Chapter 24 #2
I’d take a look at another one then, I decided as I followed him down the path, my hands tucked into the sleeves of my borrowed coat, its high collar snug against my throat. Durlain didn’t look terribly in the mood to pause right now.
We walked in silence for a minute or two, found the next pillar, and moved on after a quick check to make sure it wasn’t damaged.
‘Do you mind if I ask more questions?’ I said.
A loud exhale in the darkness – I couldn’t tell whether it was a laugh or a huff of annoyance. ‘I would start worrying about that concussion if you didn’t.’
‘Oh. Alright.’ That was easier than expected, and I had to scramble for a moment to figure out which of the dozens of questions in my mind deserved priority. ‘What is the situation between your aunt and you, if you don’t mind telling me?’
‘I love her to death,’ he said – not a moment of hesitation, not a care for the sudden, startling vulnerability of those words.
‘After Mother died, she more or less adopted us, which was a risk she did not need to take and has quite likely saved our lives several times over. And she claims I’m her favourite nephew, which would be more flattering if I didn’t know what the competition entailed, but is very kind of her all the same. ’
I almost laughed, realising just in time I’d sound too desperate for his attention if I did. ‘But she didn’t tell you about the history of this house.’
‘No.’ The tone of his voice didn’t change. ‘I didn’t say we trust each other.’
Oh.
That was quite possibly the most Averre thing I’d ever heard.
Garm darted past us, merrily chasing his tail between the trees. Next to me, Durlain was quiet as we walked, as if anticipating my next question.
‘Why?’ I said obligingly.
It would be nonsensical to think he’d been waiting for it – but he replied so immediately it was hard to shake the impression. ‘She worries I’m so determined to replace my father that I’ll end up becoming my father, and I’m afraid she’ll disappear without warning again.’
Again.
‘Like when she had to flee Mount Averre?’ I guessed.
‘Yes.’
‘She left without telling you?’
‘Oh, she had to.’ He sounded bitter. ‘She knew my father would interrogate Muri and me about the role we’d played in her disappearance, and thanks to the oathstone, we’d have been in deep trouble if we had known anything.
So she left and arranged for Seranon to hand us a letter with an explanation after all the investigations had finished – but that took about three months, and we didn’t have a clue where she was in the meantime. Or whether she was even still alive.’
His effective mother.
A little over a decade ago – which meant he’d been seventeen and stuck in a court of vipers, with an eight-year-old sister who was now his sole responsibility and no idea where the last adult he’d trusted had gone.
‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled.
He exhaled audibly in the dark. ‘We survived.’
Yes.
We both had.
And that was all there was to it, wasn’t it?
It all seemed so much clearer in the dark, his tall silhouette moving soundlessly beside me, his face unreadable in the shadows.
Barracks or palace rooms, runes or fire – none of that made much of a difference here, in the spring night of a place we could both have called home.
Different monsters, he and I, but would the corpses we’d left behind care whose claws they’d ended up between?
It had been much easier to hate him. To believe myself one step above him – a murderer and a torturer like him, yes, but at least one with a heart.
Durlain had a heart, though.
An ink-black heart, maybe … but hell, it beat ferociously.
We reached the third runestone in silence, and there we paused, neither of us picking up the conversation where it had been abandoned. Now was as good a moment as any, I decided, and moved my fingers – dagaz, sowilo, a light blooming in my palm.
‘Mind if I take a look?’
He moved back, into the shadows. ‘I’d rather step between a bear and its young than between you and your runes at this point.’
‘Bastard,’ I said absently and came up on my toes to inspect the spell.
It was a genius, glorious piece of work.
A shield, of course. Algiz, coming back over and over. Against attacks, against sound, and then, more intriguingly … algiz, sowilo, othala, naudiz, sowilo. Shield, vision, containing, lack, vision. A protection against vision without an existing vision—
Oh.
‘This is stunning,’ I told the stone, scanning the rest of the spell.
Durlain gave a soft laugh. ‘Enlighten me.’
I’d momentarily forgotten he was standing behind me. ‘It ensures passersby can’t see the house at all unless they already know it’s there. That is, if they’re aware there will be something to see, they’ll see it. If they don’t know, they won’t. When you and Cimmura first came here …’
‘We knew,’ he said, no need for me to finish the question. ‘Aunt Gon, too, when she and Errik came this way. Seranon gave them a detailed description of the route.’
‘Well, there you go.’ My fingers slid over the engravings, following them around the algae-covered stone.
‘Of course, each pillar in itself only blocks the view past its own spot. But then there’s this little gebo clause here’ – I tapped the short rune sequence farther down the pillar – ‘which adds all eight spell points to one big formula and creates a full loop of protection between them, rather than leaving them standing as separate shields. Brilliant. Someone’s really thought this through. ’
‘So it seems, yes.’ The words were barely audible.
I turned at that.
He stood with his back towards me, gazing into the impenetrable black of the forest – into the wilds of the world outside, the night from which these spells protected us. Eight stone pillars between me and cruel reality, I realised with a sudden shiver. Between me and Aranc, between me and—
Kestrel.
No. Kestrel couldn’t follow me here.
I whisked out the light in my palm all the same, blinked against the darkness, and muttered, ‘Perhaps we should walk on.’
He didn’t even question it. ‘Yes.’
Who had he been thinking of? His father? His brothers? Those same birds on our trail?
We walked in silence past the fourth column, then past the fifth.
It was there that the trees receded to reveal the main road to the Dawn House, the broader sand path over which we must have arrived with the horses.
A glimpse of moonlight streaked down between the branches, illuminating us and the frolicking hellhound up ahead.
Garm’s fur was a blanket of snow in the silvery light.
Next to me, Durlain’s face looked almost as pale, the angles and edges starker than ever – a look that was both impending doom and …
Doubt?
I frowned, replaying the last bit of the conversation in my mind. Was he angry? Had I said something wrong? But the point that had made him go suddenly quiet wasn’t an insult or an accusation. Rather—
Someone really thought this through.
Someone.
A witch, more specifically.
An outrageous suspicion reared its head, almost too good to be true.
I cleared my throat, made an attempt to look neutral even though the darkness of the forest was closing in around us, and said, ‘Pretty ironic, isn’t it, that you’ve been living here safely for years thanks to the protection of witchcraft? ’
No answer.
Oh, this was fucking excellent.
‘Do you still believe every single one of us is a danger to Seidrinn?’ I added and kicked a pebble off the path. We passed the sixth column without pausing. ‘Even if you want to assume that I am, for the sake of the conversation?’
‘I should have left you in that bloody river,’ he muttered as he averted his gaze.
‘Witty,’ I said.
‘Oh, don’t flatter yourself. I’m being fully sincere.’ A deep, slow inhale. ‘I’m just realising— Most of them don’t get anything like the education you had, do they? The runewitches?’
‘On magic?’ I shrugged. ‘No.’
‘No,’ he repeated, sounding weary, almost resigned.
‘There used to be academies, of course,’ I added, because that was what Kjell had told me.
‘And scholars and wandering teachers and at the very least some sort of oral tradition. A lot of which was lost when you burned our libraries. No one really knows how the oathstone was made, just to name one example. And most witches born nowadays barely know more than the meaning of the separate signs, if they learn even that much.’
He sighed. ‘Yes. No Rigmor’s Law and compound maxims, whatever those might be.’
Hell.
He remembered my babbling?
‘Exactly,’ I said, trying not to sound too baffled. We passed the seventh pillar. ‘And just in case you were wondering, a couple of loose eihwaz signs aren’t going to bring about a second Mount Thuel.’
‘I figured.’ In the darkness, the hand he rubbed over his forehead was little more than a blur of skin and glittering scars. ‘Well. I’ll have to think about that.’
‘Careful,’ I said wryly. ‘You might have to conclude you’ve been wrong.’
He glared at me. ‘Thorn in my side, didn’t I say?’
The burst of laughter broke from my lips before I could stop it.
I managed to rein it in almost immediately, to swallow that stupid, grasping sound – but in the ice-cold silence of the forest, I might as well have tried to take back a thunderclap.
Next to me, Durlain’s footsteps wavered for a single damning moment.
Shit.
The eighth pillar loomed up from the night, and I grasped the excuse with both hands, hurrying towards it to check the inscription.
When I turned back, Durlain had stopped walking.
Standing between the trees, watching me as though he’d never quite seen me before – eyepatch a gaping hole in the darkness, his good eye almost as large, lips parted a fraction in anticipation of hell knew what scathing words were about to come out.
Too loud, Lark’s voice reminded me.
Too desperate.
‘What?’ I snapped, because the alternative was running and never looking him in the purple-flecked eye again.