Page 17 of Turncloak

—she almost tripped over it.

A supine figure lying outside the precinct.

She stumbled back, righted herself.

Looked down at the figure—no, the corpse.

The night canted sharply. Auria’s breath came in short stitches, her blood flowing hot and thin and strange. A black wall of horror rose within her, towering, vertiginous.

The body lay in the gloaming like a marble statue, silver cloak pooled around its torso, a wedge of moonlight draped over a pale face, an imprecision to the cadaver’s stare, a defiant clench to its papery fist, all the contours so familiar and yet so strange, the sight both utterly unfathomable and entirely inevitable.

The bottom fell out of her belly, and then her soul. It was only once she fell to her knees beside her betrothed that she noticed the note pinned to his chest—hammered through his rib cage with a rusty nail, the violence so gratuitous, so ugly and cruel.

This is what we do to Silver rats.

Part Two

Mistrust

9

• • • •

Sixteen Years Ago

The swaddled baby from the woods became a little boy, and the little boy learned the word for what was wrong with him.

Compeller, whispered like a curse, like a death sentence.

The little boy did not understand how abnormal it was for the world to bend to his will, to live a life of no friction. He simply watched with vague interest as other mages rearranged themselves around him, like a river flowing around a rock.

Although he could have commanded anything, his wishes were fairly asinine. An extra serving of a meager dinner. Playing past bedtime in the Havenwood. Always his board game of choice, which he would invariably win—much to his older brother’s ire.

Said brother also had a Compeller’s instinct, the boy thought. Sometimes there was a sort of resistance, a grating feeling, when the boy tried to warp his brother’s will. Two swords clanking together, spraying white-gold sparks. The boy from the woods always won, of course. He was simply too powerful, and any blocks or parries were usually short-lived. But the brother had something—a flint hovering over dried twigs, an ember afraid to leap higher.

The two were thick as thieves. They built dens from snapped branches and old threadbare cloaks, made a pirate ship out of a rotten crate they found in a deadfall. They stole a map from the Rezarans’ resident Healer, jabbed briar thorns through all the places they might venture once grown. The southern tip of Mersina, a valley in Laudon, the craggy heart of Nomaden. Shishai and Soral and Suva. A speck-sized island in the Ashen Narrows. The world was so vast, and their lives were so small.

Neither brother understood the enormity of why they were in hiding, of course. They heard murmurings, but lacked the broader context.

Their parents disappeared for days on end. Often they would return bedraggled, injured even, but always richer in one thing: ascenite. Pearlescent coins by the pocketful, the crateful. A stockpile was built at the center of the tunnels snaking beneath their encampment, guarded by a feral fallowwolf who’d taken a shine to Lorissa Rezaran.

Their numbers grew in kind. The new recruits treated Lorissa with a kind of religious fervor—bowed heads and reverent whispers, a curious swish-flick of their wands to represent their devotion—as though she were a deity in her own right. But to the boy from the woods, she was simply Mother.

One warm summer night, Lyrian and Lorissa departed on a quest to Sorvel, a small northern village overlooking Fair Firth. A kindly old crone by the name of Candin was minding the brothers, ensuring they stayed in their beds and did not get up to mischief. Candin, however, was prone to sudden bouts of unrousable slumber, exacerbated by the immense quantities of flamebrandy with which she spiked her evening ambertea.

Before long, the brothers were creeping out the front door and into the vast woods beyond. The shadows in the forest were long and bruise-colored, the canopy trilling with havendoves. Bare feet skimmed over gnarled roots, black cloaks flapping around skinny ankles, the quiet of dusk draped over the forest like a blanket.

The boy from the woods, now five years old, wore a neat deminite bracelet—nowhere near as heavy or intrusive as the ankle manacles from his birth parents, but enough to temper his power. A precaution, Lorissa Rezaran said. The boy suspected it was largely because of the flamboyant wolftrot he’d encouraged his adoptive mother to perform in the midst of an argument with her husband. Lorissa Rezaran did not like to be undermined, and she certainly did not like to be made to look a fool.

“What shall we do?” his brother asked, voice low and conspiratorial in the eerie woods.

He was seven years old and mid growth spurt, limbs long and gangly, hips too narrow for his newfound height. He was quiet, earnest, a little cowardly, always lost in his rich inner life. The boy from the woods loved him very much, because he had never once made the adopted child feel like a black swan, like an afterthought. They were just brothers, as simple and as complex as that.

The younger boy peered up at the nearest wyrmwood, studying its snarled ladder of branches. It was the tallest in the forest, head and shoulders above its nearest companions. “I wonder if we could see Bellandry from the top of that tree.”

“We wouldn’t know—the Havenwood covers the border.”

“The other way. Over Fair Firth to Brasden.”