They walked in silence for perhaps an hour before Eli called a break, at which point they sat against the damp walls and drank from their water flasks in yet more studied silence. Mara chewed obediently on the apple Eli handed her. Around when she finished the apple, Eli declared the break over and they climbed to their feet. They walked another hour. Took another break. Mara’s mind freed from the perilous monotony of the stairs, churned relentlessly through what-if and what-next as her feet carried her through the darkness. Her fear, at least, seemed to have eased now that they were no longer descending so relentlessly.
As the hours ticked by, their breaks came more frequently, for which Mara was grateful. Her feet ached, unaccustomed to so much walking. Her back ached, unaccustomed to the weight of her pack.
“I think I’ve gone a little soft,” she mused during their seventh rest break, sighing as she shrugged out of the straps and leaned forward to stretch her legs.
Eli responded with a little snort of amusement, setting Nick down between them. A few breaks back, he’d given Nick charge of the light, and her son cradled it now in his hands, face aglow, transfixed by slight pulsation of the crystal’s liquid contents. She hated to see him this way, his clever mind dulled to a drunken fog.
“I hate this,” she said, reaching out to brush a lock of hair from her son’s forehead. “He’s like a barfly at last call.”
Eli shrugged out of his own pack and twisted to pop his back.
“We can try to wean him off it,” he said, sinking to the ground and leaning back against the wall with a sigh. “I’ve tried it a few times, with wounded or battle-bound officers. After the initial shock passes and their minds have a moment to adjust to the trauma, I can usually ease up without them falling back into panic.”
He tipped his head back, eyes closed, and she frowned at the sheen of sweat on his face.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
He cracked one eye to frown at her. “Of course.”
Something about the way he said it, though… “If something’s wrong, I can help. I may not be a level-unknown healer, but I am a physik. I brought some potions and tonics with me, and I can—”
“I’m fine, Mara.”
“I don’t believe you.” Now that she’d sunk her teeth into this bone, she was noticing things she ought to have noticed hours ago. The lines of strain bracketing his mouth, the sweat, the minute tremble in his hands. What kind of physik was she that it had taken her so long to note such obvious signs of distress? “Look, if you’re hurt you need to tell me. If not for your own sake, for ours. We need you. I don’t even know where we’re meant to be going.”
“I’m not hurt.”
“But you admit something is wrong.”
He cracked an eye again, then opened both, sitting up a little straighter with a resigned sigh. “It’s just the spellwork,” he admitted, tipping his chin at Nick. “Emotional persuasion is sort of like trying to bail out a rowboat without plugging the leak first. Planting ideas, like I did with the lieutenant, is easy enough. It’s a one time effort, unless there are contrary stimuli in the environment telling the mind to reject the idea. All you have to do is erase one memory and replace it with another. But emotions come from within and the magic doesn’t touch the source so they just keep welling up.”
“That’s why you just made him sleep last night,” she guessed, “instead of calming both of us. Is sleep easier?”
He smiled and nodded. “Generally. Sleep is a natural inclination. It’s easier to force than a false thought or a counterintuitive emotion. And once the mind is asleep it likes to stay that way.”
“Huh.” She leaned a shoulder against the wall, fascinated in spite of herself. “Davy never mentioned any of this.” He’d told her all about his shadow-casting, of course. They’d worked together, developing different ways to weave his magic into lasting shields, adding her theoretical understanding to his natural talent. It was his shadow-casting that made him valuable to the rebellion, able to lift and protect minds from the insidious persuasive magic of the Order and build a network of free-thinking dissenters within its rank and file. The shadow-casting was vital to the rebellion, but it was his persuasive magic that granted him access to the Order in the first place, and they’d rarely if ever discussed that.
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“Davy’s never been a fan of persuasive magic,” Eli said, eyes closed once more.
“Of course he’s not.” Persuasive magic was the tool with which the Order maintained its chokehold on the Provinces. “You don’t share his distaste?”
He rolled his head against the wall in vague answer. “I have distaste for how it’s used, especially in the hands of the Order. But refusing to study it just gives more power to those who don’t share the same reticence.”
“Don’t you think it’s a slippery slope, from studying it to using it for your own purposes?”
“Mm.”
She knew he was trying to rest. She knew she ought to let him. But every time their voices faded, everything else crept in. “What does ‘mm’ mean?”
“It means…” He sighed again. He did a lot of sighing around her. Perhaps because she kept wanting to talk when he was trying to rest. “It means I disagree, but it might be wise to save metaphysical debate for after we’re no longer dependent upon each other for survival.”
She snorted. “Or trapped underground.”
“Mm.”
“Was that ‘mm’ an agreement?”
“Mm.”
“Well, in any event, I might be dependent on you for survival, but I hardly see how you’re dependent on me.”
He cracked a weary grin at her, the expression wry, a little sad around the eyes. “I’ve got some hard news to deliver to Elise and Rorick,” he reminded her. “I have a feeling my survival will be in your hands before too long.”
“I’ve never even met Davy’s parents.” She’d met the kind older couple, the Swifts, who’d posed as Davy’s parents after he was sent to the Capital to infiltrate the rebellion. His real parents ruled the rebellion from the Enclave, and Davy himself could describe them only vaguely, having seen them last when he was ten years old.
“No, but they know who you are. He wrote them frequently, often of you and of Nick. They know the strength of your marriage. They’ll welcome you with open arms, and they’ll adore Nick.”
Rather than comforting her, the words made her feel prickly inside. However they felt about her, she didn’t know how civil she could be to the couple who had treated their son more like a pawn than a child. They’d sent him off to live a life of danger and dishonesty, keeping their own safe distance as they did so. Not to mention it felt disloyal to the Swifts, somehow, whom she had loved like parents in the absence of her own.
“What are they like?” she asked. “His parents? Did you ever meet them?”
Eli sighed. Again. And before he could answer, she cut him off.
“Nevermind. You’re trying to rest. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Are you feeling alright to move on?”
She wasn’t, but no amount of sitting on the cold, hard ground would change that. She nodded, and they gathered themselves and continued on.
As they walked, Eli told her what he knew of Davy’s parents. Some of the information Davy had already shared, but she clung to every word, Eli’s voice a distraction from the discomfort and the grief.
Davy’s mother, Elise, was a formidable woman. But of course, thought Mara. What every woman wants in a mother-in-law. Though Elise and Rorick, Davy’s father, presumably ruled the rebellion together, most of their followers understood that she was the true architect of the organization. A shadow-caster like Davy, albeit much weaker than he had been, she had woken herself from the Order’s spell just after her thirteenth birthday and run away from her home in a remote village in the Moro Plains to live a feral life in the Smokestacks until she was sixteen.
Rorick was also a shadow-caster, but unlike Elise he had been born to a rebel family and trained formally from a young age to weave shields against persuasive magic. As legend had it, Eli said, Rorick and Elise met when she was sixteen, he seventeen. His parents had sent him to the Ripshaw Enclave for further training, and it was on that journey that he stumbled upon the wild girl with tangled dark hair.
“Rorick likes to say it was love at first sight,” Eli said, amusement in his tone. “But I think she tried to kill him.”
“Some men like that sort of thing,” Mara offered, and he made another one of those vague ‘mm’ sounds before continuing.
Whether their love was instant or slow-earned, Elise and Rorick did eventually marry and establish a life together in a village near Clearwater, living much as Mara and Davy had. They lived humbly, right under the Order’s nose, all the while planting the seeds of discontent by waking up their friends, their colleagues, casting shields of shadow magic to protect their allies’ minds from the Order’s manipulations.
“When they became parents, they moved back to the Enclave,” Eli said, the story taking on a slow, even cadence that told her it was reaching its conclusion. “By the time Davy manifested as a shadow-caster, they’d taken over leadership of the rebellion. Even as a child, he was more powerful than either of them. It only made sense that they send him away, to the Capital, to continue their legacy in a way that neither of them could have achieved.”
“I can’t help but hate them a little,” Mara said, into the silence that followed. “I know they’re his parents but I just… I can’t help but hate them for sending him into danger.”
They continued on, shielded from the darkness by their little sphere of white-blue light. She waited and waited for him to answer. To tell her that she shouldn’t, that they’d been acting selflessly for a cause even higher than parental duty. When that admonishment never came, she waited for him to say that he hated them too.
She waited. She waited. And in the end, he said nothing at all.