Usually, Thomil came here when his apathy failed him, when he felt more emotion than was wise or bearable for a Kwen, and he needed to quiet his mind. This was more complicated. He was surprised at himself, not for his anger, not for his apathy, but for the bizarre way they had twisted in the wake of his fight with Highmage Freynan. His apathy should be for Freynan, a cog in the evil machine of Tiran, and his anger should be for Tiran, the machine itself. He couldn’t quite understand how it had ended up the wrong way around—how he had ended up so, so angry at Sciona Freynan.
After all, the true nature of Blight fit with everything he already knew of Tiran: that the city was a monster built by takers for takers. Thomil had known this since his first lucid moments on this side of the barrier. The anger had been a constant burn in those early days, but Thomil had grown numb to the injustice over the years, as all Kwen did if they were to survive. The great machine of Tiran was designed to work that kind of defiance out of a Kwen, one small indignity at a time.
But slowly, an old fire had snuck back into Thomil’s soul, reignited by the warmth of Sciona Freynan’s lab—this other world where only knowledge mattered, where truth was not only attainable but ultimately good. The anger that gripped him now had its roots in that lab. This fresh and foreign rage, hurting to the heart, was the sort of feeling that only came from betrayal, and betrayal could only come from trust. Reasoning backwards from there, Thomil arrived at an utterly ridiculous truth: he had trusted Sciona Freynan. Against all his better judgment, he had come to believe in that frenetic little mage and the way she saw the world. Like a starry-eyed boy, he had come to think that this Tiranish woman appreciated him as a human rather than a commodity.
What a laughable mistake for a grown Kwen to make.
Thomil cradled one open hand in another, tracing circles on his left palm with his right thumb. His callouses had softened in the last few months. How had he let this happen? Sure, when the mages told a Kwen to do something, there wasn’t much room to argue. If they wanted you to change jobs, you changed. But this was the first time Thomil had let a Tiranish person change something inside him. Somewhere in his time playing mage’s assistant, he had forgotten what he was: not a citizen of this city, just flesh that it fed on.
He had mocked Highmage Freynan’s blindness, but he had been just as blind, hadn’t he? Seduced by a light that was best left alone? And Thomil was the more pathetic of the two, for he hadn’t burned himself pursuing the ideals of his gods and kin. No, his lure had been the meadow-green brightness of Sciona Freynan’s gaze. At some point, he had started to live for the moments the mage smiled at him, the moments he could make her brow crease in thought, and the way her eyes would brighten when she came up with a response. He had forgotten how he and Maeva had returned to their father’s resting place two years after his death to find the grass growing verdant among the bones. Painfully green and up to their knees.
The brightest meadows grew from dead things.
“Oh, Maeva,” he murmured into the night. “How did I let this happen?”
There was so little wind within the city’s barrier. To get a proper breeze, you had to climb high. It was another reason Thomil liked it up here. He would always miss real winter, real wind that raked the skin and reminded him, with each searing breath, that he was alive. But here, in the numb half-life of Tiran, this cool breeze was enough. It let him imagine that he was back home on the plains.
But the memories weren’t a comfort the way they usually were. Tonight, all the loss felt new. Not just loss, though, or why would it hurt so much more than usual? Betrayal.
“Uncle?” a voice said, and Thomil started.
“Carra! Gods!” He turned to find his niece on the ladder, the breeze stirring her red hair around her like wildfire in the dark. “Devil child, you scared me.”
When she was little, Thomil had taught Carra to move like a hunter. It was a useful skill, allowing her to melt into the safety of shadows in the Tiranish homes where she worked, but Thomil did rather regret teaching her in the moments she snuck up on him.
It should have been alarming to watch his precious niece hold so casually to the ladder, her third-hand potato sack of a nightdress flapping around her skinny frame. But he reminded himself that she climbed rooftops like this every day. She always washed when she got home from work, but tonight, she hadn’t quite gotten all the grime off her face before flopping onto her cot. Chimney sweeping was a job for boys, but most employers didn’t look closely enough to see the difference so long as a child got the job done quickly. And, as dangerous as it was to clean chimneys, it was still one of the safer jobs for a Kwen girl in this city.
The Tiranish had an almost obsessive aversion to dirty things. While Thomil couldn’t be around to protect his niece, a thick layer of soot was the best defense against the sort of trouble that plagued a pretty Kwen girl—even a scarred one. And Carra made a good boy. Too good. Even with her long hair and nightdress loose about her, there was an implacable hardness to her. That was Thomil’s fault.
Maeva hadn’t been here to teach her daughter the gentler arts of their people. Arras, for all his brute strength, had also had an infectious warmth about him that would have softened Carra’s edges. All Thomil had was resentment, locked up tight in layers of apathy. Carra had grown up looking at that. She had grown to emulate it, however poorly it might suit her. All the energy that had been loving in Maeva was cold in Carra. All the power that had been steady in Arras was wild in her. Angry.
“It’s late,” Thomil said as Carra climbed easily from the ladder to the ledge beside him. “What are you doing up here?”
“I got up to get a glass of water and didn’t hear you snoring up a storm. It was weird.” She arranged herself on the lip beside Thomil and let her legs dangle by his. “Couldn’t get back to sleep without the racket.”
“Mmm.” Thomil knew he should throw a joke back at her. He couldn’t.
“You look like crap.” Carra spoke Caldonnish to Thomil most of the time, but her voice in their native tongue always sounded too much like Maeva’s. And right now, the echo of his sister was too much for Thomil. He turned away so Carra wouldn’t see the tears standing in his eyes. “Are you alright, Uncle?”
“No.”
Caldonnae didn’t lie to their children and little siblings. Though Maeva had always managed the truth with more grace than Thomil.
“Oh. Um…” Awkwardly, Carra scooted closer to Thomil so her shoulder touched his.
She wasn’t good at dealing with emotions—her own or anyone else’s. That, too, was a failure of Thomil’s—and Tiran’s, he supposed. A Kwen girl didn’t survive this city without many layers of armor, and often not even then. Thomil had just never escaped the feeling that Carra’s real parents would have taught her to navigate this life better. They would have found a way to make her strong without making her jagged.
He put an arm around his niece and kissed the top of her head.
“I love you.” He didn’t say it often enough. It was such a beautiful sound in Caldonnish. It would be a pity for such music to disappear from the world. “I love you so much.”