“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Sciona sounded as surprised as Thomil but oddly delighted. “I realized… your soul matters to me—whatever weighing system the gods employ in the next life. You matter to me.”
“I… what?” Thomil said blankly.
“If I’m going to die, I want to go knowing I left you safe and right with yourself.”
“Even if it means the ruin of your legacy?” Thomil still couldn’t believe it. “If it means you die a footnote in your own history?”
“Yeah.” Sciona wrinkled her nose and looked at Thomil with the glowing joy of discovery. “Isn’t that odd? I’ve never cared about anyone that way… more than I cared about my own work.”
“I think you’re overtired,” Thomil said. “You should get some sleep before the presentation. I can walk you to the train station.”
“No.” Sciona knit her fingers together and looked up at Thomil, seeming suddenly self-conscious. “I thought… I wouldn’t go to the station tonight.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if this is the last night of the world as we know it, I want to spend it with someone who can appreciate that with me. I want to spend it with you… if that’s alright?”
Thomil froze, wanting the suggestion to be genuine, knowing in a deep, painful part of him, that it couldn’t be. Sciona cared about her legacy more than she cared about her Kwen assistant, no matter what she might say to the contrary. She had to have ulterior motives for looking at him like that—like he really meant something to her.
“Don’t stay because you’re hoping to talk me into your plan over the course of the night,” he said tightly. “I’ve given you my answer. I’ll have no part of that spell.”
“I know that.” Sciona looked wounded. “That’s not why I…” Her voice shook, and she paused to clear her throat. “I’ll go then.” She took her coat from the hook and shrugged into it. “After all, if I’m right, this won’t be the last time. The Council will come around, and we’ll both live to see each other again. Honestly, I don’t know why I indulge your pessimism.”
Misery squeezed Thomil’s heart.
“This is better, actually,” she said, lifting her chin in defiance. “This way, we leave off with a little hope, yes?” She smiled. Gods damn, that smile. “Until next time, Thomil.”
The lamplight caught Sciona’s tousled hair, casting a soft halo about her. In that moment, time collapsed, and Thomil was looking at his sister, his father, and the whole of his clan again, knowing that all this hope was doomed.
There would not be a next time.
Before Sciona’s hand reached the doorknob, he caught it and pulled her into a kiss.
The moment their lips met, Thomil realized that he had gone insane. Sciona didn’t want this. She was leaving. They were parting ways in conflict, Thomil having denied her both glory and revenge. And all this directly after Cleon Renthorn had tried to force himself on her. There was no way she wanted this from her presumptuous, prickly, uncooperative Kwen assistant.
But a strange thing happened when he tried to abort the movement. Sciona seized his shirt, pulling him closer. Thomil hadn’t made a conscious decision to stop cutting his hair after he started working for Sciona—nor had he realized how long it had grown until her slender typist’s fingers clutched his locks tight and pressed them both deeper into the kiss.
He and Sciona both knew this was a delusion, a precursor to something that could never be. They couldn’t have this—Thomil couldn’t really belong to a Tiranishwoman, and Sciona couldn’t really belong to any man—without losing some vital part of themselves. There was no future here. Thomil would never meet Sciona’s family nor endure the scorn of her archmage father figure. Sciona would never have to shiver through a dark winter in Thomil’s homeland. There was only this moment, and its isolation rendered it invincible.
They broke apart, and Sciona breathed a soft “Wow!” her eyes as bright as they had ever been. “What was that for?”
“I don’t know,” Thomil confessed. “It felt right. I’m sorr—”
She leaned up and kissed him again.
The crossing had put a sliver of ice in Thomil—a belief that no one he loved would ever stay. Far from refuting that belief, Sciona reinforced it. But he found her presence slowly thawing that ice with the hope that someday, for some Kwen, things might be different. Loss might not be so inevitable.
Thomil held Sciona’s face between his hands, desperate to kiss her again, terrified that if he did, he wouldn’t be able to let her go.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Whatever comes next,” Thomil said, “however history remembers Highmage Sciona Freynan, I want to remember her this way.” Up on her toes, luminous with hope so powerful it verged on mania. If he was to survive the days to come, he needed to remember this buzz of energy that death and better judgment could not contain.
It was hard to say how long Thomil sat in the widow’s kitchen, staring at the spellograph with his knuckles pressed to his lips where they had met Sciona’s. He didn’t move until Carra found him there in limbo, and he had to explain the dilemma to her.
“Sciona and I have been talking about this like it’s a question of what I want or what she wants,” he said, “but the future we make… You’re the one who has to grow up in it.”
“If I get to grow up at all,” Carra said.
“I should have asked… What do you want, Carra?”
“Is this the ‘Freynan Method’ of asking, or does my answer actually matter?”
“Our answers did matter to her,” Thomil said—as evidenced by the spellograph sitting before him in unbearable stillness, awaiting his decision—“and your answer matters to me.”
“But I’m just a child.”
“It matters because you’re a child. The future ultimately isn’t mine or Sciona’s. It’s yours.”
“Don’t say that.” A gentleness overtook Carra’s features, and for a moment, she was Maeva come again. She put a hand on Thomil’s. “It can be yours too, Uncle.”
Her fingers squeezed his, and Maeva’s absence was suddenly incapacitating. Thomil was that gasping thing on the rocks inside Tiran’s barrier, all his losses raw. The gods were cruel that they could make an old thing feel so near, that they had sculpted all Thomil’s loss into his niece’s face when she was about to be his only reason left to live. Again.
He pulled his hand away. “I’m too broken to do much with the future, I think. But I’ll see you as far as I can in whatever direction you want to go.”
“Whatever direction, Uncle?” Carra raised her eyebrows.
“You’re Maeva’s only child, Arras’s only child.” He tucked a lock of Carra’s fiery hair behind her ear. “You’re the future of our tribe. So, I mean it when I ask: what do you want?”
The answer came without hesitation. “I want those mages to die.” Carra’s eyes were chips of ice as she unfolded her arms and drew her shoulders back. “I won’t live the rest of my life under someone’s heel. And if there is no life free of the mages, then… well, then fuck that. I’d rather our tribe die.”