Chapter 3 #2
I wonder what’s in Zan’s room that he isn’t showing me.
He has a right to his privacy, though, so I only nod, and he closes the door and leads me to the other side.
I don’t know what I would do with an empty space. I’m impossibly relieved that most of the house comes furnished already.
But then Zan opens the other door next to the bathroom, and I revisit that.
“This is your room,” he says.
It feels like someone else’s room.
It’s done in earthy, soothing shades—pale greens and browns. Maybe to match the forest beyond.
But I am not a soothing person, and just looking at it makes me feel vaguely unmoored.
“You can change whatever you want here, too,” Zan says. “It’s usually one of the first things we encourage sages to do, to start making low-stakes choices for themselves.”
Is it low-stakes, though? To choose what you will surround yourself with every day?
As if he can guess my thoughts, Zan says, “The room has been remade over and over again. No reason you can’t do it however many times it takes for you to like it.”
Aaand that sounds exhausting.
Zan crosses to the bed and lifts up a corner of a blanket that appears to have holes in it and sighs. “Moths got this one, it looks like. I don’t know why people always leave the blankets out in this room between visitors.”
Visitors. Because it doesn’t really belong to us.
“I do,” I say softly.
Zan looks at me sharply, but I don’t elaborate.
It’s the knowledge that there’s a starting place.
That there have been people here before me, and there will be people after.
It’s both a responsibility and an encouragement; a rock that is both weight and foundation.
“How many sages have lived here?” I ask Zan quietly.
He shrugs.
I narrow my eyes.
“I don’t know off the top of my head.”
For the first time I’m not sure I believe him.
“It has... varied, over the years,” he says. “What did you know about the political situation, in your time? Broadly speaking—I’m aware of how closely controlled sages were at that time.”
Zan leads me out of the room, allowing us to return to the less public, less personal, less fraught common space and sit down on the couch.
A puff of dust emerges, and he makes a face before standing up to go look for something.
I don’t know how to help, so I answer the question.
“Sages used to move among people directly, but after a previous incarnation of Wrath killed an emperor, there was enough popular backlash to force sages under the management of the temple,” I summarize.
“At first the emperors liked this setup because the priests could control us, and the priests obviously liked it because it gave them more power.
“By my time, relationships between secular and religious powers were much more strained, because the Order trained sages to be their own personal weapons of mass destruction and maintained a separate base of military strength that answered to the temple first. They were increasingly flexing that power in an attempt to seize greater control when I... created the Quiet.”
Zan returns carrying a wooden stick that looks like it has a flat wooden net on the end.
“What in the world is that?”
“Blanket beater,” Zan says. “Come on, I’ll show you how to use it. That’s a very succinct summary of where things stood that I’m very confident the Order didn’t teach you.”
I get up and follow his lead, stripping the cushions and a blanket off the couch and carrying them outside into the sun.
“Wrath isn’t just anger,” I explain. “Clarity is an important facet that distinguishes it from just mindless rage. Which meant that in order to be able to wield Wrath effectively, I had to have a very good education. The danger of an education, of course, is that it meant I could think for myself.”
Which is why I got quieter and quieter as the years passed. I could see very clearly what the priests wanted from me, and how any deviation would be handled, and the hypocrisy.
It’s also why I hid how much I was capable of from them until I needed it.
“I did also just spend five hundred years meditating,” I add wryly. “Now that I can move, I feel like my mind is primed to synthesize rapidly.”
“Hmm.” Zan arranges the cushions in a line. “Watch this.”
He whacks them.
Dust flies into the air.
“I think the theory here is within my ability to understand even without centuries of meditation,” I tell him dryly.
His eyes crinkle with humor.
Damn, didn’t quite get the laugh out of him.
Zan hands me the blanket beater. “Your turn. I think you’re going to have some aggression to work out when I update you.”
I already have aggression to work out—honestly that’s a pretty permanent state for me, being the incarnation of Wrath—so I take the stick without a word and get to whacking.
In between the sound of the stick striking the cushions, Zan tells me, “The Quiet was the catalyst for a revolution. The priests had been overreaching, and you rebelling against them in such a visible way brought a lot of attention to it. People thought the explosive magic you unleashed was a sign the gods thought the priests were corrupt. The priests tried to spin it as their need for more control.”
I hit a cushion with a little more force.
Unsurprising, that everyone would still try to use me for their own ends.
“To make a long story short, there was an extremely messy revolution. People seized the priests’ spell knowledge—”
Basic spells had been common knowledge, but not complicated, specialized ones.
“—but without the priests’ training, people were accidentally causing all kinds of devastation, so there was yet another backlash.
“All spell knowledge is now tightly controlled. The temple became part of the government and now effectively runs the military, so they have a monopoly on state violence. There was a period of unification, but the Order has been working to take over from the inside by installing their own candidate that they control as emperor. There are different factions among the Order, of course, with their own candidates. The frontrunner is a consul named Hakon, with an unfortunate amount of charisma, who has become known for gathering sages under his aegis.”
Zan was definitely right to give me a safe outlet for this conversation.
The priests never would have.
“And the sages?” I ask tightly.
Zan is silent a moment.
I hit the cushion really, really hard.
“Controlled even more than you were,” he finally says. Before I can ask how that’s possible, Zan says, “They’re barely trained.”
I whip to stare at him. “What?”
“The priests have developed spells that allow them to use a sage’s power without the sage actually directing it. So the priests drain the sages to keep them safe, and provide them luxuries to keep them content where they are.”
Like defanged pets.
My next strike has some magenta in it and whacks the blanket clear into the air.
Zan moves quickly to catch it.
“And once the sages have been part of the Order long enough to draw their power out, the only place they could live is here, because the Quiet suppressed their power,” Zan concludes quietly. “But...”
“But they’re comfortable,” I say, and abruptly I’m tired.
It’s not their fault. They’ve been deliberately indoctrinated. Without any education, without knowledge, without options... of course they can’t risk leaving. The priests made sure of it.
I beat some more cushions.
“Have I found your calling?” Zan asks with what I’m now sure is a hint of amusement. “You could offer this as a service. No cushions will ever be dusty around you again.”
“Oh no, I’d do this for free. Imagine what a symbiotic relationship I could have had with temple communities.”
Imagine if the priests had ever been interested in fostering a symbiotic relationship between people and sages.
They were, once, and some priests still strove for that, even within the machinery of the Order bureaucracy.
But that reality was long gone before even my time.
“The Order—this consul—is going to come for me,” I say.
Zan comes to stand next to me. “Almost certainly. The Order’s official line is that you’re dead, punished by the gods for apostasy, and that you “cursed” this region. Your continued existence alone threatens a counternarrative.”
Even if I don’t do anything.
Even if I just want to live quietly away from it all.
Even though I didn’t kill any priests when I woke up, I’m still going to be punished for it.
They can’t allow a power to exist that they can’t control.
And no matter what else I am, even if I am more—a person, and not just a weapon—I will always, always be a power.
“That’s why you were mad about me revealing myself,” I realize.
Zan sighs, gently pulling the blanket beater from my death grip. “Partly. I’m also mad at myself for apparently learning nothing in five hundred years so you had to put yourself at risk again. But I’ll stay nearby to defend you, as a sage once did for me.”
I face him.
Our faces are so close, we’re breathing the same air.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I tell him.
Zan cocks his head to one side. “That’s true. But you didn’t owe me anything either, did you?”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?” He shrugs that speaking shrug again. “As you like.”
Argh. “Then why?”
I expect him to reply with something like “why not?” as my mentors would have, and I already have an answer ready.
But instead Zan says, “Because I should have done it before, and I want to believe it’s not too late.”
There.
That’s what his hungry look was about.
He looked at me and saw a chance.
Uneasy, I search his gaze. “You didn’t owe me then, either,” I say softly. “Don’t chain yourself to me out of guilt.”
I’ve had more than enough of invisible and tangible shackles.
Zan’s eyes narrow. “It’s not a chain. It’s an opportunity.”
“To get yourself killed?” I demand.
“To see if I can live a life I can be happy with,” he snaps. “Can you imagine what that would look like, for you?”
I blink a few times.
I’m worried he’s not being honest with me, or with himself—that he’s actually expecting to gain from this in the sense of doing one final act to make him feel reconciled with his life so he can feel comfortable dying at last. Which makes me angry, but in more of a muddying way than a clarifying way, so I’ll let that simmer.
And truthfully answer, “No.”
What does happiness look like for a sage? For me?
I don’t know the shape of freedom.
But maybe it looks like a cottage on a mountainside.
As if following my thoughts, Zan says quietly, “I can’t either.”
A look passes between us.
“But this—” he gestures at the cottage “—can be where you start to think about it. That’s why it’s here.”
“And what about you?” I ask. “Maybe you don’t know because you’ve never had a space that felt like yours, and if anything, by rights this cottage belongs to you. I can live in the temple, the gods know I’m used to it—”
“No,” Zan snaps.
The vise that had only begun to constrict my chest with my own words eases.
At his refusal of that possibility?
Or because this man who has held himself apart for five hundred years is willing to let me see what lies beneath?
Still, I step even closer to him, our noses practically touching, and echo dangerously, “No?”
Zan scowls. “You deserve to have a house for once in your life that feels like a home.”
I poke him in the chest; that rush again, though smaller. “Well then so do you!”
We glare at each other for a minute.
Zan’s sapphire eyes glitter, and my breath catches.
His eyes swoop down—to my lips or my pulse, I’m not sure.
And then he turns. Not stepping back, exactly, or away from me, but so we’re side by side.
My heart is thundering. I clear my throat. “We could share?”
His eyes glance at me, back at the cottage. “That could work,” he says, like we’re talking about the academics of a spell structure and not that we will be living together.
“Great.”
“That’s settled then.”
“Yes.”
We both stand there awkwardly for a minute, not looking at each other.
...Maybe not so great.
Zan shakes his head to clear it. “Let’s go to Crystal Hollow to get what we’re going to need here.”
Everything is moving too fast. “Now?”
That was a little squeakier than I’d have preferred.
“My cheese and jam supply is not unlimited and has taken some damage,” Zan says dryly.
I let out a breath. I guess I’m just going to have to adjust, to things happening.
At least he knows how to motivate a girl.
“Yora.”
He’s looking directly at me again.
Not hungry this time, or keen exactly, but... I don’t know what this is. Like his bright blue eyes are pools that go on forever.
Like I could fall into him and never reach the end of him.
“You need to move, to decide what you want,” Zan says. “You haven’t seen the world, but now you can. Shall we start with some more food?”
My chest tightens, and I swallow over a sudden lump in my throat.
Then I smile, and I find it’s real.
Zan’s gaze blazes back at me.
An opportunity, he called it.
A second chance.
The priests may come for me, but they’re not here now.
Zan is.
And me, too.
“Yes,” I tell the dragon, and the glow of his eyes brightens.