Chapter 33 Truth
The vision swept through Rolan on fine grains of sand.
The scene assembled grain by grain before him, putting him in the center of a reconstructed view of Verity Square.
A sour fog haunted the city, and the statue of Duke Benhald loomed behind him.
He could tell by the shadow it cast across the cobblestones, and he instinctively tried to turn to look at it.
But of course, this was not his secret, not his memory to control.
He was a helpless witness, trapped in the body of whomever this secret belonged to.
The eyes he was peering through shifted then, grazing over the face of a man in blue.
The duke, standing in an empty square, complained about the cost of grain imports.
Ugh, boring. What kind of secret was this?
But then another voice cut through the memory, high and sharp, ragged with desperation.
“Your Grace!”
Rolan’s borrowed eyes swung to the left, focusing on two figures across the square: a tall guard captain—Hoff—and the boy he was dragging to prison.
The boy, of course, was Rolan.
And the secret, he realized, was Luc’s.
I’m eager to be out of this city. I’ve grown too used to my silence and solitude, I suppose.
This place stinks of secrets and desperation.
Like the boy I see now, being dragged across the square by old Hoff.
How that overgrown bully rose to so high a position, I cannot fathom.
Poor kid is probably bound for prison. I wonder if he even deserves it.
I turn back to my brother, assuming he’ll pay little heed.
He rarely does when it comes to the smaller details of his city, the finer points of his people’s lives, no matter how I advise him otherwise.
The little things matter. The smallest stone in the road can ruin the finest warhorse. He doesn’t listen.
But today he surprises me. He considers the boy, who calls out again, proclaiming his innocence and begging my brother to intervene.
Benhald raises his hand, getting Hoff’s attention, then strides over.
“See, brother,” he murmurs out of the side of his mouth, “I do care about my people’s little lives.”
So this is all for my benefit, is it? I sigh and trail behind him, noting the way his guards move just a little away from me, nervously stroking their crossbows. As if they hadn’t once been my guards, and this my city.
How easily the winds change.
Benhald and Hoff speak over the boy’s head, my brother inquiring about the boy’s situation, Hoff struggling to keep his small prisoner under control.
The child squirms like a weasel in a trap, his face flushed, with Hoff’s big hand smothering his mouth.
My fingers drum the hilt of my sword, my jaw set.
Truth, I never liked the man. I cast a hard look at him, but he pointedly ignores me. Few in this city will meet my eyes.
Benhald is inspired to bring up his plan to rehabilitate the youth of Crisanth. An old plan he’s talked about for years, though I’ve yet to see it bear any fruit.
While he drones on, the boy bites Hoff’s hand. Ha! I like his spirit. The captain hisses, pulling his hand away for just a second before wrapping it more tightly around the boy’s jaw.
But that second was enough for me to see the diagonal scar tracing away from the corner of the boy’s mouth, pulling his lip into a slight, permanent smirk.
And that’s when it hits me.
I know this boy.
I’ve seen him before.
Not in person, but through a secret. One I found a year ago, cracked from a talon relic in the forest.
The Cryptic had been low and long like a snake, and it put up a nasty fight. That was months ago, but I never forget a secret, nor any of its details. No Arcanist can, no matter how we might try to wring them from our minds.
And this boy, I remember very well.
The secret was a bad one, though brief. Its bearer’s hands were large and sported a tattoo—a bone drawn in thin, dark ink, stretching from the wrist joint to the first knuckle of the thumb.
The sight sent a jolt of lightning through me, white hot with savage fury.
Oh, I knew that hand. I knew it as well as my own, so often had I traced the memory of it in my mind, exactly opposite to the way I traced the faces of my dead wife and son.
The bone tattoo distorted as the hand flexed, gripping the length of a long cane. There was shouting, curses and insults hurled at the boy, who cowered against a wall, trapped.
Then the cane flashed, and the boy cried out and fell, blood welling from a long cut over his lip.
A diagonal cut that tugged the corner of his lip. It would leave a scar.
That part was not the secret, however. The secret came a moment after the boy fled, blood welling from the cut, tears welling in his eyes.
Alone, the man with the bone tattoo had fallen to his knees and raised his hands to his face, weeping for the violence in him he could not control.
That was the secret: the shame he could not speak.
The regret he dared let no one see. He had hit the boy before, and would hit him again, and he would hate himself for being too weak to stop it.
It all washes through me now, as vividly as it had the night I crushed the snake Cryptic’s relic and absorbed its power. Gazing at the boy, I see the same dark, desperate eyes, the same defensive slant to his eyebrows, and of course, the scar.
Yes, it is the same boy. And the man with the bone tattoo was his father, I would bet my horse on that.
This is it.
This is the link I have been waiting for, looking for, without knowing where to start.
This boy knows whose hand bears the bone tattoo.
He is how I find the monster. He can guide me to him if he’s cooperative, and if he isn’t, he can be bait.
If he’s the father, the man will surely come looking for him.
And when he does, I’ll be waiting.
I make my decision in a stuttering heartbeat, stepping in front of Hoff. I’m hardly aware of what I’m saying. All I hear is the roar of vengeance in my ears, the monster inside me rearing its head.
“I’ll claim him,” I hear myself say.
An apprentice? Ha. I swore long ago to take no apprentice. How could I? How could I risk anyone learning what I truly am, knowing that I am indeed the monster they fear? That behind all my talk of honor and integrity and duty lurks a Cryptic of my own, its claws vengeance, its venom fury.
I’ll take the boy. I’ll feed him and clothe him. And he’ll lead me to the quarry I’ve so long hunted. After that… I’ll find some excuse to send him back. Likely by then he’ll be desperate to escape anyway.
“I’ll claim him,” I say again, and the plan is set. It’s all in motion. I’ll play master for a few weeks, until I’ve gotten what I need from him, and then the boy and I will be rid of each other for good.
We’ll both be better off that way.
The secret retracted its claws from Rolan’s brain with a sibilant hiss.
He sat back, eyes blank, his mind glassy.
“Boy?” Luc stretched out a hand, then closed it uncertainly. “Is it done? Is it over?”
Rolan said nothing. He felt he would never speak again. He felt as if a Cryptic had cut him lengthwise with a long, wicked claw, and at any moment now, his body would realize it and he’d split into two halves.
Luc watched him, his brow low with concern. “You haven’t taken the oaths yet,” he said. “You can tell me what you saw. It helps, to speak it aloud. Whatever it was, I can help you carry it.”
Drawing in a trembling breath, Rolan stood and shook himself. The secret still clung to him all over, like cobwebs.
He looked at Luc. Really looked at him. Past the mask of honorable duty Rolan had just praised like a truth-blasted fool. Past the warrior, past the farmer, past the father he’d been.
And he saw a man like any other. A man ruled by anger, like his own pa. By vengeance, like Hoff. By lies, like every person who had used Rolan in the past.
He looked at Luc and saw all the worst parts of everyone he hated and feared bound up in one man. One man he’d grown to trust. To idolize. To love.
Like an idiot.
“You never wanted me,” he whispered.
Luc frowned. “What? What are you talking about, boy?”
“I’m talking about the man with the bone tattoo.”
Luc’s face went slack. He sucked in a breath, leaning backward, away from Rolan. A look flashed over his eyes, a terrible look, and Rolan thought of the monster Luc himself had said lurked inside his mind.
“It was yours, Luc,” Rolan went on. His voice sounded strange in his own ears, both hard and brittle, and cold, so cold, like the crackle of a frosty winter morning. “Your secret. All those times I joked you’d have to fight one of your own secrets, and now…”
He laughed bitterly.
Torchlight made shadows dance on the Arcanist’s face, but otherwise, he was completely still. A man turned statue, not even blinking.
“What’s the man with the bone tattoo to you, anyway?” Rolan asked. “Why do you hate him?”
“He killed my family,” Luc said hollowly.
Rolan took a step back, feeling like he’d been punched.
No. No, it couldn’t be true.
“He set the fire that took Miriel and Mylas,” Luc went on.
“I never knew his face, nor his name. Only his hands. After he set the flames, I ran to catch him. But he went out the window, and the only glimpse I had of him was his hand gripping the sill before he dropped. I’ve been hunting him ever since. ”
Pa killed them. Pa killed Luc’s family. Rolan struggled to breathe, to make room in his heart for this terrible new information. But it was too much pain at once. If he let it all in, he would collapse from the sheer weight of it. He focused on Luc instead.
“That’s why you became the Arcanist,” Rolan whispered. “To find his secrets. So you could find him. And you did. You found his secret, and it led to me. And I was to be your bait. You used me just like Hoff.”
Rolan began to laugh again, harder this time, a horrible, rasping laugh like the wheezing of a sick animal. He began to pace, his legs still wobbly from the sudden loss of Arcana.
Casting his eyes around the cave, his gaze fell on the list of Arcanist names carved into the wall, and the blank spot under Luc’s where he’d imagined carving his own name one day, and he felt infinitely, unbearably stupid.
“But he never came for me,” Rolan continued harshly.
“He never took your bait. So you were stuck with me, until you decided you’d had enough.
And you sent me back, as you’d intended to do from the start.
You filled my head with your books and your histories and your knives and your stupid, stupid sense of honor, and then you dumped me in the gutter because you never wanted me in the first place! ”
“I…” Luc’s face twisted into a grimace. Still he would not look at Rolan directly. “At first, yes. That was my intention. And it was wrong, I know that. But it’s not that simple anymore, boy. I didn’t expect…”
“You didn’t expect what?” Rolan cried, desperate for Luc to say something, anything that might reverse the way this was going.
But the Arcanist only shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Of course this was how it would always have gone. Why would Luc have ever wanted Rolan, the son of his family’s murderer, for an apprentice? He probably loathed Rolan almost as much as he did Rolan’s pa.
It had all been a lie.
Rolan stood. He took the knives from his belt and threw them on the ground with a clatter. He took off the belt of supplies and dropped that too. His cloak had been a gift from Luc, and he hurled that down, though it fluttered to the ground with a less satisfying result.
Finally, the boots. The boots that had been Luc’s son’s. Mylas’s boots. He kicked them off, flinging them at the wall.
He’d been trying so hard to prove himself to a man who’d never wanted him to begin with.
“I don’t want any of it,” he snapped. “I don’t want any part of you or your miserable life!”
“Rolan—”
He didn’t wait to listen.
He ran, out of the cave and into the woods.
It was properly dark now, but he knew the way back.
He couldn’t tear out everything Luc had taught him, rip it from his brain and dash it to the ground.
If he could, he would have. He’d claw out every memory of the man and his house and his goat and his secrets and he’d drown them all in the river.
Rolan tore through the trees, knowing Luc was still too weak to give chase.
He thrashed aside branches and stumbled over roots, glancing up now and again to fix his eyes on the star that led north, hating that he knew how to find it now, hating how proud he’d felt when he’d first managed to pick it out on his own.
See? he’d boasted to Luc. I’m not so stupid after all!
Oh, how wrong he’d been.
He made enough noise to draw every Cryptic within ten miles, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care.
When he finally broke through the forest’s edge, a short distance from Luc’s house, his anger broke like a dam and the pain flooded him. He fell to his knees in the grass, under the half-moon, and sobbed into his hands.
“I’m so stupid,” he wept. “Stupid me. Stupid Arcanist!”
Played for a fool from the start. Worse, he’d let Luc in, let him closer than he’d ever let anyone, maybe even Anaya. He’d let Luc change him. He could never go back now to who he was. Maybe he hadn’t been happy before, but he’d been fine.
Now he was sure he’d never be fine again.
He was ruined. He’d been shown too much, both of the world and of himself.
He’d seen the things he might be capable of, and the person he might have become.
He’d believed, actually believed, that Luc had chosen him for Rolan’s own merits.
That the Arcanist had seen something in Rolan no one else ever had, and that he’d wanted him for an apprentice.
And Rolan had felt something he’d never felt before: that he was worth wanting.
But oh, what a fool.
What a pathetic fool he’d been.