W e set off in the morning. It wouldn’t take us too long to get to Orasiev, at least not with the help of Stratagram travel—we were lucky to now
have multiple functional Wielders, which made life so much easier. We stayed away from main roads, choosing to move along side paths and camp at night instead of finding inns. Getting run out of town by bounty hunters once was more than enough for me.
Ishqa, as we had come to expect, came and went as he pleased. He traveled with us for the first day, then said he had business to attend to and abruptly flew off into the sunset, leaving us a few feathers to contact him.
What “business,” I wondered?
I kept waiting for the moment when Brayan, too, would announce his departure, but it never came. At the end of the first day, as he was putting together his tent, I approached him.
“You’re staying?”
“Of course I’m staying.”
“I clearly remember a conversation or two where your attitude was more along the lines of, ‘I’m going to Besrith and you can come or not,’ et cetera et cetera.”
“I don’t appreciate being mocked, Max.” He gave me a flat stare over his shoulder. “Do you want me to go to Besrith?”
That was a complicated question. My new memories—the darkest ones
—weighed heavily on me. Heavier than ever, every time I looked at my brother’s face.
“No,” I said. “I’m just saying, there’s nothing ‘of course’ about it.” “I changed my mind. Are we done?”
“We are done, General.” I gave him a sarcastic salute and turned away.
I made it three steps when Brayan’s voice said behind me, “I thought you would end up back in Ilyzath if you stayed with them. I was trying to…” A pause, then a grumbled, “Never mind.”
I didn’t turn. I couldn’t decide if I was angry that Brayan was essentially confessing that he manufactured the urgency of going to Besrith, or touched that he had done it because he was trying to protect me.
I settled on both. I tucked my hands into my pockets and kept walking without another word. It was always easier for Brayan and me to just not talk about things, anyway.
 |
ON THE THIRD night on the road, I dreamed of my family.
I had forgotten how bad the dreams could be. Before, the ghost of grief was there, yes, but the absence of the memory eased the pain of it in so many ways. Ilyzath had shown me their faces every day, but the walls in my mind had protected me from the truth behind that torture.
Now, the wounds were as raw as they were the day it happened. When I dreamed of their faces this time, it skewered me. When I watched them die, it tore me to pieces.
I woke up covered in sweat. Tisaanah’s body curled around mine. “Wake up,” she murmured in my ear. “You’re dreaming.”
I was, and I wasn’t.
I blinked in the early morning sun streaming through the tent. I kissed Tisaanah’s forehead and then silently extracted myself from her embrace. My whole body was tense, as if cringing for an incoming blow.
“Max…” Tisaanah’s voice behind me was an unspoken question—
what’s wrong with you?
I put on my clothes. “It’s just a hard day.”
I didn’t even have to look at a calendar. When there is a day in your past that’s that bad, you just know.
Tisaanah understood immediately, because of course she did.
 |
THE SILENCE at breakfast was suffocating. Sammerin knew what day it was, too, and if there was any doubt, the way Brayan almost took his head off over something totally innocuous acted as an apt reminder.
I could barely look at Brayan.
I hadn’t allowed myself to think too hard about the lie I was telling him just by being here. Compartmentalization was a beautiful thing. But it was broken, today. Today, everything was just too big, too loud, too painful to sit inside those neat boxes.
Brayan looked like he hadn’t slept at all.
“We need supplies,” he grunted, in the first words anyone spoke over breakfast.
“There’s a market nearby,” Tisaanah said. “We can go today.”
Her fingers traced mine. She had hardly let go of me all day, like she felt like she was the only thing tethering me to the earth. She may not have been far off.
“I can hunt,” Brayan said.
“We can buy meat, I am sure.”
“I—” His jaw ground. “I think Max and I should go hunt.”
I could feel both Tisaanah and Sammerin’s stares drilling into the side of my face.
The absolute last thing I wanted to do today was go anywhere with Brayan, let alone somewhere secluded with weapons. My feelings towards him were so complicated they didn’t even make sense anymore—a massive tangle of grief and guilt and anger that I couldn’t pull apart even if I wanted to, which I most certainly did not.
I forced myself to meet his eyes, and I was taken aback by how abjectly sad he looked.
“It’s good to get out,” he said, a little hoarsely. “Go somewhere alone.
Spend time in nature. On… days like today.”
“Maybe we should all stay together,” Sammerin suggested, in a noble attempt to give me a way out.
But Brayan had just sounded so… desperate.
“Fine,” I said, surprising even myself. “Let’s go hunt.”
|
TOGETHER, we moved through the underbrush. The forests in Threll were odd, not as green or dense as the ones in Ara, and full of tall, ivory-barked trees with few branches. It made it easier to spot animals, but harder not to be spotted by them. We moved silently. It was a good excuse not to talk.
It was Brayan who finally said it. “You know what day it is today?”
What kind of question was that? Of course I knew what day it was today. “Yes.”
“Do you usually… do… anything?” “Drink myself into a stupor,” I said. “Do you want to—?”
I scoffed. “No.” I’d come to realize that alcohol usually caused more problems than it solved.
“I usually… do this. Go hunting somewhere. By myself.”
If I hadn’t been trying so hard to keep myself together, I might have found it a little funny that Brayan’s tactic for dealing with unwelcome emotion was running off to go stab things in the woods. Farlione men. Sensitive to the very end.
“I shouldn’t have said what I did to you,” he said, after a long, uncomfortable silence. “Before. Back in Sarilla.”
I didn’t want to talk about this. I wanted to be by myself and not talk to anyone about anything that felt this terrible, ever, let alone with Brayan. Doing this had been a mistake.
I thought, You have every right to scream at me for whatever the fuck you want. You don’t even know how much you have that right.
I said, “It’s fine.”
“The truth is,” Brayan said—and Ascended fucking above, I despised his sudden desire to talk through his feelings—“I didn’t want to find you, back then. I was grateful you weren’t there when I got home.” He stopped and turned to me, and even though I knew better, I did the same, meeting his stare. It was oddly childlike, despite the fact that he looked every bit the hardened warrior he was. “I didn’t want to have to look at anyone who looked like me.”
A pang of sharp, familiar pain rang out in my chest. I hated how much I knew how that felt. I spent ten years alone, hating myself, and I was both obsessed with the thought of Brayan and utterly repulsed by the idea of seeing him again. Some of it was guilt, of course. But just as powerful was
the physicality of it, the sheer gut punch of seeing eyes so similar to the ones that looked back at me from the flames that day.
How strongly he resembled our father.
I didn’t want to look at anyone who looked like me.
The image of Sella’s daughter, a little girl who looked so much like Brayan, flashed through my mind, and a reluctant understanding clicked into place.
“It was just—a lot to do alone.” Brayan turned back to the brush.
Brayan—Brayan, the man who had held me to such impossible standards that I signed my life away to the Orders just because I wanted to prove myself to him—had needed me. Strange how this realization so stunned me.
“I should have been there,” I said, quietly. Even knowing all that I knew now, I meant it. He shook his head. “It’s… it is what it is.”
I turned back to our task. I thought we were done. But after another few minutes, Brayan said, “They let me do it, you know.”
“What?”
“The Ryvenai extremists. The murderers. The military let me be the one to execute them.”
Fuck. I didn’t know that people had died for this—for my crime. I’d never asked, never wanted to know. I still wished I did not know.
“Did it make you feel better?” I asked. “Yes.” A pause. “No.”
Sounded about right.
I was desperate to end this conversation, but Brayan kept talking. We were barely even pretending to hunt anymore. “It’s… strange. There’s something I can’t stop thinking about. They weren’t what I was expecting.”
“What?”
“The murderers. The ones who did it. They were just so… they were so weak. There were ten of them, but more than half were scrawny, drug- addicted teenagers. How did that happen? How did our father let that happen? He was one of the most effective warriors in Ara, and yet these— these rats managed to kill them, with him in the house?”
I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
I knew the answer, of course. Remembered the way my father’s face had changed when he saw mine. How he’d been ready to fight but had
paused just long enough to temper his shot, make it non-fatal. Even as he watched me do the most horrific things, he was not willing to kill his son.
I spent a lot of time thinking about our father, too. Thinking about that moment.
“I couldn’t get my head around it,” Brayan went on. “And I came to a conclusion. I think that they must have taken hostages. I think they probably would have gone after the girls first. Maybe Kira, maybe Shailia, but I think Marisca would have fought them and—”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I threw down my bow and whirled to him. “Stop. I don’t want to listen to this.”
A flicker of—fuck, was that hurt?—crossed Brayan’s face. His jaw tightened.
“You don’t want to know what happened?” he said. “You haven’t spent the last decade agonizing about that?”
Suddenly, I understood why Tisaanah and Sammerin viewed sending me away and never seeing me again as a mercy compared to the truth.
“You want it to make sense,” I said. “It’s never going to make sense.” “It could make more sense than it does.”
“And what fucking good would that do? Why do you want to know how they suffered before they died? Is that how you want to remember them?”
“It is the only way I remember them now,” he said, between his teeth. “I remember them a million different ways in a million different seconds in the same two-hour span. I imagine them in the unknown of all of those questions. Did our mother have to watch them die?”
“Brayan, stop.”
“Did those pieces of shit rape our sisters—”
Fuck, I absolutely could not listen to this. “STOP.”
“I can’t,” he ground out. “I can’t stop. This is what I’m telling you. I imagine them in infinite horrors. It never stops. You don’t feel that way?”
It was almost darkly funny. He’d spent ten years trying to find one horror. I spent ten years trying to forget all of them.
“Besides,” he said, “don’t they deserve that? Don’t they deserve to have their last moments known, instead of lost like that? Even soldiers on the battlefield get to have their final words witnessed.”
“You know better than—”
“I should be able to do this for them.” It was practically a snarl. He turned around abruptly, his back to me, his shoulders rising and falling.
I don’t know why it had never occurred to me that he was suffering as much as I was. The realization struck me dully, now. It was hard for it to change anything when I was struggling to hold myself together, too.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The words were a little choked. I didn’t expect them to hit as hard as they did—just two words that encapsulated so much more than Brayan knew.
He let out a long, long breath and turned around. He no longer looked angry, only tired. “I—It’s not your fault.”
I bit my tongue so hard it bled. He sighed. “It’s just a hard day.”
“It’s a hard day,” I agreed, quietly.
Maybe I could have said more to him. Maybe I should have said more. Instead, I swallowed the truth as far away from the surface as I possibly could, and the two of us worked in silence for the rest of the morning. We barely spoke again.
