40 Family
Antal stalked his old bookshelves, trailing a claw along the spines. Fifty years he’d been away, yet someone had kept everything dusted. A bittersweet observation. He tried to focus on the tomes, the gramophone records, but his attention drifted.
Veshri, the first Voidweaver, had appeared before him.
He’d addressed Antal by name.
He’d told Fionamara how to become immortal.
Antal’s chest heated at the possibility. The mechanics were insultingly simple, replacing mortal flesh with ether, piece-by-piece. Not easy. If anyone could do it, Fionamara would.
And she could be his. Forever.
There in the dusk light, Antal glimpsed a future he’d scarcely let himself wish for, all their work coming together: his father appeased, his friends reclaimed, a seat on the Daey Celva all but assured. With that, he’d be able to keep Thomaskweld safe.
With Fionamara at his side, who knew what else they could accomplish.
Antal’s hand paused on a shelf, books forgotten, tail a contented sway. Veshri’s mercy, this was hope heating his sternum. The embers kindled hotter when his door opened, Fionamara slipping back into his room.
They snuffed like a smothered match when he saw the look on her face.
She was pale as ice. As the door closed, she glanced down the hall, a fleeing beast wary of its trail. Antal’s insides flashed cold. He was about to demand what did this—who did this—but she was across the room already, reaching for his hands.
“We need to go home,” she said.
“What happened—”
“No, Antal.” She eyed the open windows. Nothing there. She didn’t relax, her pulse like a drum. “We need to leave. Now. Not Thomaskweld. Take us to Nyskya, my cabin. No one here knows about that.”
Her words came breathless. Her hands were cold, trembling, small details enough to spark panic. Antal had seen this woman annoyed. Furious. What could frighten her?
He didn’t argue.
Just gripped her hands and pulled them into black.
They emerged in darkness.
Night lay upon the Winter Plane, the curtains of Fionamara’s cabin shuttered against aurora light. She squinted. Her eyes couldn’t see in the dark. Antal skirted the colorless outline of a table and touched the wall panel, powering on lights in the rafters.
They’d not visited in weeks, absence filling the room with a smell of dusty wood and ice crusting the windows. The furnace had gone out. Fionamara shivered in her light clothes from the Twilit Plane.
As she pulled the rabbit fur blanket from the bed, Antal crouched beside the furnace. The energy capsule was empty. He held it in his fingers, Shaped red energy down his forearm and into the glass. Recharged, the furnace hummed to life with a pulse of heat.
Fionamara sat on the floor beside it, blanket pulled over her shoulders, still shivering.
A fleck of red marred her cheek.
Antal tipped her chin to look at him. Her eyes were dark, glassy, a haunted look that scraped him to the bone. He hovered his fingers over the marks on one cheek, his thumb over the other, the perfect shape for… a hand clamped over her mouth.
Avroz. Always Avroz.
“Why?” Antal seethed. Fresh gold glinted on her ears. “The bands?”
“Not that. Well, he wasn’t happy about the bands.” Fionamara brushed a hand over one ear, the shell tender red.
But there was something else, something capable of rattling her, this woman who’d stared Veshri in the eye not hours ago. Antal pressed to her side, tail encircling legs.
She spoke again. A whisper. “Would you want to know the truth, even if it might change everything?” Her cracked tone carved hollows in his ribs. “You would, right?”
“Fionamara…”
“Because it felt like things were going well. Right? Like this whole wretched deal was working out for us? But then…” She stared at the floor. “What if it would be better not to know?”
Antal tried to steady himself, for her. Internally, he quaked, a slick and too-familiar monologue whispering, of course this went wrong, something always goes wrong.
“Tell me.”
His tail tip settled in her palm. Fionamara took a deep breath.
“I overheard your parents arguing.”
An old pang shot through Antal. Familiar. Manageable. He sighed in relief, if that was all this was. “Yme and Avroz have been arguing for… a long time.”
The sound of their shouting had carved into his skull.
The sound of their silence carved deeper, cold looks and untwined tails for as long as he could remember.
Always because of him. Fights over Avroz’s expectations, every time Antal failed to meet them.
Yme’s insufferable attempts to pretend nothing was wrong.
“Not that,” Fionamara said. “They were talking about something that happened two months ago. When Avroz realized I’d overheard?
I’ve never seen him so angry.” Her words sped, shaking with rage?
Fear? “Yme got me away from him. She didn’t want to tell me what happened.
But she did. She told me everything, and…
” Back to a hush. “What did Avroz tell you about how he lost that antler tip?”
Antal frowned. “He said he’d been called to the Contested Planes by a territory lord, because of an aedari sighting. He must have fought the aedari, and…”
“You assumed the rest? He never told you any details?”
Cold pricked Antal’s stomach. He shook his head.
Fionamara laughed like grating nails. “Yme told me Avroz came home from that trip. Alone. Injured. He had glyphs carved onto his antler tip.”
“Glyphs?”
“Golden glyphs. She said they smelled like aedari.”
“Impossible. Syvr and Ixli were traveling with him. They would have mentioned…” The memories were foggy, a night on a rooftop in Thomaskweld, a bottle of wine to share. “Syvr said they were separated. They found Avroz back at home, with his antler tip missing.”
Fionamara’s glare cut him to pieces.
Antal shook his head again. “Why would he—”
“Avroz fought an aedari,” she said. “But he lost. He got away, ran home to lick his wounds, but you daeyari can’t see the backs of your own damn antlers. He didn’t know the aedari had smacked those glyphs onto him until Yme saw it. Some kind of marker glyphs.”
Antal had never seen such magic in person, but he knew of it—aedari carved marker glyphs onto landmarks throughout the Shards they explored, beacons to navigate back to. If a marker was placed on a person, the aedari would take time to track it down, honing to the beacon, but eventually…
“It would have led the aedari back to Avroz,” Fionamara said. “Back to the Twilit Plane. He cut off the antler tip. Left to get rid of it, told Yme never to speak of what happened.”
Antal couldn’t make sense of what Fionamara was saying. A daeyari would never cut a piece of antler off, not unless there’d been dire need. But Avroz had told the story without qualm. He’d laughed it off.
He’d not boasted of the victory. He’d changed the subject as swiftly as he could.
“Antal, what if Avroz fucked up?” Fionamara gripped his shirt.
“Even if that fucker hurled that marked antler into the Void, who knows how close the aedari got before he realized he was being tracked? Obviously, they didn’t make it all the way to the Twilit Plane.
But the Season-Locked Planes? What if the aedari found their way here because of him? ”
“No. Avroz wouldn’t do this.”
The words slipped out like oil on Antal’s tongue. Fionamara pulled back, blinking.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Have you met him? Because I’ve met him. And five seconds in his presence was enough to assure me he’d do anything to benefit his own ass.”
Antal’s insides were ice. He’d learned, over the centuries, that there were many things Avroz would do.
He’d call his son every name short of a disappointment.
He’d cut open a man Antal loved, just to make a point.
He’d banish his only heir and not speak to him for five decades.
Endless flavors of torment, for the son who’d never lived up to expectations. Despite all that…
“Avroz has dedicated his life to the Daey Celva,” Antal tried to reason. “He wouldn’t lead an aedari here, even by accident. He wouldn’t endanger the Twilit Plane by telling no one. He wouldn’t…”
“Antal, listen to yourself. Listen to me.”
Antal was trying, past the buzzing in his ears. He…
Understood what she’d been saying before. This could ruin everything. Avroz was his route to the Daey Celva, his ally in codifying a new system in Thomaskweld.
So Avroz couldn’t have done this.
“He’s hurt you,” Fionamara said. “I’ve seen him hurt you, and I only know a fraction of what happened before me. It’s ok to be angry, afraid, but you have to admit”—she cupped his cheeks—“he would do something like this. You know what he’s capable of. Especially if it meant protecting himself?”
Anything. Avroz would do anything to serve his interests.
“So he got cocky,” Fionamara pressed. “Got his ass handed to him by an aedari, then refused to fess up. He’s a coward.”
“No…” Antal said slowly, the realization like a knife to his gut.
“Avroz is an opportunist. If he’d returned in defeat, an antler missing, it would have meant disgrace.
But if he claimed to have killed that aedari, then let others assume a different scout found the Season-Locked Planes, volunteered to lead a hunt… ”
Instead of shame, Avroz would earn more glory. Instead of a setback, he’d used the hunt as a chance for Antal to become a Sunsplitter.
“We have to tell the Dusk Council,” Fionamara said.
A numb sensation had been settling into Antal’s ether—jolted now into panic. “Tell the council? Why?”
“Because Avroz lied?” Fionamara glared in exasperation. “Because he led the immortal foes of all daeyari here, then kept it secret? Don’t you have laws against that?”
Treason, the council would call it. That wasn’t the biggest problem.
“We have no proof,” Antal said. “If we accuse Avroz and lose, he’ll be livid, we’ll lose everything he’s promised us. Even if we could prove he’d done it, Avroz would be disavowed, we’d still lose everything he’s promised us.” An impossible situation.