And I watched Patrick Colson with new understanding. The man who said it was all just business. The man who had taken on the burden his father had left him and gave work to fatherless boys and hawkers and delivered bluff to the raided parishes. The man who blew up schools for his father’s war, who led his brother around on his shirtsleeve and kept an old dog at his heel.
A man who would do what was necessary to keep his mother alive.
He was—and had always been—a constant battle of scales that wouldn’t balance. The cost of need outweighing the cost of failure. Bad deals and bullets and me, digging out terranium with a guillotine hanging above. Saving his mother at the mercy of an approaching ambush.
I looked at Patrick. Inhaled deeply. “I can do it,” I told him.
Patrick turned to face me. He only seemed further pained.
“No,” Tess said, pushing herself off the counter.
“Ma,” Patrick said, his knuckles white. “Please.”
“This is exactly why I came here myself, Pat,” she said, pulling her cardigan closer around her. “To talk some fuckin’ sense into you. If I hadn’t, you’d forge ahead no matter the cost, and your brothers would let you. Yourfatherwould let you.” She looked to her husband then. “Not a damn thing is worth the cost of my sons,” she said, nailing John to the wall with her eyes.
He looked unwilling to face up to her. “Sometimes a risk has to be taken,” he said warily. “You were never able to see that.”
“And you were never able to see past your own ambition,” she said in return, barely withholding her temper. “Even if it meant tradin’ in your loyalty!”
Gunner looked to his father. “What’s she talkin’ about, Dad?”
“He told you lot that he’d go to Belavere City and capture their Alchemist, Domelius Becker. But that ain’t all he was there to do.”
My heartbeat doubled. I heard Patrick’s voice in my head, telling me the story.Something went wrong, he’d said, never able to pinpoint what that something was.
“You went to the House,” Tess said, a tear sliding down her cheek. “And you offered them a book.The Stewards’ Testament.”
Patrick went eerily still. So still that I went to him, touched his hand, and felt how cold it had become. In the lines of his stark face, I thought I saw him fracture at his core.
“That book came from the archives,” I said.
“It came from the brink,” Tess retorted. “Where the Stewards always intended it to be. Safely in the hands of a Craftsman named Sullivan Prescott.”
Another blow. “Polly,” Theo realized aloud, eyes bulging.
“Polly.” Tess nodded. “Girl should have shut her mouth. But she came to Kenton Hill homesick, and she told stories about her grandfather. The second my husband learned of the book’s existence, he went hunting for it. He killed Sullivan Prescott in his home, and he dug out that damnedbook.” Tess spoke of it like it were a curse. “Brought it back to Kenton Hill and told me it were a map to the biggest seam of terranium that had ever existed. Only he couldn’t read a fuckin’ thing it said, and he was too much a coward to ask Polly, to admit to how he’d come by it.” Tess laughed mirthlessly. “Need to keep her in our good graces, he said. But he figured there were a bunch of scholars in the city who could translate it.”
“So, you took it to the Artisan capital,” Patrick said, closing his eyes. “And tried to sell it to the House.”
“Dad?” Donny said, something dark in his voice. “Tell her she’s got it wrong.”
John was silent. He expelled a breath and braced himself against the wall, shaking his head.
“Tell her, Dad,” Gunner said, his voice breaking on its way out. He rocked where he stood. “Say somethin’!”
Patrick seemed frozen in stasis, his eyes on his father.
“I tried to find a solution,” John said. “For the Union.”
“No,” Patrick argued, the pieces finally falling into place. “No, you tried to find a solution for yourself.”
Donny and Gunner looked stunned. “What do you mean?” Gunner asked.
“I mean Dad promised those parishes more bluff than we could give ’em, found his head on the choppin’ block, and he ran off to the House to save himself. Traded one evil for the lesser, and left behind a mountain of debt.” Something new reared its head in Patrick. “A debt I became well aware of when he didn’t return from the city. A debt I’ve been repayin’ ever since, to keep the Union members compliant.”
Donny took off his cap and screwed it into a ball. Gunner simply looked dumbstruck. “God, Patty,” his older brother said. “You never said nothin’.”
I looked at John, detesting every part of him. Upstairs, my father faded into the mattress by degrees, but I thought there’d never been a sorrier excuse for a father than John Colson.
