“Your Grace!”
Rolan’s borrowed eyes swung to the left, focusing on two figures across the square: a tall guard captain—Hoff—and the boy he was dragging to prison.
The boy, of course, was Rolan.
And the secret, he realized, was Luc’s.
I’m eager to be out of this city.I’vegrown too used to my silence and solitude, I suppose. This place stinks of secrets and desperation. Like the boy I see now, being dragged across the square by old Hoff. How that overgrown bully rose to so high a position, I cannot fathom. Poor kid is probably bound for prison. I wonder if he even deserves it.
I turn back to my brother, assuming he’ll pay little heed. He rarely does when it comes to the smaller details of his city, the finer points of his people’s lives, no matter how I advise him otherwise. The little things matter. The smallest stone in the road can ruin the finest warhorse. He doesn’t listen.
But today he surprises me. He considers the boy, who calls out again, proclaiming his innocence and begging my brother to intervene.
Benhald raises his hand, getting Hoff’s attention, then strides over.
“See, brother,” he murmurs out of the side of his mouth, “I do care about my people’s little lives.”
So this is all for my benefit, is it? I sigh and trail behindhim, noting the way his guards move just a little away from me, nervously stroking their crossbows. As if they hadn’t once been my guards, and this my city.
How easily the winds change.
Benhald and Hoff speak over the boy’s head, my brother inquiring about the boy’s situation, Hoff struggling to keep his small prisoner under control. The child squirms like a weasel in a trap, his face flushed, with Hoff’s big hand smothering his mouth. My fingers drum the hilt of my sword, my jaw set. Truth, I never liked the man. I cast a hard look at him, but he pointedly ignores me. Few in this city will meet my eyes.
Benhald is inspired to bring up his plan to rehabilitate the youth of Crisanth. An old plan he’s talked about for years, though I’ve yet to see it bear any fruit.
While he drones on, the boy bites Hoff’s hand. Ha! I like his spirit. The captain hisses, pulling his hand away for just a second before wrapping it more tightly around the boy’s jaw.
But that second was enough for me to see the diagonal scar tracing away from the corner of the boy’s mouth, pulling his lip into a slight, permanent smirk.
And that’s when it hits me.
I know this boy.
I’ve seen him before.
Not in person, but through a secret. One I found a year ago, cracked from a talon relic in the forest.
The Cryptic had been low and long like a snake, and it put up a nasty fight. That was months ago, but I never forget a secret, nor any of its details. No Arcanist can, no matter how we might try to wring them from our minds.
And this boy, I remember very well.
The secret was a bad one, though brief. Its bearer’s hands were large and sported a tattoo—a bone drawn in thin, dark ink, stretching from the wrist joint to the first knuckle of the thumb. The sight sent a jolt of lightning through me, white hot with savage fury. Oh, I knew that hand. I knew it as well as my own, so often had I traced the memory of it in my mind, exactly opposite to the way I traced the faces of my dead wife and son.
The bone tattoo distorted as the hand flexed, gripping the length of a long cane. There was shouting, curses and insults hurled at the boy, who cowered against a wall, trapped.
Then the cane flashed, and the boy cried out and fell, blood welling from a long cut over his lip.
A diagonal cut that tugged the corner of his lip. It would leave a scar.
That part was not the secret, however. The secret came a moment after the boy fled, blood welling from the cut, tears welling in his eyes.
Alone, the man with the bone tattoo had fallen to his knees and raised his hands to his face, weeping for the violence in him he could not control. That was the secret: the shame he could not speak. The regret he dared let no one see. He had hit the boy before, and would hit him again, and he would hate himself for being too weak to stop it.
It all washes through me now, as vividly as it had the night I crushed the snake Cryptic’s relic and absorbed its power. Gazing at the boy, I see the same dark, desperate eyes, the same defensive slant to his eyebrows, and of course, the scar.
Yes, it is the same boy. And the man with the bone tattoo was his father, I would bet my horse on that.
This is it.
