"They never bit me," Mireya protested.
"Of course not, dear one," Tobias agreed kissing her hair.
As if something had just occurred to her, she sat up. "Wait, what are you doing here?"
"He's who I've been tracking," Faela answered.
"Oops," Mireya flushed a bright pink.
"Oops?" Faela repeated, as the heat of the room finally required her to peel off her overcoat.
"You didn't know," Dathien told her.
"But I should have," Mireya argued. "I knew Tobias’ surname is Gresham. I just never thought..."
"Don't worry, Mireya," Faela said to reassure her. "He's known me most of my life too."
"Whole life actually," Tobias said in correction.
Faela's brows knit together at the revelation as she draped the coat over the back of the chair and pushed her foot against the edge of the table.
"But we'll get to that. Right now, Jair was about to tell me how he joined our ranks."
All eyes turned to Jair who slouched down further in his chair and hooked his ankle across the top of his thigh.
"It's a good thing this isn't awkward at all," Jair said, his voice cracking. "Any way, like I was telling you before we were so rudely interrupted, I really didn't know what I was doing. I was pretty young when the war broke out and my father was conscripted. I never went to any of the temples because the Brothers and Sisters of the Orders, who hadn’t been forced to fight, had been expelled from the country. I grew up here, in Nabos, on a farm near Garon.
“My mother caught me playing with green magic one day. I had picked her daisies and kept them alive for weeks. It took her awhile to figure out who was keeping them alive. She had liked them so much and it made her smile. She didn't smile much after my father went to fight. One of my sisters ratted me out.
“Once she determined I was the culprit, she taught me the basics. Before the war, my mum helped out at the local Phaidrian temple with the little ones. She had some talent for green, but nothing out of the ordinary and not enough to take vows. I never knew everyone couldn't mold green magic the way I did."
Jair interlaced his fingers and opened his palms like in a child's game and just stared into his hands. Tobias once more did not interrupt, but allowed Jair to continue when he was ready.
Clasping his hands together, Jair sighed. "My eldest brother was eventually conscripted as well. I'm the youngest boy, but have two younger sisters. With da and Zane gone, my mum and sisters needed me to help run the farm. I never got any real training. The war was real hard on my village. There was a battle fought not far from it. Daniyelans and probably other Orders fought there too."
His eyes slid from Sheridan to Eve. "But the battle did something. It did something wrong to the land. All that magic in one place at one time, it wasn't right." Jair picked at the fabric of his pants, keeping his gaze down. "Afterward, nothing wanted to grow. No matter what we did, nothing would grow. That's how it started. Then the animals started having stillbirths."
His voice had faded to a whisper and his brows knit together. Pushing his hair back with his fingers, he said, "Then people started getting sick. I could feel it. Everything was off. I kept our crops alive for a season, but I knew it couldn't last. I knew I wouldn't be able to keep it up.
“One night, I was standing on a ridge overlooking our fields and I followed the eddies of magic until they fattened and became pools and rivers and lakes. There was so much. I figured redirecting it wouldn't,” he paused, “that it couldn't.” He fell silent again staring into the creases of his palms.
"That's not true," he whispered. "I convinced myself it couldn't hurt anything, but I knew. I could feel it when I erected the channels to siphon the green magic back to Garon. I knew what had happened at the battle. I knew that the energies would renew themselves, but it would take time. I knew that I was damning another area to the same sickness plaguing my home.
“But my little sister, Emma, had just gotten sick. So, I lied to myself and said that it wouldn't be like it was for us and I did it. I took the energy and trapped it. It wasn't until the Phaidrian Order reestablished itself at Lanvirdis that my mother insisted I go for training if they would have me. I was only there for two years when they discovered what I could do and it didn't take them long to realize what I had done. They came when I was home visiting."
Faela extended her arm across Kade and pat Jair's hand in reassurance. He gave her a grateful, half smile.
"I still didn't really understand that there was anything unusual with what I could do. I thought all Phaidrian's could follow the flows like I could. They told me I had wrecked the Balance and it was affecting the green magic all over the world. I couldn't believe that what I had done could possibly have had that kind of impact. They questioned me, but I didn't know what they were talking about. They asked about something called the Brethren and why I had done it.
“When I didn't give them the answers they wanted to hear, they threatened my family. They said they were going to send my mother and sisters to work as indentured servants far to the southwest, high in the mountains at Wistholt.
“I’d never left Nabos. I couldn’t even imagine my family being somewhere as far away as Wistholt in Indolbergan. They gave me a night to think it over. My family and I left that night. I left my mum and sisters with my uncle in Kilrood. Then I left, so they wouldn't be endangered any more."
Tobias shook his head. "Same mistakes again," he said in an absent voice. "We keep making the same mistakes."
"The town we stopped in before here, Moshurst." Jair picked up his narrative, but his voice caught. "The same thing that had happened in my village had happened there. Only this time it wasn't because of a battle." He paused and curled his hands into fists. "It was because of what I had done."
Obscuring his mouth with his fingers, Tobias watched Jair's constant fidgeting movements, but kept his thoughts to himself.
"There were no animals, no people, nothing new grew there. The town had been abandoned. It's what would have happened to my home. When I saw it, I reached out and I destroyed the dams I had created. Like Faela said, it felt like I was burning to cinders. When I was done, she told me that my eyes had turned and that I was Gray now."
Tobias' mouth twitched into a smile that spoke of triumph and vindication. "Do you see the commonality between your two stories?" he directed his question to Faela and Jair. "Do you see what links them?"
"Other than our blatant disregard for the natural order and use of black magic?" Faela asked her tone dry.
"Turning Gray brings on a wicked bad case of heart burn?" Kade suggested.
Tobias gave a tolerant smile. "Funny. But what preceded each of their turning?"
Jair raised his tortured gaze from his intertwined hands. "We tried to reverse what we had done. It's like you said, black magic uses magic for itself, for its own goals and purposes. We tried to fix what we’d done without caring what it would do to us. We just wanted to make it right. Was that it?"
Tobias’ smile widened and his eyes twinkled. "Precisely so. What you both did, trying to reverse the magic you had built was done so at great personal risk. Faela severing the link could have easily killed her or at least burned out her gift. You destroying the barriers you had created could have done the same. By dismantling the black magic you had constructed, you rejected that magic. The recoil that creates usually kills the wielder."
"That was the burning sensation?" Faela asked, letting her foot fall as she scooted to the edge of the chair.
Tobias nodded. "It was the backlash of the energy. Dark magic takes, it destroys and it resists change with a tremendous amount of force. Have you never wondered why there have been so few Grays in our history?"
"It never kept me up at night," Faela admitted.
"Well, I did," Sheridan said, speaking for the first time. "And none of the books I came across ever explained what they were, except that they had all used black magic at some point. But it never explained why all
wielders of black magic didn't become Gray."
"Not all people who use black magic and then renounce it become Gray," Tobias explained. "They don't become Gray, because they don't survive the process. Both Faela and Jair absorbed the energy when it recoiled. They had the capabilities to absorb it.
“You said you thought you would burn away, right? Well, were you unable to absorb the release of the magic, you would have. The energy would have consumed you, leaving nothing behind. Only the strongest wielders become Gray, because they are the only ones who can survive the turning."
Faela and Jair looked at each other, then back to Tobias speechless.
"Do you know why your eyes turn to silver?" Tobias asked them. "Why all Grays are marked by the mirror eyes?"
Faela bit her lower lip. "Like I said before, I thought it was a mark of my curse. To never allow me to forget what I had done."
Sheridan smacked Jair's upper arm repeatedly. "No, no, don't you get it?" she said the words tripping over each other in her haste to verbalize her thoughts. "It's part of the absorption. It's so obvious. Why hadn't I made the connection before?"
"Because the Orders' stories about Grays that are told aren't meant to explain what they are." Tobias shrugged. "They’re meant to be morality tales about what happened to bad, little magic wielders who use black magic."
"I'm still lost," Jair admitted.
Sheridan swiveled in her seat, tucking a leg underneath her thigh. "Okay, think about it this way," she said gesticulating widely. "Think about what happens when you boil water. There can be things in the water that can make you sick. But when you boil it, the heat kills anything that might harm you. The heat purifies the water."
In the exact same intonation, Jair repeated, "I'm still lost."
"The colors that we harness to do magic, they're energy, just like fire." Sheridan gestured to the unseen, but felt fire in the stove. "Just a different form of energy. Our bodies channel the energy and our minds shape it. With that much magical energy blasting through you, your bodies went through the magical equivalent of boiling water. Any impurities were literally vaporized.
“Well, not exactly.” She corrected herself. “It's more like when lightning strikes sand. If it hits the wrong material it destroys it. But Grays, you’re like sand. Instead of destroying you, the energy melts the sand into glass. The energy purifies it, changes it into something new, something reflective. Don't you see? It makes so much sense.”
“Yeah,” Jair said shaking his head, “not at all.”
“Some of the magic leaks through us when we wield it,” she said the words tumbling out. “Through our eyes and our skin. It focuses and collects itself in certain areas. Some have theorized that how we think of the magic determines how it manifests."
Sheridan shifted her body toward Faela. "Yours radiates from your hands when you heal, like most Tereskans. When I pop, it radiates from my collarbones because it's my center and I'm moving me. We all know that over time this seeping of magic permanently marks our bodies, like tattoos. Look at Dathien's wrists." She gestured with her palm open and pointed at Dathien.
Dathien held up his arms, the sleeves falling down toward his elbows. Dark blue lines crisscrossed around his wrists forming cuffs.
"How old are you?" Sheridan asked him.
"Twenty-nine," he answered, lowering his arms into his lap.
"See," she said waving her hands out from her chest. "From what I understand, from what I've read, a Grier's power is always present, right?"
Dathien nodded in affirmation.
"Because of that he is already marked. Those lines shouldn't be permanently visible for another ten, maybe fifteen years."
"What does that have to do with our eyes?" Jair asked.
"When you absorbed the backlash of black, it scorched every bit of color magic within you at the time, like when lightning strikes sand. It melted it all and reformed it into something fundamentally different and new. Instead of marking itself in your skin, it," Sheridan said snapping her fingers over and over grasping for a word, "purged your eyes, so to speak."
"Purged?" Faela said a hint of amusement in her voice.
"She's not wrong," Tobias said grinning at Sheridan’s explanation. "Well done, young lady."
Sheridan looked pleased with herself, but more than anything she nearly vibrated with delight at this discussion on magical theory. Few things got her this excited.
“Well think about it,” Sheridan began. “The color in our irises changes as we use magic. Most people are born with green eyes and they change as the magic changes us. I have four color blendings, as do Eve and Kade. So, we all have brown eyes now.
“Though Eve and I are identical twins, my eyes have indigo flecks around the pupil, but Eve,” she said gesturing to her sister, “has golden flecks. Because where I have purple magic, she has yellow. So, it follows that the silver eyes mean that at one point, all color was burned out of you.”
Faela's face contorted in a look of horrified realization and she snapped her head up looking at Tobias. "Does that mean that in that moment we were completely colorless?"
Tobias nodded as he stroked his beard. "It does."
"How is that possible?" Eve blurted out half rising from her chair. "No magic wielder can be colorless."
"Grays not only were at one time," Tobias said, his expression stoic, "but the ability to be colorless remains within every Gray."
"Darkness take me," Faela whispered as she sagged in her chair her shirt bunching under her arms. "But what does that mean? To be colorless…" she trailed off her voice strangled.
Kade's eyes reflected the churning of his mind. "That means that Grays can absorb any magic used against them."
"That and so much more, my boy," Tobias said in a hushed tone.
No one spoke, trying to process the revelation. To be a colorless magic user was worse than blasphemy. To be colorless went against the foundations of the Orders teachings about magic. Magic infused every living thing in the world. The colors of magic were the threads that bound reality together. To be colorless meant that a person was nothing, a void. Worse than a void, to be colorless meant that person existed outside the structure of reality.
The implications left them stunned, everyone looking at something, anything other than Faela or Jair or Haley. Except for Sheridan, who chewed on her thumb as her mind tracked down each implication that watershed from this revelation.
"Darkness," Faela finally spoke, her voice an empty echo. "No wonder the Orders hunt down Grays to bring them to judgment and cleansing."
Tobias' eyes clouded at the final word she spoke, but it passed as fast as it had appeared so that Faela thought she must have imagined it. "The Orders fear that which they cannot contain and control."
At that statement, Eve's gaze locked on Tobias, her eyes guarded and suspicious.
Before she could speak, Faela pushed back her chair rising to her feet. She paced in her small section of the crowded room and leaned into the corner, her forehead resting on the paneled wall. The cool, lacquer of the varnished wood pressed against her skin.
Inhaling, she broke the silence. "I thought I had been cursed, but this..."
Startling everyone in the room, she slammed the flat of her palm with a loud crack against the wall at the height of her face. "This is an abomination," she said in a choked whisper. Her nose touching the wall, she let her hand slide down until her arms hung at her side. In a dead tone, she said, “I'm an abomination.”
Mireya slipped off of Tobias' lap and stood beside her. She slid a hand onto Faela's back. “No. No, you aren't, Faela. Really, you just need to–”
Faela shook off Mireya's touch, whirling to face the girl. Her eyes glowing a dangerous crimson, Mireya took an involuntary step back.
“I need to what?” Faela seethed as she yanked back the scarf revealing her flushed face. The scarf sagged down her back. “What do I need to do, Mireya? Guide me. Counsel me. Tell me what to do. Tell me how I'm not a monster.�
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Faela advanced a step closer to Mireya with every sentence, until Mireya backed into the adjacent wall, next to the stove. Dathien half rose out of his chair, but one look from Mireya restrained him.
Mireya's voice was small. “Faela, stop. You're scaring me.”
Anger and loathing and guilt and shame rolled off of Faela in waves.
“This isn't you,” Mireya said only loud enough to reach Faela.
Faela's eyes flashed and without a warning, she hauled back her left shoulder and with a scream of frustration threw all of her weight behind her fist into the wall narrowly missing Mireya. With a crunch, she shattered several bones in her hand. Tears in the corners of her eyes, her voice thick, she pressed her body in toward the wall and Mireya. “You have no idea who I am, little girl, or what I'm capable of.”
No one in the room moved. No one made a sound. Until the noise of a chair scraping the floor, as it was pushed back from the table, shattered the tension. Tobias stood behind Faela, who still leaned in toward Mireya, her knuckles ground into the wall. He covered Faela's hand with his own and pulled her away from Mireya whose cheeks were stained with silent tears.
Blood dripped down Faela's knuckles where the skin had split and ripped against the wood. Tobias flipped her hand in his to examine the damage. He did not try to extend any of her fingers that curled in unnaturally. Instead he rotated his large hand that cradled hers to see which joints and bones had taken the brunt of the impact.
He made an affirming noise in the back of his throat. "This is going to hurt, Rafaela. Are you prepared?"
She gave an apathetic nod as she stared through everything.
His hands glowing with red light that enveloped hers, he flattened her hand in his, straightening each one of the crushed fingers. Faela gasped with a sharp intake of air at the pain, but did not flinch.
"There," he said dropping her hand. "It's going to feel stiff for weeks and be sore for days." He lifted her chin with a finger, forcing Faela to meet his gaze. "That was a reckless, hot-headed, and cruel thing to do, Rafaela," Tobias reprimanded her, "and I understand completely. I did something very similar when I found out the same thing. Only I didn’t hit a wall. What I hit, hit back."
Shatter (The Children of Man) Page 31
