“Whatever parts of Carra have impressed you, I doubt I can take credit for them,” Thomil said. “My sister and her husband were exceptional.”
“But a fire can’t burn on nothing,” Sciona said. “You’ve fed her energy. That’s not easy. I know—” She stopped herself and rephrased: “I mean, I don’t know how it is for Kwen, but I figure it’s not easy to raise a daughter anywhere in this city without suffocating her. So many parents will try to kill everything brilliant about a girl in the name of giving her a good life, a safe life, a chance at happiness. Whatever you’ve done… you haven’t done that to Carra. It’s—” Sciona swallowed, and Thomil was shocked to realize that she was on the verge of tears—and not tears of distress, but the kind she cried when she beheld wondrous spellwork. Whatever she saw in his little, broken family, it had moved her. “It’s beautiful.”
“I’ve done her a disservice.”
Sciona turned piercing green eyes on Thomil in confusion. “Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s true! I’ve done a terrible thing!” And suddenly, Thomil was spilling the unvoiced torments of a decade. “I learned to crush the hunter, the man, everything that was Caldonn in me because I knew that was the only way for a Kwen to stay alive in this place. But, when it came down to it, I couldn’t find it in me to have Carra do the same.”
“That’s a good thing,” Sciona said.
“No, it’s not,” Thomil insisted. “It’s a dangerous, dangerous thing for a Kwen to be as wild and outspoken as she is. I knew that from the beginning. I just…” He swallowed. “I missed my family and our language too much. I couldn’t bring myself to force Tiranish over that last vestige of my people, even to spare my niece a life of anger and hardship.”
These were things Thomil had never been able to articulate to anyone else, not even to Brodlynn or Kaedelli. After all, if he had been a little better at explaining himself, maybe they wouldn’t have left him. Maybe they could have understood. It helped that with Sciona, their relationship had begun by discussing theory, then arguing about it. With her, he knew how to give his worst thoughts voice.
“Everyone knows assimilated Kwen suffer less Tiranish hostility. They have hope, even if it’s illusory, that they can succeed on this side of the barrier. I could have let Carra have that. Instead, I was selfish. I didn’t teach her the restraint to keep herself safe the way I have. Because I couldn’t bear it.”
“But it sounds like there’s a good reason you couldn’t bear it,” Sciona said softly.
“My gods and my ancestors won’t care for my reasons if my failings get her killed.”
Sciona made a thoughtful sound and turned her eyes forward, seeming to chew on Thomil’s words.
“What?” he said, surprised at his own impatience—at how much he needed her response. It was silly. She was Tiranish. She knew nothing of Caldonn customs, nor Kwen girlhood in this city, nor the tensions between the two… Yet she was the only person who had told him he was doing right by Carra. From a woman of such power, that had to mean something. Gods, he wanted it to mean something.
“The deities of your tribe don’t just care about life and death, though,” Sciona said after an interminable silence. “At least, that was how you framed it to me. When your gods weigh the evil a man has done, they also factor in non-lethal damage. Suffering.”
“What’s your point?”
“It just makes me think of a question I asked myself over and over again after opening those first Freynan Mirrors: is it better to be safe and broken than it is to be dead?”
“I don’t know,” Thomil said honestly. Not for lack of contemplation. Because Sciona’s conundrum was hardly original. Is it better to be safe and broken or dead? This was a question every Kwen had to ask themselves.
Now was the part where he should berate Sciona for comparing her plight to his, for thinking she could ever understand. But when he drew a breath to voice the thought, he considered the little mage at his side and found that he couldn’t do it. Because Sciona would need to kill herself to be what Tiran demanded of its women—a doting wife who tempered her every ambition and put some man’s career before her own. From what he knew of the irrepressible innovator at his side, the effort alone would kill her. Or at least, it would kill everything that made her Sciona. In her own sheltered, Tiranish way, she also faced a choice between death and authenticity.
“You never thought about having your own?” she asked.
“My own what?” Thomil said, having lost the thread of the conversation in his thoughts.
“Children,” Sciona said. “I mean, obviously, you’ve had your hands full supporting Carra for all these years, and that’s wonderful, but she’s almost a woman, and you’re still young…” She trailed off, seeming to realize she had hit on something raw.
Thomil had learned to hide his emotions from Tiranish so well. Damn him, when had he become so unguarded with this particular mage?
“The woman I courted before—” Gods, had Thomil almost said ‘before you’？ “Before I started working for you… She wanted children.”
“The one who worked in Bringham’s factory?” Sciona said.
“How did you know?” Or, more importantly: “How did you remember?” It had been months ago that Thomil had mentioned Kaedelli. And Sciona, by her own admission, never remembered small talk about other people’s lives.
“I don’t know. I just remember you looking…”
“What?” How had he looked? Because, thinking back on Kaedelli now, he knew how he felt.
“Broken.”
Feeling suddenly far too visible, Thomil looked away. But even as he trained his eyes on the pavement before his boots, he wanted Sciona to know. For whatever reason, it was important to him that she understand what no one else had.
“Kaedelli wanted a baby more than anything. I couldn’t be that man for her. That is to say I… I wouldn’t be that man. One night, we argued about it. I told her this city wasn’t made for people like us, for our families, for our children; it was made to destroy us, and we would be monsters to bring a child into lives like ours. She didn’t speak to me again. I heard from Raehem a year later that she’d found someone else to get her pregnant. It was a stillbirth, unsurprisingly.”
“Why is that unsurprising?”
Thomil was quiet for a moment, regretting the decision to bring up the last part. But if he had wanted to spare Sciona the pain of his honesty, well, it was rather late for that, wasn’t it? What was one more twist of the knife?
“I think Archmage Bringham is the leading employer of Kwen women because no mage would ever want a Tiranishwoman working with those particular dyes. Not when her role is to bear children.”
“No.” The word was a mourning cry more than a denial. She already knew Thomil was telling the truth. “No.”
For some time, Thomil had felt a vicious sort of satisfaction watching horror dawn on Sciona, as she came to understand the tortures that had plagued him for his entire life. The satisfaction had been hollow and fleeting, even in the beginning. Now, it was completely absent. The two of them just walked together under the weight.