25 Easy #2
She opened her eyes to a well-organized library, still able to feel the grip of his hands around hers. She had no hope of leaving his head until he let her go.
Cursing roundly, she took in the library.
After months on the job, she’d learned that they were the most common unconscious structure that people chose for their memories.
Endless oak shelves labeled by letter and topic stretched out ahead.
Noceo had lived quite a life. Perusing the stacks of books, she walked toward a series of shelves of topics beginning with the letter W “Whitesleep.”
She opened the first volume.
Her surroundings reshaped and re-formed into a cramped but well-furnished bedroom. She was outside Noceo’s perspective in the memory just as she had been with the farmer. Whoever this god was, they seemed to affect the unconscious realms immensely, down to warping her abilities.
A large, austerely built bed of mahogany, pristine but for the carving of a wolf on one of the posts, occupied much of the space.
Gray sunlight streamed through barred windows and spread fingers over an ebony writing desk, washbasin, and a wardrobe stocked with silver robes that would have fit an adolescent.
Fire crackled in the hearth. Despite the decidedly grim stamp of the room’s layout and the cut of its furniture, everything was of the finest quality.
Several pieces sported the geometric patterns that had been ubiquitous during the monarchy’s time.
A smile broke over her face at the adolescent boy hunched over a mortar and pestle, grinding the distinctive yellow venom sacs of boil beetles to dust. A series of vials and powders littered his desk.
Behind Kadra, Noceo lounged on the bed and made notations on his scroll, spilling ink onto Kadra’s sheets.
The scene was so wholly comfortable that it hurt.
“It won’t work,” Noceo insisted as Kadra continued to mash the beetles, adding small quantities of leaves to the mortar.
“Hmm,” was Kadra’s only response. Like his half brother, he hadn’t yet grown into his features. The strong nose and stern mouth that would harden as he matured gave him the look of a very serious hawk at this younger age.
His fingers slipped on the pestle. It clattered to the ground.
He gave it a look of consternation before turning to the blazeleaf roll he’d left smoking on a nearby plate.
Her jaw dropped when he took several deep draws, blowing a ring at the ceiling.
So, it was blazeleaf before you turned to alcohol.
Noceo leaned over the edge of the bed and picked up the pestle. “Overdid it?”
“A little,” Kadra admitted.
His half brother cautiously sniffed the pestle. “What kind of drug is it for to you to pound away at it for so long? Hallucinogen?”
“Analgesic.” Kadra took a puff of blazeleaf. “Thought it might help with my back but it isn’t strong enough yet.”
She stilled. That’s why you made it? He had been in pain.
“So, you’re concentrating it?” Noceo swung his legs over the bed and peered over Kadra’s shoulder. “That’ll take hours.”
The tight lines around Kadra’s mouth said he was aware and didn’t give a damn.
She watched him in dawning understanding.
She had always thought that he drank to numb himself from the weight of what he did, but it had been to numb his body as much as his mind.
Recalling how often he’d reached for a glass after they’d made love, she resolved to swat him at her next available opportunity. His spine must have been in agony.
“I’ll never understand Father’s preoccupation with drugs,” Noceo muttered. “What good is an empire from the shadows? I need a better weapon, Drenevan. Something that’ll bring the world to its knees.”
“Your voice already does that.”
“But it’s so fucking limited!” Noceo flopped back against the bed.
His jaw tightened. “I can barely take on a crowd, and even then, I’m drained after a one-word command.
Not all of us can weave lightning.” He stretched his hands in front of him and splayed his fingers.
“I wish I were a Twelfth-Tier too. Parvine might like that. I could aim a word into a crowd and watch it dance.”
Kadra blinked. “Don’t aim one at me,” he said with a strange seriousness, before he began grinding away again.
Sarai caught a flash of resentment in Noceo’s eyes. Had he thought that Kadra was looking down on him?
“I’d make the world mine.” He scowled. “Maybe then, Clevsin’ll finally be pleased. I’m sick of getting my legs broken.”
A fissure of sadness tunneled through her chest as everything clicked.
Broken legs in one son. A broken back in another.
Kadra had left his spine in agony as penitence for what he had done, because pain was all he understood.
Noceo’s agony had steered him into megalomania.
How bitter it was that he had grown to subject others to the same hell that he had lived through.
Seeing him young and hurt and scared felt like looking in a mirror. No wonder he saw through me.
“You’d be starting a war,” Kadra noted.
“Life is war.” Noceo propped himself up on an elbow. “Take you. That’s what you were molded for. You’d be lost without a knife in your hand. You’ll never be normal.”
An ache spread behind her eyes when Kadra considered that gravely. “True,” he said without inflection.
True. The crack in her chest grew. The crucible that had formed him had burnt off too much of his morality for that. Clevsin had boiled him in blood and violence until he had conquered both and gained an enjoyment for their simplicity and familiarity.
The world Kadra lived in was a world at war.
He was one of the rare few who could see the battlelines that people had queued up at before the fighting began.
It was part of what made him such a brilliant politician, because the games of one-upmanship he had learned young had easily translated to politics.
She had always wondered which parts of him had been innate and which ones had been a byproduct of experience.
It was a miracle he’d turned out as honorable as he had when he’d traded one abusive home with Clevsin for another one with Othus.
No wonder he had hidden so much. How did anyone explain such a childhood?
The memory devolved to Kadra walking in on Clevsin bringing a poker on Noceo’s legs. Noceo had given Kadra such a desolate look that she had choked.
The jerk of her body outside his memories told her that he had pulled her hands away from his head. The world reemerged in flashes of light and sound.
“Well?” His voice was dim. “I had it easy, did I?”
Her lips parted on a soundless exhalation before she found the words. “I’m sorry. You didn’t.”
Every muscle in his pallid face stilled. He let her hands go. “Will you join me then?”
She looked at him then. Truly looked at his too-pale features and the imprint his clammy hands had left on hers. “The baker’s girl you cared for, how did Parvine Poxtan die?”
Noceo’s eyes darkened. “She’s none of your concern.”
On the contrary, she’s in every one of your memories. “You were fond of her. If you want me to understand you, then—”
“I never asked for understanding, Death-Summoner.”
“Why else would you show me your mind?” she asked quietly.
His features went bloodless. The subsequent silence was a knife between them. Jaw tight, he took a sharp breath when a portal split the air outside the horreum. Dalvia emerged and started at the sight of her.
Noceo composed his features into an admirable blank mask and took a step forward. “You shouldn’t have been wandering about alone, Death-Summoner.”
“Is she?” Kadra stepped out of the night behind her.
This should be good.