Chapter 16 #3
A woman stumbled over to him. Her dreamy stare brushed him with a slow smile. “Are you one of the newborns?”
“Newborns?” Sesto couldn’t help but repeat her. He knew immediately he desired no answer though.
“Hm. Welcome.” Her hand brushed a lazy path over the air. “There are some free beds in the back. Or were... yesterday... or was it today? Could be. The atmosphere is different down here.”
Guardians deliver me. “Thank you, but I’m looking for someone. Perhaps you know him.”
“We don’t bother with names.” She lifted a sleeve, exposing her wrist. On the inside was permanent ink, and it read 763CS. The only other place Sesto knew of that did that was in the prison camps in the Wastelands, where men were said never to leave, regardless of their sentence.
Sesto sighed in slight defeat. He’d not noticed a tattoo on Daire, but they’d spent their entire acquaintance in the dark of night. “Daire, where might you be?”
He’d said it to himself, but her glossed eyes came alive. “You’re looking for the consort of the pretor’s son?”
Sesto’s hope brightened. “Yes. Do you know him?”
“Everyone knows him.” An ominous note edged into her sleepy tone. She pointed to her left, toward an arch, where two esguards stood sentry.
“He’s in there?” Sesto asked, frowning. Was he in trouble? Was it a cell?
“The pretor’s son insists he be kept away from the rest of us, so we don’t catch what he has.” She sauntered away with a bitter laugh.
Sesto’s stomach dropped. Isolation was a tactic of a bully, a subjugator. It was how Castien, Jesstin’s repugnant half brother, had gotten away with hurting so many young and vulnerable women. He turned them into pariahs to ensure they’d never feel safe telling another soul.
The only thing more maddening than the machinations of power-hungry men was how they always got away with it.
Was he so much better, soliciting Daire’s aid? Using was using.
He would ask for advice but wouldn’t press if Daire looked uncomfortable.
The esguards gave him no trouble at all. One sniffed, and the other laughed, but they didn’t stop him.
The space inside was roomy, even cozy, compared to the chaos of the main hall. There were cushions scattered around, and a modest bed behind a gauzy curtain. A fire burned in a hearth that had a hook and a cooking shelf, and Sesto marveled at the lack of chimney, wondering where it vented.
Daire sat at a small desk, near a canvas of the sept that seemed to have been done in... gold. Pure gold. The steaming liquid he poured from the kettle into his mug smelled delightful.
“Sesto!” Daire cried in surprise. His chair shoved back when he shot up. “What are you doing here?” “Will you... Would you like to join me?”
“I’d never think of declining,” Sesto said with a warm smile, sick at the thought that it was probably the only one he’d seen since they’d last been together. Elloven had been kindhearted toward Daire as well, and though he was still getting to know her, he adored her for it.
Jesstin might be too stubborn to admit it, but he adored her too. With time, he might even love her.
The steaming drink tasted of cider and pine—of home. The teeming conifers that cast soft shadows over the hamlet of Riverchapel... late nights in the Reliquary, tending the fire in Rhiain’s room while she slept fitfully, her dreams piecing together memories unavailable to her while awake.
“Ancora—that is, my mother...” Daire frowned. “She would make this for my brothers, and sometimes one would sneak a mug to me when she was doing the washing. Then she found out and blistered their asses with reeds from the riverbank.”
Oh, how it burned Sesto to hear such recognizable cruelty detailed.
His own family had, at one time, been loving, but those years belonged to the wind and sky.
He’d thought himself over it all until he’d met Daire, who was still deep in the thick of his abuse, too deep to understand scraps of kindness were not love.
The apartment was not to set him apart as a favorite but to keep him from realizing life didn’t have to be this way.
Ryquin had chosen Sesto to accompany Daire because he thought the men were the same.
“It’s lovely, and I’m sure you’ve improved on it, with your skill,” Sesto said amiably.
“Daire, I haven’t asked you, and I feel I should.
.. In my mind, I’ve been thinking of you as a man, but I’d like to know if that is how you see yourself, and if it is that by which you prefer to be seen or. .. as a woman? Or something else?”
Daire set his mug down, pensive. “No one has ever asked me before.”
Sesto wasn’t surprised. “It’s also all right if you prefer not to answer.”
“No, no...” Daire cast a thoughtful gaze past Sesto.
“I’ve sometimes thought about it. My mother had no name for what I was, no name I’d want anyway.
Ryquin says I don’t need a word for it. My brothers were kind, though, and thought of me as one of them, and I suppose, well, that this is how I see myself.
As a man, like they are.” He nodded to himself, a small smile appearing.
“Yes, that is how I think of myself—or would like to.”
It was striking how deep Sesto’s affinity had grown toward a man he’d barely met. But the hours had been long, and Sesto was used to passing his time in his own head. Daire was too. “Then that is who you are, Daire, and I’ll not forget it.”
Daire flushed, smiling down at his mug. “Thank you.”
“The most basic element of decency requires no gratitude.”
Daire looked up. “You didn’t just come for a visit.”
Hesitantly, Sesto nodded. “I do enjoy your acquaintance...”
“And I, yours.”
It was Sesto’s turn to smile. He felt it travel to his heart.
“I sense your worry for your master.”
“Jesstin?” Sesto stopped short of laughing. “He’s my friend, Daire, not my master.”
“Oh?” Daire considered that. “His necromancy has strengthened since coming here.”
Sesto waited to see where Daire would lead. He sensed he could trust his new friend, but Ryquin’s influence couldn’t be discounted. “He has not been himself. Nor Lady Elloven, for that matter.”
Daire’s eyes shifted downward. “His magic is not like mine or the others’.”
“So you’ve said.”
“He’s suffering because... Well, I believe he is suffering because our magic is designed for the world we belong to. Jesstin can speak to all the dead, at his will, because the dead are less accessible in your world.”
Sesto had stopped counting the number of times that the people of Rivenholde referred to it as a separate world.
“The windows between the Infinitum and most worlds are shuttered. In Rivenholde, the dead have dominion. It was not always so, until they were trapped. All this energy creates a thinness between upper and nether. Before the great betrayal, truly powerful necromancers were a rarity, but this thinness has allowed more of our magic to surface. Still, we can only speak to them with great effort, and never for long. You might imagine how it feels not to have the ability to shut off the voices.”
“I can’t imagine, but I take your point.”
“If I were Ryquin, I would say... Well, I think I would say... I know I would say, he must endure it because it’s who he is and he must learn...”
“Because he needs him.” Sesto ground out the words, holding as much pleasantness in his eyes as his anger allowed.
Daire nodded.
“And you? What would you say?”
Daire shook his head and shrugged.
“It’s all right, Daire. I’m not Ryquin. I would never punish you for speaking true, and I am excellent at holding my tongue.”
“It’s not Ryquin who worries me... It’s the other one. Acheron. He’s...”
“He’s what?” Sesto asked.
Daire nursed his mug to his mouth with a scattered look at the table. “Only rumor, you know...”
“Please. You can tell me.”
He looked around and leaned in. “I’ve heard he plans to... have Jesstin killed.”
Sesto reared up. “What? Why?” Of course there were a dozen reasons that any of the powerful in Rivenholde might want Jesstin, an outsider bonded to one of their own, dead, but if he couldn’t home in on a motive, he had nothing.
“He thinks the bond has taken too deep of a root, that even if they remove it, it won’t be enough. It was Jesstin’s fault she fell from the sky, people are saying, and...” Daire gripped his mug tighter. “It’s only something I’ve heard.”
That was all Sesto was getting. Daire needed to feel valued, not pressured. “What would you do, Daire, were you me? How would you proceed if your friend was in a predicament like this?”
“Ryquin would implore you to convince Jesstin to stay.”
It wasn’t an answer, and Daire’s strained expression indicated he knew it wasn’t.
“But?”
“I don’t have any friends, Sesto.”
“Yes, Daire, you do.” He stretched his arm out, surprising even himself when his fingers wrapped around the other man’s wrist. Daire looked up with a start, but his eyes.
.. Ahh, his eyes were so full of hunger, so desperate for genuine connection that Sesto nearly crawled across the table and hugged him.
“Are we? Friends?” Daire’s voice was as soft as a light breeze.
Sesto nodded, his throat stuffed. “We are.”
Daire’s gaze fixed to Sesto’s hand. “As a friend, I would tell you to get him as far from this place as you can and never, ever return.”
Sesto sighed through his nose. His instincts were sacrosanct, but the confirmation was the final piece.
“Then, as your friend, I need your help now.” He almost left out the next part, but it was Daire’s choice whether it was an offer worth accepting.
Sesto would never challenge his agency the way his own world had.
“And in return, I think I can help you too.”
Oh, she could hear Jesstin now. You stupid bitch. You always run right back to him, don’t you?
It wasn’t what Elloven was doing at all, but he’d never see it that way. He was so fatigued of her, he’d hardly made it into the loft before he was snoring.