Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Much knowledge can be saved in books. This is why I task my descendants with salvaging and protecting every written word they can. Someday, we will all need them again.”
Istared at the painfully unfamiliar front door and took deep, steadying breaths. I needed to stop being so ridiculous. I was the candidate of the Third Ring, a guest of House Viper. I’d passed seven of the ten Trials. And yet, this felt like the most daunting task I’d faced yet.
“He’s just your brother,” I said aloud, chiding myself. “It’s just Warren.”
And Dahlia.
I closed my eyes, sighed, and knocked on the door.
When it swung open, my mother greeted me with a warm smile.
“Congratulations,” she said.
“Thank you,” I replied, smiling back at her. "Is Warren home?”
Her grin broadened, and she stepped aside. “He’s in the back, working in the garden. I’ll go and get him.”
I nodded and meandered toward the living room while my mother disappeared down the hall. I stepped inside the family room to wait, but I wasn’t the only one there.
Dahlia looked up from where she sat on the couch.
She wore a simple gray sweater with a small, dark floral pattern and a pair of faded jeans.
On her lap was a pair of my brother’s pants.
In her hand, a needle and thread. She was the very picture of the dutiful, domesticated housewife. My heart clenched in my chest.
“Dahlia,” I said, voice cracking.
“Adrian,” she replied, but she looked away from me, back down to her work which she wasn’t very good at. Though I doubted that Warren minded a crooked stitch. “It’s good that you’re here.”
I just nodded and busied myself with looking everywhere else in the room that wasn’t her.
“Congratulations, by the way,” she said, her voice quiet. “I heard about the seventh Trial. It’s amazing, truly.”
I made the mistake of looking at her. Her bright blue eyes bored into mine. I blinked.
“Adrian?” Warren had entered the room, wiping the dirt on his hands off on an old cloth our mother had given him. “I—it’s good to see you.”
He hesitated for only a moment, then stepped forward and embraced me.
Our mother smiled at us from the doorway.
“We can, um, go into the dining room to speak in private,” Warren offered. “I can get you something to drink, or to eat, if you’re—”
“I’m fine. The dining room is fine.”
He nodded and gestured for me to lead the way. I glanced back at Dahlia and my mother one last time before stepping into the hall and heading for the door directly across from the living room.
The dining room looked the same as it had two months ago.
The same old paintings of various stages of Sanctuary’s history that I was sure Milo would have been able to identify.
The same shiny, wood table and chairs. The same scratchy blueish-gray carpet.
I strode to the corner and placed a hand on the strange vase that had come with the house.
I ran a finger along the smooth surface and studied the intricate design to avoid looking at my brother, who’d taken a seat at the table and waited, hands folded patiently in front of him.
“I suppose congratulations are in order,” I muttered after a moment.
“Funny,” Warren chuckled. “I was about to say the same to you.”
“You’re married now,” I breathed, hardly believing it. “I should have congratulated you last time I was here.”
“I’d like to apologize, Adrian.”
My shoulders tensed.
“I shouldn’t have said you were becoming one of them. That wasn’t fair of me. After everything you’ve done for us, and I know it isn’t the life you chose for yourself—”
“And this? Is this the life you would have chosen for yourself?”
Warren sighed.
“Do any of us really get to choose?” he asked.
I looked over to him, finally. He smiled sadly.
“No, Adrian. This isn’t the life I would have chosen for myself originally.
But, as it turns out, I’m happy. I think we have a remarkable way of being able to find our own happiness despite our circumstances and, sometimes, even because of them. ”
I snorted. “You’ve been talking to Bria?”
Warren chuckled.
“She comes and goes.” He leaned back in his seat, more comfortable now that things weren’t so awkward between us anymore. “I think she’s trying to save our souls.”
“Good luck to her on that,” I replied, and Warren smiled again.
We sat in silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry too,” I said then. “For anything I said or any guilt I might have made you feel. You did the right thing, Warren. I had no right to be mad at you for it.”
“You had some right, but not much.”
I chuckled. “How’s she doing?”
Warren’s smile dimmed slightly.
“She has good days and bad days,” he admitted.
“She finds solace in the simple things. Mom’s been teaching her how to cook, how to sew, things like that.
It’s not what she’s made for, but she’s finding some contentment in doing it all the same.
Sometimes, she talks about him. It’s hard for her, I can tell, but I think she knows I understand. In a way.”
I nodded, staring down at the table.
“I never told you what happened…with Anna.”
My gaze snapped back up. He hadn’t. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. And yet, I felt I needed to. To understand him better, to see what Dahlia was going through, to remember what risk I faced myself if something ever happened to Dante.
“The night she died, she reached out to me,” he began. I braced myself for the story that we’d avoided for so long. “She was a servant, did you know that? She spent her days working for House Viper.”
She’d worked for Cosmo? I blinked at Warren. It was rare for a Third Ringer to be given the privilege of serving a First Ring family, a role which was typically reserved for Second Ringers, since they were considered more ‘civilized’ and closer in values and capability.
“It was a good job, a stable job,” he continued, “one that anyone would have been envious of.
“One day, she was approached by someone. A man, though she never told me who. He offered her a deal. We’d just successfully completed the first Trial, and Anna, having worked for the Major Houses for so long, was certain the old families were harboring secrets about how to succeed in the Trials that they weren’t sharing with the rest of us.
This man asked her to retrieve a book for him, just a dusty old tome he assured her that no one in House Viper would miss.
And in return, he would tell her all of those secrets they kept hidden away.
She could be the next hero. We could use them to pass the Trials together.
“She was so excited when she told me, but I asked her not to do it. It was too good to be true. If the Major Houses had had secrets to help them pass the Trials, why hadn’t they been successful in centuries?”
I held my tongue, a perfect image of the cover of Prima’s journal etched in my mind.
“But she was convinced.” Warren shook his head.
“We had an argument about it, then made up. In the end, she promised she wouldn’t steal the book.
But one night she was cleaning Cosmo’s office, and she found it, the book the man had asked her to retrieve for him.
And on a whim—a stupid, irresponsible whim—she took it.
Anna hid it in her cloak and left the house. ”
He drew in a shaky breath. Warren's hands clenched where they rested over the table. Moisture gathered in the corners of his eyes, and I marveled at his pain for her even now, years later when he’d married a different girl and his life had taken a different path.
“She told me she’d taken it, told me she was leaving,” he pressed on. “You might remember the moment. I think I spilled dinner all over the table in my haste to find her.”
I nodded.
“I met her at the gates,” his voice was quiet now.
I fought the urge to lean in to hear him better.
“She opened her coat and showed me the book. She was so excited, going on about how much better our chances would be now, how much we could learn and how far we could go together as soon as she got the book to the man who asked for it. She smiled right up until a spear pierced her straight through the neck.”
I closed my eyes and lowered my head.
“I still see her at night sometimes, in my dreams,” he confessed. “Dropping the book, clawing at that wound in her throat, eyes wide and terrified, dying.
“The officer that did it just pulled out his spear, snatched the book, and turned back for the First Ring. He never even looked back.
“I held her on the ground until all her blood had spilled out and her gaze turned glassy. I shut her eyes and carried her to her family. Then I came home.”
I remembered what had happened next, the horrible wailing I’d listened to while lying in bed as my brother’s heart ripped in half.
“They never leave you,” he whispered. “Not entirely. I’ve heard stories about men who’ve lost an arm but sometimes they still feel it.
Sometimes they even try to move it, flex their fingers, like it’s still there, the ghost of an appendage they once had.
It’s like that but in your mind. An echo of another person, more intimately connected to you than anyone can ever hope to be again.
A phantom, always there but just out of reach. ”
I said nothing, though my heart broke for my brother as he relived the traumatic loss.
“That’s what Dahlia is going through.” Warren sniffled and wiped away tears I hadn’t seen fall.
“And I can’t stomach telling her that he never goes away, that she’ll never truly be free of him.
I can’t talk to Anna, I can’t reach her, but I can still feel her, and it’s almost worse.
It’s a constant reminder of what’s missing.
It’s like there’s a hole inside me, and the only person who could ever fill it is gone. I can never get her back.”
He stared at the table. He’d been that way for most of the story. As if the only thing keeping him talking was the fact that he didn’t have to see the pity in my eyes.