“What do you mean?”
Bringham sighed without answering her question. “You could have been something great. You could have changed things for all women in Tiran for centuries to come. Instead, you’ll be a reason for the Council to never let a female near the order again.” With his elbows on his knees and his staff resting against his shoulder, he rubbed his hands over his face. “Maybe I’ve just been a fool, and the other mages were right. This simply isn’t a job for a woman.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Sciona said honestly. “It’s not a job for a good person.”
“No, it’s a job for a great person. And Sciona, you could have been so great if you had just kept your emotions under control. Now, all your work and genius will be reduced to a horror story—if that.”
“If that?”
“The High Magistry controls the history books, Freynan. You know that. If they don’t want Tiran to remember something, then within a few short generations, it will be buried.”
“No.” Sciona’s voice strained with an unwelcome swell of anxiety—unwelcome because it was so profoundly selfish to be thinking of her own legacy on a night like this with so many people’s lives burning to the ground. But Alba was right about her. Bringham was right. Deep in her core, she was a selfish creature. “I dug back into the histories and found things no other mage ever uncovered. Someone will do the same in the future, no matter how well this is concealed.” One way or another, her genius would be remembered. It had to be.
“You underestimate the Council’s power to control historical narratives,” Bringham said without any relish. “As far as the public is concerned, you will be forgotten—all your skill and innovation.” His voice seemed to catch on something fragile, and he cleared his throat. “It’s happening already. Tiran is changing the story as it moves through the city. Most civilians think you revealed what you did for self-serving reasons. Many think you cast illusions using dark magic. Those who believe what you revealed about the source of magic will say that it doesn’t matter. The Kwen are uncivilized, inhuman brutes—as evidenced by these riots—deserving of whatever fate befalls them.” Exactly what Thomil had predicted. “A shame.”
“You really sound sad.”
“Should I not?”
“Well, it’s odd, given that you don’t actually care about me or the Kwen,” Sciona said, tired of this act—this kindly mask Bringham showed her to pretend he wasn’t completely empty inside. “If you cared, you wouldn’t have misled me about magic for years. If you cared, you couldn’t have built your career on factories that poison Kwen women.”
Bringham didn’t make any attempt to deny the accusation. Instead, he said quietly, “You never worked directly with my alchemists or toured any of my factories in the Kwen Quarter. I didn’t think you knew.”
“And you didn’t feel that was something you should tell me?”
“Honestly, Freynan, it never occurred to me that you would care.”
Disgust overwhelmed Sciona—but as always, it wasn’t as though his line of thinking was unreasonable. When had Sciona ever given an indication that she would care about the well-being of working women in Tiran? She didn’t even treat her own aunt and cousin particularly well; who could guess that her heart could be moved by the plight of women even lower on the social hierarchy, women she hadn’t even met?
“I mean this as a compliment,” Bringham said. “I saw in you a superior mind, one capable of putting progress over emotion when it mattered. I saw greatness. This was how I knew you could succeed where no woman ever had. You could be the woman to make history.”
Sciona’s eyes narrowed. “The other mages were right about you, weren’t they? You just wanted to go down in history as the man who put the first woman in the High Magistry, who made the barrier expansion possible. That’s how you want to be known, whether or not it has anything to do with the real effect you’ve had on the world.”
“I would have done it without taking any of the credit,” Bringham said, and it didn’t have the oversweetened, oversmoothed denial of his lies. “I needed to do this for you, for Tiran.”
Sciona frowned because how did a man with no heart sound so sad? How dare he sound so sad?
“I would hope that you understand this, if nothing else, my dear Freynan,” Bringham said softly. “I never helped you for glory. I did it because it was the right thing to do.”
“The right thing to do?” Sciona repeated and only then began to understand that her conclusions about her mentor’s apathy had been off. There was a hole in her assessment of Bringham, the void.
For her entire career before the Freynan Mirror, Sciona had neglected empathy in the belief that her work was ultimately more important than her personal relationships, that it represented a good that superseded all the good a woman could affect in her own life. Maybe she and Bringham had this twisted line of thinking in common.
“I’m not your glory,” Sciona realized aloud. “I’m your penance.”
The quality of Bringham’s silence told her she was on to something.
“That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve taken credit for great magic when it is actually murder. You’ve taken credit for employing women for years when you were actually poisoning them, and deep in your soul, you know that. You know these are terrible things you’ve done.”
“Some dyes have unfortunate side effects, yes.” Bringham’s voice rose slightly. “But my factories pay better than other jobs a Kwen woman might hope to get, and in the end, it’s probably good for them.”
“Good for them?”
“My industry has been instrumental in curbing overpopulation among people who are not competent to control it themselves. It is well-documented that, unchecked, Kwen will multiply beyond their capacity to provide for their young.”
“Because we have stolen every chance they have to prosper,” Sciona said, thinking of how Carra hold two jobs instead of attending school and Thomil did the work of a highmage’s assistant—all so that they could afford an apartment smaller than Bringham’s servants’ quarters. “You know that perfectly well, Archmage. All these ugly statistics about Kwen employment, or poverty, or crime are moot in the face of the truth: that we rendered these people’s homeland uninhabitable. We have done a great evil, and you’re smart enough to know that, deep in your soul, no matter what lies you spin around it. You know. And I’m your attempt to get out of that feeling, aren’t I? After years of being a ‘leading employer of women,’ you thought if you got one into the High Magistry, you might feel better about that title. You might feel that you deserve it.”
Bringham didn’t meet her eyes. “We all bear the burden of knowledge in different ways, Freynan. Some of us endeavor to do good.”
“Good?” Sciona’s broken voice went shrill in indignation. “Do you honestly think this balances your scales, Archmage? Do you think that helping to advance me—or the dozen women who might have come after me or the hundred women after them—really makes up for mass slaughter? And, in your case, mass sterilization?”