A handful of brown-haired servants met the car inside the second gate, looking shaken to the core—and Sciona had to wonder what had become of the thousands of Kwen serving in the houses of the city’s elite. How many had revolted the moment they grasped what they were seeing in the Freynan Mirrors? How many had been preemptively imprisoned on suspicion of insurrection before they got up the nerve to do anything? How many were hiding from the chaos?
As the burned Kwen beyond the gates screamed and the others shouted in rage, Sciona selfishly took refuge in the knowledge that Thomil and Carra had a place to shelter. They knew how to disappear when they needed to. They should survive the night.
“Master Bringham, the magical shielding is down!” one of the servants stammered in terror. “W-we tried everything we could to activate it, but—”
“It’s not your fault.” Bringham put a calming hand on the man’s shoulder. “It’s all the use of firearms and multi-purpose conduits. The Reserve towers—private and public—are overtaxed.”
“Feryn help us!” Another servant put her hands over her face and started crying. “We’re all going to die, aren’t we?”
“Of course, we’re not going to die,” Bringham said with that total tenderness that had once made Sciona so sure he couldn’t knowingly commit murder. “The gates will hold.”
“Will they, though, Archmage?” Sciona turned toward the Kwen shouting beyond the gates. Their numbers seemed to swell each time she looked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bringham addressed Sciona and the cluster of servants with an air of perfect calm, benevolent, fatherly. “Now that I’m here, you will all be safe.”
And, remembering what Bringham had done to the Kwen outside the prison, Sciona hoped the gates did hold.
“Duris, you should stay.” Bringham turned to his fellow archmage. “Just until morning. The police should have this mess in hand by then.”
“Morning isn’t coming, Bringham.” Duris had the door of his vehicle open, one foot already back inside. “Not for another two months. I helped you with your little errand like I promised.” He cast a disgusted look at Sciona. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m getting back to my wife and daughters.”
With a sigh, Bringham nodded to one of the servants. “Reopen the gates for Archmage Duris when he’s ready. And don’t fear. He won’t let any Kwen through.” To Duris, he said: “Good luck out there.”
“I don’t need luck.” Duris slid into the seat of his car and put his hands on the control array. “The forces of darkness are nothing to the Light of God.”
Sciona looked anxiously to the gates as Duris’s car rolled back down the path, but Bringham put a firm arm around her shoulders, steering her away from the horror.
“Inside, all of you,” Bringham addressed the remaining servants. “You can wait out the night in the kitchen cellars if you’re afraid.”
Bringham’s estate was not unlike his office, sparsely furnished and cavernous. Tasteful was how Sciona had thought it on previous visits. Tonight, the emptiness contrasted sharply with the visceral press of human bodies in the streets outside, carving an eerie silence from the chaos.
“Finally, a little peace,” Bringham breathed as the doors of his private library closed behind them, cutting off the sounds from outside. “I imagine this is quieter than the jail.”
It’s lonelier, was Sciona’s only thought. Despite there being no one to talk to in her cell, somehow, this was far lonelier.
Unlike most archmages, Bringham had never married. No family had ever filled these halls. Only a limited staff, who, during normal times, all went home at the end of the day. Each chamber was decorated to affect the illusion of humanity; a painting here—though Bringham probably had no affinity for the art style—a vase there—looking expensive and pointless—mounted Kwen ceremonial artifacts from the conquest, valuable only because they were old, not because he understood their significance or cared to learn.
“I’m married to my work,” Bringham had always said to anyone brash enough to ask why he was still single when an archmage could have any woman he wanted. Some of his detractors snidely speculated that he was more interested in men than women. Sciona had always scorned those rumors on the assumption that Bringham was more like her—dedicated to his magic over all else.
After watching him kill on the streets, she realized that she and the rumor mill had both been wrong. It wasn’t that his heart belonged to his work or to some forbidden person. If that was the case, he would have understood that the Kwen were as human as himself. Knowing what his magic and his factories did, he had clearly managed the only way he knew how: he had cut the heart from his being. Sciona had seen the emptiness in him as he blasted Kwen to the ground, and she felt it in this house. Where places like Aunt Winny’s apartment, Duris’s car, and the widow’s home contained something of the owner’s heart, this house did not. The prescribed good taste of these halls made sense now that Sciona understood that her mentor was a shell—a void wearing the skin of a gentle man who might have existed once, before he learned the truth and hollowed his soul to bear it.
A void couldn’t fall in love. A void couldn’t raise children—unless, perhaps, those children were empty themselves. I know you, Bringham had said when Sciona had tried to talk to him about the Otherrealm. Your first devotion is to magic and advancement. He had seen a void in her, too, a vacuous absence of conscience that cared only for innovation.
As far as Sciona knew, she was the closest thing Bringham had to family. A daughter. Perhaps, he harbored a similar parental feeling toward his male proteges, Farion Halaros and Cleon Renthorn, but it wasn’t the same. Halaros and Renthorn had fathers in the High Magistry already. Bringham was the only father figure Sciona had ever known, and, by extension, in a way, she was his only child.
“I suppose this was your idea,” she said into the cold chamber. “The house arrest. I imagine the other mages would have been happy to throw me to the Kwen and be done with it.”
Bringham didn’t answer for a moment, then seemed to realize his silence had effectively confirmed her suspicion. “I couldn’t let them kill you,” he said quietly. “Not like that.”
He motioned for Sciona to sit on one of his reading couches, not caring that her dirty dress would sully upholstery that looked like it cost as much as Aunt Winny’s entire apartment. When she was seated, he sank down on the matching couch opposite her, looking impossibly tired.
“Oh, Sciona…” And how in God’s name did the disappointment in his voice still hurt her? She was just tired too, she decided. Overwrought. Logically, she should be far past caring what Bringham thought of her. “Three centuries, we’ve kept our society from this disaster. And it had to be you… it had to be the mage that I brought into the High Magistry. My Freynan.”
“Sorry about your reputation,” Sciona said, annoyed with herself for not being able to summon the frigid tone she intended.
“No.” The utter sadness in his voice was disconcerting. “I’m sorry about yours.”