I open my eyes. The corner remains empty.
"He was at the bar," I say, and I hate how close the words come to pleading. "I saw him there. He watched the door. He led me there."
Aven comes into my peripheral vision. His bandaged hand is pressed to his stomach now, the blood staining the linen in a slow bloom. His attention keeps dragging to the corner, then back to me, splitting him between the brother I can't see and the man who can't bear to believe what the room is already telling him.
"He was at the bar because I was," Aven says. The anger in him turns brittle. "That's what he's saying. He couldn't reach most people clearly. Most mediums would only catch pieces of him. Priests would feel gathered divinity and call it holy residue. I saw him as a person before I knew what I was seeing, so he stayed."
Gathered divinity should be a phrase from the Church's mouth, not Aven's. It shouldn't be standing in this room with Ellis's name attached to it. My mind tries to reject the combination and fails, because the tower has already begun rearranging itself behind my eyes. Church delegates in the lower hall. Adaro's soft laugh. Ellis going still beneath our father's hand for one fraction of a second before he covered it with an insult. The smell of incense layered over bloodline magic and polished wood.
I'd thought they were discussing me that night. I'd been vain enough in my suffering to believe all hunger in that house pointed toward my throat.
"How long?" I ask.
Aven looks toward the corner, and something he hears makes his shoulders pull tight. He lifts one hand slightly as if asking a dead man for space, but his fingers shake too badly for thegesture to hold any authority. "He's not giving it in order. He keeps trying to show me too much."
"Then choose one thing." The command leaves me before I can soften it. It's unfair, and I know it the moment Aven flinches, but I have nothing gentle left to offer the bridge while the abyss opens beneath us.
His jaw sets. For one moment, all the pity leaves him, and only the anger remains. It steadies him more than mercy would have. "Adaro sold him."
The room doesn't change. The candle burns. The shelves hold. Aven stands beside me with blood on his hand, and Adaro’s name moves through the library like a door opening below water.
"To the Church," Aven says, because Ellis isn't done and neither of them will spare me. "A private arrangement. Ellis says Adaro handed him over because once Adaro disowned him, he had enough bloodline power to be useful and no standing left to protect him. They called it a transfer. He says they made it sound clean."
My father had always made violence sound administrative. A transfer. A preservation measure. A family necessity. He could have ordered a throat cut in the same tone he used to request more wine. I remember Ellis at the foot of the tower stairs, dressed too well for the hour, mouth curved around some careless remark while his eyes tracked the priests in the hall. He'd looked at me once before they took him below. Only once. I'd mistaken that look for resentment. I'd wanted it to be resentment because resentment meant he was alive enough to hate me.
"He was my brother," I say.
Aven's eyes flash toward me. "He knows."
The answer isn't comfort. It's worse. It means Ellis has been standing inside that fact for longer than I've been willing to look at it.
The cold in the corner pulses, and Aven bends slightly as if a hand has pressed between his shoulder blades. He grips the edge of the cartography table, breathing through his teeth. The connection is hurting him now, not in the way the ordinary dead hurt him with their hunger and noise, but with the strain of holding a spirit too old, too bound, too jagged around the edges. He tries to say something and stops, his eyes unfocusing as Ellis pushes more through.
"Aven," I say, and step toward him.
He shakes his head hard enough that a curl slips over his eye. "Don't touch me. If you touch me while I’m holding him open, the bond makes him clearer, and he's already—" His voice catches. He presses his bloody hand harder to the table. "Cain, they used him alive first."
For a moment, the words don't enter me. They remain at the threshold, waiting for a mind still trying to bar the door. Aven doesn't wait. He can't. Ellis is inside the room now, inside him, inside the old silence I've wrapped around my brother's absence.
"They drained him," Aven says, and every syllable seems to cost skin. "Not all at once. Rites under a chapel. Silver basin. Chain through the throat, but not metal, not exactly. Impure magic. They kept taking pieces and calling it sacred extraction. When his body failed, the binding held what was left."
Bound.
Dead should have ended it but being bound is the continuation of ownership past the mercy of a pulse. It's the hand closing again after the body has already paid everything it had.
I cross the space before I decide to move. The rug gives beneath my boots, the candle flame bends toward the corner, and Aven makes a small sound behind me that might be warningor grief. I lift my hand into the empty place where his gaze has been fixed, fingers spread as if I can find a shoulder, a sleeve, the edge of a jaw I remember from childhood before my family sharpened both of us into different weapons.
There’s just nothing and then cold slips around my fingers and vanishes, leaving my skin aching, Aven behind me making a sound so wounded that I turn before I can stop myself.
His eyes are wet. "He flinched."
That breaks what the rest only cracked.
My body chooses the chair because the floor can't be trusted. I sit with my hands open on my knees, staring at the place my fingers passed through Ellis and trying to understand the size of the failure. I left the tower. I crossed the ward. I burned through the gate with my skin blistering and my blood boiling, believing I was tearing myself free of my family's last claim on me. I hadn't known the gate recognized me because it had been fed by him. I hadn't known my escape passed through what remained of my brother.
Aven kneels in front of me before I can tell him not to. The movement is too fast to be careful, and his knees hit the rug with a dull sound. He takes my hands, blood and linen and all, and folds his fingers around mine with a stubbornness that feels like refusal. I grip him too hard. I know it from the way his breath catches, but he doesn't pull away. He shifts closer instead, anchoring me with a body already carrying more grief than any living thing should have to translate.
"He says he's sorry," Aven whispers.
