— POV: Emerion —
A few minutes passed before the uncle returned.
He came in carefully, the way a man enters a room he's been embarrassed in recently tea in hand, eyes finding the safest corner to settle on, taking deliberate interest in the grain of the wooden table.
My sister had that effect on people. I had spent eighteen years watching her leave rooms slightly more uncomfortable than she found them and considering it a skill.
I took stock of my surroundings properly for the first time. The interior told me everything the architecture, the stonework, the particular style of the eastern-side windows. One of my family's eastern palaces. The one Pristilia had taken.
Which meant Arlienne had taken it back.
I had too many questions and not enough of them had answers yet. The most immediate one sat in the silence where Alec should have been.
"Where is Alec?" I asked.
The question landed in the room and stayed there. The uncle's tea cup paused halfway to his mouth. Arlienne glanced at me over the rim of hers.
In the corner, Pristilia's general attempted to say something emphatic, but Arlienne's seal reduced it to muffled indignation.
"What timing, brother," Arlienne said, setting her cup down with the air of someone whose leisure has been interrupted and who wants that noted. "I was just beginning to enjoy this tea." She tilted her head. "Would you like a long answer or a short one?"
"Detail," I said. "All of it."
"Naturally." She looked across the table at the uncle with an expression of bright, focused curiosity the same expression she used to get as a child when Father brought home something from a foreign market.
"In that case, I believe our answer comes from him. I'm curious to hear it myself."
The uncle set his cup down slowly. The shift in his expression was complete all the awkwardness of earlier gone, replaced by something older and heavier that had clearly been waiting a long time behind it.
"It's a dark chapter," he said quietly. "One I hadn't expected to open."
"Dark chapters are the most interesting ones," Arlienne said, leaning forward slightly.
I reached over and lightly smacked the top of her head.
She turned to look at me with genuine offense. "What was that for?"
"He can tell it's difficult. Don't make it harder."
I looked at the uncle, who appeared neither relieved nor particularly grateful more the expression of a man who had resigned himself to telling a story he didn't want to tell and found the audience only marginally acceptable. "Take your time."
He sighed. Folded his hands on the table.
"To understand what happened with Alec… you need to understand where we come from first."
I frowned slightly. They were merchants. Careful merchants who kept their last name quiet and their head down. What history could require this kind of weight?
"When you introduced yourselves," the uncle said, looking at me, "Alec told you his surname."
"Kirtanson," I said.
He nodded once.
Beside me, Arlienne's expression shifted just for a moment, something moving behind her eyes before composure reasserted itself.
I noted it and filed it away.
"We don't give that name to anyone," the uncle said. "Especially not to nobles. That Alec told you" He paused, considering.
"His blessing reads people. Their emotions, their intentions. If he told you his name willingly, it means something about you felt safe to him." He looked down at his hands. "Which makes what happened afterward even harder to explain."
"What is the Kirtanson family?" I asked.
Arlienne set her cup down.
"I'll tell it," she said. "The old man clearly finds it painful, and I've read the source material." She looked at me with that particular expression that meant she was about to enjoy herself. "Don't interrupt."
I gestured for her to continue.
"Four hundred years ago," she began, "when humans had only just begun to understand the Nullborne Factor it was a time of discovery. Scholars were excited. Nobles were excited for different reasons." Her voice took on a faint dryness.
"The Factor appeared in so few people you could count them on your hands. And nobles, being nobles, decided that acquiring them would bring glory. Which it did, eventually. But the cost of those acquisition missions was enormous in gold, and in people."
She paused, turning her cup slowly.
"Children were conscripted before they were old enough to make that choice. Men were taken from their families for expeditions that many didn't return from. The economy was collapsing, food was scarce, and the nobility's response to all of this was to increase the pace of the missions."
She set the cup down. "When those missions failed and many did the nobles needed somewhere to direct their frustration. Common people were available."
The room was quiet except for the general's continued muffled protests, which nobody acknowledged.
"They did things," she said simply, "that don't survive in the histories Measters are allowed to teach. There's a reason those records are sealed."
I thought about the history lessons of my childhood. The six great noble houses and their glory. The discovery of the Nullborne Factor as a triumph. Nothing about what it cost. Nothing about who paid.
"But it still doesn't explain Alec," I said.
"I'm getting there." She refilled her cup. "Every story of sufficient darkness eventually produces someone who decides they've had enough. This one was no different. A commoner his name was buried so thoroughly that even I couldn't find it, which tells you something about how seriously the people who came after took the erasure received a divine blessing from the Old Great Sage."
She glanced at me.
"Before you ask yes, I believe it now. The evidence is in Father's private journals, which I accessed"
"You broke into Father's room."
"I accessed his private journals. The blessing this man received allowed him to hear the emotions and inner voices of the people around him. In ordinary times, perhaps a manageable gift."
She set her cup down. "But these were not ordinary times. The suffering around him was constant and overwhelming. Every person he passed carried grief, fear, rage, hopelessness and he heard all of it. Every hour. Every day." A pause. "The nobles' contempt layered on top of that. Their pride, their indifference, their casual cruelty. He heard that too."
"He went mad," I said quietly.
"He went berserk," the uncle said. His voice had dropped to something flat and final. "And my ancestor slaughtered nobles. Seventeen times."
The number landed in the silence like a stone in still water.
I didn't respond immediately. I sat with it the weight of it, the horror of it, and underneath both of those things, the understanding that was trying to form whether I wanted it to or not.
"The nobles had the last laugh," Arlienne said, after a moment. "The six great noble houses united against him. They defeated him." She looked at me steadily. "You know those houses, brother. House Nightbloom. House Stormlance. House Frostborne. House Ironcrest. House Sunfury." A pause. "House Dawnveil."
The name of my own house in that list felt like something cold pressed against the back of my neck.
"They showed no mercy to his family," the uncle said. The hatred in his voice was old and quiet the kind that has been carried so long it no longer burns, it simply exists, like scar tissue. "Not to his wife. Not to his children."
"Then how--" I started.
"One child survived. Whether they spared the child deliberately or whether it was an oversight I don't know. Perhaps they wanted a reminder."
The uncle's jaw tightened. "They bound that child with an Oath of Echoes. An oath ensuring that all descendants would never raise a hand against the nobility. That they would live under a false identity."
He looked at his hands. "They gave the child the name Kirtanson. And the divine blessing passed down through the bloodline diluted, changed, but present. We learned to use it for trade. It gave us good instincts, good business, a quiet life."
His mouth tightened. "As long as nobody knew the name."
The fire in the lantern shifted. Somewhere outside, wind moved through the trees.
I looked at Arlienne.
She was already looking at me, with that expression she uses when she wants to see if I've arrived at the answer without her having to hand it to me.
"The blessing passed down through the blood," I said slowly. "Along with everything else. The sensitivity. The way it responds to suffering." I thought of Alec's face in that final moment the hollow laugh, the broken certainty, the sword that went through both of us without hesitation.
"When his uncle was hurt in front of him, when everything collapsed at once"
"The blessing amplified it," Arlienne said quietly. "Just like it did four hundred years ago. Too much input. Too much pain. And a bloodline that already knew where that road ended."
"He went berserk," I said.
She nodded once.
I thought of Alec saying I was such an idiot. The laugh that was worse than crying. The way his hands had bled from biting them.
A sixteen year old merchant who had tracked a military camp alone because his divine blessing told him I was still in pain.
"Where is he?" I asked.
"Miravale Island," the uncle said. "For treatment." He exhaled, long and slow. "He came back to himself after after it was over. Enough to understand what he had done. That was--" He stopped. Started again. "That was perhaps worse."
I didn't push for more detail. I didn't need to.
"I will make sure he returns to himself," Arlienne said, in the tone she uses when something is already decided. "I've spoken with hector"
"Hector," I said, testing.
"with hector about it. He'll take a seat on the family council in exchange. His contributions to retaking the eastern territory are documented. Father will accept it."
I looked at the uncle hector who had the expression of a man who had made a pragmatic bargain he wasn't entirely comfortable with and had decided to live with it anyway.
"I don't want to go back," I said.
Arlienne turned to me, and for a moment I thought she was about to argue. Instead, she smiled a real one, the small private kind I had almost forgotten she was capable of.
"We're not going back,"
she said.
She reached into the air beside her and did something with her hands that I didn't fully follow. Two shapes assembled themselves from condensed mana slow at first, then faster, taking on color and weight and dimension until two figures stood in the room that looked, with unsettling precision, like the two of us.
I stared at them.
The replica of me blinked. Adjusted its posture. Tilted its head with my exact habitual slight frown.
"They'll hold for extended periods," Arlienne said, with the casual satisfaction of someone describing a project they are very pleased with.
"Minor magic, basic behavioral patterns, enough personality to survive a conversation. Father won't suspect. Mother won't suspect." She paused. "The new maids definitely won't suspect."
"You built copies of us."
"I've been working on the concept for two years. This seemed like an appropriate occasion to test them properly." She straightened her sleeve. "There is so much outside these walls, Emerion. Knowledge, experience, things that don't exist in Father's sealed records or the approved Measter curriculum." She looked at me with something that was almost, if I was being generous, wistfulness. "I've read about it all. I haven't seen any of it."
She held out her hand.
I looked at it.
"Don't forget our arrangement," she said to hector.
"My name," he said, with the patience of a man conserving his remaining energy, "is Eril. Not Hector. You have been told this three times."
"Yes, forgive me I'm genuinely terrible with names." She said it without embarrassment, because she never had any about things like that. "Eril. The deal stands."
He sighed the sigh of a man who has accepted his circumstances.
I took her hand.
The evening air hit us as we rose cool and open and honest, the kind that doesn't ask anything of you. Below, the eastern palace shrank to something small and manageable. Ahead, the sky went on for longer than I could see.
"Adventure, you said," I muttered. "It's going to be insufferable with you along."
"You're always so mean," she said, squeezing my hand once before letting go so we could fly properly. "Truly. It's your worst quality."
"I have a list of your worst qualities if you want to compare."
"I'd love to hear it, actually. I'll take notes."
I looked at her silver hair catching the last of the evening light, eyes already scanning the horizon with that bottomless curiosity she had never once managed to turn off and felt something shift quietly in my chest.
Not forgiveness, exactly. Not yet. But the beginning of it.
The direction of it.
That was enough for now.
I don't know what's out there, I thought, watching the horizon open up ahead of us. I don't know what I'm looking for or what I'll find or whether any of it will answer the questions I've been carrying.
But at least I'm moving toward something I chose.
That has to count for something.