- Archmage Theredes Orynhel, A Treatise on the Compassionate Assimilation of Kwen Peoples （284 of Tiran）
IT HAD BEEN years since Sciona set foot in the Berald family bakery. Usually, she just rushed past it on her way to the train. The warmth and the honey-glazed smell took her straight back to when she had been a child, shyly clutching Aunt Winny’s skirts as her aunt told her she could pick out one sweet treat. Just one, so choose carefully.
“Morning, Ansel,” Sciona greeted the baker’s son as she set her basket on the counter. “I’d like some blueberry scones, if you have them.” Those were Thomil’s favorite—or at least, the ones that disappeared the fastest when Sciona brought baked goods into the lab. It occurred to her that she had never asked him outright what he’d like her to bring from the bakery. She had just thought he was lucky that she was considerate enough to share with him. Ha!
“Are you alright?” Ansel asked, and Sciona realized that there was an unhinged smile hanging on her lips, her hair was an unwashed mess, and she likely looked as though she hadn’t slept in days—which was nearly the case. After the doctor had cleared out, she had passed out on her bed for a few hours. Alba and Winny would have liked her to sleep longer, she knew, but after Alba left for work and Winny left for the morning market, she had taken her opportunity to escape the apartment.
“Miss Sciona?”
“Yes.” She shook herself. “Sorry. You asked a question?”
“How many?”
“Huh?”
“How many scones?”
“Oh, right. As many as you have. Or as many as you can fit in this basket.”
“Miss Sciona…” Ansel paused after picking up his tongs. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
“I’ve been better,” she said, knowing she would never sell ‘fine’ with her eyes as puffy as they were.
“Well, my Ma always says there’s nothing a delicious bake can’t fix.” Ansel had a contented look on his broad, simple face as he transferred the blueberry scones from the display case into the basket. Sciona had a vague memory of his big brother greeting customers from behind the same display. Carseth had been even taller than Ansel and just as kind—a big, contented tower, all warmth and strength.
“Ansel, I’m going to ask you a question that isn’t nice at all.”
“Um—alright?”
“Why did your brother kill himself?”
Ansel fumbled, nearly dropping a scone on its way to the basket. “Sorry—what?”
“I told you it wasn’t nice.” But she needed to know.
“No, it-it’s fine.” He glanced around, but there was no one else in the bakery. Sciona had purposely come between the morning and lunchtime influxes of customers when the place would be quiet. “I just… I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me about it quite so bluntly.”
“He was a barrier guard, right?”
“Only for six months. He meant to make a career there. The pay’s good, you know, and he wanted to support our parents.”
“My Aunt Winny says he left home a happy, ambitious man and came back different.”
Ansel didn’t meet Sciona’s eyes as he placed the last scone in the basket and folded the cloth over them. “She’s not wrong.”
“What happened?”
“Carseth wasn’t supposed to talk about it.” Ansel lowered his voice. “He—well, you know better than most of us how government jobs can be. Confidentiality and all that.”
“I do.”
“So, you know that if I tell you, you have to promise not to share it with anyone else.”
“On my honor as a mage.”
“Alright.” Ansel leaned a little closer. “After Carseth came back home, he talked about refugees—Kwen folk—coming through the barrier torn up, covered in blood.”
“Torn up?” Sciona repeated.
“I won’t say how he actually put it. Not to a lady.”
“Tell me how he actually put it,” Sciona demanded and then added, “please.”
“Well, Carseth said they had pieces of their limbs missing, skin peeled back from the muscle, muscle peeled back from bone, just…” Ansel shuddered. “The stuff of nightmares. Stuff so horrible you couldn’t make it up if you tried. At first, he thought it was cannibals or wild animals, but after a while, he found out it was something else.”
“What was it?” Sciona already knew, of course. She was just wondering how much a simple man like Ansel had inferred.
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Wouldn’t or couldn’t?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it was all confidential. He really shouldn’t have been telling us about anything he saw at the barrier. He was just in such a state; I don’t think he even remembered the rules.”
“And you think that was why he killed himself?” Sciona whispered softly. “Because of the injuries he saw?”
“No. That wasn’t the thing—or the only thing—that really tormented him.”
“Then why?”
“Just that… I guess if the injured Kwen couldn’t be helped or if the camps were at capacity, guards were ordered to throw them back outside the barrier.”
“They what?” Sciona had suspected as much, but hearing it confirmed still made her blood run cold.
“Carseth wouldn’t do it. At least, that’s what he’d say when he woke in a cold sweat, screaming. I won’t do it. I won’t do it… But whatever he did or didn’t do, it seems like he watched other guards throw Kwen back through the barrier. And whatever happened to them then, whatever my brother saw… he couldn’t take it. After a year of us trying to get him back into the rhythm of the bakery and Doctor Mellier trying to help him, he still just…” Ansel shook his head and blinked tears from his eyes. Then he sniffed sharply. “Sorry. God, look at me.” He dabbed at his eyes with his apron, leaving smudges of flour on his cheeks. “Crying like a girl.”
“It’s alright,” Sciona said. “I do it all the time.”
That got a little laugh out of the baker’s son.
“And Ansel, I’m sorry I brought it up.” She wasn’t, of course. She had needed to have this suspicion confirmed. ‘Sorry’ just seemed like the thing to say.
Ansel sniffed. “Miss Sciona, I don’t want you to think my brother was a lunatic or a coward. He—”
“I know he wasn’t,” Sciona said seriously. “He was a good soul, who saw things no good soul could process.”
“You really think so?”
“I do.” Perhaps what Carseth had done—how he had ended it—was the only thing a good person could do faced with the reality of the barrier. Thank God Sciona’s ego superseded her heart. She needed something more than an impotent, bloody end on the cobbles beneath her window. She needed action. But that certainly didn’t make her a better—or stronger—person than Carseth Berald. “He wasn’t weak. He was a good person.”
“You sound so sure,” Ansel said thickly. “How are you so sure?”