“Your mother – and I will say my sister’s name as I please, boy – was supposed to pass the knowledge to you, and if not her then your father after her. I had no way of knowing she’d failed in her task.”
“She was dead before I was twelve! And my father damned near jumped into the grave after her – she – she tried, I think, but there was so little time.”
“And what was I supposed to do with you, after I’d discovered her failure to teach you restraint? She’d never deigned to tell me her techniques, even though the fire she held consumed her from within, so when Ranalae offered to take you in and teach you discipline, how was I to decline? I am sorry I sent you away, but it was far too dangerous to keep you here, you must see that. And spreading the rumor that you’d lost your sel-sense kept you safe, kept your people open to loving you should the Bone Tower ever teach you well enough to return. But when I heard you’d run away from them–”
He thrust a trembling hand between them. “Stop. Just. Stop. Teach me discipline? Run away? Have you no fucking clue what Ranalae is, what actually happens in the Bone Tower? It’s not named for its pretty white walls, Auntie. It’s named for the experiments-turned-corpses buried at its feet.”
“The empress would never–”
“The empress is dead!” Shit. He hadn’t meant to say that, hadn’t meant to clue his auntie in to Thratia’s little tale of a political coup. He needed his auntie blind to Thratia’s motives, needed her to keep Ranalae around so that the imperial fleet’s presence would perform as a stopgap to keep Thratia from swooping right in. Without Ranalae’s numbers here, bolstering the city’s defenses, Thratia may not even need him to take control.
And then he’d be given over into Aella’s complete care. Thratia’s loyalties were to her own power, and the second she didn’t need him as an heir she’d relegate him to specimen.
“Don’t be a fool,” she snapped. “I received a letter from her just this morning.”
Delivered by Ranalae’s couriers, no doubt, but he wasn’t about to press the point.
“You washed your hands of me. You cut me loose, bundled me away to the whitecoats and never gave it a second thought. Did you ever write to them to ask how my so-called training was going? Did you ever inquire after their methods of teaching? No, you fucking didn’t, because as strong as you are, as clever as you are, I think you knew.
“Not wholly, not the complete picture, but a smart woman like you should have a pretty good idea of what an empire would do with a man who could be turned into a walking weapon. But you saw a solution to your little problem, a way to clean up the mess you felt my mother left behind, so you shoved me away behind those walls, across a sea, and thought no more of me.
“Were you afraid, when you’d heard I’d escaped? You must have had an idea as to why.” He stepped forward. She stepped back. He let the words course through him, let the old hurts bleed out through his lips, and marveled, silently, that he didn’t feel the slightest urge to tear the sky to pieces while he rode his anger.
“You must have wondered if I might come home, looking for vengeance. Is that why you only ever wrote to me of banal things? Is that why all your letters were about who married who, and what crops were doing well that year? To keep an eye on my mental stability without ever asking outright? Not once. Not fucking once, did you ask what had happened to me there. Did you ask if I was safe? If I was hurting? You let the rumors swirl about a disgraced lord who’d lost his sel-sense and turned to conning for food and fun, and stuck your head deep in the sand.
“If you’re angry at all that I’ve come here with Thratia on my arm, you have only yourself to blame. You cut me loose, left me to suffer, and didn’t so much as send a bouquet of flowers, but you couldn’t be bothered to renounce me as heir, either, and now it’s biting you straight in the ass, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t abandon you,” she whispered, and he felt ill to see a sheen of tears building in the corners of her eyes. “Tibal was supposed to–”
“What the fuck do you know about Tibal?”
She pressed her lips shut hard, as if to snap back the words. “He never told you?”
A knock on the door made them both jump. “Everything all right in there?” Aella’s voice, smooth, but tinged with warning. His senses had reached out without his conscious agreement at Tibs’s name, he hadn’t even noticed. Some wounds were just too fresh to risk picking at. Whatever his auntie thought she knew about Tibs would have to wait.
“Fine,” he grated, reeling himself back under control. Aella must have jumped out of her skin when she’d felt him reach out like a shockwave. His sphere of influence was beginning to unsettle even himself. It seemed every time he reached, he reached farther than before. Not necessarily a good thing, when one was surrounded by five active selium mines. He’d better get off this ship, before his auntie got them all blown to bits.
“Did Pelkaia make it here?” he asked. She blinked, the change in subject sudden enough to take her off guard.
“Yes – and your friends, Tibal, Ripka, and those others. I don’t like that Honey woman.”
“I don’t really care what you like.” The words were out before he could stop them, his temper still high though he’d reeled in his power. As a young man, he would have rather cut his own tongue out than speak this way to her. His auntie had been the domineering force of his life ever since the day his mother had died – for his father’s spirit had fled on that day, as well – guiding, but always firm. Now, he’d discovered there were greater terrors in the world. And he’d faced them, and won.
And would again.
“You really are just like Elatraia. Careful it doesn’t burn you up from the inside, too.”
He ignored the jab, and fell back on formality. “We will bring the Dread Wind to the palace to begin preparations for the marriage ceremony. See that my friends come to see me.”
“They have fled into the city, or so my guards tell me. I have no way of contacting them.”
“Fled?”
A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face. “I had placed them under house arrest at the Hotel Cinder until this whole silly invasion of your betrothed was over. They took poorly to the treatment.”
He snort-laughed. “I can only imagine. Why in a clear sky would you ever find it necessary to lock them up?”
“They intervened one too many times in my methods of preparing the city.”
“Do you know how you can be certain you’ve walked down the wrong path?”
“I suspect you’ll tell me.”
“Ripka Leshe disagrees with you.”
“This is my city.”
“For now,” he said, and sighed, reaching up to drag a hand through the hair he’d worked so hard to arrange into nobleman perfection. “Be safe, Auntie.”
She reached to him, fingers curling to clasp his shoulder, but he had already turned, and felt little more than the brush of her fingertips against his sleeve. The air had grown cooler while he’d been in that cabin, the sunlight muted by a lazy drifting of clouds. He shoved his hands into his pockets and strolled over to Thratia’s side, sliding his affable smile back into place like slotting a key.
“Auntie Honding has offered us use of her private dock for the Dread Wind while you and I prepare for the happily-ever-after.”
Thratia’s brows lifted, but Dame Honding had followed him out just close enough to have overheard, and she nodded mute agreement.