53. Lazarus
Konstantine sits across from me in the leather armchair that used to belong to our father.
He is swimming in it. The last few years have eaten away at him like rust on iron, leaving behind something hollow and corroded.
His hands shake when he lifts his glass.
The tremor is new, or perhaps I am only now allowing myself to notice.
Tonight is his last night, our last night together. I thought it would be prudent to bring him around, give him a send-off so to speak, and to interrogate the bastard over the last of his little secrets.
“You had another episode,” I tell him as he blinks rapidly at his surroundings. “Three days ago. You don’t remember it, but you had to be sedated.”
His eyes find mine across the rim of his whiskey glass.
There is something floating in them, something unmoored and drifting.
I have seen that look before. I have seen it in the eyes of men who have spent too long in solitary confinement, men who have forgotten the shape of their own souls.
But this man never had a soul, or if he did, he sold it to the devil a long time ago.
“I don’t remember,” he says.
“No. You wouldn’t, but you’re back now. You’re in control.” I lean forward, letting the firelight catch my face. Letting him see the sincerity I have practiced for weeks. “That’s what matters. You’re back, and you’re in control.”
He accepts this. Of course he accepts this.
The alternative would be to acknowledge that his mind is a ship breaking apart on rocks he cannot see, and my brother has never been good at acknowledging things that might undo him.
Instead he drinks, and I watch him drink while the clock on the mantle counts out the seconds of his final night on earth with mechanical indifference.
Tomorrow, I will kill him.
No. That is not quite right. Tomorrow, I will have him killed. There is a difference, though I suspect it will feel the same when I close my eyes and see his face. Which I will. Until the last vestiges of my own hate finally fade away.
“I wonder if he would be proud of me.” He says suddenly.
“Who?” I reply.
“Our father.”
He rolls the glass between his palms, staring into the amber liquid as if it might contain an answer.
“If he could see what I’ve built, what I’ve maintained. The alliances I’ve forged. The enemies I’ve buried. Would he look at my rule and see it as a success?”
I do not answer immediately. In my head, I see our father’s face the way I last saw it alive; hard as winter earth, eyes that missed nothing, hands that had never once been gentle.
I hear his voice, the one he used when he spoke of duty, sacrifice, and the terrible weight of leadership. I think about what he would say if he could see what Konstantine has become.
He would be furious.
No. Furious is too small a word. Our father would look at the sins Konstantine has committed, and he would feel something closer to divine wrath.
The Brethren was his life. His soul. His reason for drawing breath. And Konstantine has weakened it, ruined it, twisted it into something unrecognizable. Something rotten. If he could see his eldest son now, he would weep. And then he would reach for the sword he kept above the mantle.
None of this crosses my face.
“He would be proud,” I say. “You’ve held the Brethren together through storms that would have broken lesser men. You’ve made the hard choices, the necessary choices. Father understood necessity.”
Konstantine’s shoulders drop a fraction of an inch. The tension bleeding out of him like air from a punctured lung. He needed to hear that. He is so desperate for absolution that he will drink it from any cup, even one held by the brother he has spent years trying to destroy.
“Thank you,” he says quietly. “That means something. Coming from you.”
I nod back, because I do not trust myself to speak.
The fire pops. A log shifts, sending sparks spiralling up the chimney like the souls of the damned ascending to nothing. I watch them disappear into the darkness and think about how many souls my brother has sent in the same direction, how many more would follow if I let him live.
“Tell me about Paitlyn,” I say.
The change is immediate. His fingers tighten on the glass. His jaw sets in that way it does when he is about to lie or about to rage, and I have learned to read the difference in the twitch of his left eye.
Tonight it is fear. Genuine, bone-deep fear. Interesting.
“What about her?”
“Why were you and Ines so determined to make her disappear?”
He runs his hand over his face, the palm dragging across stubble I don’t think he’s shaved in days. When it comes away, his eyes are older than they were a moment ago. Ancient. Haunted.
“Secrets,” he mutters. “It always comes back to secrets.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that secrets are what got us all cursed. Secrets are what caused all of this. If you hadn’t started digging, Lazarus. If you hadn’t kept pushing and prying and refusing to let things lie…”
“I started digging because things didn’t add up.” I keep my voice steady, but something cold is winding its way around my spine.
“Curiosity killed the cat.” He laughs, but there is no humour in it.
“And satisfaction brought it back. Isn’t that how the saying goes?
But that’s not true, is it? Satisfaction doesn’t bring anything back.
The dead stay dead. The buried stay buried.
Until someone like you comes along with a shovel and a righteous conscience, and digs everything up again. ”
I do not react. I have spent years learning not to react when my brother tries to wound me.
“What is the big deal with Paitlyn?” I ask again. “What is she to us?”
He is quiet for a long moment. The fire whispers to itself in the grate. The wind presses against the windows like a stranger trying to find a way in. When he finally speaks, his voice is so low I have to lean forward to catch the words.
“Her grandmother is an Attainted.”
I wait for more. When nothing comes, I scoff. The sound is louder than I intended in the quiet room. “That cannot be it. That superstitious nonsense…”
“You think it’s superstition?” His head snaps up, and for a moment I see the man he used to be. Sharp. Dangerous. Present. “You think I would have gone to all this trouble for superstition?”
“It’s an old wives’ tale. Attainted bloodlines. Curses passed down through generations. It’s the kind of thing the elders used to frighten children with around the fire. It’s not real.”
“You never read the ancient texts.” He settles back into the chair, and the sharpness fades as quickly as it appeared. “Father never permitted it. You weren’t the heir. You weren’t going to be Grand Master. There was no reason for you to know any of it.”
“So tell me.”
He takes a long drink. When he lowers the glass, his eyes are focused on something I cannot see. Something in the past. Something in the dark.
“There was a woman. A witch, they called her. She had visions. She saw things that hadn’t happened yet, things that would happen. Things that might happen. The future, Lazarus. She could see the future.”
I want to dismiss this. I want to roll my eyes and change the subject and go back to the world I understand, the world of flesh and blood and quantifiable threats. But something in his voice stops me, something that sounds too much like belief.
“She came to the Order before the schism, before we are what we are now. Before any of it, and her visions split us in half. Half the Order believed she was a gift from God. A prophet if you will. The other half believed she was the daughter of the devil himself, sent to ruin us from within.”
“And which half was right?”
“Both. Neither. Does it matter?” He shrugs, and the gesture is almost childlike.
“What matters is what came next. The fracture. The schism. The Esau. They were the ones who believed in her, who followed her. Who mixed their blood with hers and created something new. Something terrible. The rest became the Brethren, and we have been at war ever since.”
I stare at him. The firelight is dancing across his features, making him look both older and younger than he is. A boy playing at being a king. A king crumbling under the weight of his own crown.
“What does this have to do with Paitlyn?”
“Because she is Attainted.” He says the word like a curse.
Like a diagnosis. Like a death sentence.
“Her grandfather, our great uncle, secretly married a woman from that cursed bloodline. From the witch’s bloodline.
They mingled their blood, they joined the two houses.
The Brethren and the Esau. She is an heir to both thrones, Lazarus. Both of them.”
The words hang in the air between us and clearly, he wants them to hold far more drama than they do.
I want to laugh. I want to tell him he’s being absurd, that this is the kind of paranoid fantasy that belongs in a novel, not in the mouth of the Grand Master, but I can see that he believes it.
Every word. Every syllable. He believes it with the desperate fervour of a man who has built his entire worldview on a foundation of fear.
“If anyone found out who she really was,” he continues, his voice dropping to a whisper, “who her grandparents are, what flows through her veins, we would all be ruined. Us Heseltine’s would never out live the shame.
The Brethren would split just as they did before.
Brother against brother. House against house.
It would be civil war, It would be anarchy.
It would be the end of everything our father built, everything his father built.
Everything that has held us together for a thousand years. ”
“You never told me.”
“Because you didn’t need to know.” He says simply. “Ines and I were handling it. We had it under control.”
“Ines.” The name slips out before I can stop it. Sharp. Bitter. Wounded. “Ines knew all of this. She knew, and you trusted her. But not me. Never me.”