Chapter 21. Defiance

My heart had never beat as hard as it did in the second after I muttered those words.

I did not know why I had said it. I had meant it, that much was true, but I would never have muttered it in a normal council, and I had gone into this room with no plan to say anything like it, yet the words had arrived at the front of my mouth with no warning.

I regretted it the instant the silence began.

That silence did not pass quickly and I kept my head down, my eyes on the stone and my face as empty as I could make it. After what felt like much longer than it probably was, I heard a small hushed exchange start up to the side of the arc, one voice and then another, too quiet to make out, the shape of a conversation rather than its content. My grandfather did not speak.

Still, I kept my head down.

Then my grandfather’s voice came, and it was pitched lower than it had been a moment ago.

“You are beginning to behave as you did before. This council thought we had taken that out of you. It seems we were premature.”

I did not have to ask what he meant. Nana Serre had told me the story once, that when I was three years old, I had thrown a tantrum in this estate because I had wanted to see my mother. Nana had said that afterward, the northern wing had come down and the elders had decided some kind of correction had to be applied.

I did not remember any of it since I was only three. What I had instead was the tacit rule of the years that followed, which was that I did not ask about my parents, and I did not ask about my siblings, and nobody spoke to me about them, and if I brought them up by accident an instructor would change the subject smoothly enough that by the time I was eight I had stopped bringing them up altogether.

I had been told, in a hundred different ways across a hundred different sessions, that a boy of my station did not need family the way other children needed it. That attachments of that kind were distractions. That the house was the only family that mattered and that the only work worth doing was the work of becoming what the house needed me to become.

That in time, when the years were right, a marriage would be arranged and an heir would be produced and the line would go on, and that would be the extent of my obligation to the shape of blood that had made me.

But I had spent yesterday standing in a staging yard while a boy I had known for twenty hours pulled me into a half hug and told me there was a stupid four-move handshake I was going to love, and I had spent the afternoon before that sitting in moss in front of a rock who had listened to me talk about a burp without once telling me I was taking too long, and somewhere in me the tacit rule of the years was starting to feel less like a rule and more like a set of walls nobody had ever actually explained to me the purpose of.

How was it a distraction? Rael had friends. Rael had an entire family of Solennes back in whatever Solenne estate he came from, and he also had Eydric, and now he had me, apparently, and his being the second-highest scorer in this year’s cohort suggested none of it had slowed him down.

Eydric had his Shadow Sera, who had said she was proud of him, and he had come out of the practical at the side of a boy he had spent years bouncing off of and had still scored better than almost anyone in the columns behind him. None of them had fractured under the weight of knowing the people they were born next to.

I just wanted to know what my mother’s face looked like and hear my father’s voice when he was not speaking to an audience and know whether any of my siblings had a laugh I would have recognized. I wanted one afternoon with them, just one.

The hushed voices started again for a moment, and then stopped, and my grandfather let the silence come back to its full weight.

Then, from the highest chair, with no warning or warmth or prelude:

“Granted.”

…Granted? Huh, that was easier than I th—

“You will see them on the day you depart for the academy. One week from this morning. Not before. Not after. The meeting will be arranged by the household and will take place at a time and a location of the council’s choosing, and the duration will be set by me. That is the shape of your wish. That is all of it.”

I did not answer immediately.

Nana had used to say a word under her breath when something had made her angry and she thought I was not listening. It was always one word, said in many variations and always with the object of her anger: Fuck. Fucking highborns. Fuck this. Fuck that. Fucker.

I had not known it was a bad word until I had said it out loud once at the age of eight, and she had grabbed my wrist very fast and made me promise I would not be vulgar, not ever, not where anyone could hear me. I had promised, and I had kept the promise, but somewhere between that afternoon and this one I had also found, quietly, that it was a very… how do I put this… powerful word.

It did a thing no other word I had been taught in this house could do. It carried anger out of you in a single clean syllable and left the inside of your head lighter for a second afterward, and nothing in my vocabulary lessons had ever managed the same trick.

Nana made me promise to not say it out loud, yes, but she had not said anything about inside my head, and I was inside my head now.

That fucking old man.

“Do you understand, Howl?”

“…Yes, Elder.”

“Good.”

I kept my eyes on the tile for another beat, and then, because the anger was still there and I felt robbed, I spoke again.

“In that case, might I be granted one further thing?”

“No. You were granted one.”

“…Please, Elder.”

They went silent again, then, after a while…

“Know this, Howl. You were granted a wish and you spent it poorly and so the vaults, in case that was where your second question was leading, are now closed to you. Let that be the lesson. See that it takes.”

He let that sit for a moment.

“With that understood. What is the second thing you would ask of this council?”

I took a deep breath.

“There is a shrine. Somewhere in the grounds of the estate. It is said to be the dwelling of the guardian spirit of the house.”

The hushed voices started immediately. Two of them at first, then a third, then a fourth, all from different points along the arc, none of them loud enough to make out clearly but the shape of them sharp.

“Who told you of this?”

“Na—” I caught it on the first syllable. “Servant Serre, Elder.”

The voices got louder. Not quite louder enough for me to make out full sentences, but loud enough that I caught pieces of them in the air above my head. —corrupted him from the start— and —how dare she, after everything— and —I told you, I told you the woman was— and one voice, a woman’s, from somewhere on the left side of the arc, just the word Serre spoken with a sort of disgust I had not heard from any of these elders in any council I could remember.

My grandfather let the voices run for a few seconds and then said one word.

“Enough.”

The voices stopped.

“I presume you would like access to this place?”

“Yes, Elder. I would.”

“Granted.”

“Thank y—”

“You may leave.”

…Fuck that fucking old man.

I rose from the tile slowly, head still bowed, and bowed once to the centre of the arc, then turned and walked back through the gap in the circle toward the doors. I kept my steps even, my shoulders straight and my eyes forward.

I also fought, very hard, to keep the smile off my mouth.

Nana had told me about the ancestral shrine once. Years ago. She had said that a guardian spirit lived in it, or had once, and that no living member of the house had seen it since the death of the last Axiom over a thousand years ago. The shrine had been maintained since. Tended, swept, kept in repair. But not visited that much. Nobody walked into a shrine to bow to a spirit who had not answered in a millennium.

Nobody, that was, who could not see spirits the way I could see them now.

With [Spirit Sight] and the spirit contract I recently earned, perhaps I could get something better than these fucks could ever give me.

The doors opened ahead of me as I reached them, and I stepped through without looking back.

***

The doors of the council chamber had not been closed for a full minute before the voices started.

Oserys Aridis sat in the highest chair and let them run.

“Three years since the last time he raised his voice in this chamber, and tonight he raised it twice.”

“He named that witch, almost said it out loud.”

“That woman should have been gone the day he turned three.”

Oserys waited until the noise had spent itself, then raised one hand, and the chamber went still.

“Elders, tell me what you saw tonight.”

The elder on his far left answered first. “A boy who has been corrupted by a servant’s stories and softness. Had the woman not—”

“I did not ask you what you think caused it. I asked you what you saw.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Only silence answered him.

“I will tell you what I saw.” Oserys leaned forward in the chair, just slightly, and the shadows along the arc leaned with him. “I saw a boy who has obeyed every instruction this council has given him for sixteen years walk into this room and, for the first time, ask for something. Not demand, ask. And the thing he asked for was his mother’s face.”

He let that sit for a moment.

“Now. What does that tell us?”

“Had it not been for that woman filling his head with stories and softness for eight years, none of this would be happening. The boy would be on the path we set for him. She corrupted him from the start, Oserys, and every one of us in this room said so at the time.”

“Perhaps,” Oserys said. “And perhaps you are right that the witch accelerated what we are seeing. But she has been gone for five years, and the boy’s hunger has not gone with her, which tells me the hunger is not something she created. It is something we created, by leaving a space where a family should have been and assuming the space would stay empty because we wished it to. That was a miscalculation. What the woman did or did not do is no longer relevant. What is relevant is that we have seen the crack in time.”

“In time for what?” said the elder on his right.

“In time to fill it ourselves, before someone else does.” Oserys rested his hands on the arms of the chair. “We raised him clean, with no attachments, no bonds, no warmth that was not earned through performance, and the intent was correct. A blade must be forged without softness or it will not hold its edge.”

He paused. “But a blade that has never been held does not know whose hand it belongs to. And tonight, the boy showed us that he is already looking for a hand.”

He stood from the chair, which he did not do this often, but he wanted the elders to notice, for this was important. And they noticed.

“He has been outside these walls for a matter of days. In that time, a Solenne boy called him friend and the boy accepted it without hesitation.” He crossed to the window that overlooked the darkened courtyard below. “This is not a rebellion, but merely a symptom. The boy has a vacuum where his family should be, and he is filling it with the first people who offer him anything resembling warmth.”

“Then we tighten the structure,” the elder on his left said. “More discipline. More—”

“More discipline?” Oserys turned from the hidden window. “You want to press harder on a boy who just showed you that pressing is what cracked him in the first place?”

The elder’s mouth closed.

“That is foolish, and every year of resistance costs us two years of correction. We do not have those years to waste.” He walked back to the chair but did not sit. “The boy wants his family, so give it to him.”

“You cannot be serious.”

“The meeting is no longer a kindness. It is a correction.” He looked across the arc. “If we refuse him tonight, after he stood in this room and asked for the first time in sixteen years, he learns that asking this house for warmth produces nothing, so he stops asking and he finds it somewhere we cannot reach.”

He sat.

“If we give it to him, measured, controlled, on our terms, the boy remembers that it was his house that opened the door. Not his friends. Nor his instructors. Us. That is an anchor. Anchors hold when the tide turns.”