Harin was the first one to mention it to Joros, and so, later that night, Joros moved five silver gids from one of his pockets to another, and a single small copper back to the first pocket—the latter for his bet that, among those of the pack brave enough to talk to him, it would be Harin who broached the subject; and for the former, one silver coin for each moon-pass they’d let the nonsense carry on without saying anything.
As the only man in the entire place with more than a single coin to bite, Joros was reduced to betting against himself.
“We’re getting worried, is all,” Harin muttered, scuffing her tattered boot just outside Joros’s door. She hadn’t crossed the threshold—nerves, he imagined, or perhaps some misplaced sense of propriety.
“It sounds like you should be,” Joros said heavily, smoothing over the layers of sarcasm and mirth with a topsoil of manufactured sorrow. He added, “I only wish you’d come to me sooner.” He’d given himself fifty-to-one odds they came to him on the second day. “He seemed so troubled lately, I thought to give him some space to heal on his own.” Really, he’d wanted to see if the boy was able to function on his own without Joros’s correction. Clearly, the boy was not.
Harin kicked her boot lightly against the doorframe, leaving a faint smear of mud against the wood that she didn’t seem to notice. “So you’ll talk to ’im?”
“Yes,” Joros said, sighing as he stood from his desk. “I’ll talk to him.”
Whitedog Pack had done what they could with a space not meant to live even half their number—there weren’t more than a dozen rooms that could conceivably be called bedrooms, and most of those were crammed full of people; they’d turned the dining hall into communal sleeping quarters; they’d even turned the stables into the saddest excuse for a bedroom he’d ever seen. No, that wasn’t quite right—he’d seen, briefly, where they’d all come from. The shit-reeking Canals, where they’d carved alcoves into mud walls and lined the spaces with flea-gnawed blankets. Hells, anywhere above water level had to seem an improvement to them.
Aro had been shunted into one of the dogpile rooms with six other people. The boy could have gotten a room to himself if he had any sense; between the Dogshead’s favor and his witchcraft, Aro had both respect and fear on his side. His roommates had given him the room’s only bed, and given him a wide berth between the bed and their mats. An overly loud sneeze from Aro likely would have sent them scattering.
But there Aro sat in a crowded room, little space to himself as he perched at the edge of his bed and steadily, methodically, drove the tip of a dagger down again and again into his palm. Blood pooled in his hand and dripped between his fingers, falling in slow spatters to the floor.
Joros stood in the doorway for a moment, watching with one eyebrow raised. Aro didn’t take any notice of him, or of the others in the room casting nervous glances at him. Joros had seen him over the last few days, stumbling from one place to another and dragging his nails down his arms, red furrows that had grown deeper until they’d sprouted blood. He’d slapped himself, gentle wake-up slaps at first that had become ringing, neck-snapping things as the days went by.
The dagger, though—that was new.
Joros stepped into the room and walked a straight line toward the younger man, forcing the others in the room to scoot or twist out of his way. He stood before Aro, a careful distance away from the small-but-growing puddle of blood, and said, “Aro. Walk with me.”
The boy’s eyes snapped up to fix on Joros’s face, as mad a look as Joros had ever seen in any mage’s eyes. The pack was always so careful with their words around Aro, suggesting rather than commanding, cajoling instead of ordering. Joros had no such compulsions; his time was valuable, and he wasn’t about to waste it pleading with a madman when he could far more easily just tell the madman what to do. There was something deeply gratifying about the way Aro lurched to his feet; it was the same feeling he got when he watched the pack slaughter preachers: his influence made manifest.
When Joros turned and walked from the room, Aro followed tight at his heels. He let Aro keep the knife and the boy left a trail of blood drops in their wake. He led the boy out of the house and then, as they walked through the crumbling gates to the road beyond, he called Aro up to his side. “They tell me you haven’t been sleeping,” he said.
Aro nodded jerkily, but said nothing. Joros made a soft noise at the back of his throat and kept walking. There was a place some of the pack had made, the feet and fingers who had been messengers and pickpockets and now found themselves with nothing to do. They’d decided to take up farming, or perhaps gardening, or possibly just dirt-turning for all the skill they seemed to have at it. There was a little cove among the surrounding fields, visible only from the estate walls, where the feet had stomped down grass in a circle, where the fingers had dragged logs from the other side of the road, where they could sit together and stare at the furrows they’d scratched in the ground and wait to see if anything would grow.
Joros had thought it beyond foolish at first—how did they expect to grow anything in a sunless world?—but the rest of the world was still growing and sprouting, spring beginning to bloom. Perhaps they could have grown a garden, if they’d known how.
Joros pushed his way through the head-high wheat stalks that had gone wild in his family’s absence. To the foolish boy Joros had been, the fields had always felt a sprawling castle, endless halls and wild spires and ceilings that curved above his head.
Once he found the tramped-down cove—quiet and empty with the fingers and feet having apparently found something somehow more thrilling than staring at dirt—Joros sat down on the cleanest-looking log and waited for Aro to jerkily seat himself nearby. Too close; Anddyr had had the same habit, when he was lost in his madness, of not remembering that personal boundaries existed. Joros readjusted himself farther away from the boy and the trickling pool of blood he was still drawing from his palm. Staring together at the hacked-at ground, Joros asked, “Aro, why haven’t you been sleeping?”
Aro turned wild eyes to him. “I can’t.” It came out somewhere between a hiss and a wail, a vocal contortion that made Joros’s own throat hurt. “If I—I’ll—”
“Out with it.”
The words practically exploded from Aro. “They’ll escape if I’m not careful, escape again. If I don’t hold the barrier, it’ll fall, and I have to watch it. I can’t let Sharra down.” He stabbed his palm particularly hard, gave the dagger a twist, eyes bugging at the apparent pain though he made no sound and did not stop. “I have to keep her safe, I have to keep the pack safe, and if I don’t, they’ll—they’ll—”
“They’ll what?”
“They’ll send me down there,” Aro whispered, “and they won’t ever let me come back up.”
Genuinely curious, Joros asked, “Did they tell you that?” It seemed like something Tare, heartless bitch that she was, might say—precisely the same kind of motivating threat Joros might have used.
“I can see it in their eyes. If I’m not useful . . . if I’m bad . . . they’ll get rid of me. They won’t need me anymore. Same way they got rid of Rora.” Aro made a choking, broken sob around his sister’s name. The dagger fell soundlessly into the blood-watered soil as Aro curled around himself, doubling in two with his arms tight around his middle, leaving behind a dark smear of blood on his tunic that was hardly clean to begin with. A high, keening sound drifted up from where his head hung between his knees.
Joros looked up at the stars, blinding-bright without the moon to fight. Impatiently, methodically, he counted them. He did not draw the lines between the stars, did not make shapes in the night sky as he’d done when he was boy to pass the lonely hours. He counted the stars, quicker than a heart’s beating, and he waited.
Aro raised his head, splotchy with unshed tears, to stare pitifully at Joros. “I hate it here,” the boy whispered.
And opportunity flared its wings to land gracefully on Joros’s shoulder.
Joros rested his hand lightly on Aro’s back, in his best approximation of a fatherly way. “So do I. Aro,” he asked gently, “do you want to leave this place?”
Aro’s eyes went wide and then knit in confusion, and he made an inarticulate little noise.
“There’s so much to be done beyond the walls of the estate, so many that need help. I want to go and give that help, but I can’t do it alone. After Anddyr’s betrayal—”
This time the noise was a plaintive sound of denial with no real conviction behind it.
“After Anddyr’s betrayal,” Joros repeated firmly, “I’ve been left as alone as you are. Foolish of me, not to see it earlier. We can help each other, Aro. I need a mage. And I can take you far away from here.”
Aro rocked slowly, reached up to run one hand through his hair and grip it tight at the roots. That keening sound came from him again, his eyes wide and wild and lost when he turned his face up to Joros. “They . . . they need me . . .”
“Do they really?” Joros asked, low and implacable as only the cold truth can be. “Have they ever?” As Aro whimpered, Joros patted his back in that supposed-fatherly way again. “They’ve done you a disservice, Aro, treated you as little more than a tool to reach their means. They don’t understand what you’re capable of. I know you can be so much more.” The boy looked up at him with red eyes and running nose. “If I go, Aro, will you come with me?”
He could have commanded it, used the madness and the drug that sluiced through Aro—but a change of heart wasn’t the sort of thing the susceptibility to suggestion was meant for. He could order the boy to come with him, and Aro would, but as soon as the edge of sanity touched him he’d go racing back to where he belonged. No, it was far better to use the boy’s weakness to convince him that Joros’s way was the right one, and let Aro think he’d made the choice on his own.
Voice tremoring on the edge of breaking, Aro said, “If I go . . . I’ll need to make sure they’ll stay safe.” There was an earnestness in his face, a need to explain and to be understood. “They’re my family. I can’t leave them to die.”
“The mages?” Joros asked, and Aro nodded grimly. “You’re a clever boy—you’ll figure something out. I know you’re capable of greatness, Aro.”
Those offhand words were the ones to make him break, strangely enough, and so Joros stared up at the stars again as Aro curled himself into a small and shaking shape as he wept.
When the boy finally got his emotions under control, he seemed to be holding also a portion of his sanity; he lurched to his feet, and there was determination in his eyes. “I can do it,” he said.
“We’ll need to leave as soon as we can,” Joros said. “So much time has already been wasted.”
Aro’s straight-backed resolve crumbled a little, shoulders hunching forward. “I . . . I’ll need to tell her. Sharra. I . . .” He looked at Joros piteously, and Joros waited. This was something he’d needed to train out of Anddyr, too—the expectation that Joros would guess his thoughts or intentions. He waited for Aro to work up the courage and the words to ask in a whimpery whisper, “Will you . . . come with me? To tell her? I don’t . . .”
“Of course,” Joros said, rising to his feet and aiming himself toward the estate. He’d been speaking the absolute truth when he’d said there had been enough wasted time; he didn’t intend to let another moment go by. Aro trailed in his wake, reminding Joros once again how often he’d compared the boy to a kicked puppy.
“Go collect your things,” Joros told Aro as they passed through the gate, and he noted how the boy’s back snapped to attention, his eyes going sharp. “Pack whatever you think you’ll need, whatever you have, and then come to my room. We’ll find Sharra from there.” He hung back as Aro scurried off to do as he’d been told, for Joros had spied a familiar face lurking just inside the gate. Harin didn’t need more than a finger-flicking summons to hurry to Joros’s side.
“Well?” she asked. “How is he?”
Joros sighed heavily. “Truthfully? He’s in a bad way. I’ve seen a similar sort of thing happen with mages before, when they’re under too much stress, too much pressure . . . and it only gets worse if they’re forced to carry on.” It wasn’t even a lie. Mages who’d been addicted to skura were broken enough that they were only ever a few precarious steps away from shattering. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, and Harin leaned in eagerly. “I worry the Dogshead has become too focused on the short term. She can’t have missed Aro’s condition, and the fact that she’s done nothing to lighten the pressure on him . . .”
Harin gnawed her lip, and Joros saw the unspoken agreement in her eyes.
“I’m worried about him,” Joros said with another heaving sigh. He put too much heave into it, and felt one of his ribs twinge in protest. “I don’t think this . . . any of this . . . is very good for him.”
“But the Dogshead won’t stop him,” Harin said, “not with things going so well as they are. And Aro’s got so much loyalty in ’im, he won’t ever think to stop on his own.”
“Just so,” Joros agreed, and he started for the house with Harin tripping over her feet to follow after.
After a silent handful of steps, she prompted, “So? What’re you gonna do?”
“I’m going to take Aro away from here, and give him the chance to heal.”
Another few steps of silence. “And you’re gonna fight the Twins, too, aren’t you? With Aro’s help?”
“If he’s well enough,” Joros allowed.
Harin’s steps stopped following; Joros could feel her watching him, and he smiled. Word would spread throughout the estate by the time he finished crowing to Sharra. Aro was well loved, and added some much-needed legitimacy to Joros’s cause. Joros would be sorely disappointed if there weren’t at least a handful of pack members waiting beyond the gate to join him and Aro when they left.
There was something so deeply satisfying about pieces falling into place just so.
Joros had little enough he needed or wanted to take with him: the battered but serviceable gear he’d taken with him out of Raturo so long ago, his shortsword, plainclothes that didn’t have a thread of black on them, all the jars and seekstones he’d collected.
Almost all, at least.
Joros stared down into the near-empty desk drawer. He’d packed away almost two dozen of the seekstones, all carefully cataloged in his mind and organized in his pockets and pouches, each one a starting point, each one like a smear of blood on the map in his mind. They would prove invaluable.
But there was the last one. The seekstone that had been linked to a boy—a boy who was surely dead now, and in the boy’s place: a god. Anddyr had broken into convulsions the one time he’d touched that seekstone, and Joros had been careful never to handle it with bare skin since.
It was a direct link to a god—a direct link to his enemy. It was, potentially, the greatest weapon he had at his disposal.
Hovering above the near-empty drawer, his hand tremored slightly, and that made Joros growl. He wasn’t scared of a rock. He wasn’t scared of anything.
He wrapped the seekstone in layers of torn cloth and tight knots, and stuffed it deep into one of his robe’s pockets, far away from all the others. It was important to keep powerful weapons safe, and secure.