“I worked in the building where those dyes were developed,” Sciona whispered at length. “I probably sourced the energy—”
“You didn’t know.”
“But you did.” Sciona looked up at Thomil, her green eyes brimming with pain. “You knew what Bringham was—what his factories did—and he visited for tea all the time. We spent that week in Trethellyn Hall. I just… I had you stand there and be quiet while we chit-chatted about his work. I made you serve him.”
“I’ve been in this city a long time,” Thomil said. “I’ve served a lot of men who don’t care for the lives of Kwen. And, when it comes to Bringham, I’m not the one who deserves your sympathy.” As someone who had done his own part to hurt Kaedelli, he did not deserve it. “I just wish…” He sighed into the mist. “I wish Kaedelli could have been right about the world, and I could have been wrong.”
“Alright, so you were right about Bringham,” Sciona said. “And maybe you’re right about everything else, too. But you’re wrong about yourself. You’re a good father.” She said it with such conviction. Thomil looked at her, on the verge of begging her to stop. Did she know what she was doing to him? Did she understand how badly he wanted to believe her?
“You’ve been good for Carra,” Sciona went on, “and you would be—will be—for any children who might come along in the future. Honestly, if Carra’s life—even these last ten years of it—are your only legacy in this world, then you are the greatest of all men.” She met his aching gaze in what looked like total sincerity. “I mean it, Thomil Siernes-Caldonn. If more fathers were like you, the world might not be so terrible and cruel. Hell, if more men were like you, I might not be so…”
“So what?”
“Vehemently opposed to them.”
Thomil laughed, the pain lifting slightly.
Far ahead, Carra looked back at them. Unable to hear any of their conversation but seeing that they were walking leisurely together, she rolled her eyes—or rather rolled her whole head to make sure they didn’t miss her exasperation—and resumed walking.
“That seems unfair to your own father,” Thomil said, “considering you never knew him.”
“Oh, I know him. In a way.”
Thomil turned to her in confusion. He distinctly remembered Sciona sullenly referring to a dead father when the subject came up. Had he misunderstood?
“My father is Perramis.”
“The City Chair!?” Thomil exclaimed.
“Yes,” Sciona said tightly. “Keep your voice down.”
All this time, Sciona’s birth father had been one of the most powerful politicians in Tiran, and it had never come up? “But you said—”
“I tell people he’s dead because it’s easier than the truth.” Sciona fidgeted uncomfortably, her mouth smushed into a pout-like frown and her gaze fixed ahead. “It’s probably how he prefers it.”
“What do you mean?”
“He sent me to stay with Aunt Winny the day after my mother’s funeral. He didn’t want me.”
“Why?” Thomil said, truly uncomprehending. “Why wouldn’t he want you?”
Sciona shrugged the question off without Thomil’s emotion. “I have my theories. Maybe I wasn’t really his, and he tolerated my presence in his house only out of love for my mother. Aunt Winny swears up and down that that’s not true. Her story is that I just look so much like my mother that my father couldn’t bear to see my face in his grief.”
“That can’t be,” Thomil said fiercely. He didn’t pretend to understand what went on in the head of an affluent Tiranishman, but he had to imagine that there were some things so fundamentally human that they came stitched into any man’s soul. When you saw a woman you had loved and lost in a child’s face, that child was the most precious thing in the world. “He’s a monster and a fool.”
“Is he?” Sciona smiled. “I mean, I did end up being rather difficult as daughters go.”
Carra was ‘rather difficult as daughters went.’ Thomil would die before he gave her up.
“He’s an idiot,” Thomil insisted. “He’d have to be to give up a girl like you—the greatest of all mages.”
Feryn’s Feast decorations lit up the train station—clusters of five lights that mimicked candles, each set representing the staffs of the five Founding Mages holding the line against the Horde of Thousands and the darkness of the Deep Night. The symbolism may have been pointedly anti-Kwen and the rituals infested with the usual Tiranish opulence, but the Feast itself was the most Kwen thing the Tiranish still practiced. The holiday predated Tiran by at least a thousand years. At its roots, it was not a celebration of any specific god or mythic figure. It was a celebration of family—the one thing that got all people through the Deep Night.
As he and Sciona joined Carra beneath those mist-softened lights, Thomil let himself wonder, for a moment, what it would be like to have a family with these two and to let that family grow. He was on the verge of berating himself for the thought, which was as na?ve as it was presumptuous, until he caught Sciona’s gaze and had the strange feeling that she had just imagined something similar. She was flushed, green eyes full of affection. It was a beautiful thought—for a different world that was just, and kind, and not about to collapse.
“I must make clear my strong objection that female mages be allowed into this, our holiest order. Leon himself explains that logic is an intrinsically masculine characteristic. Women, being governed by emotions, have no place in positions of political or magical power. It is fine and good to have them trained in magic as educators, as fits their nurturing nature, and it is my personal belief that such pursuits should be encouraged. But to have a woman take the masculine role of innovator is not right or natural. To entertain the notion disrespects our forefathers as well as endangering our wives, sisters, and daughters. On these grounds, I reject Miss Trethellyn’s application to the High Magistry.”
—Archmage Supreme Sireth Verdanis （280 of Tiran）
THE CEILING OF Leon’s Hall had been repaired since Sciona punched a hole in it. An artist had painted Archmage Stravos’s face back in, and Sciona noted that he looked more like the other founding mages now. Perhaps the artist had used the figures on the rest of the ceiling for reference. Perhaps he had simply thought Stravos ought to better represent the Tiranish ideal of manhood. His nose was more pronounced now and slightly turned up at the end, his brow a little flatter, his hair more brown than copper.
“I see Stravos got more handsome,” someone commented appreciatively as the highmages filed to their seats. And Sciona wondered if this was how the mutual history of Tiran and the Kwen had fallen so far out of public consciousness, washed out a little more with each coat of paint.
The last time Sciona had sat in this hall, the highmage hopefuls and their relatives had filled only a small section of the chamber. This morning, the benches were packed with white-robed mages, the entire High Magistry, gathered as they only did a few times a year.