Page 69 of Turncloak

“But it’s going to be alright, isn’t it?” he begged, throat bobbing, eyes filled with salt. “You have the scroll of necromancers. They can bring her—”

Yet Lyrian was already striding away, back toward the camp, as though he could not bear to look at his dead wife or his life-ruining son for a moment longer. The fallowwolf sat vigil beside the corpse of his lost mistress, crying in a way that broke the boy’s already ruined heart.

For several minutes, the breathless boy lay flat on his back on the forest floor, concentrating on the twigs and roots jutting into his spine, pressing his eyes tightly shut and willing himself to wake from this nightmare.

When the distant crunch of overlapping footsteps grew louder, the boy peeled his eyes open. Several feet away, the dropped board game piece was nestled at the foot of a tree. The boy scrambled to get it, muddying the knees of his pajamas. He tucked it in his pocket without knowing why. Perhaps some part of him knew what was coming before it did.

Two figures emerged from the deep black shadows: his father and his brother.

No Healers. Nobody carrying a scroll of names.

Just the only two people left in the world who loved him.

His brother wore a pale, horrified expression that only deepened at the sight of his deceased mother. He shook his head so fast it must have made him dizzy—that universal reaction, that feeling of no, no, no, this cannot be. A violent rejection of this new reality.

His father carried an object that sent a sharp slice of cold down the boy’s spine.

A set of deminite shackles.

Larger than the ones removed from him as a baby. Newer, as though they’d been made especially for him. As though his adoptive parents had always known, on some level, that this moment would come.

“It wasn’t my compelling,” the boy whispered. “I promise, it wasn’t. I only used it to try and help her. I…”

His unlistening father crouched before his no-longer son, movements stiff and harsh, and latched the boy in. The deminite was cold and heavy around his ankles, endlessly more robust than the slender bracelet, and impossible to compel through.

Not that the boy would even try.

Not now. Never again.

Lyrian dragged the boy into the portari gate, through one of the four ascenite arches, beneath the carved axelmares on hind legs with their spectral wings unfurled, and onto the black-tiled threshold where raw magic whorled and swirled.

“Dad? What are you doing?” the boy pleaded, though, of course, he already knew.

“We took you in,” Lyrian said, his voice terrifying in its emptiness. “She didn’t want you, you know. I was the one who insisted we keep you. Protect you. Raise you. And now she is dead because of you.”

The boy’s brother sniffed sharply, as though holding back tears.

“I’m sorry,” the boy from the woods pleaded. “I’m so sorry, Levan.”

But Levan simply stared at him, as though remembering the way he’d been forced to climb the wyrmwood all the way to the top, as though remembering all the board games he’d lost to his indomitable brother, as though remembering every night he’d gone to bed hungry from sharing their meager food rations with one extra mouth.

Then Levan looked at his dead mother, and his entire face collapsed with grief, eyes screwed up, mouth twisted, the sound of his sobs enough to carve permanent grooves into a heart.

It was the last thing the boy from the woods saw as Lyrian raised his wand and uttered a destination. “Ad Novarin north-east.”

The gate obliged before the boy could say goodbye.

The Havenwood swirled and evaporated, and a new city stood beyond the ascenite arches and bucking axelmares.

Beneath a star-sprinkled sky stood tall townhouses of pale creamstone, sapphire spires and crimson obelisks, purple-domed Augurest temples and vendor carts selling cups of whisky hot chocolate. The street hung with the scents of honeywine and old parchment, and each cobblestone was etched with the title and author of a book. Hoof clops and raucous laughter rang out like music. A babble of scholars in pale blue cloaks stood outside a towering library, passing around a smoking pipe and arguing vehemently about something so abstract as to be nonsense.

For the second time in his life, the boy was left alone in the world.

That first night wandering the streets of Novarin was the longest of his life.

The deminite shackles around his ankles were linked together with a chain, and while they did not prevent him from walking, they were cold, heavy, clanking with every step. They filled him with a deep, animal shame, and he could not meet the gaze of anyone who searched his tearstained face. He was deeply aware of the dirt on his pale blue pajamas, of how it must make him look like a beggar. He wrapped his too-big black cloak tighter around himself and kept walking, nowhere to go except away.

Novarin was a scholar’s city, and he felt the hot press of academic stares as he wandered. He was a curiosity, a research subject.