The Dark Ability: Books 1-4

by D. K. Holmberg

  “Being sent to the mines will do that,” Rsiran said.

  She stared at him for a moment. “I wish he had never done that, but Neran always thought that he could keep you from…” She caught herself and shook her head. “Perhaps that is in the past. What has happened, has happened. And now that Neran is gone, it doesn’t matter, does it?” she said, mostly to herself.

  Brusus looked over and caught Rsiran’s wrist. “It seems that you are more welcomed than you expected. Do you need me to be here?” he asked.

  Rsiran looked at his mother, at the deep wrinkles that had formed along her eyes, and the way that her face wore a mask of concern that she’d never had when he lived at home. What had happened to his family? So much had changed, not only for him, but for them as well. Seeing her, and seeing that she seemed almost relieved, left him with questions that he suddenly found he needed answers to.

  His mother watched him, and there was a hint of… worry or hope or… something written on her face. As much as he needed answers, it seemed that she did as well.

  “I think that I’ll be fine.”

  Brusus turned to the door.

  “Brusus?” Brusus paused and turned. “Can you find Jessa and tell her where I am?”

  Brusus smiled. “Probably wise that I do. Better be ready to answer a few questions.”

  “I am,” Rsiran’s mother said.

  Brusus tipped his head to her. “That’s good, but you’re not the person I meant.”

  With that, Brusus pulled open the door and stepped back into the streets of Lower Town, leaving Rsiran standing with his mother, alone for the first time in ages.

  Chapter 10

  When Brusus left, Rsiran debated what to ask first. His mother saved him by motioning him into the small home. Rsiran followed, noting the utilitarian furniture, a far cry from the plush chairs and the warm decorations found around their home when he’d been growing up. Here, nothing adorned the walls other than a few lanterns to provide light, thick oil burning within them.

  The smells were familiar, though. He caught the scent of bread rising and the fragrant aroma of roasting meat as she stopped at a small table and touched the back of a chair, motioning for him to sit.

  Rsiran settled onto the chair and rested his hands on the table. “What happened, Mother?” Rsiran asked.

  She took a seat, balancing on the edge of the chair and clasping her hands in her lap. Her fingers played with the fabric of her dress, and she shook her head softly. “What happened, he asks,” she whispered. “So much. So much. How can you begin to understand everything that we’ve been through?” she asked him, barely meeting his eyes.

  “Everything you’ve been through?” he said. “You think nothing of what I’ve been through, only the hardships that you’ve endured?”

  Her gaze drifted to the door, where Brusus had disappeared. “You travel in the company of the Elvraeth now. I think you have endured much less than we have, Rsiran.”

  Rsiran smiled inwardly. Brusus would have been either amused or annoyed that his mother identified him as one of the Elvraeth. Born to one of the Elvraeth, Brusus had been exiled as surely as his mother. “He is not one of the Elvraeth.”

  “No? I thought…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. Much as it doesn’t matter what happened to us in the time you’ve been away. We have suffered, that is all that you must know.”

  Rsiran thought of how he’d been tortured, the friend he’d lost, the way he’d been abducted. “That’s not all that I must know,” he said. “What happened?”

  “When you left—”

  “Left? I was sent away, Mother. Don’t make it seem like it was my choice.”

  “You could have listened to him,” she said.

  Rsiran sat back in the chair and shook his head as he studied his mother. “Listened to what? He wanted to change who I was. He wanted me to refuse the abilities that I have been given. How could I listen to him?”

  “Neran only wanted what was best for you, Rsiran. He knew what would happen if you were to use them, and how others might use you. You don’t understand… You can’t understand. And now he’s gone.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Rsiran said.

  “You couldn’t know,” she answered, clenching her hands more tightly in her lap. “After… after you left, he fell into the ale even more. Neran always had a problem, always thought that drinking could help him ignore…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “He lost the smithy,” Rsiran said.

  She nodded.

  “I saw it,” Rsiran admitted.

  “You know your father. Maybe not as well as you should have, but you should know that losing the smithy—especially after losing you—was the worst thing that could have happened to him. More than anything else, it changed him.”

  “Why did he leave you?”

  “He… He was ashamed, I think. And afraid that if he stayed, they would hurt the rest of us.”

  Rsiran frowned. “Who would?”

  His mother reached toward him, before pulling her hands back. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter. To me, it matters.”

  “Why? Because you’re still so angry with him for what happened? What does that change, Rsiran?”

  Would it change anything for him to know?

  It was possible, he realized. He still didn’t know why his father had been taken to Asador, or why Venass had claimed him. Rsiran still didn’t really know why his father had been to Thyr before, or even how. He had thought he’d spent his entire life in the city, but if that wasn’t true what other secrets could his father be hiding?

  “Do you know where he is?” he asked.

  “Gone,” she whispered.

  “Do you know who took him?”

  “Rsiran,” she said, a pleading note entering her voice. “You only put yourself in danger by asking. Why do you think I’ve come here, to a place where they won’t even search for me? Why do you think I had Alyse find work, and put her out from my home, separating her as much as I could? She needed to be safe.”

  “They? You mean the Elvraeth?”

  “Please don’t ask.”

  Rsiran wondered what secrets she was keeping. There was more to his father than he had realized. And here Rsiran had thought that he was the one that the Forgotten had come for, but maybe there was more to it.

  “Why was he in Asador?”

  She looked up, her eyes reddened. “What?”

  Rsiran nodded. “When I found him, he was in Asador, locked away like nothing more than a prisoner.”

  “Neran lives?”

  Rsiran sniffed. “You haven’t answered. Why would he have been in Asador?”

  “They wanted smiths with skill, master smiths they claimed could hear the call of the ore. Your father, he…”

  Rsiran nodded. “He can hear lorcith,” Rsiran finished. He pulled on the lorcith knives in his pocket and sent them hovering above the table. They pulled on his awareness, calling to him. Rsiran noted that there was no other lorcith in her home, not as there once had been. Lorcith had always been a part of the home, always a decorative metal. In that way, they were blessed nearly as much as the Elvraeth, at least he had always thought that to be the case.

  “Great Watcher,” she whispered. “When you did that before, I thought it some trick.”

  “No trick. This is what father fears. This connection to lorcith. It’s this connection that’s kept me alive when so many have tried to kill me. Tell me, how could this be dark?” he asked.

  Her eyes fixed on the knives, as if unable to move away from them. “Stop that.”

  Rsiran sent the knives spinning. Since holding the crystal in the heart of the palace, his connection to both lorcith and heartstone had increased. Now he could easily spin and hold the lorcith in place, and could more easily detect heartstone around him.

  “Stop!” She smacked at the knives with her hand and they dropped to the table.
/>   Rsiran pulled them back to him, and slipped them into his pocket.

  “You’ve been around Father too long if you fear that,” Rsiran said.

  “Not your father,” she whispered. “You don’t understand anything, do you?” she asked. “Perhaps Neran was right. All this time, I thought that he had been wrong sending you to the mines, that he had made you suffer needlessly. I tried telling him that you could learn, that you needed time to understand, but he saw what I could not.”

  Rsiran’s back stiffened. “And what is that?”

  “That… what you just demonstrated… is dangerous. That leads to darkness.”

  He sat frozen for a moment, unable to even answer. How could his mother believe that his ability with lorcith was dangerous? It had been Sliding that they feared, not his connection to lorcith. Only when he’d begun listening to lorcith had his father decided that it was time Rsiran be punished.

  “Dangerous,” Rsiran said. “This dangerous ability kept me alive when I was trapped in the Ilphaesn mines. This dangerous ability helped save me when one of the Elvraeth thought to use me. And it helped keep me safe as I began to realize how much danger exists outside of Elaeavn.” He stood, knocking down the chair as he did. “Is there anything you wish me to tell Father if I see him again?”

  “You know where he is?”

  “I told you that I found him in Asador.”

  “Found. What does that mean?”

  Rsiran stepped back, moving toward the door. It had been a mistake coming here. All that he had done was dredge up the same feelings of inadequacy that he’d had all those years spent living at home, feelings that he’d managed to move past with the help of his friends, and Jessa.

  When his mother had first welcomed him into her new home, he had thought that she might have been happy to see him, but now he realized he’d been mistaken. She wasn’t happy to see him at all. All she cared about was what happened with his father, and how that had affected her. Did she even know about Alyse? How would she handle that news?

  “It means he was in Asador. He is not any longer.”

  “Where did they take him?” she asked. She stood and reached toward Rsiran. “What did they do to him?”

  “He’s in Thyr. I don’t know what they did to him,” Rsiran said.

  “What? Why would they have taken him to Thyr? That leads to nothing but…”

  “But what?”

  She shook her head. “What does it matter? You don’t care what happens to your father. You can leave, go back to wherever and whatever has become of you, and enjoy the finery of your new station. Leave me here in this part of the city,” she said, her nose turned up as she did, “and don’t worry about us.”

  Rsiran should have left, but he hesitated. “You think that I don’t care, but when I learned he was the man I’d brought from Asador—”

  “You brought him back from Asador?”

  He nodded.

  “Neran was here and he didn’t come for us?”

  “He wasn’t allowed.”

  “By who?”

  Rsiran crossed his arms over his chest. Brusus didn’t deserve the blame for what happened with his father. What had happened with him was on Rsiran. “Because of me. There was something I needed in Thyr, and when I learned that Father had been in Thyr before, I took him with me.”

  She sucked in a soft breath. “So you know.”

  “Know that he hasn’t spent his entire life in the city? Or that he feared me becoming what he already was?”

  Rsiran felt certain that part of his father’s concern with his ability with lorcith stemmed from his own ability, or possibly inability, to ignore the call of lorcith. Rather than ignoring it, Rsiran had embraced it.

  She turned away from him. “Did he tell you?”

  “Why don’t you?” Rsiran said.

  She leaned on the nearest chair as if for support, but didn’t turn back to face him. “You are more like him than you realized, you know that, Rsiran? Only, he was much harsher to you than his own father ever was to him.”

  Rsiran never knew his grandparents. They had been gone, returned to the Great Watcher long before he ever had a chance to meet them, but his grandfather had the smithy before his father. And his father before him. The smithy should have eventually passed to Rsiran, and now it never would.

  That would have bothered him more only months before. Now, he had grown accustomed to the fact that he would never know the smithy where he’d first swung a hammer, and would never work over the anvil of his forefathers, heat the same forge that his ancestors had heated. No, now he would only work at the hidden smithy, always fearing what would happen were the constables to discover his presence, and always fearing what his ability would compel him to create next.

  “Harsher how?” Rsiran asked. He didn’t want to know—whatever had happened no longer mattered—but a part of him needed to know. Had his father gone through something similar? If so, how could he have thought it fair to put Rsiran through the same? After what Rsiran had gone through, he could never do that to another, especially family.

  “Do you think you were the first to hear the way the metal called to you? Do you think that you were the first to struggle with control?” She sniffed and wiped her arm across her face. Rsiran realized that she was crying. He couldn’t find it in him to feel sorry for her.

  “Was Father sent to the mines by his father, like he sent me?”

  “No. And he recognized the mistake as soon as he sent you, but how could he call you back without sharing what you needed to learn on your own?”

  “I learned how to nearly die,” Rsiran said softly. “Was that the lesson he wanted me to learn?”

  “He knew what it was like. When he was about your age, he was sent from Elaeavn much like he sent you, only he was sent farther from the city. His father wanted him isolated from the call of the ore, and thought that sending him away would weaken it. Neran should have done the same for you. It would have been less cruel.”

  It wouldn’t have mattered where his father had sent him. With his ability to Slide, nothing weakened the call or limited him other than his willingness. And maybe, had his father sent him anywhere but Ilphaesn, the others who knew of Sliding, and how to control it, would have reached him sooner.

  Could it be that his father had protected him?

  Not intentionally, but nevertheless, maybe he needed to give up the anger and hurt that he’d been feeling since he was kicked out his home and focus on what he’d been given. Sometimes, it was easy for him to forget about all that he’d gained, the friends—family, really—and the understanding of his ability. That might be more valuable than anything else.

  “Where was he sent?” Rsiran asked.

  His mother turned to him. Tears streamed down her face, leaving her eyes streaked with red. “I thought you said he told you.”

  Rsiran stared at her and said nothing.

  “Thyr. His father sent him to Thyr. Far enough from the city that he wouldn’t feel the draw of it.”

  “Why Thyr?” Rsiran asked. His father had never answered that question for him, or told him why he’d left, but now that his mother had, Rsiran thought he understood.

  “There were craftsmen in Thyr who worked with him, men who knew how to work with other metals and helped turn him into the smithy that he is—or was. That was where we…”

  Rsiran could imagine what had happened. His father sent from the city and forced to ignore the drawing of lorcith, learning to work the forge until he no longer heard the draw of lorcith. Using iron or steel or any other metal, until using lorcith was a faded memory and his forging ability became second nature. Had Rsiran been forced to learn the same way, what would have changed for him? What would he have learned? Maybe the same skill as his father, or maybe less. Lorcith had turned him into the smith he was now, guiding him at first, helping him draw shapes from the metal that he wouldn’t have known possible.

  Something his mother had been about to say pulled on hi
s attention. “What were you going to say about Thyr? That was where you what?”

  She wiped her arm across her face, smearing the tears that had streamed there. “It no longer matters, does it? All of that is in the past.”

  “It matters,” Rsiran whispered.

  “Thyr,” his mother said, “it is where we met.”

  Chapter 11

  The words took a moment to sink in. If his parents had met outside of Elaeavn, there could really only be one reason for it, but the reason made no sense, not given what he knew of his parents. They had always followed the Elvraeth rule and had served as expected, living quietly within Elaeavn, or had until Rsiran had been sent to the mines.

  “If you met in Thyr, that means that you’re one of the Forgotten,” he said.

  Her entire body stiffened. “You think that I could have been exiled?” she asked.

  Even the term she chose matched what the Forgotten used. Exiled, not Forgotten.

  But that meant that he had ties to the Forgotten. Had Evaelyn known? Was that part of the reason they had wanted him?

  No. They wouldn’t have poisoned him, trying to force answers from him if that were the case. Unless Inna didn’t know. Evaelyn had been upset at how she’d used the slithca syrup on him.

  He needed to find Della. She might know more.

  Rsiran turned his attention back to his mother. “What did you do?”

  She pulled her chair back and took a seat. “I did nothing but have the misfortune to be born outside of the city,” she began. “Your father returned me. Such a thing is allowed, but there is monitoring, and a price to pay.”

  “What kind of price?”

  “The kind your father paid,” his mother said.

  Rsiran frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that he had permission to return with me to Elaeavn, but there would come a day when he would be asked to do more. You, like your father, are descendants of the ancient smith blood. There is power in that.” She pointed toward the pockets of his cloak where he’d tucked the knives. “Even they know that.”