Chapter 34. What We Made

The doors had closed behind Howl as Jahaeser walked him the length of the outer yard toward the carriage. The Greymanes stood in their traces with their heads down, the driver already up on the bench, and Gowyn a few paces off with his hands folded behind his back like always.

“You’ll write when you arrive,” Jahaeser said. “Not to me, but to the house. A line to say you’re through the gates. The council likes to know.”

“Yes, Father.”

“The first term is the one that decides how they’ll treat you for the other years. Say little. Let them measure you before you show them the ruler. A boy who tells everyone what he is, is a boy they’ve stopped wondering about.” He watched the road. “You understand me?”

“I do.”

“You’ll take the Shield path. The council’s already settled it, whatever the academy tells you about choosing freely, so don’t let some instructor talk you into imagining it’s an open question. Crown work is councils and correspondence, and there’ll be time enough for that when you’re older. Shield first. And always keep the staff on you while you’re at it. Russo didn’t give a year of his life to a thing so you could pack it away.”

“…I’ll keep it on me.”

Gowyn stood a little apart, waiting, and when Jahaeser glanced at him he gave the smallest nod. The estate’s business would be handled. It always was.

Howl looked at him. “You’ll be with me the whole time?”

“The whole time, Young Lord.”

“Cousin,” Howl said. “You’re my cousin. I never… we never finished that.”

Gowyn held his eyes for a moment, then nodded.

At the same time, Jahaeser looked at his son.

He was tall for sixteen, and the formal black sat well on him now that the attendants had stopped needing to fold him into it. He held the pale stick loosely at his side, already comfortable with it. The eyes really were Jahaeser’s, but everything else was the boy’s own.

He was… softer than Jahaeser had hoped. But it didn’t displease him. He’d spent sixteen years quietly afraid the boy would grow cruel — an Axiom with no ceiling to his power and a taste for using it was not a thing any house could hold the leash on for long. This was the better outcome. A gentle weapon was still a weapon, and it could be pointed, using the right methods. A cruel one pointed itself.

Whether that was a flaw or the very thing that would remake the world, Jahaeser genuinely did not know. His father was betting on the second, but Jahaeser had spent the hour deciding he’d wait and see.

The horses suddenly shifted in their traces, taking him out of his thoughts.

“Well,” Jahaeser said. “The academy won’t hold the gates past dusk, son of this house or not. What are you waiting for?”

Much to Jahaeser’s curiosity, the boy didn’t move toward the carriage. Instead, he stood where he was, looking at the ground, the pale stick held loose at his side.

“Son?” Jahaeser watched him. “What is— Oh!”

The boy suddenlly stepped in and put his arms around him in a shocking hug.

It was tighter than Jahaeser expected, the boy’s arms closing around him with a strength nothing in his frame suggested. For one disordered moment, Jahaeser understood in his body what the reports had only ever told him on paper.

Jahaeser’s own hands came up and stopped in the air above his son’s shoulders.

He… he did not know what to do with them. That was the plain truth of it. He could not remember the last time he’d been held, and the boy was still holding him, face turned against his collar, but Jahaeser’s hands hung there deciding, half-closing toward the hug until he felt the rest of them.

Gowyn, off to the side, the driver up on his bench, the guards ranged behind them at the wall. None of them looking, yet all of them looking.

So, he stayed his hands.

Less than a second later, Howl quickly let go and stepped back, his face having gone red to the ears while his eyes went to the ground and stayed there.

“Sorry. That was… sorry.” He got a breath. “It may be a while before we see each other. And today, to be honest, I had mixed feelings about, well. A lot of it. But I’m glad I got to see you at least. That’s all. Sorry.”

“Don’t.” Jahaeser waited until the boy’s eyes came up, which took a moment. “When you’ve made a decision, you don’t apologize for it. You made it. Own it, and let it stand. A man who says sorry for the thing he chose to do teaches everyone watching that he can be argued out of it.”

“…Yes, Father.”

“Now go. You’ll be late.”

“I know… Thank you, Father. For the staff. And… and for the time.”

“Go,” Jahaeser said, nodding at the boy.

Howl climbed into the carriage while Gowyn followed with a nod to Jahaeser as he passed, and the door shut, then the driver clicked his tongue, and the Greymanes leaned into the traces.

The carriage pulled away, and through the window the boy’s face turned back, watching him.

Jahaeser watched too. He stood in the yard and did not move as Howl kept looking through the glass until the road bent and the wall cut him off and the dust came up where he’d been.

Jahaeser stayed where he was a while longer, still looking at the empty road ahead.

“I see your paternal fibre still runs for the boy after all.”

Jahaeser didn’t bother to turn. “Brother.”

Vaerys laughed behind him. “He’s growing up well. Better than any of you dared write down.”

“He’s become… unpredictable.”

“He’s become human. That’s a different thing, and you’d know it if you weren’t so frightened of the word.”

Jahaeser turned, already tired of an argument he’d had a hundred versions of. And stopped.

Vaerys was dressed for travel, and dressed well for it.

“…You’re going somewhere?”

Vaerys smiled at him. “I’ve been turning it over a good while now. And with my son gone off to guard your boy, there’s little enough left for me in this house.” He looked up at the walls behind them. “Father’s made the place a tomb that hasn’t finished burying anyone yet. I find I’ve an appetite for something with air in it.”

“You can’t.” Jahaeser heard how it sounded but said it anyway. “There are protocols. A man of your standing doesn’t simply put on a cloak and walk out the gate. The council—”

“Little brother.” Vaerys was still smiling. “I am a First Seal. The council can take its protocols, its opinions and its very great concerns and put them somewhere the sun has never once reached, and if any of them would care to discuss it with me directly, my door is open.”

Jahaeser went pale.

It wasn’t the first time he’d heard his brother talk this way. Vaerys had said worse, and said it in front of their father, in rooms where doing so should have cost him something and somehow never had. But he’d always had the sense to keep it behind closed doors. Here the yard was open and the guards were still close enough to catch every word of it.

Which only meant…

“Did something happen,” Jahaeser said, “between you and Father?”

Vaerys chuckled as he came forward, his hand landing on Jahaeser’s shoulder.

“You’ll be head of this family one day. Sooner than’s comfortable, if the boy’s still short of his age when the seat comes open.” The hand pressed once. “So grow some balls, little brother. Oppose the old man. He and those elders still flinch at the sight of that child over a thing he did before he could form a memory of it, and they go on treating him like something they’ve caged, when he stood in that Pit today and showed every one of them he holds the reins of his own power better than mages three times his age. They saw it, yet they’ll go back to their dark little room and fear him anyway, trying to control him.”

The hand pressed once more, then lifted.

“Keep letting them, and you’ll wake one morning to find they’ve broken the one thing that could have saved this house. And the boy will be strong enough by then to take the rest of the world down with it when he breaks.”

He walked on.

“Take care of yourself, brother. I’ll write when I’ve somewhere to write from.” He lifted one hand without turning. “And kiss the children for me.”

“Vaerys, wait—”

But there was only smoke where his brother had been, a coil of it already thinning, and a hahahaha that hung in the air a moment after the shape was gone. A breeze moved through the place and took the last of it, and then Jahaeser was speaking to no one.

No sooner had he had a moment to ponder what had just happened that a bird came down out of the pale sky. It settled on his forearm without being asked, a slip of rolled paper bound to its leg, and waited while he worked the knot loose.

He unrolled it.

The council was calling an emergency session. No reason given, which was reason enough. He looked at the empty road where his brother had stood a moment ago and thought he could guess at least part of it.

Jahaeser let out a long breath and rolled the paper closed.

“Not a word of this,” he said to the guards at the wall. “Any of it. To anyone.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

He walked back toward the estate, a familiar weight settling across his shoulders as he thought of what awaited him.

***

I pissed near a tree on the side of the road while Gowyn waited in the carriage and the driver looked politely at the sky.

I had been holding it in for the better part of two hours because I could not figure out how to ask for a stop without feeling embarrassed about it, and by the time I finally asked, my voice had come out strained enough that the driver had pulled the Greymanes over without a word.

We would be at Sartheon in a few hours. The valley was already starting to look familiar from the first journey, the hills flattening out, the wardstones appearing on the ridges in their circles and lines.

I finished, adjusted my robe, climbed back in, and the carriage started again.

I pulled out the glyph sheets I had been copying since this morning and went back to the set I had been working on, a mid-tier reinforcement array Instructor Varren had assigned me months ago that I had never quite finished.

The pen moved, the ink dried, and Gowyn still sat across from me with his book open on his knee, reading by the light of the small mana orb he had conjured above his shoulder, same as the first journey.

Neither of us spoke.

To be honest, I had wanted to know more about him, but the drug he used on me still left me resentful, and even despite that, every attempt I had made in the hours since we had left the estate to start something resembling a conversation had been met with the same clipped, closing answers that made it clear the topic, whichever topic it happened to be, was finished.

How was your week, Gowyn?

Uneventful, Young Lord.

Did you stay at the estate the whole time?

Yes, Young Lord.

Was the weather—

Fine, Young Lord.

It was like trying to have a conversation with a locked door that occasionally confirmed it was, in fact, locked.

Still, we were going to be at the academy together for at least a year. He would be my Shadow for the duration of the first term, possibly longer, and spending that time in a carriage-shaped silence felt like a waste.

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I noticed he had been reading since we left the estate though, and he seemed to like reading a lot, which was a point we had in common, I supposed.

So I set my glyph sheet down on the seat beside me.

“What are you reading?”

Gowyn looked up from the page.

For a second I thought he was going to give me another Young Lord and go back to reading, but he held my gaze longer than he usually held it, as if he was deciding something about me that he had not yet decided.

“It is a historical account of the first Axiom. Durhain’s early campaigns, before he unified the eastern provinces.”

“Oh.” I sat up a little. “We covered Durhain extensively in the curriculum. Instructor Varren had me on the historical accounts for the better part of a year, though they were mostly dry. Dates, treaties, troop movements. Nana’s books had better versions of him, honestly. There was one where the author had taken the siege of Ashenmoor and written it from the perspective of a soldier trapped in the lower city, and you got to see the whole thing from below while Durhain held the gate alone for three days with a staff and a half-broken ward. The historical texts just list it as a tactical decision. The novel made you understand why he stayed. He could have left with the bannermen. He had the rank. He stayed because someone had to hold the gate, and he decided it was going to be him.”

I realized I had been talking for a while, and Gowyn was watching me with an expression I had not seen on him before. It wasn’t warm, exactly, but not the locked door either.

“…What about you? What do you like about him?”

Gowyn seemed to consider the question for a moment, which was already more than he had given any of my previous attempts at conversation.

“His ideology, I suppose. The framework he built for the house before any of the campaigns began. Most people remember Durhain for the battles, the unification, the map. But the structure he put in place before any of that, the charter of obligations between the main line and the branches, the rotation of command, the principle that no Aridis holds a seat they have not earned through demonstrated service, that was the work that outlasted the wars.”