Chương 21: Defiance

My heart had never beat as hard as it did in the second after I muttered those words. I did not know why I had said it. I had meant it, that much was true, but I would never have muttered it in a normal council, and I had gone into this room with no plan to say anything like it, yet the words had arrived at the front of my mouth with no warning. I regretted it the instant the silence began. That silence did not pass quickly and I kept my head down, my eyes on the stone and my face as empty as I could make it.

After what felt like much longer than it probably was, I heard a small hushed exchange start up to the side of the arc, one voice and then another, too quiet to make out, the shape of a conversation rather than its content. My grandfather did not speak. Still, I kept my head down. Then my grandfather's voice came, and it was pitched lower than it had been a moment ago.

"You are beginning to behave as you did before. This council thought we had taken that out of you. It seems we were premature." I did not have to ask what he meant. Nana Serre had told me the story once, that when I was three years old, I had thrown a tantrum in this estate because I had wanted to see my mother. Nana had said that afterward, the northern wing had come down and the elders had decided some kind of correction had to be applied. I did not remember any of it since I was only three.

What I had instead was the tacit rule of the years that followed, which was that I did not ask about my parents, and I did not ask about my siblings, and nobody spoke to me about them, and if I brought them up by accident an instructor would change the subject smoothly enough that by the time I was eight I had stopped bringing them up altogether. I had been told, in a hundred different ways across a hundred different sessions, that a boy of my station did not need family the way other children needed it.

That attachments of that kind were distractions. That the house was the only family that mattered and that the only work worth doing was the work of becoming what the house needed me to become. That in time, when the years were right, a marriage would be arranged and an heir would be produced and the line would go on, and that would be the extent of my obligation to the shape of blood that had made me.

But I had spent yesterday standing in a staging yard while a boy I had known for twenty hours pulled me into a half hug and told me there was a stupid four-move handshake I was going to love, and I had spent the afternoon before that sitting in moss in front of a rock who had listened to me talk about a burp without once telling me I was taking too long, and somewhere in me the tacit rule of the years was starting to feel less like a rule and more like a set of walls nobody had ever actually explained to me the purpose of.

How was it a distraction? Rael had friends. Rael had an entire family of Solennes back in whatever Solenne estate he came from, and he also had Eydric, and now he had me, apparently, and his being the second-highest scorer in this year's cohort suggested none of it had slowed him down. Eydric had his Shadow Sera, who had said she was proud of him, and he had come out of the practical at the side of a boy he had spent years bouncing off of and had still scored better than almost anyone in the columns behind him.

None of them had fractured under the weight of knowing the people they were born next to. I just wanted to know what my mother's face looked like and hear my father's voice when he was not speaking to an audience and know whether any of my siblings had a laugh I would have recognized. I wanted one afternoon with them, just one. The hushed voices started again for a moment, and then stopped, and my grandfather let the silence come back to its full weight.

Then, from the highest chair, with no warning or warmth or prelude:"Granted." Granted? Huh, that was easier than I th—"You will see them on the day you depart for the academy. One week from this morning. Not before. Not after. The meeting will be arranged by the household and will take place at a time and a location of the council's choosing, and the duration will be set by me. That is the shape of your wish. That is all of it." I did not answer immediately.

Nana had used to say a word under her breath when something had made her angry and she thought I was not listening. It was always one word, said in many variations and always with the object of her anger: Fuck. Fucking highborns. Fuck this. Fuck that. Fucker. I had not known it was a bad word until I had said it out loud once at the age of eight, and she had grabbed my wrist very fast and made me promise I would not be vulgar, not ever, not where anyone could hear me.

I had promised, and I had kept the promise, but somewhere between that afternoon and this one I had also found, quietly, that it was a very… how do I put this… powerful word. It did a thing no other word I had been taught in this house could do. It carried anger out of you in a single clean syllable and left the inside of your head lighter for a second afterward, and nothing in my vocabulary lessons had ever managed the same trick.

Nana made me promise to not say it out loud, yes, but she had not said anything about inside my head, and I was inside my head now. That fucking old man.

"Do you understand, Howl?"

"... Yes, Elder."

"Good." I kept my eyes on the tile for another beat, and then, because the anger was still there and I felt robbed, I spoke again.

"In that case, might I be granted one further thing?"

"No. You were granted one."

"... Please, Elder." They went silent again, then, after a while…

"Know this, Howl. You were granted a wish and you spent it poorly and so the vaults, in case that was where your second question was leading, are now closed to you. Let that be the lesson. See that it takes." He let that sit for a moment.

"With that understood. What is the second thing you would ask of this council?" I took a deep breath.

"There is a shrine. Somewhere in the grounds of the estate. It is said to be the dwelling of the guardian spirit of the house." The hushed voices started immediately. Two of them at first, then a third, then a fourth, all from different points along the arc, none of them loud enough to make out clearly but the shape of them sharp.

"Who told you of this?"

"Na—" I caught it on the first syllable.

"Servant Serre, Elder." The voices got louder. Not quite louder enough for me to make out full sentences, but loud enough that I caught pieces of them in the air above my head. —corrupted him from the start— and —how dare she, after everything— and —I told you, I told you the woman was— and one voice, a woman's, from somewhere on the left side of the arc, just the word Serre spoken with a sort of disgust I had not heard from any of these elders in any council I could remember.

My grandfather let the voices run for a few seconds and then said one word.

"Enough." The voices stopped.

"I presume you would like access to this place?"

"Yes, Elder. I would."

"Granted."

"Thank y—""You may leave." … Fuck that fucking old man. I rose from the tile slowly, head still bowed, and bowed once to the centre of the arc, then turned and walked back through the gap in the circle toward the doors. I kept my steps even, my shoulders straight and my eyes forward. I also fought, very hard, to keep the smile off my mouth. Nana had told me about the ancestral shrine once. Years ago.

She had said that a guardian spirit lived in it, or had once, and that no living member of the house had seen it since the death of the last Axiom over a thousand years ago. The shrine had been maintained since. Tended, swept, kept in repair. But not visited that much. Nobody walked into a shrine to bow to a spirit who had not answered in a millennium. Nobody, that was, who could not see spirits the way I could see them now.

With [Spirit Sight] and the spirit contract I recently earned, perhaps I could get something better than these fucks could ever give me. The doors opened ahead of me as I reached them, and I stepped through without looking back.

The doors of the council chamber had not been closed for a full minute before the voices started. Oserys Aridis sat in the highest chair and let them run.

"Three years since the last time he raised his voice in this chamber, and tonight he raised it twice."

"He named that witch, almost said it out loud."

"That woman should have been gone the day he turned three." Oserys waited until the noise had spent itself, then raised one hand, and the chamber went still.

"Elders, tell me what you saw tonight." The elder on his far left answered first.

"A boy who has been corrupted by a servant's stories and softness. Had the woman not—""I did not ask you what you think caused it. I asked you what you saw." Stolen story; please report. Only silence answered him.

"I will tell you what I saw." Oserys leaned forward in the chair, just slightly, and the shadows along the arc leaned with him.

"I saw a boy who has obeyed every instruction this council has given him for sixteen years walk into this room and, for the first time, ask for something. Not demand, ask. And the thing he asked for was his mother's face." He let that sit for a moment.

"Now. What does that tell us?"

"Had it not been for that woman filling his head with stories and softness for eight years, none of this would be happening. The boy would be on the path we set for him. She corrupted him from the start, Oserys, and every one of us in this room said so at the time."

"Perhaps," Oserys said.

"And perhaps you are right that the witch accelerated what we are seeing. But she has been gone for five years, and the boy's hunger has not gone with her, which tells me the hunger is not something she created. It is something we created, by leaving a space where a family should have been and assuming the space would stay empty because we wished it to. That was a miscalculation. What the woman did or did not do is no longer relevant. What is relevant is that we have seen the crack in time."

"In time for what?" said the elder on his right.

"In time to fill it ourselves, before someone else does." Oserys rested his hands on the arms of the chair.

"We raised him clean, with no attachments, no bonds, no warmth that was not earned through performance, and the intent was correct. A blade must be forged without softness or it will not hold its edge." He paused.

"But a blade that has never been held does not know whose hand it belongs to. And tonight, the boy showed us that he is already looking for a hand." He stood from the chair, which he did not do this often, but he wanted the elders to notice, for this was important. And they noticed.

"He has been outside these walls for a matter of days. In that time, a Solenne boy called him friend and the boy accepted it without hesitation." He crossed to the window that overlooked the darkened courtyard below.

"This is not a rebellion, but merely a symptom. The boy has a vacuum where his family should be, and he is filling it with the first people who offer him anything resembling warmth."

"Then we tighten the structure," the elder on his left said.

"More discipline. More—""More discipline?" Oserys turned from the hidden window.

"You want to press harder on a boy who just showed you that pressing is what cracked him in the first place?" The elder's mouth closed.

"That is foolish, and every year of resistance costs us two years of correction. We do not have those years to waste." He walked back to the chair but did not sit.

"The boy wants his family, so give it to him."

"You cannot be serious."

"The meeting is no longer a kindness. It is a correction." He looked across the arc.

"If we refuse him tonight, after he stood in this room and asked for the first time in sixteen years, he learns that asking this house for warmth produces nothing, so he stops asking and he finds it somewhere we cannot reach." He sat.

"If we give it to him, measured, controlled, on our terms, the boy remembers that it was his house that opened the door. Not his friends. Nor his instructors. Us. That is an anchor. Anchors hold when the tide turns." The elder on his right leaned forward.

"And if the anchor is not enough? The boy is the Axiom, Oserys. When his Expression manifests—""Yes." He interrupted, his patience thinning.

"When his Expression manifests, whatever the boy believes himself to be will become real in a way none of us can contain. I am aware of that. Every decision I have made about him since the morning he was born has been made with that day in mind. Which is precisely why I am telling you to give him the afternoon with his family instead of another year of silence and empty rooms." He turned his head toward the second-highest chair.

"Jahaeser." His son looked up.

"Father."

"When you sit across a table from him at the end of this week, you will be warm. You will ask him about the academy, and you will listen as though you have been waiting years to hear his answers and you will let the boy become attached to you. He is hungry for it. The hunger is the leverage, so do not waste it by being stiff, and do not overplay it by being sentimental. Be his father. That is all he wants, and it is the cheapest thing we can give him that produces the most return."

Jahaeser held his gaze for a moment.

"... Yes, Father."

"Good. Gowyn handles the rest of it once the boy is past these walls. The boy trusts him already, more than he knows, and that thread is ours. We will not be careless with it." He rested his hands on the arms of the chair, and the chamber understood the conversation was ending.

"One more matter. One of the savage clans on the continent of Khaeldun has attacked the eastern colony. Their new leader is a rising young man named Orzan of the Varkai. Send four to deal with him before the next summons of the King." The elder on his left nodded to confirm.

"Then we are finished. Send word to the shrine attendants. The boy will be fetched in the morning, and come back a day later."

I had slept the rest of the night through without dreaming, and I had woken to a hand on my shoulder and a voice telling me to dress. A carriage took us as far as the foot of a mountain and after that, there were stairs. They had been cut into the rock itself, narrow, steep and worn smooth at the edges by centuries of feet that were not mine. The dawn was somewhere behind the eastern ridge and two guards walked ahead of me and two behind.

None of them spoke, and the only sounds were the slow scuff of leather against stone and the wind moving through whatever trees clung to the slope below us. I had never been on a mountain before. The air was different here. It was thinner than what I was used to, and also… cleaner, in a way I did not have a word for, with a faint cold edge in it that I could feel at the back of my throat when I breathed in too deeply.

I climbed while breathing and I turned my head once to look back the way we had come, and the estate was already smaller than I had expected it to be, sitting in the green of the valley below like something somebody had drawn from a great distance. I turned forward and kept climbing. A building came into view as we cleared the last bend. It sat at the top of the slope on a wide flat shelf of stone, and it was older than anything I had ever stood in front of.

The roof was tiled in a dark blue-grey that the dawn was just beginning to touch, the eaves curling up at the corners in the old way I had only seen in illustrations in Nana's books. The walls were timber and pale stone, weathered into a colour that did not have a name. A narrow path of flagstones ran from the top of the rock-cut stairs to the front of the building, lined on either side by lanterns, and at the end of the path stood the gates. They were enormous.

Two heavy slabs of dark wood banded with iron, and above them, carved into the lintel in deeper relief than I would have thought the stone would allow, the gryphon of House Aridis with its wings spread. The guards stopped at the foot of the path. One of them inclined his head to me. I understood that I was meant to walk the rest of the way alone. I reached the gates, and before I had decided whether to knock or call out, they opened, letting three figures step through who bowed deeply, all at once.

They were old, with pale grey robes that were cut in a fashion I had not seen on anyone in the estate. Two men and a woman. Their hands were folded in front of them in the same precise way, and their bows held a beat longer than the bows in the estate ever did.

"Young Lord. We are the keepers of this place. We have served the shrine for as long as our line has been permitted to serve it, and for the duration of your stay, we are honoured to serve you."

"Thank you. The honour is mine." The woman straightened first. She gestured, with one open hand, toward the open gates behind her.

"Please. Come in." I stepped past them, and they fell in behind me without a sound, and the gates closed at my back as I crossed the threshold into the shrine. The keepers walked me through the shrine over the next hour. Courtyards with raked white stone, a long hall lined with paper screens, a meditation chamber, a library wing where the woman lifted the corner of a silk cover and told me the oldest scroll beneath it had been copied in the second century of the house. A bath house.

A kitchen smaller than I had expected. The wing where I would sleep, which they walked me into and then bowed back from. The room was a single low bed under an east-facing window, a writing desk, a table for tea, and a folded set of grey robes laid out at the foot of the bed in case I wanted to dress as the keepers dressed. Nothing else. I thanked them and asked the question I had come up here to ask.

"There is a shrine within the shrine. The one the guardian spirit is said to dwell in. May I see it?"

"Of course, Young Lord. This way." We crossed a smaller courtyard at the back of the complex, the one I had not been shown on the tour. The flagstones here were older, and the moss between them had not been swept in a long time. The woman walked at my side.

"Does the spirit really live here?"

"Spirits do not, as a rule, dwell where humans dwell. The barrier between their world and ours is thinnest in old forests and mountains nobody has built on, and it thickens wherever men gather. A shrine on a mountain is closer to where a spirit might pass than a council chamber, but it is not a place a spirit chooses to remain. They visit. They are remembered more than they are seen."

"And this one?"

"Saoren. Yes." A few more steps.

"There are stories. The keepers before me kept a record of every reported sighting since the founding, and you may read it during your stay if you wish. But I will be honest with you, because honesty is what this place asks of the people who tend it. The shrine is a historical place now. Your ancestor, the first Axiom built it over four thousand years ago for a spirit who was, at that time, very much present. That conversation has not been heard in over a thousand years."

"But it's still possible he's here, right? Saoren, I mean? After all, this whole place was made for him."

"... Of course, Young Lord." She had said it the way you said of course to a child, so I kept my face still and walked. We came to a second set of gates at the back of the courtyard, smaller than the ones at the entrance but built in the same dark wood and the same iron, and the woman pushed one of them open then stepped through, and I followed. The garden inside was small and old.

A path of pale stones ran from the gate to the centre, lined on either side by low mossy boulders and the small twisted trees I had seen in the first courtyard. There was a stone basin off to one side with water sitting still inside it, and a low wooden post beside the basin with a small bronze bell hanging from a frayed silk cord. And at the centre of all of it, there was a tree. I stopped walking. It was not a tree I had seen in any of Nana's books, and I had read most of them twice.

The trunk was dark and slender and slightly bent, the branches reached up and out in soft uneven curves, and they were full, every one of them, of pale pink flowers. The whole tree, end to end, in bloom in the cold grey light of an early morning that should not have been warm enough for any flower in this kingdom to be open.

"Whoa..." The woman, beside me, smiled.

"It is called a suren blossom, Young Lord. The line was once said to be older than the house. This particular tree had not bloomed in over a thousand years." She paused, and the smile deepened a little.

"It started blooming again sixteen years ago. On the morning you were born." I turned my head to look at her.

"... Wait. Me?"

"Yes, Young Lord." I waited for her to explain, and she seemed to understand.

"The suren is connected to the spirit world, and so, the old texts say, is the power of the Axiom. The tree blooms during the lifetime of a new one. It had been bare for over a thousand years. Then, on the morning of your birth, one of the older keepers walked out at dawn to see why the air smelled the way it did, and found it in flower."

"... I am flattered?" She inclined her head. We stood there for a long moment, the two of us, looking at the tree until I cleared my throat. She was, I suspected, waiting for some signal from me about what came next, and was too polite to ask for it.

"I would like to spend the rest of the day here, if you don't mind. Perhaps even try to find Saoren. Why not." She smiled again, and this time the smile reached the corners of her eyes.

"It is said, Young Lord, that he can be called by the bell." She gestured toward the small bronze bell on its post by the basin.

"You may ring it, if you wish. The keepers have not done so in many generations, out of respect for what the silence after the ringing has come to mean. But the bell is yours to ring, by right of your name and your blood. I would only ask, again, that you not hold too much hope on it."

"I'll remember that. Thank you, uh..."

"Mireth, Young Lord."

"Thank you, Mireth." She bowed, and as she straightened she folded her hands in front of her in the way of the keepers.

"What hour would you like to take your meal, Young Lord?"

"Whenever you eat is fine by me."

"We eat once a day, at midday, then we take tea at sunset, with sweets. That is all."

"... Sure." She bowed again, turned, and walked back through the gate the way we had come, and the gate closed behind her with a small soft sound, and I was alone in the garden with the tree and the bell. I stood there for a long moment after she had gone, looking up through the pink branches at the slow-brightening sky, and I let myself want it. Ding! [Quest Issued] Objective: Find the High Spirit Saoren-of-the-Long-Coil and establish a contract. Reward: New skill (Rank S). Failure: No reward. A waste of time.

Rank S?!

"... I really hope I'm not about to waste my time."