Chapter 33 Fifteen Years Ago #2
He was approached several times by mages who sank down on their haunches, asking if he was alright, if he needed help.
Asking why he was chained up like a killer being hauled off to Malcarzus.
But he could not speak, could barely see through blurred tears.
He kept walking, ignoring their coos of concern.
He could not let himself be taken in again.
He could not destroy another family. He deserved to be alone—it was the only way to keep others safe.
With every step, his heart panged afresh.
He would never see Levan again. He knew that with awful certainty. Lyrian had not just closed the emotional door behind him, but locked and bolted it tight.
Yet what right did the boy have to want that?
What right did he have to want anything?
Want was the very problem. Because every time he wanted something, the world gave it to him. Yet when it had mattered most—when the force of his want should have kept his mother from being murdered—he had faltered.
When Lorissa Rezaran had been struck by the killing curse, his little mind was still whirring to make sense of everything he’d witnessed, trying to reconcile the acts of brutal slaughter with the soft-voiced woman who’d raised him.
He had, for the first time in his young life, been grappling with ideas of who deserved to live and who deserved to die, concepts of justice and retribution and wrong.
He would have been able to save her, if he’d wanted it enough.
How was it fair, that his thoughts could have so much power?
No boy should be able to mold the world around his wants.
And so the only thing he could do, from now on, was to rid himself of all desire.
To wipe himself into a blank slate, obeying only the basest of needs in his body: hunger, thirst, exhaustion.
A preference for shelter, if it was available.
He would become a ghost moving through the world, never leaving a mark.
The boy spent many weeks perfecting his spectral existence.
The vacant glaze to his face—borne from grief, and from a desire not to desire—became his permanent mask.
He drifted through the city, relying on the goodwill of strangers for food and water, sleeping in doorways and dark alleys until his periwinkle pajamas were black with grime.
By day, he wandered the streets in a slow rhythm, thinking only of the clank of chains and whatever weather had descended upon the city.
It was mid-Táryriel, by his calculations, and the sky alternated between fine misty rain and buttery yellow sunlight.
The nights were cold, but he learned to embrace the shivering, the gnash of his teeth, the ache in his young bones.
It was fair punishment, he thought, for the pain he had caused, and which was now rebounding onto him.
No, he told himself. Most desire springs from pain, and so I must not feel pain either. I must detach myself wholly.
Spring tipped into early summer, and the offers of help dried up with the earth.
In his first few weeks, strangers lavished him with offers of care—a spare room above a tavern, a knapsack filled with honeycakes, a change of clothes, a spot in an orphanage.
But the longer he spent haunting the streets, the less he was seen, and the less he was seen, the less the world extended a hand.
Food grew scarcer, and the pit of hunger in his belly grew deep enough that it steered all his thoughts.
It hurt, of course, but he buried that hurt so it could not mutate into want.
The only luxury he allowed himself was a single minute every day—the moment after he’d settled into whatever rancid alley he would call bed.
He would pull the wooden board game piece out of his pocket, run a thumb over its unfinished grooves.
A raven, he thought it was going to be, before Lyrian discarded it.
As the wood warmed under his touch, he would weep for all he had lost. For all that was never his to begin with.
It was late autumn or early winter—colder, crisper, the streets crunching with umber and ocher leaves—when he met the mage who would define the next two decades of his life.
The boy traipsed into one of his most frequently visited taverns, the Red Quill, whose owner, Covar, did not mind him using the bathrooms to wash himself over the sink.
Once he was done, they’d usually fix him a bowl of hearty soup, with a doorstop wedge of sourdough and enough salty butter to keep him from dying of starvation for another day.
That afternoon, the tavern was oddly quiet. After the boy had dabbed at his body with a bar of lavender soap, he took a seat at the deserted wooden bar—a swirling quill pattern carved into its wine-stained surface—and looked dully at the bowl of soup.
“Whiteclam chowder,” said Covar, polishing a goblet with a cotton rag. “Made from this morning’s catch in the Bay of Silence.”
A flicker of disgust twinged in the boy’s belly—he was mildly allergic to seafood. But he chastised himself for the impulse immediately. If he was not allowed to want, he also was not allowed not to want.
As he nodded his silent thanks and ate, the door gusted open on a bitter breeze, and a tall, black-haired mage stepped over the threshold. He wore a cloak more handsome than the boy had ever seen, the usual scholarly sky blue, but made of a thick, brocaded velvet and pinned with gold brooches.
The academic strode toward the bar in gleaming boots and took a seat right next to the boy. His skin was deathly pale, like curdled milk.
“One pot of ambertea, Covar.” The timbre of his words was low, well-spoken, and the cut of his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose suggested patrician lineage. He was perhaps in his early forties. “And whatever liquor you’d recommend spiking it with.”
The academic peered over at the boy as he ladled small amounts of revolting soup into his mouth. The boy caught his gaze before he could smother the instinct, and the stranger raked his stare up and down the boy’s body.
The scholar blew air through his lips. “There’s only one reason a wandless young boy would wear shackles like that.”
Heart skipping, the boy said nothing.
The mage’s onyx eyes shone with a sort of hunger, a naked flame of ambition. “Truthfully, I’ve been watching you for weeks. Months.” A meaningful beat. “It’s not a sin, you know. The power you have.”
The boy bowed his head, thinking of corpses in atriums.
“I was born with it too.”
With a jolt, the boy looked up again. He’d never met another like him.
“Of course, to be bound in deminite so young…your power likely far outstrips my own.” Again shone that crystal-cut gleam in his eye. “It’s possible to master it, you know. To use it for good, for right. You do not have to live like this.”
The fleeting interest in the boy’s belly soured—though that could have been the soup.
This academic might be like him, but he had not killed.
Your compelling is not what killed your mother, he reminded himself.
But then a deeper, darker voice in his mind said, Isn’t failing to save her the same thing?
If he’d had mastery over his power, on the other hand…
No. He would not indulge such thoughts.
Be a ghost. Be nothing.
“I could help you, boy. Give you a home, give you the tools you need to control your gift.” A rueful smile. “Because that’s what it is, you know. A gift. All I’d ask in return is to be able to study you. Call it a two-way mentorship.”
A home. The boy shook his head vigorously, so very afraid of the bubble of want swelling between his ribs.
The academic leaned closer. He smelled of boot polish and old coffee and warm skin. “Allow me to rephrase, then. You will come with me, and I will help you.”
And so, because the stranger commanded it, the boy went with him.