Chapter Eight Sylas
Founder’s relic: One of three relics of immortality belonging to the founders of Gorhail Institute of Magic.
Founder’s relics include Ysenia Faro’s Cuff, Sileas Ronin’s Imortalis, and the Arkani Coin from the four founders who joined the Houses of Illusion, Metal, Dust, and Secrets to form the House of Arcane.
Private Note: Faro’s Cuff missing since Willow’s death.
eight | sylas
Beau is dead.
My shoulders ache from the number of people who squeezed them, offering condolences. By now, they must be familiar with the routine. They all look at me with pity in their eyes when they should be wishing death upon me. Dad and Beau were both killed because of me.
We’ve been back from the woods for hours, and I haven’t moved from the front steps of Overseer Paltro’s office, unable to go anywhere near the institute. The cold early afternoon air bites at my exposed skin. Still, I don’t move because I deserve every ounce of pain the weather chooses to inflict.
Paltro was in his office when I walked out of the passageway, my dead brother in my arms and my sister at my heels.
He’d considered me for a moment, wondering if this was yet another of my antics gone wrong.
But when my tears started flowing, and Lyria wouldn’t stop crying, he took Beau’s body from me without a word and carried him away, with Lyria following closely behind.
My fists unclench, and the stupid Afa’s Bloom stares at me—white petals splattered with Beau’s blood. Damas wears his name well as the God of Luck and Treachery. We came back with all the ingredients and my brother’s corpse. Then again, why do we pray to the Gods for a gamble?
I squeeze my fist, rub the flowers together, and toss them to the side. It’s all useless now. Beau is dead. And nothing can bring him back.
Around my wrist, Raiku coils and uncoils himself, occasionally slithering to my hand, and then back.
Railesza hisses, her sharp eyes studying my face, then she wraps around my forearm.
I run my knuckles against the soft scales of her head.
She tried so hard, harder than she did with Dad, but like before, even she can’t bring back the dead.
“Sylas.” A labored voice calls in the distance. I lift my head, and Paltro walks toward me with an unsteady gait. As he gets closer, I notice his bloodshot eyes and the quiet sniffles.
“Let’s go inside, son.” He pats me on the shoulder, his face somber. He looks like a decade swallowed him today. I probably look worse, with my torn clothes and maroon-crusted nails.
I drag myself into his office, the rust stink of blood trailing after me, taking over the room’s usual scent of pine and wood.
Paltro gathers a couple of books from his desk and neatly shelves them on the wall behind him.
When he turns around, his face looks gaunt.
He clicks his tongue, lets out a long sigh, then takes a seat, beckoning me to do the same.
The brown leather armchair squeaks when I slump in it.
If Paltro expects me to talk, he’ll wait a long time.
I already know what he’s going to tell me: I’ll have to answer to the Grand House for Beau’s death.
They’ve probably already decided to throw me in prison.
I’ve broken too many rules to ask for leniency—endangering the lives of two uncertified mages, one of whom was killed under my watch; breaking curfew with a mage who was accused of murder; stealing Afa’s Bloom from the Northern Greenhouse; and retrieving Chasmore without prior authorization.
Even if I didn’t kill Beau, he was killed on an unauthorized field assignment led by me.
Besides, what would be the point of fighting their sentence? Going through life with Dad’s death weighing on my every thought is agonizing, but even the mundane task of breathing feels impossible when I think of Beau. How will I carry on for Lyria if I can’t hold myself together?
In silence, I watch Paltro drop two heaping teaspoons of tea leaves in the black iron kettle to his right. Beau used to be fascinated with these kettles when he was younger—Arkani made, forged by manipulators and powered by dustmaker dust, they heat up the moment water is poured in.
“Silver’s missing.” Paltro catches me off guard. I was expecting him to chastise me, not go straight to investigating. Perhaps it’s how he copes. He lost himself in work after Dad died.
Beau’s aspier, Silver, was given to him a few years after his mother’s death, while his father’s aspier rests in his family vault in Riverview.
Normally, a young Aspieri goes to a relicsmith to have their own aspier forged with a hair from their bloodline—usually their own—but Beau’s parents died when he was only two.
They didn’t even have the chance to take him to the relicsmith.
Now the Cardot line is dead, and Silver is free to bond with another Aspieri.
“Rhodes mentioned that Victor’s relic was also taken,” I reply with a frown.
I want there to be a connection, want a reason for the poachers to have murdered my brother, because I refuse to think Damas was this cruel.
We’ve all gone into the woods countless times past curfew. Why did it have to be Beau?
Paltro hums while he retrieves a small towel soaked in alcohol and hands it to me. I hesitate. Washing Beau’s blood off my hands feels like I’m already moving on. He died mere hours ago.
“Son.” Paltro looks at me like I’m broken, and maybe I am. “Grief will swallow you whole if you don’t forgive yourself,” he says, edging the towel in my direction.
My hands wrap around the wet cloth. With each scrub, I hold back my tears. How could I let this happen?
“Sylas, I understand what you’re going through, but you need to pull yourself together,” Paltro says softly, plucking the towel out of my hands.
Then he pulls two cups from his drawer. He reaches for the kettle through the mess on his desk and pours us each a cup.
The earthy smell of his special blend of mint, vanilla, and black tea from Old Iserine calms me a little. I take a sip.
“Olivia Corvi also died this morning,” he says.
“How?” I nearly spit out my tea. Now, he has my attention.
“Drowned in Little Lake Albion. A gruesome sight.” He recoils, setting his empty cup aside. “Claws ripped through her arm. I’ll spare you the details. Her relic is also gone.”
Three relics stolen in three days. It can’t be a coincidence. “That doesn’t make sense, Uncle. Olivia Corvi was a nonmagi, wasn’t she? Nonmagi can’t wear relics, and poachers can track them.”
“A nonmagi who hid so well that no one found her until her death.” He nods.
“Per the Firstline investigator assigned to her case, someone fashioned a real relic for her at some point. She was going to be offered a teaching position at the academy, and they needed to test her relic for modifications, as per protocol.”
I have a hard time believing that the nonmagi wanted to stay at Gorhail for a teaching position. Magisters—mage teachers—are somehow paid even less than their nonmagi counterparts. Her motivations for staying aren’t convincing… and now she’s dead.
“Do you have the preliminary report?” I lean forward. This nonmagi may be key to figuring what happened to Beau.
“Firstline hasn’t released one yet, but the Albion sheriff says she tripped on the boardwalk and fell into the lake.” Paltro gives me a knowing look. “It’s certainly not a coincidence that Victor was found dead yesterday morning, and Olivia and Beau died around the same time this morning.”
He doesn’t have to say more. This isn’t the work of random poachers if they were unafraid to murder them in Gorhail and Albion, where Secondline patrols night and day.
There’s a link between the three of them, and I have to find it.
I need to know why my brother was killed.
Only then will I allow myself to grieve him.
“Who’s Firstline assigning to their case? ” I ask.
Paltro nods. “Darro’s first case.”
At the mention of Gryff’s name, I look away. As much as I am comforted that Gryff has been assigned to the case, I hate that this is probably how he and his brother, Grayson, found out about Beau’s death.
“Poacher activity is rampant across the Ten Provinces.” Paltro pulls down the map of the country from a shelf behind him. With a long pen, he taps on the border where Aurignan and Holm meet Old Iserine. “Reports of settlement expansion across the country came in.”
I squint for a better view of the map. It’s filled with red crosses. “It seems like they’re preparing for something.”
Paltro rises from his seat, walks around his desk to the low table encased by a warm brown sofa behind me.
I stand and watch him pick up a copy of The Daily Mage, a national newspaper spreading propaganda like it’s their only purpose.
He raises it up so I can see the headline: “Rafael Grimm: Monster or Misunderstood?”
The increase in poacher settlements makes sense now.
For centuries, The Daily Mage has been rewriting history about Grimm, making him out to be some sort of hero and dismissing his crimes.
As a result, his followers have been growing in number and becoming bolder.
But he is dead, his soul bound for eternity in a Mortemagi relic in our ancestor’s personal vault, which only Lyria and I can access.
It’s ironic how Mortemagi don’t even trust themselves to contain a monster they forged.
“Why doesn’t DOTS put a stop to The Daily Mage’s Grimm propaganda?”
“Money,” Paltro says as he puts on his coat.
“The Daily Mage pays a hefty sum to DOTS every year to be able to operate in the Ten Provinces. Walk with me.” Paltro holds his office door open, and I follow him outside.
Without the distraction of the map and the newspaper, my thoughts drift to Beau again.
“The Grand House has yet to deliver your sentence, Sylas,” he says. We cross the grass and take a left past the empty fountain of a snake with three heads, until we’re under the sheltered walkway that leads to Hollow Tree.
Haal, I had momentarily forgotten about the Grand House.
“Raiek does complicate things,” he adds when I don’t reply.
Of course the Imortalis complicates things.
If the Grand House could sentence me to death like they did Beau, I would’ve already been dead.
It’s almost comedic how poachers are now emboldened to murder mages right outside of Gorhail walls, and the Grand House’s priority is to discuss me.
“When’s my hearing?”
“Tonight in Riverview,” he says. “They’ve agreed to let you see your brother one last time, because you won’t be allowed to attend his funeral.”
I halt, clenching my fists at my sides. They know how important burial rites are to mages, and yet they won’t let me bury my brother. Instead, my sister will have to stand alone as her aspier’s venom locks our brother’s casket and his body is lowered into the ground.
“Lyria…” I choke up.
“…will be fine,” he reassures me. “A Firstline investigator questioned her, and she was cleared immediately. Not that she didn’t try to take the blame. I’ve sent her home to Iserine for a few days until we settle your case.”
Guilt punches me in the gut. I took so much from my sister, and she’s still trying to defend me.
Hollow Tree is quiet when we walk in. It’s suspicious for this time of day, when mages should be having their afternoon tea.
As Paltro and I walk across the expansive circular room, the few people there avert their eyes.
Out of fear? Out of shame? I’m unsure. I follow Paltro up the stairs in silence, every step steeling myself to see Beau’s body again.
We take the narrow hallway opposite Dean Rhodes’s office and pass by three portraits of the Deathbringer, her golden eyes looking down on me.
Why do we still celebrate her? What does she know of duty?
If she hadn’t abandoned all of us, poachers wouldn’t have returned to Bale and killed my father, or my brother.
Our steps slow down. The chapel is on the other side of the large opening overlooking Hollow Tree’s dining hall. I glance down, and the mages below scramble to resume their meals.
When we round the corner to the chapel, four High Guards block the entrance.
Paltro holds his hand across my chest, barring me from taking a step forward.
Two of the High Guards hurry toward us, black masks covering half their faces.
They are high-ranked Firstline mages, tasked with the most dangerous cases.
By the way they’re acting, one would think I’m the leader of the poachers.
As they come to a stop in front of me, I peek around them into the chapel.
Beau’s and Victor’s bodies are gone.
My head snaps toward Paltro, but he’s also in shock.
Did someone move their bodies? I step around the guards to inquire, but one of them grabs me by the arm.
“High Magus Sylas Archyr, you are under arrest for the murders of Beau Cardot and Victor Carver, as well as the abduction of their bodies. You will be tried for coconspiring with poachers.”
My hands begin to sweat, and my muscles stiffen.
Beau’s and Victor’s murders? How did the Grand House come to this absurd conclusion?
At the commotion, both Raiku and Railesza awaken, their eyes shifting between me and the guards.
But there is nothing I can do. Conspiring with poachers means high treason.
And high treason means they will kill me and my aspiers.