— POV: Emerion —
"Stop it."
My own voice surprised me. Hoarse, barely there, scraped raw from a week of cold air and silence and the particular exhaustion that comes not from physical pain but from having nowhere to put it.
"Stop it… please…"
The cell was the same as it had been every hour before this one. Stone floor. No light except what leaked under the door in a thin yellow line that moved with the torches outside.
The collar at my throat cold, constant, the absence of magic so complete it felt like a missing limb. My wrists raw from the bindings.
Pristilia sat across from me in the chair she had brought herself, on the first day, because the cell had no furniture and she apparently refused to stand for hours. Her fan moved in that slow, lazy arc. She looked exactly as composed as she had when she walked in.
"Oh, you want me to stop?" She tilted her head with genuine amusement. "You have no right to give me orders, pretty boy. Tell me your house, and this ends. Until then--"
she smiled "I'm just talking. And last I checked, talking isn't against any laws, even in wartime."
"Then finish me off," I said. "Because I have no intention of giving you anything useful."
"Finish you off." She repeated it thoughtfully, the way you repeat a suggestion you find faintly ridiculous.
"Where's the fun in that? A broken toy gives you nothing to play with. No." she crossed one leg over the other
"I won't harm you physically. Wounds can be healed. But this?" She gestured vaguely at the space between us. "Mental suffering doesn't leave marks anyone can treat."
She settled back.
"Now. Where were we." Not a question. "Ah yes. The merchants. The ones selling counterfeit gold in the southern district. I had their hands and feet removed which was fair, I thought, given the nature of the crime and then fed them to the crocodiles in the east garden."
She paused, considering. "The crocodiles were quite enthusiastic about it, actually."
Stop it. Stop it. I hate you. If I ever get out of here
My eyes burned. My fists pressed against the floor until the knuckles went white.
I will never forgive you for this.
And then the cold arrived.
Not the cold of the cell something different. Something total. A white light spread through the dark from no source I could identify, washing over the stone walls, the bindings, Pristilia's voice, until all of it simply
faded.
I looked at my hands.
Small. Soft. The hands of a child.
I was standing in a corridor I knew with the specific certainty of something learned before memory fully forms the Dawnveil family estate, the eastern wing, afternoon light falling through the tall windows onto marble floors I had spent years trying not to make noise on.
The smell of it. The particular silence of a house that does not feel like a home.
I was just in a cell.
I found a mirror in the alcove near the staircase. The face that looked back at me was mine unmistakably mine but from years ago. Seven, perhaps. Eight.
Am I hallucinating?
Footsteps.
I turned. My father came down the corridor with two soldiers behind him, his expression carrying that particular quality it always had when it landed on me not anger exactly, something worse.
A faint, reflexive disappointment, the kind that doesn't even bother to explain itself.
He glanced at me and didn't slow his pace.
"Instead of standing in corridors doing nothing, practice your magic.
Learn your geography. A noble who cannot name his own territories is an embarrassment." He passed me without stopping. "While other children your age are already learning to fly, you can barely walk in a straight line."
The soldiers followed him. The corridor went quiet again.
I stood there and felt the old weight settle back onto my shoulders like it had never left because here, in this memory or hallucination or whatever this was, it hadn't. Here I was still the child who cried alone at night after everyone else was asleep, quietly enough that nobody would hear, because even grief felt like something I wasn't allowed to do too loudly in this house.
I started walking. Faster. Then running, because running was the only thing that made the corridor feel like it was ending.
I turned a corner and walked straight into someone.
The floor came up fast. I landed hard and sat there blinking.
"You should be more careful." A hand extended toward me. "Are you all right?"
I looked up.
A man I didn't recognize blond hair, a short beard, perhaps five feet nine, with the kind of calm in his face that doesn't come from having an easy life but from having decided what to do with a hard one.
He looked at me without pity, which was the first thing I noticed. Just attention. Genuine attention, the kind that actually sees you.
I took his hand and let him pull me up.
"I'm fine," I said, already turning. "Sorry."
"Wait."
I stopped.
A few tears had escaped before I could stop them. I wiped at them quickly and didn't turn around.
"Did your father say something unkind again?" he asked.
"Were you following me?" The question came out sharper than I meant it the instinct of someone who has learned that attention usually precedes criticism.
"No," he said, simply. "But you have the look of someone who cries in this corridor regularly. It wasn't difficult to guess."
I turned back despite myself.
The injustice of it rose up before I could contain it every torn storybook, every afternoon spent inside while other children's voices drifted up from the courtyard, every dinner where I sat at the far end of the table and counted the minutes.
All of it compressed into one sentence:
"I hate them."
The words broke slightly on the way out.
He didn't flinch. Didn't correct me or tell me that was wrong to feel. He crouched down to my level and looked at me steadily.
"That's a heavy thing to carry," he said. "Can I ask you something?"
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
"What do you actually want? If you could have anything."
Something loosened in my chest at the question the simple fact of being asked, genuinely asked, without the answer already decided.
"I want to play with other children," I said. "I want to read my books without anyone taking them. I want to go wherever I want and not have to ask permission."
The words came faster now, something in me leaning toward the idea of it. "I want to be free."
He smiled. Not at me with me.
"That's a real thing to want,"
he said. "Hold onto it." He paused. "But I'll tell you something, and you don't have to understand it yet. You can't be free while you're carrying all that hatred. It's too heavy. It will follow you out of every room you escape into."
I frowned. "But they hate me first."
"I know. And that's real, and it's wrong, and you didn't deserve it." His voice was even and certain about this. "But do you want to become someone who hates? Is that the free person you're imagining?"
I thought about it. Actually thought about it.
"No," I said quietly.
"Then forgive them," he said. "Not for their sake. For the weight you'll stop carrying." He stood and put his hand briefly on my shoulder. "The world will give you many reasons to fill your heart with hatred, Emerion. Most of them will be justified.
But a heart full of hatred belongs to whoever put it there. Forgiveness is how you take it back."
He smiled one more time.
"Like a flower growing in a field of swords."
The light shifted.
Cold stone under my palms.
The collar at my throat.
Pristilia's voice, still going, filling the dark cell with the particular intimacy of cruelty that has made itself comfortable.
I sat very still for a moment.
Forgive.
I tried it. Not as a feeling I couldn't manufacture the feeling, and I didn't try to. Just as a decision. A direction.
I forgive you.
Something shifted in my chest. Faintly. Like a door opening somewhere far away.
It wasn't peace. It wasn't even relief exactly. But it was lighter marginally, undeniably lighter and in a cell with no light and no magic and nothing else to hold onto, lighter was enough.
"Why are you smiling?" Pristilia asked.
Her voice had changed slightly. The amusement was still there but underneath it something uncertain, the tone of someone whose instrument has stopped responding the way it should.
I shook my head.
She stared at me for a moment longer than usual.
Then she kept talking. But it didn't land the same way.
"Brother." A hand on my arm. "The ship is leaving."
I blinked.
Blue water. Open sky. The smell of salt and rope and wood and distance. The port stretched around us, alive with the particular noise of people going somewhere.
I had been standing at the railing staring at the horizon without realizing it.
"You were doing it again," Arlienne said, pulling my hand. "The zooming out. Come on."
I let her pull me.
I didn't know who the blond man was. I still don't whether he was a memory, a hallucination, something my mind assembled from scraps when I needed it most, or something else entirely. I couldn't say with certainty.
But the word he gave me.
I had carried it out of that cell, through everything that came after, all the way to this port, this morning, this ship.
Forgiveness.
It hadn't made me good or peaceful or free of everything I was still carrying.
But it had kept a door open in me that hatred would have sealed shut.
And somewhere on the other side of that door I was beginning to think was whatever I was actually looking for.
I followed my sister up the gangplank.
The ship moved.
The shore got smaller.