Page 18 of Turncloak

“I’m not climbing it, and neither are you.”

“Chickenheart.”

“Yes, yes. I’m a wimp, a featherweight. Any other insults you want to throw at me? They won’t work, but they might make you feel better.”

Frustration surged in the younger boy, a reservoir threatening to overflow a dam. He took a step toward the foot of the tree, where its roots were knotted and protruding from the earth. An inkmouse scuttled over his bare ankle, but he did not flinch. “Suit yourself. I’m going.”

“No! We can’t get hurt. Perant is always low on magic, and if Mother or Father are injured on their mission, our only Healer can’t have wasted his power on broken bones.”

Such logic was of little interest to the younger boy. His limbs twitched with a sort of ingrained restlessness he’d been plagued with ever since he’d learned to walk—the need to be on the move, to be stretching himself, to feel his lungs tighten and his blood pound. He was an addict at five years old, adrenaline his drug of choice.

He took another step forward.

The older brother’s hand went to the spindly wand tucked in his waistband. He’d been given it a year prior, when he turned six, but wasn’t entirely sure how to use it yet.

The younger boy, who knew this, scoffed. “What are you going to do? Fail to cast a basic levitation spell?”

Redness rushed to the older brother’s cheeks. “I’m still bigger and stronger than you.” But he said this uncertainly—he was all angles, while his brother was shorter, stockier, more determined.

“If you’re so big and strong, you climb it.”

There was too much strength behind the words; he knew the moment they left his lips.

It was a command.

Which shouldn’t have mattered, because he was wearing a deminite bracelet.

And yet slowly, terribly, his brother started to climb.

His limbs shook, and he cast a horrified glance over his shoulder at the ground below. The wand tumbled from his hand. “Please. Don’t. Let me down.”

But the younger boy did not retract his inadvertent order—whether through shock, or thrill, or something darker still. He simply stared down at the slender bracelet and marveled at what he was able to do despite it.

“It’s not funny,” the older boy muttered, climbing higher and higher. “I know I don’t want to do this. I know it’s you. Let me down.”

The younger boy fought the smile plucking at the corner of his mouth. “Not until you can see Brasden.”

Two things took root in the Rezaran boys that night.

In the swaddled baby from the woods, a vast and bottomless self-loathing.

And in his adoptive brother, a fear that would simmer and swell for many years to come.

10

• • • •

To Kill a Wand

Levan rolled his late mother’s wand in his golden prosthetic palm.

The wand was a proud, handsome thing, carved of garnet wood and bolstered by an ascenite handle. Its core was shot through with a coveted weaverwick—a gift from dragonkind, allowing its holder to turn back time.

It had always galled Levan that while he was the last living Rezaran, the famed house of Timeweaving, he could not use the wand himself. Even pushing himself to the brink of ruin, he had never been able to wind back a single second. His mother had been weak with the art; perhaps it diluted with every passing generation. Perhaps it had skipped him altogether.

Lorissa Rezaran’s wand was a rare artifact, worth either a hundred thousand ascens or a death penalty, depending upon whom you asked.

And Levan knew, deep in his marrow, that he had to destroy it.