The Shattering of the Spirit-Sword Brackish 1

by Sam Farren

  “But so much of it is already lost. So much of me has been altered,” Castelle said. “I believed it, Eos. I believed it all.”

  Eos dragged her chair closer, knees almost touching Castelle’s.

  “Yet it has only taken you months for you to unlearn much of it. You always challenged me, but you have given yourself over to the truth. None of this has been easy for you. After you learnt what you did of your family, you did not lose yourself to denial. You did not let what you felt erase all the hurt they’d caused others. You did not let your grief blind you to the reality of it.

  “You did not believe lies over the truth. You did not choose one path over another. You were only ever presented with one world, and you had no reason to think it false.”

  Castelle blinked heavily. The tears were still coming, slow but steady.

  Eos was right. She was the first person to breathe the truth to her. Castelle hadn’t known of it for decades, hadn’t pushed it to the back of her mind because it was easier for her. She hadn’t made herself deaf to the voices of those in need to live out a comfortable life.

  She’d been a child. She’d believed the only thing the adults in her life told her, consistent and unchallenged.

  She’d been a child. She’d been a child! They’d planned every step of this, they’d used her, and she’d been a child!

  “You hated me, when we first met,” Castelle said, biting the inside of her cheek. “Didn’t you?”

  Eos sat straighter.

  “Yes,” she said, holding nothing back. There were never lies with her. “I hated the Princess of Fenroe. I hated the last of the Greysers. I hated any connection to the monarchy. I was wrong for that. I hated an idea, a concept, an assumption. It never occurred to me that you were a person. That you had truly been kept prisoner, all those years.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I know you are not nothing. You are not useless. You do not need to think of this as the end of anything. You are free now. It may take you years to believe it, but you are free. You can begin to move on from this, no matter how slowly.”

  Castelle nodded not because she believed it, but because she wanted to.

  “What do I do, Eos? What do I do now?”

  Eos drew Brackish from her hip and placed the sword on the table. Blue light ran the length of the blade, burning along the edge of the letter.

  Castelle let her hands hover over the sword, never touching it. Eos didn’t stop her, didn’t grab her wrists. Castelle could let herself close, for a moment. She could open herself to Brackish without the spirit surging through her.

  She’d never felt more like herself than she did with her chest rising and falling, tears all cried out.

  She’d never been more uncomfortable in her skin.

  “We came for a reason. You are the only one who can help Brackish. The only one who can give her what she needs,” Eos said.

  “We,” Castelle corrected, mouth slanting at the corner. “You’re the only one who can wield her.”

  Eos nodded, fingers wrapping around the hilt of the sword.

  Light gathered around Eos’ hand. She was comfortable with the weapon, and the weapon was comfortable with her. She’d fought her way out of situations direr than Castelle’s and would see this through. She’d get Brackish what she needed, she’d get Castelle to Yarrin, to her cousin, and then—

  And then what? Eos was nomadic at heart, and she had people scattered across the archipelago. She had no reason to stay, once Castelle was with Layla.

  “Eos,” Castelle asked, eyes fixed on the fingers holding the sword. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “Yes,” Eos said. There were no lies there. She wasn’t capable of it. Her truths were hidden, and only empty silences took their place. “Why do you ask?”

  Castelle shook her head. She couldn’t begin to wade through what had happened in Nor, couldn’t find the right way to ask the questions she might not want the answers to.

  There’d be no lies when the time came, and that was the terrifying part. It would freeze Castelle to her core, leaving her with no chance of disregarding anything Eos said.

  “I simply—” Castelle paused, teeth grinding together. She couldn’t lie, either. “I wanted to know. That’s all.”

  “I went to war. I was a soldier for a long, long time. I did not have a choice in it, but that does not change what I have done.”

  Castelle held Eos’ gaze. In her mind, she saw herself take hold of Eos’ face, fingers fanned across her jaw, thumbs pressed to all her scars. Eos tilted her head to the side, waiting for Castelle to say something more, but no words came.

  “Brackish wishes to be taken into the city. I am uncertain whether the exact location is still within Torshval as we know it, or if the city limits have changed. Our job is to ferry her there. I doubt we will have to do much, beyond be a vessel for her closure.”

  What if Brackish wanted to be taken to the castle? Torshval had grown like a living thing over the years, had struggled to find its shape, but the castle had always been at the heart of it. The castle had always stood upon the same spot, dark volcanic rock making it a formidable thing. If she had to go back there, if she had to go back there, if she had to go back, she, the castle, it would, after everything, she—

  “Castelle?” Eos said.

  “Sorry,” Castelle said, shaking the stained floors and empty eyes from her head. “Sorry. We need to take Brackish somewhere. It’s the least I can do for her. When do you want to leave?”

  She spoke the words clearly and confidently, as though her legs had not turned to wood and sunk into the grain of the chair she was bound to.

  “We do not need to leave now. You should take a moment to rest. Would you like me to give you time alone?”

  “That might be a good idea,” Castelle said.

  Retrieving Brackish, Eos stepped around the table and said, “Would you rather I stayed?”

  “That might be an even better idea.”

  Tears welled up in Castelle’s eyes, as though her head didn’t already ache enough.

  Eos sat down where she stood, close to one of the blanket forts, and idly stroked Rhyolite as he slept. She focused on nothing in particular, and neither avoided looking at Castelle nor stared intently at her, demanding something.

  Time was nothing, in that room. Brackish didn’t hiss inside her head, demanding that she move, that she run, sprint, sword in her grasp, bare feet pounding the pavement. Eos didn’t clear her throat, eyes ever glancing towards the door.

  No one knocked, no one intruded upon them. The hurt in Castelle’s heart softened, challenged by the headache pressing behind her eyes, reaching into her teeth. She didn’t want the truth, didn’t want the lies to clear away, didn’t want her purpose to be presented to her.

  All she wanted was a glass of water and a handful of pills.

  “Eos?” Castelle asked, after the quiet between them had worn away most of the day’s rough edges. “Would you do me a favour?”

  Eos nodded and pushed herself to her feet, pretending she hadn’t already done enough for Castelle.

  “I don’t want to look at this. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to ever read it again,” Castelle said, pushing the letter across the table.

  Without a word, Eos picked it up. It weighed nothing, in her hands. It was paper and ink, its message written in a language Eos had never understood. It was easily torn into pieces, fragments too small to hold a single word.

  It was nothing, nothing. It was gone, scattered across the floor.

  Eos dusted the last pieces from her hands and Rhyolite darted over, batting the shreds of paper.

  “There. Do you need anything else?” Eos asked.

  “No,” Castelle said, getting to her feet. “That’s all, Eos. That’s all.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Castelle spent the rest of the day in the kitchens, playing cards with Tanen as they cleaned a stack of pots, pans, plates, and cutlery in no real
hurry. They explained it was something they liked to do for everyone, something to keep their hands busy, but even beneficial behaviours grew boring, after a while.

  They taught Castelle two games she’d never heard of and didn’t ask a single question about what’d happened in the study, or why her eyes had been so red, her face so blotchy. The overwhelming normalcy of sitting somewhere cool and quiet, when Tanen wasn’t knocking pots against each other, was what she needed.

  She didn’t need to think about her fathers, about spirits, about the branching Greyser family tree and all the hurt it had caused. She needed to sit with a deck of cards and an oversized bowl of stew and believe that this was her final stop, this was her life now.

  A handful of other women who lived in the house popped down to get a look at her, under the guise of making themselves a snack. A few joined them for a game of cards, but nobody asked Castelle if she was really Castelle Greyser.

  Stranger things had happened in that house.

  “How did you meet Eos?” Castelle asked, once they’d exhausted most of their games and were dropping cards on the table without paying them any real heed. “You’re an unusual pair.”

  “Gods, it was forever ago. Five, six years, maybe? I’d run into her a bunch of times. We kinda worked in the same circles, picking up odd jobs no one else wanted to do. A lot of it was, like, go to Lor and pick this up, take these letters to Llyne, blah, blah. Some of it was sketchy, though. Eos never really touched that stuff, but I needed money to support my, uh, bad habits, soooooo.” Tanen shrugged, leaning back in their seat. “There was this guy who hadn’t seen his kid in forever. A real sob story.

  “It was like My husband is being a dick and won’t let me see my kid, I’ve never done anything wrong in my life, I don’t get it. Whatever. I didn’t read it too closely. So, I’m pretty pumped up, thinking hell yeah, this is something I can do. I’ll break into the husband’s house, take the kid while they’re sleeping, and set up a nice little reunion.”

  Castelle raised her brow, but Tanen waved their hands before she could say anything.

  “Don’t go judging me yet, okay? The job paid well, I was in a bad place, but Eos fucking—Eos fucking grabbed me by the back of my shirt and said no. I was like, man, what the hell? And she was like no. That’s all she kept saying. No. No, you ain’t doing that, Tanen. It’s like she’d decided that deep down, I knew better than that.

  “I mean, she was right. It was a shitty job to take. The guy who’d hired me was all—” Tanen pressed a finger to the side of their nose and sniffed a few times, short and sharp. “Like that. Fuck knows what he would’ve done, once he got the kid. The husband was keeping his son safe, yeah?

  “Anyway, I’m a bit out of my head myself, so I’m super pissed. I mean, I need the money, and Eos is just standing there, telling me no? What the fuck. So, I ask her what the hell I’m supposed to do, and she just says, come with me. We’ll find something else to do.

  “Reckon I was so caught off-guard by her saying no to me that I thought, fuck it. Alright. Let’s try this out for a while. Turns out she’s only like, my favourite person on the planet.”

  Castelle smiled over the cards they’d both forgotten. How rare it was to find a certain sort of softness hidden beneath Eos’ silence, in the distance she kept between herself and others.

  “What does that mean? The man was all like that?” Castelle asked.

  “Huh?”

  Castelle tapped the side of her nose.

  Bursting into laughter, Tanen said, “Seriously? That’s the international sign for coke, Cas.”

  “For what?”

  “Drugs, Cas,” Tanen said, laughing still. “It’s a very bad drug, girl.”

  Bristling, Castelle folded her arms over her chest.

  “Learning about drugs wasn’t the top priority for a reclusive Princess, living out in the forest.”

  “Damn,” Tanen said, leaning over the table to pat the side of her arm. “I’ve got so much to teach you. Eos is gonna hate it.”

  Eos spent most of the day sleeping. The footsteps in the corridor never belonged to her, no matter how many times Castelle looked over her shoulder. Come night time, Castelle was shown to a small chamber with a narrow bed and no bars on the window. She fell into a deep, dreamless slumber, nightmares torn to shreds along with the letter.

  In the morning, she found a breakfast tray outside her door and a neatly folded pile of clothing. There was a note from Niamh rested on it, For the journey, and Castelle relished the opportunity to eat and bathe and take her time stepping into new clothes.

  They weren’t terribly different from those Eos had brought her. A little better quality, if anything, but the design was more or less the same. Not having seen the tides of fashion turn over the last fourteen years made everything new look roughly identical.

  Castelle left her chamber with a heavy heart. If the first few months of her journey were anything to go by, she wouldn’t see another bed for a long, long time.

  Eos was waiting in the entrance hall, arms folded across her chest. Brackish hung at her hip, ready to sing, and Eos’ bags had been stocked generously with supplies. Svir stood close by, one eye on Eos. Every time Eos took a step away from her, Svir shuffled closer, until Eos was forced to close her eyes to escape her.

  “Why is it that every time I stand next to you, I become momentarily convinced that my shoulder could feel so, so much better?” Svir asked.

  “It is the sword. She’s trying to get on your good side,” Eos said, eyes still closed.

  “If she turns my bad side to my good side, so be it. Do you have any idea how intolerable incessant pain is?”

  “None at all.”

  Castelle stepped into the entrance hall, interrupting them. Brackish lost interest in Svir and the wound she could close to get through to her.

  “Where are the unlikely duo off to, then?” Svir asked.

  Castelle and Eos hadn’t discussed it. They hadn’t need to. They’d headed towards Torshval for a reason, and that hadn’t changed, despite the tangents they’d been thrown into.

  Eos tapped Brackish’s hilt.

  “Ah. Spirit business, is it? You do not change, Eos. I think I’ll keep out of it. But do come back, if you ever need a place to stay. Rhyolite and Tanen will miss you endlessly and obnoxiously.”

  Eos held out her hand.

  Svir pulled her close and pressed their foreheads together. Castelle didn’t understand the words that passed between them, but her throat tightened to hear Svir speak so tenderly. Eos closed her eyes, whispering softly, and cupped Svir’s face as she kissed her forehead.

  “And you,” Svir said, turning to Castelle. “What can I say? It was a pleasure kidnapping you, and I thank you deeply for your generous gift. I’ll have you know that I would not have done what I did, had I known who you were, beyond your name. I truly did believe I was doing this all for Eos.”

  “Is that an apology?” Castelle asked.

  “Goodness, no. It is the mere fact of things, sweetheart.”

  Sighing, Castelle said, “Sorry about your shoulder.”

  “Oh, think nothing of it. It’s all in the past,” Svir said, waving her off.

  Svir left without another word, content in the knowledge that the house would be taken care of for years to come. Castelle hovered on the spot, expecting the others to see them off, but Eos picked up her bags and held the door open for Castelle.

  “Don’t you want to say goodbye to Tanen? To Rhyolite?” Castelle asked.

  “I have,” Eos said. “They are used to my comings and goings, by now.”

  Eos headed down the path and didn’t look back.

  In the light of day, Castelle saw Torshval for what it had become. The city had merged the old with the new: the shape of it had remained and the streets ran in their destined directions, but the sprawling estates and manor houses had been demolished. In their place stood dozens of homes hundreds could make use of. There were new storefronts wherever C
astelle looked, open spaces where people sat on benches, coats pulled tight around them as autumn turned bitter.

  They walked for a mile through a familiar city that rang hollow. The city hadn’t been rebuilt as a symbol of starting over, ushering in a new age. So much of it had been lost to the fires, so much of it had been ash.

  Castelle tilted her head back. Two people almost walked straight into her. She couldn’t imagine flames engulfing the houses around her, couldn’t make herself see smoke rising in the distance. Torshval had moved past all that’d happened to it.

  The children running through the streets had been born into a world without strife manufactured by a bloated monarchy. There were children who were thirteen, fourteen, the age she’d been when she’d held her breath so the rebels wouldn’t find her, who only knew of what’d happened as a series of stories.

  There was relief in that. There was peace.

  Torshval wasn’t the smouldering ruin it’d been in her dreams, those last fourteen years.

  It’d become something else, something stronger, despite its past. It had taken the people years to rebuild, parts of the city were still under construction, but the monumental task ahead hadn’t stopped them taking those first tentative steps through the rubble.

  The castle was upon them before Castelle knew it. There was no avoiding it.

  The flags had been taken down, the fences removed, and the open land around it was all but gone. Buildings took their place, whole neighbourhoods replacing the meticulously-tended lawns Castelle had ran in circles around with her siblings.

  “It is the seat of the government, now, but it serves as a temple well enough, too,” Eos explained.

  “Really? There’s no separation there?”

  The part of her mind she was desperate not to listen to said it was all wrong, it was all doomed to failure. How could a nation run itself if it was concerned with bowing and simpering to the gods?

  “The idea is that if a government cannot help the individual when they need it, then it has no right to guide the masses,” Eos said. “A woman who is down on her luck has to be as important as the economy of Yarrin, or the trade routes between here and Amaros.”