The Last Sun

by K. D. Edwards

  “I sense a story,” I said. “Possibly with wallet photos.”

  Addam gave me an uncharacteristically shy look.

  “I’m teasing,” I said. “What happened in Russia?”

  “It was my mother’s idea, that I spend time in Russia. Irkutsk. Quinn was only five years old, and we’d never spent a day apart. When Quinn found out I was leaving, he cried for days. On the morning I was to go, he hid, and refused to see me off. We finally gave up looking for him, and I drove to the portal station. Quinn waited until the guards were looking the other way, snuck off our estate, and began running through the city after me. He made it twelve blocks before security caught him. He’d wrapped a cheese-and-pickle sandwich in his bedroom drapes, tied them to a curtain rod, and had it slung over his shoulder, like a little boy in a Norman Rockwell painting.”

  Addam shook his head. “Over the next seven days, he ran away a dozen times. When I found out, I called and tried to explain to him that I’d return, that the assignment wasn’t forever.”

  “Did he understand?”

  “He understands far more than people realize. He told me precisely how many people on the estate were scared of him. How many of his guards would ask for a new posting since I wasn’t around to scowl them into being polite. He told me how many times he’d cry himself to sleep if I didn’t come back, and how many times he’d get so sad that he’d throw up. He said . . . Ah, you have to know Quinn to understand how he sees things. He sees the future like it’s the past—futures, really. He said if I didn’t come back, then one time he ran away and got lost in a bad section of town. He said sometimes a man in a white van pulls up and offers him candy.”

  I burst out laughing. “Oh, he’s good.”

  “Indeed. So I signed away a tenth of my trust fund to have a private portal constructed between Irkutsk and the court. I’d spend the week in Russia, and weekends with Quinn. Or at least I tried. He didn’t have much respect for the concept of here and there. I lost track of the number of times I’d come back from meetings in Irkutsk and find him curled up in my bed, having snuck through the portal because he’d gotten it in his head that I mustn’t wait until Friday to know about his new toothbrush, or the frog he caught. He brought the household guards to tears on a weekly basis.”

  He smiled for a second, and then the smile faded, weighed down by the present. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them. “Let’s have a snack, and then continue our search, Hero. There must be a generator or fireplace somewhere.”

  We completed our search of the first floor.

  I was on the lookout for anything that would help us communicate with the city or pinpoint our exact location. Technology was notoriously unreliable in the Westlands, but Arcana usually had people on their payroll smart enough to ward phone and internet lines.

  The only thing I found of practical use was a large, rough sketch of Nantucket’s northwestern shores. It was thumbtacked to a corkboard in a downstairs office. The Moral Certainty compound was labeled, which was great, but I wasn’t sure how much we could rely on the map of a forest that ignored geography depending on what mood it was in.

  “They are moving,” Addam said.

  “What’s moving?”

  “The lines on the map. Look, there. The tree line is now thicker between here and the ocean.”

  “Damn,” I said with a low whistle. “Do you have any idea how much a map like this is worth?”

  “Careful, Hero.”

  “Yeah, I know. Wouldn’t want the wards to think we’re ungrateful houseguests.” I pointed to a spot on the map. “Look there. I think those double lines are safe roads. Here’s one that goes near the Moral Certainty compound.”

  “I recognize this,” Addam said. He tapped an oval outline. “Peat’s Swimming Hole. It’s just outside the compound wards.”

  “There’s about a football field’s worth of unprotected ground between us and your compound’s wards, then. Filled with snowstorms, liches, and huge Muppet monsters.”

  “Will we risk it?”

  I nodded slowly. “But not until my sigils are swapped out with some different spells.”

  We went back to searching.

  On the second floor were guest rooms, sealed up for an extended absence. One of them had a marble fireplace and a bin filled with seasoned logs. I thought if worse came to worst, maybe we could camp there.

  At the end of a west-wing hallway, we had another stroke of luck.

  Against a stretch of eggshell-colored wall, my senses began to tingle. I put my hand on it and felt a vibration. It was a steady, grounding power—unmistakably a sanctum. But the doorways on either side of the wall led only to bedrooms, and neither bedroom had an entrance to the sanctum.

  In one of the bedrooms, Addam went over to the balcony doors. The glass was crusted with thick frost and he couldn’t get a decent view out of it. He said, “I think there’s a loggia here. Perhaps there’s an entrance from it to the sanctum?”

  We both had to pull on the handle to crack the seal of ice. As the door opened, winter shoved in. The weather tantrum had worsened: the sky now spat ice and long streamers of sleet.

  As I stepped onto the long loggia that ran along the side of the house, I tried to stare through open archways, looking for any signs of ambush or aggression, but everything around the manor was lost in a churning grayness.

  We made our way down the unprotected balcony. There was, as Addam suggested, a middle balcony doorway. The glass panels had been cracked by a loose tree limb, spilling snow drifts into a bare, diamond-shaped sanctum. He shouldered the doors open and went inside just as hail began to pelt from overhead, bouncing and skittering across the flagstone.

  Once we were inside the sanctum, we closed the damaged door as best we could, and took stock. There was no doorway on this level other than the one we’d entered, but a wrought-iron stairway spiraled up to the third floor. I climbed the stairs high enough to peek into the room overhead. It was a few square feet shy of being a master bedroom. Maybe the consort quarters, or close family.

  Addam pulled his ruined sigils from his backpack and spread them out on the floor. After a long minute of staring at them, he shook his head. “I do not think these will function at all. I sense no magic in them. It shouldn’t be possible.”

  “Welcome to the story of my life. The impossible things that get shoved in my face are never like winning the lottery or digging up Spanish doubloons in my vegetable garden. Impossible things are liches and melted sigils.”

  That got me a wan smile. I was playing it light for Addam’s sake, but inside, I was worried. Sigils were the bedrock of a scion’s power. They were the irreplaceable product of a dead art. I’d never heard of one being destroyed before. Lost? Sure. Won in conquest; pawned; even dropped between the sofa cushions. But not destroyed.

  The cracked windows of the balcony stole whatever warmth the manor offered. I took off my crusted jacket and shook the sleet into a corner, and laid it open on the ground to dry.

  While Addam reluctantly returned his sigils to his backpack, I went to stand in front of him. When I had his attention, I touched my two necklaces: a cameo and silver ankh. The ankh needed cleaning; it had begun to tarnish.

  I lifted it and said, “I got this when I was seven. It was one of my first sigils—a gift from my father’s seneschal.” I unwound the necklace and pooled the chain in my hands. On my hands were three rings. I pointed to the gold and emerald band. “Elena Lovers gave this to me. Long story. Well, not so much long as not reflecting too well on my sense of self-preservation.” I took the ring off, then leaned forward and stuck out my leg while tugging up my pants. The glow from Addam’s cantrip caught my gold ankle chain and made it slick with caramel-light. I bent, undid the clasp, and palmed it.

  Addam said, “This has the appearance of a strip tease, but usually strippers remove the articles of clothing without describing them.”

  “Funny.” I cradled the three sigils and said, “I give these sigils f
reely. Your Will is now their Will.”

  “What are you doing?” he asked in surprise.

  “You have a better chance of protecting yourself with sigils. I trust you to give them back when you’re done.”

  Addam regarded the sigils I dumped next to him in wonder. “Rune . . .”

  “And if you break them, you get a visit from Brand.”

  “You’d lend me these? Knowing I could not even protect the ones I had?”

  “I could just as easily have lost mine to Rurik. Plus, I’m not doing anything Quinn didn’t do for me.” I tapped the platinum disc on my belt. I would have given Addam that one as well, but I didn’t have time to recharge the spell I’d stored within it.

  “True,” Addam said, “but Quinn’s a remarkable young man. I don’t often find people who measure up to him.”

  I took a deep breath and pushed out the one question I hadn’t wanted to ask. “Addam, what do you think happened when we touched in the forest?”

  “You want to know?”

  “I asked.”

  “I think,” he said, “that you’re my talla.”

  Surprise first made my face go cold, and then warm as a flush rose beneath it. In a voice far gentler than I’d thought I could manage, I said, “We’re not tallas, Addam. I’m sorry.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I just am. It’s not possible. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “Is . . .” He chewed on his bottom lip. “Is Brandon your talla? Is that why?”

  “That’s not why,” I said.

  “But when we touched . . . what I felt . . . didn’t you feel it too?”

  “It could have been another part of your Aspect. Or maybe it was part of mine—it looked like sunlight, didn’t it?”

  “Or maybe it came from both of us. Don’t such things happen between tallas? It’s a mysterious bond. Powerful.”

  Would that it were so easy, I thought tiredly. “We should get some rest. We head out at first light.”

  He stared at me, hard, for a good ten seconds.

  Then he nodded and said, “You can run, Hero, but you can’t hide.”

  Right around midnight, I accepted that we were stranded for the night.

  Tactically, I didn’t want us splitting into separate rooms. Logistically, there was only the one bed in the suite I’d picked earlier. I tried to avoid any future awkwardness by making appreciative comments about the fainting sofa in the corner.

  Addam gave me a small smile and went into the adjacent bathroom to see if the pipes worked. They did. I won the coin toss and got to take a quick, lukewarm shower to clear the worst of the dirt off me. Addam headed downstairs to scrounge for food.

  When I was done showering, I cleared the mirror with the side of my hand. I hadn’t packed a brush, so I had to finger-comb my hair into respectability.

  I got dressed and left the bathroom. Addam had returned from foraging and dumped a pile of packaged food on the bed. I poked through it and saw olives, digestive biscuits, animal crackers, and water chestnuts.

  Addam said, “We may possibly come to blows over the animal crackers.”

  “Digestive biscuits?” I said in disgust. “What kind of man leaves million-dollar golems in the open and can’t even stock microwave popcorn? Just see if I break into the Hierophant’s house again.”

  “To be fair, there was plenty of food in the pantry, but it was behind a sealed vermin ward. I didn’t want to tamper with it. We’ve intruded on the house’s good will enough as it is. But at least we’ll have a fire. Behold my industriousness!”

  I walked over to the wide marble fireplace, where Addam had stacked a pyramid of logs.

  “It is soft pine,” he said. “It will smell very nice. Do you have a lighter?”

  I transmuted my wrist-guard into a sabre hilt and shot the pyramid with a firebolt. I kept on shooting until flames roared out the jumping logs.

  Addam leaned against the wall, pulled off his boots, and dropped into a heap. He wrapped his hands around his toes to squeeze warmth into them. As the glow in the room grew steadier, he allowed his light cantrip to die.

  While I tore open the waxy lining of the animal crackers, Addam said, “Was the shower pleasant?”

  “It’s not my fault all the hot water is gone,” I said quickly. “There wasn’t much of it.”

  “Suspiciously defensive,” he said.

  “Sorry. I’m used to fighting about hot water. Brand has more knives than you, though.”

  Addam got up and came over, briefly touching the side of my head. “Your hair is cute when it’s wet. I will shower now. Must I dress in these clothes afterward? Will my vigilant prince require us to sleep in battle gear in the event that Rurik comes calling?”

  “I can honestly say Rurik will have no bearing on my decision to keep my clothes on.”

  He winked and vanished into the bathroom.

  I split up the food, skipping the water chestnuts and olives, but sampling a digestive biscuit. It tasted like sawdust and cough syrup. I put the box in Addam’s pile, palmed some animal crackers, and went over to look at the hardbacks on the bookshelf.

  When Addam came out of the bathroom, he was in a towel. As he sat down by the fire, the towel parted over his muscled thigh. The flames made his leg hairs glint like bronze.

  He saw my attention and stretched a smile over his lips. “Do my tattoos really look like I got drunk with a sailor?”

  “Oh. Um. No. Did I say that?”

  “You did. Do you like this one right here?” He touched the side of his stomach, where the tattoos feathered out at his waist. “Or this?” He touched his hip bone, nudging the towel loose.

  “Stop that, or I eat the last giraffe.”

  He laughed and knotted the towel closed. He held out a hand for the crackers.

  While he ate, he studied me, his wine-colored eyes narrowed into a crescent. I tried not to react, but he was half-naked and wearing my sigils, and it was distracting. My ankh was against his chest, the emerald ring wedged between the knuckles on his index finger, the gold chain loose on his ankle and reflecting firelight in a dancing glimmer.

  He was, truthfully, one of the most handsome men I’d ever laid eyes on. The reality of that filled me with regret. I always felt a sharp sense of regret when I stared at a truly beautiful man.

  “So,” Addam murmured. “Do you want children?”

  “What an awful pickup line.”

  “And what are your views on group marriage?”

  “Even better. You want to knock me up and see other people. You know, I was led to believe you were good at this sort of thing.”

  “Perhaps I am sly. Perhaps I am overreaching in my negotiations, in hope that I end up with a simple kiss.”

  “I don’t think there’s a single thing about you that’s simple, Saint Nicholas.”

  He gave me a slow grin and leaned back. His arms were braced behind him, his body spread into something like a pose or an invitation.

  Things stopped seeming abstract and started seeming like a real and present danger. I started fidgeting.

  And then, to my surprise, the grin faded from his face. He pulled his legs up against his chest. “You are such a good fighter that I was . . . surprised. In the forest. To see you at a momentary disadvantage.”

  Since he was being oblique, I responded in kind. “Hmm.”

  “You’ve been skittish since then.”

  “Skittish?” I repeated. “No one’s accused me of being skittish since I was a pony.”

  “Perhaps I am not expressing my concern as well as I’d like. I am asking if you are well, Rune.”

  I gave him a slow shrug. “I know you are. Addam, Rurik fucks with people’s heads. I told you that before we headed out. He was messing with my memories, trying to get me off-balance.”

  “He . . . had your memories? He read your mind?”

  “No, he,” I said, and stalled by taking a bite of cracker. “He can make you relive things. He makes you re
live the things that hurt you. He feeds off dark thoughts and—”

  Addam drew in a breath. I saw it in his eyes: it clicked. Maybe it was because I’d been thrown over the tree trunk when he arrived. Maybe he’d seen me scrambling to button my jeans. Maybe he’d noticed how doggedly I protected my personal space. But, either way, it finally clicked for him. “You relived your . . . assault.”

  “Sort of. A little.”

  “But . . .” To my utter astonishment, tears filled his eyes. “Oh, Rune. I’ve been so forward. I have been awful. I am so very sorry, I didn’t—”

  “Addam, it’s okay.”

  “It is not. I’ve been boorish and insensitive. I didn’t mean to act in such a way. I didn’t mean—”

  Before I could think better of it, I lifted my butt off the ground and scooted over to him. His mouth closed in surprise. I leaned in gave him a quick, aimless kiss on the cheek and scooted back the way I’d come.

  “If you still feel bad, though, you can give me the best side of the mattress.” I thought about it some more. “And the rest of your animal crackers.”

  His discomfort broke apart, and he recovered his smile. He had a nice smile. It was a good thing to watch.

  Later, I returned from a bathroom break and caught Addam slipping out of his towel and back into boxer briefs. He sensed my presence and turned. I expected a quip or a double entendre, but his cockiness had been tempered by the talk we’d just had. He gave me a small smile and tugged the briefs up over his pelvis.

  He’d already removed the protective covering from the mattress and remade it with sheets he’d found in a linen closet. He slipped under the covers, then stilled and watched me cross the room.

  I took off my socks and shoes, and unbuttoned my jeans. I thought about stripping down to my own underwear, I really did; but the idea was met with a near mental shutdown.