“Stop what?”
“Making those sad green eyes at me.”
“But this is my fault.”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit.” Jaw clenched, Thomil straightened up with the tea kettle. “I did what I did, and I’d do it again. You’re the one who suffered the worse indignity, and you’re the only reason I’m not dead, so just… go a little easy on yourself.”
“Alright, and this is the other thing that worries me.” Sciona grabbed the spout of the kettle and pulled it toward her. “You’re being much too nice to me, all things considered. I’m not irreparably damaged either, you know.” There was a struggle over the kettle. Thomil won, but the fact that he didn’t do so instantly was worrying.
“I mean it, Thomil. Sit down.”
“No.”
“Sit, and I’ll stop making the sad eyes. I’ll stop being sympathetic altogether. Deal?”
Thomil considered the proposal for a moment. “Fine.” He pushed the kettle to Sciona and gingerly sat on a kitchen stool.
“Now…” Sciona drew a dipper of water from the bucket Carra had brought so they wouldn’t have to use the tap conduits. “You don’t like my spellweb. Why?”
“Come on, Highmage Freynan,” Thomil sighed, weariness shadowing his face as much as the bruising. “If the mages at the heart of Tiran don’t care about the fate of the Kwen, what on Earth makes you think the average people of Tiran will feel any differently?”
“Because the average people are… well… people.”
“And mages aren’t?” Thomil raised an eyebrow.
“No.” Sciona felt that this should be quite obvious. “Mages are detached from reality. They’re obsessive, socially stunted egomaniacs. You know, like me,” she said and caught Thomil suppressing a smile. “They’re not a representative sample of the Tiranish population.”
“I see what you’re saying,” Thomil said, “I do. But I’ve known a lot of non-magic Tiranish citizens who could give any mage a run for nastiness. Case in point.” He gestured to his split lip.
“Thomil, I am so sorry about that,” Sciona started before remembering that she had promised to roll back the sympathy.
He shook his head. “It was worth it to punch Highmage Renthorn in the face. Wanted to do that for years.”
“Yeah, that’s what Carra told me,” Sciona said. “Why him, specifically?”
“I’ve cleaned up after a lot of highmages, most of whom I wouldn’t have pegged for mass murderers. But Renthorn… we all knew there was something a bit wrong with that man. Something no amount of hair product or fine clothing could cover up forever.”
“What do you mean you all knew?” Sciona asked as she located the case where the widow kept the logs for her wood-burning stove and dragged a few out. “Who’s the ‘all’ in that sentence?” As far as Sciona was aware, Renthorn’s colleagues and superiors thought well of him, admired him, enjoyed his company. She had thought she was the exception.
“Most Tiranish prefer to ignore the Kwen who work for them. Renthorn rather enjoys torturing them. Female staff won’t clean his office if they can possibly avoid it.”
“Female staff?” Sciona looked up from the wood-burning stove with a terrible feeling crawling up her spine.
“I’ll put it this way. If I had found you fooling around with some other mage in the library, I wouldn’t have been so quick to jump to conclusions. But the cleaning girls talk. When some of it got back to Mr. Dermek, he started rearranging the staff, taking pains to keep the girls out of Renthorn’s path. That’s why you almost never see maids cleaning up on the fourth floor, only men.”
“So, Renthorn habitually…” Sciona grimaced, not wanting to put the vile thought into words. “I wasn’t the first?”
“You may have been the first Tiranish woman, but no,” Thomil said grimly, “certainly not the first.”
“And the women on the cleaning staff? They told you this?”
“Not directly. That’s something Kwen women discuss with each other, not the men, but there are things a man can infer. Also, shortly after Mr. Dermek removed the female staff from the mapping laboratories, I had my own run-in.”
“Your own?” Sciona said in horror. “What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t too bad,” Thomil said hastily. “Highmage Renthorn asked me where his usual maid had gone. I told him the truth—that she’d left the Magistry to work elsewhere—so he smashed a test beaker over my head and then stabbed me with the broken neck. More than once.” Thomil pulled his shirt down to show a collection of thin white scars.
“God! Thomil—”
“After that, he stood over me and made me pick up the glass with my bare hands. From what I understand, this was much kinder treatment than some of the girls got.”
“I had no idea!” Sciona exclaimed. “You should have told someone!”
Thomil let out a harsh laugh. “Yes, I’m sure Renthorn’s peers and superiors would have dropped everything to protect a few cleaners from a highmage. After all, Kwen well-being is so very important to them.”
“The Magistry’s image is important to them, though,” Sciona protested, scandalized.
“Yes, but it’s far easier to dismiss and discredit a few Kwen than it is to condemn an archmage’s son. Cleon Renthorn banks on that, I think, when he chooses his victims. With you, I don’t know what he was thinking—maybe that he could use your recent breakdown to claim that you were imagining things?”
“I don’t think he was thinking much at all,” Sciona said honestly, remembering the animal hunger in his eyes.
But the depressing thing was that Renthorn probably would have gotten away with whatever he wanted, despite his carelessness. Sciona did not have anything like his social status, and his colleagues already thought she was going insane. A week ago, she would have said that Archmage Bringham would believe her version of events over Cleon Renthorn’s and pull for her against the rest of the Magistry. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Or rather, she was still sure that Bringham would believe her; she just no longer believed he would support her. He would want an ugly truth like that covered and forgotten. God—an awful thought crossed her mind—what if Bringham already knew about Renthorn’s behavior? Why not, given everything else he had quietly decided to ignore?
“Is Renthorn always that sloppy about his extracurriculars?” Sciona asked. “I mean, do you think the other mages know?”
“Of course, they know,” Thomil said. “Highmage Tanrel was in Renthorn’s lab while I bled all over the floor. He barely glanced up from his papers.”
“They just don’t talk about it,” Sciona murmured. She was coming to understand the hideous pattern that governed the Magistry’s relationship with the Kwen.
We do not speak of it. It’s in poor taste.
“It’s strange,” she mused as she poked at the logs crackling inside the stove. “It seems like some mages have a psychological need to deny what they’re doing, make convoluted excuses, wrap it in civility…” Bringham certainly needed that. “But Renthorn isn’t playing that game at all. He’s not scared of the fact that he’s raping the Kwen. He likes it. He’d rather look it in the face.”