“She’s Kwen, Highmage,” Thomil said. “She doesn’t go to school. She works.”
“Oh,” Sciona said awkwardly. “What do you do for work?”
“I work nights in a warehouse, Milady,” Carra said flatly. “In the daytime, I pull dead rats out of the storm drains.”
“Oh—” Sciona withdrew her hand.
“She’s joking, Highmage,” Thomil said with an admonishing look at the girl. “In the day, she cleans chimneys uptown. Carra, my heart, could you give us a moment? We were in the middle of something.”
“Sure,” the teenager said and slunk off through the apartment’s only door with a last sullen glance at the two adults.
Sciona looked after her and then back to Thomil. “You said she was your daughter.”
“I did,” Thomil rubbed a hand over his face as he sank back into the kitchen chair.
“But she called you ‘uncle.’”
“I can explain, ma’am… just don’t tell anyone.” He looked up at Sciona, anxious. “I know we’re not… exactly on the best of terms right now, Highmage. But please?”
“Sure.” Sciona sat back down opposite him. “If you don’t want me to tell anyone, my lips are sealed. But why?”
“The crossing into Tiran was the last gasp of the Caldonnae.” Thomil looked away. “Carra and I are just… the death rattle.”
“What do you mean?” Sciona asked, disconcerted by the impossibly morose phrasing.
“I mean we’re the last. I told you that I lost my sister to the crossing, but with her went the rest of our tribe, including my brother-in-law, Carra’s father.”
“Arras?” Sciona said, surprised she had remembered the man’s name from the brief mention Thomil had made months ago.
Apparently, Thomil was surprised, too, because his eyes flicked up to meet hers, his brows raised slightly as he said, “Yes. He died while he ran with Carra in his arms. That scar on Carra’s face… that’s where the Blight that killed him clipped her. My sister, Maeva, went through the ice less than a mile past where he fell. When Carra and I were the only two of our tribe to make it through the barrier, I had to tell the guards I was her father.”
“So they wouldn’t separate you,” Sciona realized.
“Healthy Kwen orphans get taken straight to the workhouses. The ones who are visibly injured like Carra was…”
“The barrier guards throw them back to the Blight,” Sciona realized.
“Obviously, Carra’s not the helpless tiny thing she was ten years ago. She can work for herself, fend for herself, but she still relies on me for housing and, if I’m not registered as her father on our paperwork—Carra!” Thomil’s attention abruptly snapped upward. “No!”
Sciona had no idea how Thomil moved so fast, but in the blink of an eye, he had shot past her to jump clear over the back of the couch. When she whirled to her feet, she found Thomil restraining his niece, one hand clamped hard around her right wrist. There was a knife in Carra’s hand, poised in an overhanded grip—right over where Sciona had been sitting.
“Have you lost your mind?” Thomil demanded.
“Let me go!” Carra thrashed against him with animal fury that made Sciona back up until her legs hit the table, spilling tea over the unfinished surface. She instinctively grasped for her cylinders—only to find that they weren’t there. She had left them at Aunt Winny’s as a peaceful gesture. But Thomil was immovably strong and held his niece through all her feral attempts to pitch free.
“Calm down!” he commanded before switching to a rolling, deep language Sciona was certain she had never heard before in the mouth of any Kwen—because it wasn’t a language that any other Kwen in the world spoke, she realized after a moment. It was Caldonnish—a nearly-dead language ferociously alive on these two tongues here in a dingy apartment in the poorest part of Tiran.
When she couldn’t twist free of her uncle’s grasp, Carra snarled back in those same wild, ancient sounds what Sciona could only take to be a barrage of curse words.
“She’s a killer!” The animal girl glared past Thomil at Sciona. “A mass murderer! You said so yourself!”
“Wait—you told her?” Sciona looked to Thomil in horror. “God, Thomil, she’s a child!”
Sciona’s mind had nearly splintered from the truth. Thomil had been in so much pain he had physically collapsed. Sciona couldn’t imagine laying that burden on someone who hadn’t even come of age.
“We’re Caldonnae, you bitch,” Carra spat, as though this should mean something to Sciona, “not a bunch of slimy, lying leeches! We keep nothing from each other!”
“Look, Carra, I-I didn’t know,” Sciona scrambled for the words to explain, to ease that rage dagger-pointed at her. “I had no idea what our magic was doing, where the energy was coming from. I didn’t know any of it.”
“But you had to!” The knife was still clutched in Carra’s right hand, shaking against Thomil’s iron grip. “Someone in that damn Magistry has to!”
“I know it seems that way from the outside.” Sciona held up her hands, placating. “But some of these men”—or one specifically—“I’ve known for years. They’re not the sort of people who would intentionally hurt innocent people. They’re not evil.”
“They’re either evil or they’re the stupidest people who ever lived!”
“Alright, listen,” Sciona felt her ire rise. “You can’t hold all highmages to account for what a few of our founders did—or tricked the rest of us into doing. And you shouldn’t speak so ill of the current Magistry. They have no knowledge of the Otherrealm, and they’re the reason you have a home here!” Sciona said and only then caught Thomil’s gaze. Ice cold.
“We had a home, Highmage Freynan,” he said in a voice far quieter than his niece’s but no less furious, “before Blight took it away.” In a short, fluid movement, he disarmed Carra and put himself between the two women, knife held tense at his side. “And don’t take that tone with my sister’s daughter.”
Sciona’s hand twitched toward her cylinders, which again weren’t there. “Are you threatening me?”
Thomil’s eyes went to the hand by her hip, then registered her belt, devoid of any conduits. His bearing softened just slightly. “No.”
“Thomil, I know I shouldn’t have said the things I said to you. But surely, you don’t think that I would knowingly—that I could ever—”
“Of course not,” he said stiffly as Carra glowered daggers at Sciona from behind his arm. “I watched you find out. I know you didn’t know. Why should that matter to me? To Carra? We suffered. You benefited. Your guilt is useless to us.”
“But—I wasn’t trying to—”
“I know you Tiranish aren’t used to being told you can’t have things, but you won’t have our forgiveness for this. No matter how much crying and hand-wringing you do.”