Chapter 7 #4
Armand broke away to stand against a row of bushes. Lars was next, sharing a cautious look with John, who grabbed Mason in a rush. Fox was the last, his head still caught in Gennady’s chokehold. But the sudden silence that hushed the courtyard was enough to pause their tussle.
Someone had arrived, and it wasn’t the proprietor.
The setting darkened from the outside, closing in on him. Everyone else became a motionless observer. The light above spotlighted Jesstin and his blood father, who stood five feet in front of him, wearing his full Oldcastle regalia like he’d just returned from official business.
He wasn’t in a memory anymore. The trial had begun.
It’s him now, is it, Mother? I need to forgive yet another letch for fucking up our lives?
Nara was silent though. He hadn’t felt her at all since the garden memory.
“You look so much like her.” Sestinn had an officer’s stance, formal and cold. His dark eyes glowed like candles in an icy window. “She really was a beauty, Adynara. I never understood how she could choose a dog like Mathias.”
“At least that was a choice. What you did to her...” Jesstin stretched his fingers. How many times had he fantasized about pummeling Sestinn into dust in this very spot, for everyone to see?
“This unpleasant business?” Sestinn cleared his throat and adjusted his cuffs with tight snaps. “Women don’t know what they want, Jesstin. It’s why they have us.”
“Men like you—”
“Like what?” Sestinn cocked his head. Jesstin fleetingly saw himself in the brash, challenging stare that followed, the rise of just enough irritation to assume command.
“Oldcastle’s coffers have never been fuller.
Poverty is in record decline. We’re the favorites of Whitechurch.
You know my wife is a close friend of Lady Quinlanden. ”
“Theocratin has done these things. You and Castien live in disgrace. And your wife? Capriotta? She died years ago.”
“Ask anyone who lives within my borders whether they’d rather have me or Mathias looking after their interests.”
“Only because they don’t know about all those children. What you did to them.”
“Mathias failed you. He had just enough”—Sestinn pinched two fingers together—“cunning in him to line his banks and pad those of his enemies but not quite enough to pass onto his sons. A steward’s work comes with burdens.
It also comes with benefits. Those benefits, they’re the only thing that makes it all worth doing.
A satiated steward means a thriving community. ”
Jesstin bit down on his tongue until he tasted blood.
He couldn’t forget he was being tested. Unlike Mathias, Sestinn wasn’t dead.
He couldn’t actually be there, though the “illusion” was so effective he wondered if Sestinn had actually died while he was in Riverchapel.
“No one would turn a blind eye to what you and Castien have been doing if they knew the whole truth.”
“That’s your dearth of guile talking.” Sestinn’s neck lengthened as he angled his head upward, away.
Until then, Jesstin hadn’t realized how tall the man was, where his own height had come from.
“Are there no periods in our realm’s history to which you look back and wonder why the citizens ‘turned a blind eye’ to something unfathomable? ”
The question brought Jesstin’s anger to a grinding pause.
There’d been many small and several major wars fought in their past, periods of upheaval and atrocity that seemed impossible in their modern world, but men didn’t require wartime to perpetuate inhumanities.
When he was younger, he hadn’t understood how people allowed their leaders to do such unspeakable harm to others.
His time in Mythgarde had been instructional on the psyche of man though.
An individual’s basic needs would always come before their personal or political morals.
Their sacrifices must never infringe upon their essentials.
They’d donate their time, their coin, and even their voices when it was convenient, but never their lives unless forced to, and it was difficult to judge a man or a woman for protecting their own family.
But shouldn’t it be impossible to look at someone who was breeding and sexually abusing children to feed his sadism and offer even a sliver of forgiveness?
Except, this trial wasn’t about forgiveness at all.
It was about courage.
“You don’t think I know what you were up to, secreting those girls away from my keep like a cat burglar?
” Sestinn chuckled. “You really believed you were making a difference, didn’t you?
That one poor girl every month or so meant you were on the side of good?
The side of what is ‘right’? That you weren’t like aaall those others throughout history who stood by and did nothing? ”
“If you’re saying I should have done more, you’re right.”
“We both know where lies the cradle of your ineptitude. You lived with that truth every day. You’ll die with it.”
The Sestinn Edevane standing before him might not have been real, but everything Jesstin had ever felt about him was. The dread. The shame. The fear he might be just like him, which had become an excuse for every failure.
He studied his father’s face, the flow of the lines around his eyes and mouth, the permanent curve that was almost genial.
He’d never looked at him so directly before, had never been brave enough.
Anytime he’d seen Sestinn, or even Castien, in the village, he’d made himself small and disappeared behind something safe, or took a longer route.
Now that he was really looking at him though, there was nothing worth fearing. Sestinn’s eyes were as dead as his humanity. Standing before Jesstin was a husk of what might have been had the stars been in different alignment upon the day of his birth.
“My ineptitude? You haven’t been steward for years.” Jesstin fixed his gaze to Sestinn’s. Tingling spread along his jaw. His palms were on fire. “You’ve been in disgrace. You’ve been in exile. You’ve never known burdens, only created them for others.”
“Careful, Jesstin, you might say something clever here,” Sestinn retorted.
“Being clever, though...” He raised his hand, ticking fingers in the air.
“How long did you leave them all to suffer? Trickling them out like a leaky faucet, as the others wondered, why not them? Why her? Why can this child decide who lives? And yes, I say child, for a man would have ridden to my keep with his sword drawn and dealt with the matter with honor.”
Jesstin choked on his spit. “Honor? Is honor a concept you’re at all familiar with?
” Light traveled from his flame through to his belly, spurring him vigorously alive.
Pieces of him fell away, pieces he no longer needed.
Had he really been so afraid of this man?
Why? For what? A creature whose deceptions relied on darkness and complicity was no god.
Sestinn and Castien were only as powerful as others enabled them to be.
Asterin’s tiny rebel army had been enough to topple decades of fragile idolatry.
Jesstin didn’t have an army, but he didn’t need anyone else. He was a legion of one.
“All this time, I was so afraid I’d become you or Mathias, but I’m neither of you. I’m Rhiain and Emrys and Asterin and even my poor mother, but I could never be you.”
Sestinn smirked. “If it pleases you to believe so.”
“No, no, you’re not getting in my head ever again, old man.
I’ve spent way too much fucking time in there not to see you coming.
” Jesstin tapped his temple. “No one is born with the evil you’ve spread through this Reach.
A man chooses it. A man learns it. A man chases it.
Takes it. Because there’s nothing if you don’t, is there?
Just emptiness.” He swept his hands away. “A void.”
Sestinn’s stony mien cracked. “You sound like your vacuous sister.”
“So vacuous, she had you and your son expelled from society.” Jesstin had his rhythm.
His heart was beating fast but true. The lesson had become so clear to him that it was his past self he lifted up in judgment, for failing to see what had always been evident.
He hadn’t been broken upon the wheel of his fathers’ evils; he’d slipped between the spokes and made his own path.
Any pain or fear or sadness still hanging on was only him tugging at the roots of a tree he’d dug up.
Even at ten, he’d possessed enough wisdom to make the right choice for himself: stay with Mathias, go with Sestinn, or leave with Rhiain.
In that moment, he’d decided who he’d wanted to be—who he hadn’t wanted to be—he just hadn’t known it.
“Your name is a dying legacy, Sestinn. Theocratin has been distancing himself from you for years now. He wants nothing to do with his father. The Summer Palace belongs to the real Edevanes now. The stewardship is in the hands of a man who shares your blood but didn’t inherit your immorality.
It eats you up, doesn’t it, to see someone you must believe is so much weaker than you running your village?
Theocratin and Emrys are the future of the Edevanes and Skylarks.
That’s what burns you up, seeing the best of you change everything the worst of you built. ”
“How tidy you’ve structured your assessments.” Sestinn’s stony grin flagged. “But what will you do when you next see me in the market? Cower behind stalls or shrubs as though I won’t see? How long will you carry these bold words before you realize that’s all they are?”