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“He watched her for the week they were stationed in the village, and on the seventh day he seized her. Yielding my mother allowed him unfettered access to her powers for any use as he saw fit.”
The pretty family portrait I had constructed began to fall apart. “He stole them from her?” I leaned forward from my seat at thedesk, intrigued and a little terrified.
“No, not exactly. When a mortal changes, any crafts they might have remain theirs. But their soul...” he looked wearily out of the window at the sun that hung so low atop the mountain. The two objects kissed a scatter of silver light across the world. “It serves its master.”
There was no mistaking the defeat in the slant of his spine as he wrapped his knees to his chest. Kalen was Yielded. Which meant somewhere in this world was another being holding tight to the strings of his soul. It was something of a concern, and I would have been lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it a million times since the ball. It complicated his loyalties to the faction, to the Sages—to me.
“She never fought against him,” he continued. “She gave him six sons, which was like six golden goose eggs to a highly positioned general. My mother gave him a legacy, and then she disappeared.”
Her soul was chained to The Cleaver, but Adryada’s heart belonged to another. Her feet followed that of her mind, and her ship that of her will. She was gone from Sythe for seven months before Kalen’s father could locate her transport docked just outside of the eastern seaboard of Aegedonia in a bay that channeled straight into the heart of Grovsney. “My brothers said they were sure he would kill her, and I think he would have.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“Me, I guess” Kalen shrugged his shoulders, unconvinced. “She was pregnant, but no one knew how far along. None of the midwives could put a date to the conception because she had glamoured her body to conceal it. They couldn’t be sure if Akkius had fathered me. Not that it made much of a difference. As soon as I was born, it was obvious what I was. What Iwasn’tif we are going to play semantics.”
“Each of my brothers had been born on the tail end of a veilof darkness. They matured at an alarming pace and showed an affinity for Shadow magic well before their second birthday. Akkius waited until mine, just to be sure. But I was as ordinary as the day was long. A trait I inherited from my very mortal father.”
“Where is your father now?”
Kalen had been looking at me with a soft smile, which disappeared instantly.
“Dead,” he supplied, some kind of distance growing in his voice. “They both are.”
The Cleaver was intent on defending his honor with the equally dishonorable act of lover’s revenge. He killed Kalen’s father only a few weeks after Adryada gave birth, and then he’d lived the rest of his vengeful life, according to Kalen. Utter rage was the temperament of the man who had unknowingly raised the future Preserver.
I looked up from the silken tassels of the quilt I held against my chest and tried to look closely at the person who now stood before me. A god in his own right who had seen what it was to be mortal. To be weak. And when he finally garnered the power most forfeited their souls for, he had chosen to keep his humanity. Yes, he could be cruel, but how could he avoid it? I was sure that he hadn’t been brought up in the gentle ways I’d pictured before. Despite whatever he had suffered as a child, Kalen grew up to be honorable. Somehow it was possible, then, to be made of everything bad and still find a way to be good.
“I wasn’t there, so I can’t be sure.” My voice was meek. It was not my story, and I felt like an intruder to add or take away from it. I let out each syllable slowly, trying to convince both of us that it needed to be said. “But I’d argue you probably inherited less from your father than you think.”
Kalen’s expression turned dour, unenthused. “Does it matter?” He demanded. “I will never know.”
He began to stare at me in a way that made me think The Cleaver had been more effective in his rearing after all. The energy in the room lost all camaraderie though I’d only meant to compliment him. It was clear in his tense posture and the clasp of his hands that the storytelling was over. I would have been a child to ask for more.
I was just beginning to think of ways to escape back to the comfort of my room when something like a rock hit the window of our grand house. I looked to Kalen in alarm, but he had mysteriously regained his zeal and was taking great strides toward the sound. A crow with beady eyes of red was perched on the outside ledge, pecking incessantly. The aimless direction of its beak told me it was blind and must have flown straight into the window as it came. Whatever it wanted, it was determined to get it.
Kalen removed a small iron rod from the mechanism of the window and pulled hard against the frame. It stuck a little but opened wide enough for the bird to slip a small roll of parchment into his hand and fly off to wherever it came from.
“What is that?” I asked, as he unfurled the note to reveal a set of numbers scrawled onto it in black ink.
His smile returned, and I thought of a pit of amber and all of the light in the world. Dazzling.
“It’s the map to your next stone.”
FORTY-THREE DEGREES NORTH,twenty-seven and a half degrees east.
Coordinates that held the key to finding where the next piece of my soul lay hidden. It would take only two days to ride from our safe house in the Time faction to reach them, according to the intricately sketched map pasted against the wall of our loft. At least, I thought it was two days.
For the past few hours, I’d been using a pair of brass forceps and a thin stick of coal to carve out the route we were to take to Grovsney. Kalen had traced along a wide path with his middlemost finger against the map this morning and asked that I count the miles to a small clearing in the bottom left corner of the faction’s expansive forest.
I was eager to be put to use but took my time walking the divider from point to point across thin paper. The task was tedious, but I will admit it did a perfect job of distracting me. The implications of a fly-by pronouncement of my next stone were too much for my mind to take in all at once. It seemed unnatural that my soul could be within one mount of a horse and I not have any clue about it.
In such a short time, I might have another piece of myself jabbed like a knife into my mind. I was still healing from the cut of my first stone, and who knew if the vision in the second would be a worse wound.
Put simply, I was afraid of how I might bleed.
We packed light, taking with us a few bags of coins from the trove located behind a painting in my room. Kalen laughed at the way my face lit up upon seeing the tiny mountains of gold hidden away like a secret treasure.
“You didn’t know?” he asked and began filling four beige satchels with generous handfuls of golden coins. “We’re rich.”
