TWENTY-FOUR
The winter rain in Vennaro has teeth. It bites spitefully at my cheeks, cold beads of it spilling down the back of my neck and soaking the collar of my thick sweater. It hasn’t stopped in the last three days I’ve been out in the garden. No wonder everybody gave up on tending it.
But after a few days of honest work, the overgrowth in the garden’s easternmost zone is almost gone.
The ground is visible there again, the dark soil ready to be planted with bulbs and bushes and anything else that stands a chance of surviving if the ground freezes.
It’s hard to say if winter will bring that depth of cold or just keep spitting rain at us.
Much to the oscen’s annoyance, the dead tree bordering the garden edge is now a stump.
In protest, my shadow has taken to roosting in its neighbor’s branches and watching me.
That tree shows signs of the same blight that killed the other.
But I can’t find a damn thing to save it in the Icaros book.
Not that I understand half of what I’m reading.
Besides, I’ve yet to feel even a glimmer of magic waking in my blood.
The oscen dives right over my head when I drag my spade to the stump and lands in the tree next to it with a mournful caw.
“I’ll plant a new one,” I promise, wedging the spade under a half-rotted root.
I put my weight behind the tool, and the root shifts grudgingly, wet earth sucking at the blade. Leaning into it, I push harder until pain sears through my shoulder and my lower back strains. Until my entire body hurts.
But it hurts less than thinking, so I keep going.
A root snaps, and I stumble back a step. My breath fogs in the cold, and I rest against the spade to catch it. Above me, the oscen ruffles its feathers as if making its feelings on continuing this activity known.
“I’ll try to save that one.” I tip my head to the tree it’s sitting in.
Its beak opens, followed by a caw that’s shrill enough to make my jaw clench. Then it hops along the branch, moving closer to oversee the work like it owns the place.
Negotiating with a bird. This is what I’m reduced to, but it’s better than sitting in my room, waiting for the next time the Stars fuck me over.
Or walking Kieren’s belongings down to the Bellatorum.
Forcing myself to pass them off to strangers.
Better than letting go of the pieces of him I can still hold in my hands. And since Bishop won’t train me …
Even with my burns now nearly gone and only the slightest blisters remaining.
I hope the void swallows him.
I’m lifting the spade, pretending the next root is his beautiful face, when a shadow falls over me.
“You never came for a lesson,” Hadrian says.
“I’m not sure …” I grunt as I push its cutting edge against the swollen root. “… why you’re surprised.” The damn thing won’t budge. I fall back a step, panting, and glance over at him. “Honestly, I’m not sure I want answers.”
What good will it do? Scions get to live. People like me, people like Kieren, don’t. It’s just further proof that life’s unfair. That the Stars play favorites and screw over the rest of us. Not that I needed any more evidence of that.
“I assumed as much when you left the book.” He tucks his hands into the sleeves of his robe, looking around with a grimace as if he’s just realizing that we’re nearly in the twelfth month and he should be wearing a coat.
“Let me guess, you came all the way out here to give me lessons in the ancient tongue?” That seems like something he would do.
“I came to make sure you’re alive.”
My chest constricts, but I ignore it. “You might be the only person who cares if I am.”
“You’re being looked for. Lenora checked the library,” he tells me.
I roll my eyes so hard it almost hurts. “I’ve been right here. She must not be looking very hard.”
“She said you won’t come down for meals.”
I return to digging at the root. “I’ve been busy, and I’m sure you all have better things to do than babysit me.
” I grunt again, wishing the oscen would swoop down and scare him away.
Hadrian strikes me as the superstitious type, but the bird has finally quieted, almost like it agrees with why he’s here.
Traitor.
“She’s concerned,” Hadrian says.
He sounds just like Bishop.
“I’m fine.” I keep my attention on the dirt so I don’t add anything that I’ll regret.
But my spade slips, catching on the root, and I trip forward, barely catching myself from falling on my face.
“Clearly,” he says flatly.
“I thought this was what you wanted me to do.” I abandon the starsforsaken stump and return to my other project: a shallow trench carved for the bulbs I dug out of the potting shed. They need winter’s cold ground to sprout roots before they can bloom in the spring. If they’re still any good at all.
As soon as I change direction, the oscen flutters down to the stump like it plans to take up residence so I can’t keep hacking away at it.
“Oh, have the damn thing!” I shout at it. I collapse to my knees and reach for the basket of bulbs.
But Hadrian shifts to stare at the bird, then goes completely still. “Void above, is that …”
I turn a fraction, watching him study it. “It’s just a bird.”
“I haven’t seen one in years.”
“A bird?” I shake my head and drop another bulb into the trench. “You need to get out more.”
But he isn’t listening.
Beads of rain collect on the bird’s feathers, but it doesn’t budge from its vigil, utterly unfazed as Hadrian moves closer, tracking the oscen like he’s seeing a ghost.
“Not since the war,” he continues, mostly to himself.
A shiver races down my back, and I straighten, flinging mud from my gloves onto the ground. More than five hundred years old. I still can’t wrap my head around it.
But it is like having a walking history book to reference, and I can’t stop myself. “Were they hunted back then?”
Have people always been this superstitious?
He’s quiet long enough that I regret asking.
“Not until Ravenell fell,” he finally says.
I swallow. It’s not surprising, but somehow still sad. “I’ve never understood that,” I admit. “We still use nochtimetry.”
Hadrian shrugs. “People always choose the parts of a story that serve them and try to rewrite the rest.”
“So they blamed birds?” I stare at the oscen’s sharp, intelligent eyes. It’s only a creature. But I know all too well how easily fear turns a simple truth into a threat. “That’s silly.”
Hadrian doesn’t correct me. He takes another step closer to the stump, and I cringe, waiting for the bird to startle and fly away.
It doesn’t.
“Ravenell was never good or bad. People have forgotten that part,” he says quietly. “Power hates what it can’t control. The other patrons saw Ravenell as a threat to their own magic, so they let everyone believe the worst. It’s why, even now, some of them want you dead.”
Like the oscens.
An unsettling prickle creeps across my skin. “Where were you during the war?” I ask.
Do I want to know?
His gaze stays on the oscen. “Trying to stop it.”
Not what I expected, but it never is with him. With any of the people Bishop has collected in this house. Only Lenora is what she seems to be.
Which means that any minute I’ll probably find out she’s really an assassin.
“I suppose you succeeded in doing that.” Five hundred years of peace with not even a hint of threat until I dropped my blood in a stupid well and ruined it all.
But he shakes his head. “I failed.”
I open my mouth to ask what in seven hells that means, but before I can he crouches until he’s staring directly at the oscen.
My breath catches as the bird stares back. It doesn’t move. Doesn’t flutter its wings. Just tilts its head and holds its ground.
“I was there when Ravenell fell,” he murmurs.
I sit back on my heels, not daring to interrupt him.
“I tried to reach them.” The words are so distant they almost echo, as if he’s back there again. “But I couldn’t.”
The oscen hops forward and makes a soft clicking sound, and I realize I’m holding my breath. He reaches out a hand, and the bird nips him and takes flight, soaring into the low cloud bank overhead.
Hadrian snaps out of his daze and turns to me, but something raw lingers in his brown eyes. “Sometimes, I think I came back to life as a punishment.”
“Do you really believe that?” But it’s not like I can judge him. Kieren would be here if it weren’t for me.
His mouth twists into something that’s not quite a smile. “You believe a lot of things after something like that.” He looks up at the sky like he might see the oscen soaring among the clouds. “Especially when you jump off a cliff and the Stars put you right back in your body.”
The confession knocks every thought from my head. I scramble for something to say, but my mouth won’t even open.
Something of the ghost I saw in Bishop haunts Hadrian’s eyes now, too. As if the weight of their deaths still lingers like chains around their necks.
Hadrian rubs his jaw with his hand. “There’s no need to say anything. It was a long time ago.” He pauses, still searching the clouds. “Go on. Ask.”
I suck in a breath so deep that it hurts and force out the question. “Was it scary? When you came back?”
Was Bishop scared? His hands were so certain the other night, but the first time …
Hadrian finally looks back at me. “I was afraid of what I might become.”
“Why? What did you know about scions before?” I ask.
He shifts and squares his broad shoulders, allowing me a glimpse of the warrior he must have been back then. “I lived through the Last War,” he says. “I was a child in the one that preceded it. But I knew what scions were capable of.”
I blink at him, standing up. “What are they capable of?”
“Scions started the war cycles, fighting to claim the Eternal Throne.” He takes a seat on the abandoned stump. “Mortals got in the way.”
My eyebrows shoot up. None of this makes any sense. “The king sits on the Eternal Throne. Or he did.” Before his death, and then it hits me. “Wait. Is the king a scion, too?”