Chapter 67 A Few Months Ago
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A Few Months Ago
At a watchtower notched halfway up the Mountains of Promise, Sebran stood on an outside window ledge, gazing down on the dusky spires and domes of Carduban.
Beyond that, smudged with warm desert haze, stood the vast white walls of Zitra.
A narrow teal river with a single heavily guarded bridge—built from an alternating pattern of creamstone and painted marble—marked the border between Vallin and Eqora.
In the last few hours, a cluster of axelmare-riding mages in earthen brown cloaks had gathered on the opposite side.
Border skirmishes, indeed.
The fighting had been minimal, thus far.
A smattering of taunts and nonlethal spells, a general sense of defenses being sized up.
Exaggerated gestures toward the mine entrances in the mountains.
A sense that this was uncoordinated, unsanctioned by any actual government.
Mere posturing, Sebran suspected, though to what end he was not entirely sure.
All he knew was that he was grateful to Nissa Naszi for being unable to keep her cool (or tolerate the boredom) during the border posting—because it had gotten him out of Atherin. Away from the Bloodmoons, away from the growing number of people who knew his secrets.
Sebran looked down at the ground beneath the window ledge, the tips of his polished boots poking over the lip, relishing the dizzy tilt inside his head.
He’d never much cared for heights—until he learned to fly.
He plucked the hem of his silver cloak and pressed the tip of his pine wand against the silk. “Et volinotan.”
The fabric swooshed up behind him like a parachute, and he leapt into the air.
A southeasterly gust carried him forth, and he fought the childlike urge to whoop and holler his glee.
For a moment, he was the boy in the Havenwood searching for his next adventure, before Lorissa, before everything else.
The mountain rolled out in front of him, his rate of descent deliciously equal to the gradient of the peak, and he glided and glided and glided until eventually coming to land several hundred yards from the guard tower, the soles of his boots grazing rocky earth as he jogged gracefully to a standing stop.
It had taken years of practice. Nobody at the Academy knew he was taking nighttime flying lessons from Naro Terrian, a crotchety old colonel who’d spent his career training an elite special force called the Paramagi.
It was a finicky art, halfway between enchanting and wielding, neither of which Sebran had ever been particularly gifted at.
Dangerous too—if your magical well ran out halfway through a flight, you’d plummet to the ground in a heartbeat.
But with a brutish stubbornness and an unfaltering willingness to deploy his blisblade, Sebran mastered the skill well enough that Terrian could abandon the safety nets and take the soldier on his first real flight off the top of an Augurest temple.
Since then, Sebran had fantasized about all the places around the world he’d love to fly. The Divine Peaks, the Twin Mesas, Bhondriel’s Bluff, the Far Ridges. And it just so happened that Carduban was the perfect place to stretch his wand-wings.
A smile fought its way through Sebran’s stoic exterior as he climbed the steep ascent back to his post, feeling the sweet burn of strained muscles as he walked.
Saints, he loved to fly.
But his mirth was short-lived—because waiting for him in the topmost room of the guard tower was the last person he’d ever expected to see on the craggy outskirts of Carduban.
Levan Rezaran—or Celadon, as he was now known—sat on the open windowsill, his scarlet cloak fluttering behind him, black elm wand hanging loosely from one hand, nothing like the gangly little boy Sebran remembered. His jaw was sharp, his body muscled, his blue eyes devoid of all light.
Sebran stilled in the doorway, subtly drawing his wand, but Levan did not seem to be here to cause harm—rather he jerked a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing down the mountain, and raised a brow.
“Impressive.” His voice was, of course, lower than Sebran remembered, and the light northern accent had washed away with time.
Sebran felt a muscle ripple in his own jaw. “Levan.”
“Laris.” A humorless smile. “Well, it’s Sebran now, I suppose. Sebran Aduran.” A subtle head shake. “I’ve spent so many years looking for you.”
At the sound of his old name, some young, internal part of Sebran reacted.
He had worked so hard to shed his Havenwood identity on the streets of Novarin, and his not-brother had just tossed it back at his feet like a forgotten scarf.
The reminder was bracing, like a sharp wind somewhere inside him, stripping away his defenses and leaving him raw and vulnerable.
“How did you find me?”
“We turned one of your cohort. They told me two things: that there was a Compeller among their number, and that one cadet had a mysterious past. That nobody knew where he came from, before the military academy. I wondered.”
Sebran’s mind juddered. The Bloodmoons had turned one of the cohort?
Surely not righteous Auria, nor stubborn, hotheaded Nissa. Gaian—he thought the name with a pang of grief—was across the border in Pons Aelii, which only left Tiernan. Weak-willed, weak-hearted Tiernan, with his important father and his absent spine.
Unless…no. Saffron Killoran was still in Duncarzus.
Sebran shrugged. “You always were the more cerebral of us. You thought, I acted. Though it seems you’ve been doing rather a lot of acting yourself, in recent years.”
If Levan felt any guilt or remorse, none showed. “Are you ashamed?”
“Of?”
“Calling me your brother.”
Sebran fixed him with a wooden stare. “I’m not your brother. I never was.”
“That’s mareshit and you know it.” Genuine anger simmered below Levan’s flat tone. “Blood could not have made our bond stronger.”
“I think you’re misremembering,” Sebran retorted, driving the chisel in even farther, retribution for the way Levan had not intervened when it mattered. “You spent years resenting me for what I could do, and the moment your father moved to abandon me, you did nothing to stop him.”
“I was in shock. I was staring at our mother’s corpse.”
“Your mother’s corp—”
“Will you stop with that?” Levan pushed himself off the windowsill, taking several quick steps toward Sebran. At last, his eyes shone with an emotion.
Sebran raised his wand without thought, military training signaling danger. “How did you get in here?” He gestured around to the sparse guardroom, whose creamstone walls were lined with analog weapons—swords and daggers and crossbows, all of which Sebran knew how to wield.
“The portari spell is still in my wand,” Levan muttered. “Imported from Bellandry. You’d think a guard tower would be warded against such things.”
Sebran thought of the wards in the Bank of Almere all those decades ago, of how they required a whole team of dedicated wardholders to give up their wells to keep the magic intact.
A bank was able to pay handsomely to reward such a sacrifice, but an old watchtower built during some long-ago war wasn’t worth the hassle, even with the Eqorans toeing the nearby border.
“What’s it all for, Levan?” Sebran asked, shaking his head, revulsion and sadness miring high in his belly. “The killing, the mutilating. The loxlure.”
For a long, taut moment, Sebran thought his once-brother would not respond. But then, low and reverent and somehow very young, Levan whispered, “Bringing her back.”
It took Sebran a sickly moment to realize what Levan meant. “Bringing—your mother?”
The shutters closed behind Levan’s eyes at Sebran’s horrified tone—as though he had been expecting understanding and was instead met with disgust. He fixed his gaze on a point just over Sebran’s shoulder. “Forget it.”
“You’re trying to bring Lorissa Rezaran back.” A shiver bolted down Sebran’s rigid spine. “And you’re still trying to win her the throne she believes she deserves in the meantime. I’ve heard the Risen don’t truly come back. Not as they were before.”
“I’d still take a living, breathing mother over a cadaver in a crypt.”
Sebran was momentarily at a loss for words. If he strained, he could still hear the cavernous grief echoing in Levan’s words. Sebran softened his stance, lowered his wand. Dropped his resentment, if not his guard. “Why are you here, Levan?”
“I’ve thought about you every single day since you left.” Levan still did not look directly at Sebran, but rather at a spot in the middle distance. “Since our father sent you away. As soon as I was old enough, I searched for you for years.”
A nameless emotion blurred Sebran’s thoughts. “Does Lyrian know? Who and where I am?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me—it seems he knows everyone in Vallin and the people who love them—and yet he’s never mentioned you to me. Perhaps the fake name did its job.”
“It’s no more a fake name than Laris,” Sebran replied bitterly. “I’ll never know my birth name.”
“I could help you find out. I have my methods. We could find your—”
“Why are you here?” Sebran asked again.
“Because I want to know you again. I understand that it can never be how it was before, but…I miss having a brother. I’m not asking you to join the cause.
Hells, I’m not even asking you to forgive me.
Just—a flamebrandy, perhaps, in a local tavern.
” A small, boyish smile. “Maybe you could teach me how to fly. Because that was epic.”
With an immense amount of internal effort, ignoring the wants of the little boy still inside him, Sebran kept his emotional drawbridge high.
“I have dedicated my entire life to eradicating the sorts of evil you and your family perpetuate every single day. What makes you think I would turn my back on that now?”
“If I could just tell you everything.” Levan’s throat bobbed. “Over a drink, or right here. If you could just listen to—”
“No, Levan.” Sebran gritted his teeth. “No.”
And then he felt it. A tendril of outside influence brushing up against his consciousness, one that whispered: please, let me in. I need you. I need someone.
Most would not feel the subtle stroke, but Sebran had spent days and weeks and months and years of his life practicing this art. He slammed up a shield as fast as he could, and Levan recoiled; a subtle step back, a widening of the eyes, as though he were not used to resistance.
“Where did you learn to do that?” Sebran asked, blood pounding in his temples.
Levan said nothing.
“I always thought you were a Healer.”
“I am.” Levan’s grip tightened on his wand. “But I’m other things too.”
For the first time, Sebran took a step forward. “Where did you learn to do this? Neither of your parents have it in their bloodline.”
Another agonizing silence. Then, “After our mother passed, I—you’re right, I was a Healer. And necromancy is a subclass, is it not? Our father recognized this potential, but my power wasn’t strong enough. They tried to force the matter. I taught myself to compel in self-defense.”
An icy cold spread from the base of Sebran’s torso up to his heart. “What do you mean, tried to force the matter?”
A terse head shake. “Forget it.”
“No. What did you mean?”
Forget it, said the tendril of command disguised as Sebran’s own internal voice.
“No. What happened to you, Levan?”
But from the haunted look on his former brother’s face, Sebran already knew.
And for the first time, he truly understood what a lucky escape he’d had from the Rezaran family.
Grief reared up inside him, vast and splintering.
Not for himself, but for his brother. A crack in his emotions he so rarely allowed himself, expanding rapidly into a ravine.
A lifeless body in a drowned atrium.
His brother’s crumpled face at the sight of his dead mother.
The clank of his shackles as he roamed the streets of Novarin as a beggar.
A deep loneliness, written into every fiber of his being.
“Leave,” Sebran said, more softly now. Softer than he’d been in years, decades. Not compelling, but coaxing. “Leave it all behind. You are better than this.”
Levan’s pupils were blown wide and black. “No, I’m not.”
“Who we are as children is the truest version of us. Which makes you good and kind and loyal and smart and—”
“Stop saying that.”
“You could make the world better for your presence in it.”
“No.”
“You are not fundamentally broken, Levan. You are not stuck on this path. There is redemption, if you want it.”
“STOP!” Levan roared, sending a flock of ascenbeaks soaring out of a nearby tree, only the kingpin’s son did not just shout it externally but also internally, with so much force that the tendril of command became a battering ram, and the order slammed into Sebran’s vulnerable mind so severely that not even the most powerful shield could withstand it.
Sebran stopped.
Every piece of him.
He fell to the ground.
Sebran Aduran did not wake.
After hours of frantic attempts at resuscitation, begging his healing to work, work, please fucking work, Levan had no choice but to portari his unconscious brother back to Bloodmoon mansion.
Back to a place where nobody would think to look—a place that would keep Sebran safe and contained, should he wake in Levan’s absence.
Levan took Sebran to cell six.