Arran was ten years old the first time he realized his father may have made a mistake. Most children fortunate enough to have good parents who love them would find it alarming enough to come by this realization in the first place, but Arran wasn’t most children. He was the son of one of the most powerful patricians in the empires. It hadn’t occurred to Arran before then that his father even could be wrong.
The long stretch of summer was just beginning, and already burdened by an oppressive heat that stuck heavy on his skin and clothes. His stepmother Naevia had taken to winding herself in cool strips of linen soaked in water and aloe before hiding in the tiled bathhouse with his little sister Selah, who was six at the time and still too little to be very interesting. And though she’d expressly forbidden him from going out into the sun, Naevia wasn’t his mima, and Arran had slipped away to join the other boys from his elementary in the shallows that ran along the lush private shores of Luxana’s Arborem district.
Nine boys in all splashed about the shoals, taking turns on a thin reed skimboard someone had brought, daring each other to go out farther to where the largest waves crested and broke. A few nannies sat here and there under the shade of the gray shale cliffs, calling at their charges not to wander too far now, Valerius and I see you, Julian, don’t even think about it. Arran had been searching for a crab or a particularly good clump of muddy sand to slip down the back of Phineas Halitha’s trunks, when somehow the conversation turned to their upcoming superior levels.
“I’ll be going to Farrows Hall in September,” said Val, who would of course be going into medicine like his father, and his father’s father. “You too, Phin, yeah?”
Phineas, who was as stupid as he was mean—but would eventually replace his mother as the chairman of Luxana’s largest private hospitium all the same—grunted an affirmative.
“Thank Terra we won’t have to deal with those two at Laurium,” whispered Julian, who had been his best friend at the time. Arran didn’t say anything.
It wasn’t the wrong assumption to make. Julian’s family were scholars like Arran’s, and it stood to reason that they would both be attending the Laurium School for their superior, like their parents before them. It was a great honor to go to Laurium, even among the patrician class. While Phineas and Valerian would be taught the ins and outs of medical business and maybe even how to hold a scalpel, he and Julian would learn something much more important than all that—the means and practice of scholarship itself. Because scholarship meant knowledge, and every single child in Roma Sargassa knew just how sacred that was. How much had been lost after the Great Quiet. How revered those were who dealt with the collection and preservation of the world’s knowledge, or the translation and interpretation and pushing forward into new understanding. Resurrecting everything that had once been known, back before they had to rebuild again from the ground up. And his dad, Arran had thought with a burning pride in his chest, was at the heart of that. Kleioses had always gone to school at Laurium. Selah would go there one day, too. Only it had just occurred to him then that no one had ever actually told him he would be going there to study in the fall. It just hadn’t come up.
“Don’t be stupid. Laurium wouldn’t take someone like him.”
Phin had chosen that moment to find his voice. He sloshed his way through the high tide over to the pair of them, looming large overhead.
“Like hell they won’t,” Julian shot back, shocking everyone from the boys to the nannies with his low-caste language. “His dad’s the Imperial Historian.”
“Vernae get apprenticeships, not schools,” said Phin. “Everyone knows that.”
Arran felt himself go hot and red and knew it had nothing to do with the sun.
But that was wrong. He wasn’t a verna. If he were a verna, he wouldn’t live in a beautiful home in the historic Arborem. He wouldn’t have a powerful father and a senator stepmother. If he were a verna, his parents would be servae like Julian’s nanny—pleb men and women who had wasted their chance to be productive and useful members of Sargassan society, and now had to be told what to do instead. If he were a verna, he wouldn’t be free. Not for eight more years anyway. And Arran Alexander had always been free.
His dad had just forgotten to talk to him about Laurium. That had to be it. He had so many other things going on at work that it must have slipped his mind. Disconcerting as it was to realize his dad was even capable of making a mistake like that, Arran reasoned that as Imperial Historian, he spent his days working on research projects and advising the Consul and other important members of the Imperium, and he had a lot on his plate, after all. Maybe he thought that Naevia had already done it, even though she was just as busy and important at the Senate. Maybe he had remembered, but assumed it was so obvious that there was no need to say anything about it at all.
Shaking off his momentary embarrassment, Arran took advantage of Phin’s proximity to lob a handful of foul-smelling red seaweed directly into his face, instigating a battle that would become the stuff of legends. For the next three months, anyway.
When he returned home crusted over with sand and salt, Naevia gave him a dressing down about the dangers of direct sunlight this time of year, especially for boys with skin like his, then had the cook give him and Selah each a shaved ice with mint syrup. Sure enough, within an hour his normally pale skin had bumped up and turned a violent shade of dark pink. By the time he’d gone to bed that night in his large room with the bay window overlooking the sea, itching and burning to the point of frustrated tears, he had forgotten all about stupid Phin Halitha’s accusations and his dad’s harmless mistake.
• • •
Down in the sprawling Third Ward, market vendors hawk their wares in a cacophony of shouts and blur of bright colors. Salarypeople rush to their next meeting, harried aides and apprentices scurrying in their wake. Crowds are shoved aside by sentries to part the way for ornate palanquins. Tourists from Siracusa and Bostinium point at the turrets and spires of older stone and concra buildings that have somehow managed to stay in one piece over the many years and weather systems. Kids shout and play in the hurricane wreckage of those that didn’t. And down on the low bank of one of the canals snaking through it all, a tight throng of plebs throw money at each other, shouting countering bets.
Arran’s shirtless in the center of it, jav-and-honey curls damp with sweat, lip bleeding, one of his high cheekbones purpling already. Smiling through it all the same. His opponent’s even worse for wear, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s easily three times as wide. Good. Keeps things interesting.
He dodges the next jab just as easily as each of the ones before—that was one of the first things he’d learned in the legions. The camp prefect’s voice rings in his ears like it’s still the second day of basic training and not a good thirteen months after the fact—“Come on, boy, hit him like you mean it. You may be built like a beanpole, but you’re damn fast. That’s an advantage. Use it.”
Arran circles his opponent, bare fists raised, and in the next half second thinks he sees someone from across the makeshift ring, arms crossed and gold glinting from dark braids, someone with his father’s face who can only be—Oof.
A sickening crack as the other fighter catches him across the nose. And now that’s bleeding freely, too.
Groans and cheers alike rip from the crowd—more cheers than groans, truth be told—but he’s deaf to them all, too preoccupied with the stars ringing on the inside of his skull. It’s only when the next blow doesn’t come, when the tenor of the rising shouts around him begins to change, that he realizes something’s wrong. Excitement giving way to panic. Jostling to pushing.
Frag it. The Publica are here.
This shouldn’t be a surprise—gambling and street fighting are both illegal, technically, but it’s the kind of thing the Cohort’s usually happy to turn a blind eye to so long as they get cut in on the take. Not today, apparently. Green uniforms swarm the cobblestone bank instead, apprehending onlookers as they attempt to flee the scene, nightsticks out and clapping wrists in irons at will.
Arran scrambles to gather himself together, blinking furiously to shake the stars from his eyes so he can find cover, an alley to duck down or a shop to lose himself in. But it’s too late. The hands that haul him to his feet are surprisingly strong for the small Publica officer they belong to. Short but stout, she wastes no time twisting his arm behind his back, and before Arran can get his bearings he’s halfway up the bank toward the growing line of chained offenders. That’s when he registers the cold iron clamped around both his wrists.
Oh shit, he thinks faintly. Oh shit. This is bad. This is really, really bad.
Because his dad is dead, and he has been for two weeks, and it isn’t until this exact moment that Arran’s truly appreciated this simple fact: that no matter how much else he’d resented Dad for, the protections he’s taken for granted his whole life are now gone, too. The fight they’d had—the roaring argument barely a week after he’d returned home from his year away in the legions—it seems idiotic now, in the stark light of what’s about to happen.
He is about to be arrested. Hauled in front of a magistrate who’ll take one look at his conditional citizenship and take it away. The best he can hope for is that the news will somehow get back to Breakwater before his contract goes public. After that . . . his gut twists at the thought.
And then, clear and loud over the racket—“Kleios familia. And that’s my brother.”
He hears her before he sees her, though he could have sworn he had caught sight of her in the crowd during that last round. Black braids piled high and messy on top of her head, a few wisps escaping to frame her heart-shaped face. Thick brows furrowed in that half-exasperated way. At twenty-two, Selah looks more and more like their dad every day. Arran doesn’t know if that breaks his heart or makes him love her even more. For the moment, though, she’s got her patent of identity raised, that unmistakable emblem of the eight-point Kleios sun mere inches from a tall Publica officer’s nose, her other hand pointed straight at Arran.
The other officer—the one Arran’s got the pleasure of dealing with—stops dead in her tracks. He says nothing as the officer digs roughly through his pockets, coming up with his own patent. She frowns. “Says here he’s a client plebeian, ma’am.”
“And I’m the Imperial Historian. Are you going to make me wait?”
The effect is immediate. Spine stiffening, shoulders pulling back, and the officer’s eyes go wide. And yet for all that, the hesitation’s slight, but it’s there. Bloody and bruised and shirtless and shining in his own sweat, Arran’s the clear culprit here, the actual perpetrator breaking the law by brawling in the streets. Not to mention how distinctly unrelated he and Selah look. But there’s no denying her authority, the weight of the title he’s just heard her claim for the very first time, and all three of them know it. Barely ten seconds pass before the officer begrudgingly twists the irons free from Arran’s wrists.
It should be a relief, and it is, but there’s something darker twisting itself around the feeling. Dad may be dead, but the protections aren’t. They’re just Selah’s job now.
He doesn’t know why that realization is so ugly.
“I’d keep a closer eye on him in the future, ma’am,” the officer says, pushing him toward Selah before moving on to help her fellow Publica with the rest of the straggling crowd. Arran watches her go through narrowed eyes, and spits a wad of blood out onto the cobblestone. But by the time he turns back to his sister, he remembers that it isn’t her that he’s annoyed with.
“Ma’am,” he parrots, quirking a brow.
She punches him.
“Ow,” he says, pointed. That was already going to bruise without her help, thanks. She glares at him. He glares right back. A standoff, her dark face mere inches from his paler one. Then—
He pulls her into his arms, and she clings on tight. Fierce. Holding on for dear life, never mind the sweat and blood he has to be getting on her dress. And for the first time since their father died, he regrets not going home. He already had the shitty room above a taberna in Paleaside where he’d crashed to cool off after the fight with Dad, and in the aftermath, knowing that the terrible things they’d said had been their last . . . well, it had felt easier, somehow, to stay away. Easier to just lose himself in the streets. But Arran has been gone in the legions for more than a year, and seen Selah maybe twice in the three weeks since he’s been back.
“Hi,” he says quietly, into her hair.
“Hi. I missed you.”
Guilt curdles in his spleen. At twenty-six, Arran has lived enough of life to know that his father was never the infallible person his ten-year-old son once assumed him to be. Back before he learned he wasn’t allowed to take his superior at all, never mind thoughts of Laurium School. Back before a lot of things. But that doesn’t mean he has to take it out on his sister.
Selah was never far from his thoughts when he first left home. He could almost hear her voice next to him at the start—wry jokes about his fellow conscripts and the foreign desert heat of southwestern Fornia. But her phantom voice had faded eventually, replaced by new friends and an alien landscape. Arran had known from the start that his posting would take him far from the familiar salt air and oak forests of Luxana, once he’d finally accepted that military service was one thing his family couldn’t get him out of. The Imperium learned a long time ago to stamp out any conflicting feelings in their ranks on policing their own, and always sent their conscripted twenty-four-year-olds to opposite ends of the empires. It was part of how the Imperium had survived for so long. So Arran had expected that. He hadn’t, however, been ready for the sheer overwhelming beauty of towering mesas and plunging canyons, great cracks and ravines in the red earth that went on as far as the eye could see. He hadn’t expected the locals to live so differently, their cities carved into the sides of canyons to escape the punishing heat, their cuisine formed around cacti and root vegetables that thrive below the ground. But what Arran had been least prepared for during his mandatory year in the military fort at Teec Nos Pos was to enjoy it.
Luxana is a small town at heart, and life in the patrician Arborem was never designed to take someone like him into account. It had been heady, disappearing into the regimented and anonymous life of a foot soldier, where no one knew who he was. Jarring, then terrifying, then abruptly, wildly liberating. No holier-than-thou once-overs, no smiles that never quite manage to reach the eyes, no murmurs of freedman and no reason to inflict him on the rest of us behind his back. He was just Arran Alexander, and that had been enough for doors to open. To tag in on a clavaspher pickup match that was down a player. To sneak out to a house party in the city with his new friends Enyo and Fagan. To be as good as he could find it in himself to be—with a spear, with his fists, with a tactical suggestion that earned the approving nod of his tribune—and actually see the rewards of that come back to him. And with each door that opened, he’d felt another brick in the carefully built defenses of showmanship and laissez-faire charm, built up over a lifetime, crumble to dust.
The return to Luxana hadn’t been the easy slip back into his old life that everyone had been expecting. Arran had wanted to go back to the legions. Dad . . . hadn’t understood that.
“You’re an idiot,” Selah is saying now, squeezing him once more before letting him go. “Is this actually fun for you?”
He shrugs. “Good way to make money.”
“Uh-huh.”
At least it’s halfway true. She doesn’t need to know about the other half, the half where sometimes he feels like he’s going to spin right out of his skin until it breaks open and he can feel something. This, if nothing else, is grounding. Something he knows how to do.
“Mima’s going to fully spin out, you do realize that.”
“She’s only going to find out if you tell her.”
Selah raises a brow. “You sure about that? I think walking into Dad’s viewing tonight looking like you just got beat to the Quiet and back might sort of give you away.” He pauses midway through pulling his trampled shirt back on. “Are you not coming? Or did you forget?”
He absolutely did not forget. He just didn’t know if he’d be welcome.
Dad’s viewing. No one would miss him, no one that isn’t Selah, but that doesn’t mean he feels easy, exactly, about skipping out on Dad’s final rites. Tonight will be for the masses, a chance for Luxana society to pay their respects to the late Imperial Historian—and to be seen doing so, obviously. But tomorrow they’ll send him back to All-Mater Terra, burned and interred deep in the catacombs beneath the city, and that’s just for family. He doesn’t know if he counts as that anymore.
He slaps on a lopsided sort of smile, the kind of thing he hasn’t had to fake in months. “Of course I’m coming. Have to come make my new paterfamilias look good, right? Ma’am.”
“It’s materfamilias, actually.”
“Oh, I bet the Arborem familias are going to love that. Unless that’s the new fashion? I’m old. I don’t understand youth culture. Is that a thing now?”
“I’m making it a thing.”
He kisses the top of her head. “Always the trailblazer.” And then he stops, the reality of the situation dawning harsh and cold. “Where’s your sentry? You shouldn’t be out here alone.”
No one’s been arrested or even claimed credit for Dad’s murder yet, and though of course everyone assumes the Revenants are to blame, that doesn’t explain the why. Until there’s some explanation, some sort of logic and motive to track, Selah isn’t safe. Not now she’s the new Historian.
“I’m not alone.” She shrugs. “I’ve got my scary big brother to defend me.”
“You could’ve been murdered on the way here,” he points out. “And then Naevia would’ve murdered me.”
True as that may be, neither of them have ever been able to resist a steaming bowl of bastia cam, and so much the better if it comes from the stall on the corner of Fernsedge and Wilde. Arran’s practically inhaled half of his already by the time Selah gets hers, midway through a diatribe on Dean Nija Thane’s latest crimes against scholarship and academia.
“—and then she said, I’m sure there are more important things that need your attention right now.” Selah fumes, sloshing precious fish soup over the sides of her bowl. “As if I’m not perfectly aware of how fragging busy I am. The Archives are a bona fide madhouse right now. Every time I think I’ve got ten minutes to actually do something fun—” Because sneezing through dusty tomes on arcane medicine and long-forgotten harvesting tools is his sister’s idea of fun. “—a staffer comes by with an admin issue or Gil tells me there’s a senator who wants to know if the bill they’re introducing violates some obscure treaty, and still. Still. I still took the time out of all that to come to her and her precious universitas, expressly because this is a priority.”
“Maybe she was just talking about the viewing?”
“Like she actually cares about that,” says Selah. “She just didn’t want to have the conversation. She’s fully scared of progress, just like anyone else in charge of anything. And now that I’m important or something she won’t even have the decency to own up to it.”
“She can’t own up to it. The universitas needs access to the Archives, she can’t vex you off.”
“Well, she has.”
“What did you propose, then?” he yawns. “Mobile libraries in Sinktown? Teaching missions to Arawaka and the Taino Territories?” Selah goes oddly quiet. “Was that it? Don’t tell me that was it, that’s fully and certifiably insane.”
She shakes her head, cheeks flushed. Then, very quickly, she pulls out the sheaf of papers and stuffs them into Arran’s free hand. He hands his empty soup bowl back to the vendor and glances down at the title of the proposal, neatly printed in Selah’s spiky handwriting. It takes a moment to realize what he’s looking at.
Servile Education Extension Program—Proposal & Curriculum.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Um,” he says, clearing his throat awkwardly. “So she curbed it.”
“Of course she did,” says Selah, practically throwing her empty bowl at the stall and taking off down the crowded street in a huff. Arran has to jog to catch up with her.
“The universitas is a place of higher learning for all,” she goes on, barely breaking stride, “but only so long as they’re citizens. We have a bona fide wealth of untapped potential in the servile castes. How many of them might have cured our worst diseases? Written our greatest literary works? And they’re slipping through the cracks because no one will give them a chance.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” he says, reaching out to grab her arm. Because the answer to her problem is obvious. “Look, you have the Archives now, right?” he asks, jostling slightly as a gaggle of indigo merchants push past him, shouting angrily about the decreasing value of the ceres against the Aymaran neptos. Selah frowns and nods. He can’t believe he has to spell this out for her. “So . . . let Nija Thane have her universitas. The greatest library in the world belongs to you. Use it.”
“What, teach there?” She laughs. “You’re spinning out.”
“Am not.”
“The Archives don’t teach. We research and preserve.”
“So do that, too. Servae know tons of things citizens don’t, especially if you get a few Ynglots or other natives in there. Do you realize how much they could probably tell us about the outside lands off the Imperial Road? Set it up like that, an exchange that benefits the Archives, and I bet you’ll have people lining the streets to sign their servae up.”
It’s not such an insane idea, now that he says it out loud. If only the right people would listen. And Selah is the right people.
Only she isn’t listening. Not anymore.
The Publica are long gone, but a straggling line of criminals and debtors being walked along the street level above have caught Selah’s attention instead, sunlight glinting off the new silver cuffs clasped to the ridge of each of their left ears. Servile processing. Something he’s just missed by a hair. But he knows that intent look on Selah’s face, and he knows what she’s searching for, eyes flicking shrewdly down the line.
“She isn’t there, Sel,” he says, gently as he can, but it’s been five years. Tair is gone. She isn’t coming back. There are certain hard truths in life and this is one Selah’s just going to have to learn to live with.
Selah angrily rubs at her eyes. “It’s not about her,” she bites out finally, and suddenly Arran thinks he understands.
Their father is dead, and it comes in waves. Sometimes he forgets. Sometimes he remembers, but it doesn’t feel real, like an intellectual exercise. And sometimes the smallest thing—a dog barking, that certain shade of autumn sky—will set him off and he’ll be useless for the rest of the day, head spinning and lungs heaving and utterly unable to keep his own mind straight. And sometimes he’s angry. Angry that Dad had the unmitigated gall to get murdered without leaving Arran some kind of road map because he doesn’t know how to do this.
There’s no logic to this kind of grief. Small reminders of his mother don’t do this to him. But he never knew her—postpartum depression saw to that—and he’s lived with his losses for much longer than his sister has lived with hers.
“Come here,” he says, and pulls Selah in again, his own solid weight settling against her as an anchor, letting himself sink into the steady warmth of hers.
“I miss Dad.”
“Yeah, so do I,” he says, and finds he means it.