Chương 149: Chapter 151 – Hidden Truths

"It doesn't make sense," Ant said.

"Why would my own clan, Silverwing, spend this much effort, this many years, on making sure I never bonded. What could I possibly be worth to them." Nathan's mouth curved. He'd plainly been waiting for someone to ask him a question worth answering properly.

"Even I don't know all of it. What I have are the recent whys, not the old ones."

"Then tell me the recent ones."

"I could." Nathan folded his hands again, taking his time before he said anything more, plainly intent on enjoying this part too.

"Though I doubt there's another person alive who could lay out the whole picture the way I'm about to. Most of what I know is an educated guess, built from records nobody else bothered reading properly, and the odd loose word from people who should have kept their mouths shut."

"So guess," Ant said.

"You clearly want to." Ant had said it hoping it would work, and it worked. Nathan's satisfaction only deepened.

"Your family tree goes back further than you know, Anthony. The original mages who stood against the Wraithkin were all part of a magical order called the Silverwings, because in those days, every mage belonged to it. When the most powerful among them cast the spell that burned every magic soul in the world down to nothing, the mages and their relatives who survived it founded the Silverwing clan from the ashes of what they'd done. Its first leader was Gregory Byrren.

Possibly the most powerful mage who ever lived, and certainly the one who designed the spell that ended magic for everyone else." Gregory. Adran's voice came through quieter than before, something in it Ant hadn't heard from him yet. My grandfather. He was gone from my life before I was old enough to remember his face properly. I knew almost nothing of what he'd actually done, only that nobody in the clan spoke his name with any warmth in it. Did you know any of this? Ant sent back.

About the spell, the egg, any of it? I knew of the egg, of course. Every clan leader before me carried the duty of guarding it, though none of us ever knew what it actually was. That was precisely why I went to it that day, artifact in hand, trying to finally learn what I was protecting. The spell itself is no secret, every child in the clan grows up knowing that story. What he's adding now, the bargain, the dragon, the Emperor's part in it, that's new to me as much as it is to you.

Natalia had gone very quiet at Ant's shoulder, arms folded, clearly working through the timeline of it in her head as Nathan talked.

"If Silverwing has hated the Byrren line since before any of us were born," she said, "why did it take this long for any of it to actually reach Ant. Why not act on it years ago, before he ever had the chance to bond at all."

"Oh, they tried, plenty of times, in smaller ways than this," Nathan said.

"A denied apprenticeship here. A convenient assignment there, always somewhere far from anything useful. Petty obstruction, mostly, nothing that ever touched a bonding ceremony directly. Your own father bonded a Kithren without incident. So did every other Byrren before you, as far as I've ever found record of. Why they chose your ceremony specifically to finally interfere with is the part I genuinely can't answer." He paused, considering.

"My best guess, and it is only a guess, is that it has something to do with your mother. There's remarkably little record of her anywhere I've looked. Less than there should be, for someone who married into a clan as prominent as yours. That absence alone tells me something was worth erasing." Ant's hands had gone cold, thinking back over every small unfairness he'd never had an explanation for, and now had too many at once.

"My father," he said.

"You already told me. He didn't die on a routine patrol. Was that them too, or was that Kris acting alone."

"I couldn't say for certain which hand actually did it," Nathan said.

"But I'd be astonished if Silverwing wasn't the one who gave the order. Your father was a Byrren who still had standing in the clan. That made him worth removing long before you were ever old enough to matter to anyone." Ant. Mahkir's voice came through gentler than Ant expected, none of his usual edge in it. You don't have to hear all of this right now, not on top of everything else tonight. I do, Ant sent back. I need to hear all of it. If I stop now I'll spend the rest of my life wondering.

"Gregory built the clan," Nathan went on, "then grew disillusioned with a life stripped of the very thing that had made him who he was, and left it in his son's hands. Peter Byrren took Silverwing to the top of every clan that existed in his lifetime. And Peter's own son, Adran, became the most celebrated leader Silverwing ever produced, bonded to a direwolf unlike anything seen before or since." My father.

Adran's voice again, and this time it carried real feeling in it, plain enough that Ant didn't need to guess at it. I remember him well enough. A hard man, but a fair one, or so I believed at the time. I do not remember being told any of this about my grandfather while my father was alive to tell it. Perhaps he thought it beneath discussing. Perhaps he simply did not want me carrying it. Ant didn't have anything useful to offer back.

He let the silence sit rather than fill it with something that wouldn't help either of them. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. And soon, Adran went on, quieter still, he is going to tell you how I died. I would ask that you let me hear it plainly, whatever it turns out to be. I have waited three hundred years for an answer I never expected to get at all.

Ant felt something move through the bond, faint and controlled, Adran's presence pulling back into whatever quiet corner of the system he retreated to when he wasn't speaking directly.

"There was a faction within Silverwing even then who hated what Gregory had done," Nathan continued.

"He'd taken magic from the entire world to win one war, and left nothing behind to show for it beyond a scattering of Kithren nobody could yet imagine growing into what they eventually became. Whatever happened next, only Silverwing's leadership truly knows. What's certain is that Adran was killed, and Silverwing has hated the Byrren line ever since." Adran said nothing for a long moment. When he finally spoke again, whatever had colored his voice a moment ago was gone from it entirely.

So it was my own clan after all. Not a stranger, not an enemy from outside our walls. People I served alongside every day. People I trusted enough to turn my back on. Another pause. Three hundred years, and I still could not have told you that with any certainty. Now I can. I'm sorry, Ant sent, not knowing what else there was to offer him. Don't be. You didn't do it. Whatever debt exists here, it isn't owed by you.

"Why not just remove us from the clan entirely," Ant asked.

"Why keep us close enough to watch."

"I couldn't tell you for certain. My guess, if their goal was always the return of magic, is that they wanted eyes on the one bloodline most likely to bring it back, in case it ever did." Rebekah spoke for the first time since they'd walked in, her voice still quieter than Ant was used to.

"Does any of this touch the unclanned? Is that why I've never once heard a whisper of it in all my years leading them?" Nathan considered her for a moment, his usual condescension noticeably absent for once.

"Not that I've ever found evidence of, no. Whatever this is, it stayed inside Silverwing's own walls. The unclanned were simply never worth Silverwing's attention. That's likely the only reason your secret kept as well as it did." Nathan tilted his head slightly.

"As for the egg, that's the part I'm least sure of, pieced together from records three hundred years old and half rotted through. Casting a spell of that scale required more than magic alone. A bargain was struck with the last living dragon, Mahkyros, to use her body to amplify what the mages already had, because whatever they were fighting was never only a human problem to solve. She had her own reasons for agreeing to it, something that apparently mattered more to her than her own life did.

The Emperor of that era, self-proclaimed as he was back when the whole structure of things looked nothing like it does now, was involved in striking that bargain too." Kalsar hadn't said a word through any of it, his eyes fixed hard on Nathan, the only visible sign that any of this was landing on him at all.

"Before the mages went to make their final stand, in what's now the middle of the Wastelands, the Silverwings were given an egg to guard. It was meant to be placed in the Wastelands before the spell was cast, and every clan leader after that carried the duty of protecting it once the clan itself existed, though none of them ever knew what it actually was." Nathan's eyes moved to Mahkir.

"My assumption is that egg was him. Why it sat there for three hundred years before finally hatching, I couldn't begin to guess, and I wouldn't insult you by pretending otherwise." He looked to Andy.

"It seems some of your theories about Mahkyros may have had more to them than anyone gave you credit for." His voice carried a private amusement underneath it.

"Though I'd wager even you always pictured him as a him." Andy's head came up properly for the first time since Nathan had started talking. Whatever he'd spent years telling himself was rumour had just been confirmed as fact in front of four witnesses, and the one detail he'd apparently gotten wrong the whole time seemed to bother him almost as much as the rest of it combined.

"And that's everything I know," Nathan said, plainly pleased with himself as he said it.

"I doubt there's another person breathing today who could have put all of that together for you." Ant took it in without arguing any of it. He couldn't say why, but all of it felt right in a way nothing else had in longer than he could remember, and he wasn't sure if that was the truth of it landing properly or simply relief at finally having something that made sense at all, after so long spent in the dark about everything that mattered. Careful, Adran's voice came, quieter than before, older somehow.

Wanting something to be true has never once made it so. Though in this case, I believe he is largely correct.

"So now what," Ant said, looking back at Nathan.

"Your clan has surrendered. Whatever plans you had for mine, for me, can't work anymore. Will you surrender as well?" Nathan considered that for longer than Ant expected him to.

"I don't plan to follow anyone. I'm a clan leader in my own right, and taking orders from someone with less than a tenth of my intelligence hardly fills me with confidence." He glanced toward Mahkir.

"Though I admit, it would be curious to see how he grows." A shadow moved behind them. Duncan had slipped into the room at some point while Nathan was talking, and he crossed the distance to the desk without a word, weapon already rising. It came down hard across the top of Nathan's skull before anyone could react to stop it.

"All that intelligence," Duncan said, "and you didn't see that one coming." He looked down at what was left of him for a moment longer.

"That was for Sam." He turned and walked back out without waiting for anyone to answer him. Nobody moved for several seconds after the door shut behind him. Natalia was the first to find her voice.

"He was the only one who actually knew any of that," she said, quiet, mostly to herself.

"All of it, gone, just like that."

"Maybe not all of it," Ant said, though he didn't explain what he meant by that, not yet. I did warn you he'd act eventually, Mahkir sent. There was no satisfaction in it, just a plain statement of something that had been true for a while. Duncan's been carrying that since Sam died. You know that as well as I do. Kalsar finally spoke, his eyes still on the space where Nathan had been sitting.

"Can't say I'm losing sleep over it either way." He looked at Ant.

"But you'll want to decide fast what you tell the rest of them out there. A dead clan leader raises questions of its own." Ant looked at the owl, still perched exactly where it had been the entire time, watching the empty chair with nothing that looked like grief in it at all. He didn't have an answer for Kalsar yet. He wasn't sure he had an answer for any of it yet, only more questions than he'd walked in with, and a great deal less patience left for waiting on them.