring a man to his knees. This would be the first concrete news he’d heard of his sister in years, he could feel it.
“What news?” he hissed, his body coiled and ready to strike. “Speak, man!” He felt his talent rise up in him, water beading on his skin, wetting his hair, pooling at his feet. He closed his eyes, breathed deep.
Amiti nervously licked his lips and exchanged a loaded glance with Vadden, who had his elbows propped on his knees, his dreadlocks falling over his shoulder casting his angular face in shadow, all attention fixed on the innkeeper.
“It’s okay,” Vadden said softly. “Neryan will be calm. Won’t you, Neryan?”
“I won’t if you don’t speak soon, Amiti,” Neryan grumbled.
“They were speaking loudly when I served them. I couldn’t help but overhear,” Amiti shrugged. He ran the inn above board, but he had an incredible way of ferreting out information and sending it where it needed to go, despite the guards and secret police roaming around. He was the most obvious spy in the world, but that’s what made him a good one. No one expected the obvious ones. He hid in plain sight, and did what he did best—feeding Vadden, Mouse, and Neryan the scraps of his trade.
“The Desert is really in a rough spot. They are low on resources at the best of times. Many of our farmers have left, fleeing west to see if it’s any better out there,” Amiti cleared his throat and glared at Neryan in warning, “They said Eyad had a woman with him. She was on some sort of leash, kneeling. She had fire-red hair. They’d never seen that color before, so it stood out.”
More throat clearing. Another loaded pause.
A confluence of emotions punched Neryan so hard in his gut he could hardly see straight, let alone breathe. Anxiety. Fear. Worry. Relief. He pinched the bridge of his
nose with his thumb and forefinger, inhaled deep, and fought to gain control of the water coursing through him, ready to explode outward in a terrifying burst of energy.
His sister, Seraphina, was his other half. She balanced his own brooding nature. She’d always been so hopeful and full of life. She’d kept him going, challenged him, forced him to see possibility in the darkest situations. She’d sacrificed herself for him, and now she was kept on a leash like an animal.
Eyad had chased him after he’d escaped. He’d spent a few fraught weeks in the city of Lord’s Reach, where he’d run into Mouse, who helped him hide and kept him away from the guards. Then, the two of them had fled into the countryside, eventually running into Vadden. He’d either evaded Eyad, or Eyad had given up pursuit, and now Neryan lived in relative secrecy, existing in the shadows, constantly in hiding, always looking over his shoulder, afraid his next step would be the one that would land him back in the Premier’s clutches. It was an exhausting way to live, but at least he was alive and free, working with Vadden to give back some of what the state took from its people.
He wasn’t a slave. Or on a leash.
“There’s more,” Neryan assumed, eyeing Amiti’s twitches as the innkeeper looked hopefully at Vadden, who was a calming presence in what, Neryan knew, was a brewing storm.
“Now, don’t get mad, Neryan. What I’m going to tell you is… it’s rough… but I need you to keep your water under control or we’re all fucked ten different ways and none of them pleasant,” Amiti said.
“Yes, I understand. I’ll keep it to myself.” Neryan wasn’t sure how he’d manage it, but he knew he would. He had to. Amiti’s inn was their cornerstone, their last safe haven.
“Make sure he does,” Amiti gave Vadden a pointed look, and the other man nodded, spearing Neryan with a warning glare of his own.
Finally, the innkeeper continued, “One of the travelers said Eyad’s slave looked like she was in a lot of pain. He didn’t say more than that.”
