I was in a garden. Flowers sprawled over the landscape like an untamed beast. The air was bright but cool with encroaching autumn. I sat cross-
legged in the grass.
Someone was beside me. Close—close enough that I was acutely aware of their presence. They drew Stratagrams in the dirt. The person did not speak, but I knew they were frustrated. Each mark produced either a tiny result, or no result at all.
“We can try something else,” I said.
No answer. My companion just kept on drawing. I watched their hands, pale skin spotted with tan. I knew they would not listen, would not stop, and felt an odd swell of pride at this.
Still, I didn’t look at the person who sat beside me.
I didn’t look because I couldn’t bring myself to. Because I knew that I might notice too much about the shade of their eyes or curve of their mouth, and feel something that I wasn’t prepared to feel.
So I just stared at the dirt, pulling dead weeds from the earth.
But avoiding it didn’t save me. Despite the pungent flowers, it was this other sweet, citrus scent that consumed me. Despite the cold air, it was the warmth of this other body that devoured me.
“Max.”
May-ooks.
And then I woke.
 |
A VALTAIN WOMAN leaned over me. She had a round, pretty face and curly white hair, and frowned with concentration. My eyes snapped open, and I sat up so fast that I nearly smashed her forehead with my own.
Fuck.
Ascended fucking above.
I fucking remembered.
Not everything, but— but more than I did before, all hinged upon a single sentence. It looped through my mind over and over again: Brayan is here.
Brayan is here. Brayan is here.
Brayan. I knew who that was. My older brother. And with that memory, fifteen years came roaring back to me at once.
If I remembered my brother, that meant I remembered my parents. My siblings—Atraclius, Kira, Marisca, Shailia, Variaslus.
If I remembered my brother, that meant I remembered our home, Korvius. It meant I remembered leaving to join the Orders. I remembered endless long nights and early mornings of training, always failing to meet his expectations.
It meant I remembered the Queen. The Queen—Nura.
Holy fucking hell.
It’s a strange sensation, for half your life to suddenly come slamming back onto you like a million-pound weight. It was like I had been standing in a dark room all along, and the light had suddenly flipped on. Yet, it was a flickering light, one that obscured the questions I needed to answer the most. So much was still missing.
I remembered Brayan,and my family, but I didn’t know what had happened to them… even though I knew… I knew, somehow, that they were gone, the ache of their absence throbbing in my chest at the thought of them.
I remembered joining the Orders, and I knew it had changed my life, but I didn’t know how.
All of that was shrouded in the shadows still left behind the light. “What’s wrong with him?”
“For fuck’s sake, aren’t you supposed to do something?” The voices sounded very far away.
“Breathe, Max. Breathe.”
I became aware of hands on my shoulders, of magic reaching towards my mind. I didn’t like that sensation one fucking bit.
“Get the hell out of my head,” I snapped, yanking away from the healer’s touch. The Valtain woman stepped back fast, clearly afraid of me.
Only now did I take stock of my surroundings.
I was in the Towers. But I wasn’t in the basement, where Nura usually took me for experimentation. The floor-to-ceiling windows revealed a churning surf and a sunrise-drenched sky. Standing in front of that window was the Queen, her white suit blood spattered, crown tangled even more viciously in her hair. She looked so wildly different from my memories of her as a scrawny preteen.
And beside her was my brother.
The sight of him alone was so disorienting that a headache immediately began pulsing behind my temples. The present and my patchwork understanding of the past collided, making my stomach churn.
In my memories of Brayan, he was a young military champion—in his twenties and the prime of his career. For so much of my life, I cared about nothing more than I cared about what he thought of me.
The man who stood before now me looked like a different person.
He, like Nura, was drenched in blood. A wound across his cheek seeped red. His hair was still long, as I remembered it, bound over one shoulder in a braid that now had a few strands of silver mixed in with the black. He wore a long burgundy jacket that seemed vaguely military in style, though I didn’t think it was from Ara.
When I was younger, I had admired the way Brayan managed to embody that mix of savagery and elegance so coveted by the military—cold and animalistic on the battlefield, then proper enough to wash the blood off his hands and guide noble ladies around a ballroom. Now, he seemed… different. Like the balance had been disrupted.
He surveyed me with a dark-eyed, sharp stare.
When was the last time I had seen Brayan? I racked my brain. Memory beyond my teenage years dissolved into nothingness. I had the overwhelming sense that I hadn’t seen Brayan in a very long time. That he hadn’t seen me in a very long time.
Why?
I opened my mouth and wasn’t sure what would come out. It turned out to be, “Good to see you, Brayan.”
Nura’s eyebrows arched slightly. “You recognize him?”
If Nura’s surprise meant anything to Brayan, he didn’t show it. He just stared at me in silence.
“He’ll live?” Nura said to the healer, and the woman nodded. “He’ll live.”
“Good. Call the Syrizen. We’ll get him out of here.” Finally, Brayan spoke. “Absolutely not.”
He didn’t look at me, only the Queen. “We have had this discussion, Brayan.”
“We have not, Nura. Not to my satisfaction.” “I can’t do anything about his sentence.” Brayan’s face hardened. “That’s a lie.”
“Brayan—”
“What he did at Sarlazai made him a hero. He ended the Great Ryvenai War that day.”
“And he also—”
“It is unacceptable for him to be imprisoned for those actions.” “It wasn’t my ruling.”
I scoffed. “Bullshit.”
I remembered little about my trial. But I understood that I was in Ilyzath because Nura wanted me to be there. This fact, too, now hit me with a strange new discomfort. What happened? How did we get here?
Brayan barely gave me a passing glance. “Bullshit indeed,” he said.
Nura’s face went cold and hard. “Let’s talk about this later. We have a lot to catch up on.”
But Brayan said, calmly, “We’ll talk about it now, and he is not leaving this room until we do.”
I had never seen the Queen give anyone so much patience before. A muscle feathered in her throat. But when she looked back to Brayan, something changed in her face—she looked younger.
Those new, old memories nagged at me. Nura looking up at Brayan when we were children. She had always adored him. It was odd to recognize that perhaps a part of her still did, even all these years later.
She turned to the healer, who looked deeply fraught by being caught in the middle of this discussion.
“Go. Get the Syrizen to escort Maxantarius back to Ilyzath.”
“But—”
“Go, Willa.”
The healer couldn’t leave fast enough. Nura turned to the window, her back to us both.
“I’m happy to see you, Brayan. I’ve missed you. I’m grateful that you fought with us today. Now you’ve seen how bad things have gotten, and there’s no one I’d rather have at my back for this war. But—”
“What a tremendous disrespect.” Brayan’s voice sliced through hers, cold and lethal. “This is how you thank my parents for treating you like one of their own children? You throw their son in Ilyzath?”
Every muscle of Nura’s body went tense. I could see it even in her back. When she looked over her shoulder at him, all remaining vestiges of warmth were gone.
“My Queen,” she hissed. “Address me by my title. And no one
interrupts me, Brayan. Not even you. When I saw you, I thought that…” Her voice faltered, and in that moment a realization snapped into place. This wasn’t anger. This was hurt. She had truly been excited to see
Brayan, and, beyond all reason, had allowed herself to believe that he would help her. Was that how desperate she was for a friend?
Now, she seemed to be cursing herself for her own foolishness. The door opened, and the Syrizen arrived.
“He is not leaving this room, Nura,” Brayan said, firmly. He took two steps back, subtlety putting himself between me and the door.
I blinked, stunned. Was Brayan about to get into a fucking fight for me? There was a long, awkward silence. Ice hardened Nura’s features.
“Or what, Brayan?” she said, voice deadly calm. She nodded to Brayan’s sword. “Will you use that to murder soldiers from your home country? The people you swore on your life to serve?”
Brayan’s jaw was tight. He didn’t need to reply. We all knew the answer. He was nothing if not loyal to Ara. He would never raise a blade against the people who had once been his brothers and sisters in arms.
And in this moment, I was glad for it.
Because it didn’t matter how strong of a warrior Brayan was—if he did, they would kill him. And that was something my remaining scraps of sanity couldn’t withstand.
So when Nura said to the Syrizen, “Take Maxantarius back to Ilyzath,” I let them take me without argument. Nura turned to the window and didn’t
look at any of us as I was led away again, my brother staring after me.
 |
THE BATTLE HAD TAKEN its toll on Ara. The Towers still stood, but I looked back to see that more windows had been destroyed near the top of the Tower of Midnight. The field leading to the shore was littered with corpses. The Syrizen who led me away were in particularly bad moods. I hadn’t seen these two before. One of them moved oddly—in tentative, lurching movements, as if always half-afraid she’d run into something—and her eye scars were red and angry. I guessed she was maybe eighteen years old. Maybe.
She was new. I wondered how many they were forcing through training before they were ready.
Hummingbird. The word popped into my head without warning, another shard of a useless memory. Slang. They used to call Syrizen that, because they moved in blurs with their spears drawn like a hummingbird’s beak, each strike covering the front of their uniforms with blood.
As I watched this teenage girl stumble around, the nickname now seemed so fucking cruel. Hummingbirds were tiny, fragile creatures, and this one clearly couldn’t fly. She’d get crushed the next time one of those Fey monsters turned up on Ara’s shores. I felt so bad for her that I didn’t even fight her as she led me to the shore, then Stratagrammed me back to prison.
Ilyzath, as always, welcomed me with open arms. It was oddly quiet today. No hallucinations, no whispers. I lay down in the middle of the floor. All my limbs felt heavy. My wounds had been healed, but my body still protested every movement. And my head—my head was killing me, like each new invading memory was a pickaxe slamming into my skull.
I was angry for reasons I didn’t understand. Angry on behalf of all the deaths I had witnessed today. Angry at the Queen for sending me here. Angry at myself on behalf of everyone I couldn’t save—myself included. And I was even angry at Brayan for… reasons that completely evaded me.
I wasn’t sure how long I lay there before I heard the familiar sound of shifting stone.
“Hello, Max.”
“Why are you here?” I asked, not moving.
No answer. Finally, I sat up. Nura stood against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Why are you here?” I repeated.
“You were injured badly. I wanted to make sure you didn’t die on me.
You’re an important asset.”
I gave her a look that told her I knew she was lying. “You recognized Brayan,” she said.
“I did.”
“So you remember…” “Enough.”
A lie. It wasn’t enough. But it was somewhat telling how discomfitted Nura looked at that response. There was much in our past, it seemed, that she didn’t want me to remember.
I laughed. “I see. You don’t like that I remember who you used to be.” Her face barely moved, but I knew I was right.
“Don’t be so full of yourself,” she said. “You hate who you used to be so much that you purged it from your own mind. I look my past in the eye.”
“You aren’t even looking me in the eye.”
She did, defiantly, as if meeting a challenge. “Is Brayan gone?” I asked.
“No. He isn’t happy about… your position, of course, but he agreed to stay and fight for his country. As I knew he would.”
It seemed about right. I could barely string my newly recovered memories together, but even the ones that were smashed into pieces had one thing in common: that Brayan was excellent at fighting wars, and he loved nothing more.
“Terrific,” I said. “A great boon for the Aran military.” “It is.”
A long pause. We looked at each other.
“There was a boy in the attack earlier,” I said, at last. “Blond. A Solarie.
“Military. He was hurt, but I got him to a healer. His name was Moth.” She frowned. “Moth,” she repeated, a strange note in her voice.
“Ridiculous name. I just…” I cleared my throat. “Do you know if he survived?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“He was too young to be there.”
“There are younger ones buttoning up their uniforms right now, I guarantee it.”
“And does that seem right to you?”
She let out a harsh, bitter laugh. “No, of course not, Max. None of this feels right. Thousands of Arans have died since this war began, Max. Thousands. And the damn Fey king hasn’t even shown his face here yet. He hasn’t even used a fraction of his power. You think I don’t feel the weight of that?”
She curled her hand into a fist and pressed it to her chest, over her heart, as if to drive the point home.
Thousands. I had been able to piece together just how bad things were from the glimpses I caught outside the Tower whenever Nura brought me out of Ilyzath during the day. I saw the destruction today. Those monsters shredded our soldiers like paper. They had almost done the same to me.
The truth was, I believed her. It justified nothing, but I believed her. After a moment, I asked, “Why are you here?”
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“I’m here,” she said, “because I need you to understand how much we need you.”
“Why me?”
This was the thing I never could understand.
Countless times now, Nura had pulled me out of Ilyzath to be the subject of Vardir’s machinations. Their escalating desperation was enough to tell me that they needed me. But I didn’t understand why. Why was I so important? What did I have that any other Wielder didn’t?
This was the puzzle piece I couldn’t snap into place.
Nura gave me a look that held many words she wouldn’t say. “Soon, Vardir will have a revised process to test on you,” she said. “I come here on my hands and knees, Max, asking you to help us.”
“What makes you think that I can?” I said. “It’s not as if I’m making Vardir’s experiments fail by choice.”
I refrained from adding that I definitely would if I could. “You remembered Brayan.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Nura’s lips pressed together, and she hesitated before answering, as if reluctant to reveal her hand.
“Vardir believes that we can’t tap into your power because you have blocked it within yourself,” she said. “Your own connection to it is severed.”
“That’s rich, considering that you’re the reason why I got this way.”
“I won’t defend what I’ve done to you, Max. I’m not ashamed of it, but I won’t defend it. Yes, perhaps I’m the reason why you were sentenced to Ilyzath. But whatever happened to the inside of your mind? That part had nothing to do with me.”
She began to turn away. “Nura.”
She stopped.
Maybe this was a question better left unasked. I didn’t even know how to phrase it. I settled on, “What happened? With us?”
She was silent for a long moment, her back to me.
“I loved your family,” she said. “No matter what I did to you. No matter what I’ve had to do since. I loved them.”
And before I could say anything more, the wall parted, and she was gone.
