Davram had already collapsed onto the sofa in the third bedroom. It dipped under his weight, each creak another surrender. Alize watched the Sargon shift, but the frown on his face and the drumming of his fingers made it clear that comfort eluded him. When he finally acknowledged Alize, his gaze fumbling over her, he squeezed his eyes shut.
“I’m so sorry,” Davram whispered into the flickering candlelight.
Alize glanced behind her. She stood alone. Apparently Kell had not followed her up the stairs. She repeated Davram’s words in her head but could not think of a way to respond.
Davram opened his eyes to watch her and Alize could see the lump in his throat trembling. For the first time she noticed for the wrinkles etched in his skin around his mouth and eyes. He looked ten years older than the man she had known in the autumn.
“You’re sorry?” Alize repeated.
“If you believe the prophecy was true, you must believe,” Davram shut his eyes again, forming his words between sharp breaths, “that I lured you to your death.”
“Davram.” Alize shook her head. Despite her misgivings for Kell, she carried no anger towards Davram, who had crumpled under his failures. Perhaps in another life she might have raged at Davram too, in fury for all the things he had not told her.
But not now. Now she could not reproach him for his reticence, lest it coerce her to reveal her own secrets to him. That she could not bear. “How could I believe that that if I didn’t die?”
“Unfortunately, that’s small recompense for my sins,” Davram uttered, “‘Specter immolated.’ I should have understood, but I didn’t. Not until it was too late.”
“I forgive you.”
“I didn’t ask for your forgiveness!” Davram said sharply.
Alize stepped backwards, bumping into a table. The wavering flames from the candles drove the shadows into frenzies. The room felt suddenly smaller, tighter.
But Alize had seen that life still flickered within the Ginmae prince.
“He thinks,” Kell appeared in the doorway with a teapot, “he bears responsibility for what befell you and Onder.” Kell had recomposed himself. He avoided Alize’s eyes.
But his words held her attention where her anger had faltered. There was some comfort in this notion, that all these matters concerned only the Magi and the Ginmae. But Alize’s fingers flit over her dress collar and the scar it covered. She could not afford to indulge in false hopes. She alone knew that Davram misunderstood her role, and it benefitted everyone.
Alize could offer him either truth or kindness. It was not a hard choice.
“Then this is that why you’re drinking?”
Davram shielded his eyes. “I’m not proud of this.”
“Well you don’t look it, in case you were worried,” Alize offered a smile.
Davram did not respond while Kell shuffled to place the kettle next to Alize. Crouching, Kell blew into the embers in the hearth until, almost at all once, they sparked to gentle flames.
Alize leaned forward sniff the kettle’s contents, mentally cataloguing the herbs as a momentary distraction. She wanted to fortify herself for the conversation she and Davram needed to have. Even without the truth, not all her information could be kind.
“Hazelwood?” she raised her eyebrows and glanced at Kell. “Why?”
“The errand boy confused my order. I’ll go myself tomorrow.” Kell tugged the pot from Alize to set it on the fire. He spoke tersely and blinked too often. And Alize found herself wondering how remorse would manifest on a Sargon’s face.
Alize returned to Davram and drew a deep breath. “You said yourself the prophecy was worthless. Don’t lay your despair at my feet”
“It’s not just you though,” Davram swallowed, pained, “Onder…Onder is….he’s gone and with him all our plans. All my protection. There’s nothing left for me except the death the Deku will allow me. And that’s no death at all.”
Alize swallowed. The herbs from the tea punctured the gloom of the stillness. “What do you know about the soultrussing?”
“Some consider it a clean death,” Davram groused. “That’s why the Deku assassins are often involved in wars between princes. And I know it’s similar to the Kogalok soul eating.”
“Similar, but not the same,” Alize nodded, sinking into the chair facing Davram, “Both the Deku and the Kogaloks attack souls. The Kogaloks create soulless bodies that can be controlled, but the soul is killed immediately. It’s a great mercy compared to a soultrussing that leaves the body but keeps the soul,” Alize whispered. She did not have to add for the soul that lives when the body dies lives in utter torment.
“And that’s what a Deku have done to my family for centuries,” Davram heaved his words, “a soultrussed soul will live forever.”
Alize shuddered and her mind returned to the glowing blue salt minerals framing the thresholds in the Deku citadel, to the cold that washed over her when she passed them. “Unless they’re Ginmae, the Deku don’t need to keep them.” The shutters tapped the window, restless in the wind.
Davram raised his head and Alize could see horror etched all over his face. “Have you seen the Ginmae souls?”
Alize tried to calm her nerves, her pulse. Against her wishes, the memory remained all too vivid. “Only the ones they keep in the doorways.” It was a lie. She had visited the sanctuary once, but she could not bear to tell Davram. The memory still felt like poison in her mind.
Iedaja had struggled to contain her excitement when she told Alize they would go to the sanctuary. Viken had forbidden Iedaja from entering after she joined Alize’s hunger strike. He announced he would allow her to visit again, provided that Alize accompany her. For her sake alone, Alize had acquiesced.
Alize remembered the way the light within shone dull yellow, exhausting her eyes and confounding her mind. The room had smelled like infection, like breaths of death, except the air was utterly still.
“I think it rejuvenates the Deku, but,” Alize crossed her arms over her chest, “I could feel the souls like needles in my eyes.”
Davram looked as though he would be sick. “And what of my sister? Is she there?” he gasped.
This question Alize truly dreaded. “I’m sorry Davram. I don’t know where they would keep her. To my knowledge, the Deku soulltruss any prisoners they take.”
“Not all of them,” Kell said pointedly, but somehow, not unkindly.
Alize understood his meaning, “No,” she agreed, avoiding further comment on her own treatment at Deku hands.
“Monsters,” Davram growled.
It felt liberating to hear this said aloud. All winter in the citadel, Alize had objected alone, a single voice against the entire guild. Always the Deku response came united, every Deku against her to tell her she misunderstood. Viken insisted that it was her own shallow heart that lacked the fortitude to question her ignorance, her Hrumi indoctrination. As if he believe that repetition could make her dismiss her most essential beliefs about humanity.
Iedaja had recoiled under Alize’s accusations. It had hurt her too much to hear Alize’s truth. Around her alone, Alize had held her tongue.
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Now Alize let her resentment fly free, “They say a soultrussing is beautiful. They call it the purest form of holiness in this world.”
Again Davram squeezed his eyes shut as the pain mutinied against the calm he fought to maintain. “It’s repulsive.”
“Or course it is!” Alize exclaimed. Viken had called her gullible, to believe so, but the accusation could not dislodge Alize’s convictions.
Iedaja had implored her to be generous, that Alize could not truly believe Iedaja capable of such cruelty. That entreaty unsettled Alize’s vehemence, but now, speaking without Viken’s disapproval and Iedaja’s quiet certainty, she felt her momentum grow.
“Depriving life of death is like disconnecting the wind from the sea. Enslaving nature robs it of its grace. Davram, whatever happens,” Alize’s voice almost faltered. She rushed forward in her words, “Please know that I can think of no worse crime than a soultrussing. When the Deku tell your family’s story, they say the Ginmae thanked them for the service. They believe their actions are heroic!”
As Alize spoke, she tried to banish her memory of Iedaja’s retelling of the Ginmae Deliverance, how even her cataract eyes seemed to glow as she told the story with hushed pride. She addressed Alize’s objections with pity. Alize, these beliefs you hold are harmful, they hold you hostage to hatred. The Deku love the Ginmae. We would never let them suffer.
Some nights, Alize had wished she could believe her. In her darkest moments, Alize wondered if the Hrumi soultrussing had been exaggerated, if the pain of her own experience differed from the fate of the Ginmae. Believing that felt easier than the relentless effort of objection.
Hesna had told the story of their downfall in such detail, but even that memory could not overcome Alize’s flagging resistance. But she had another reminder, one she had tried to keep private. Since she had lost her dagger at the Temple, a darkness had plagued Alize. She had begun to feel the effects of the absence of her soul. That sharpened her awareness of the true cost of a soultrussing.
Even though believing the Deku would bring her great comfort, Alize knew that Ginmae had perished in a massacre, not any holy deliverance. No matter what the Viken swore and Iedaja repeated. Truth was not born of repetition.
Davram bent his spine down, burying his face in shaking hands. He stammered his next words. “We never understood the Deku service to our family. The Ginmae have always suffered from a disease called the Empty. The victims would lose their minds and eventually die from starvation.”
“Soultrussing,” Alize whispered.
“We know that now. It used to be only the elderly who suffered, but I watched my two older brothers die from the Empty. The Deku became greedy.”
“They told me in the citadel that that they had to finish soultrussing the Ginmae. Then they would be protected forever.”
“Protected,” Davram rasped, “what twisted words. But they have not obtained all the Ginmae souls. There are two of us left.”
“Perhaps, Davram, there is only one,” Alize wanted so much to be kind, but she loathed to lie.
“There’s me and my sister,” Davram reiterated, his gaze almost blank, so sheer his pain.
Alize spoke with great sadness, wishing for another truth to give Davram. “I don’t think there is anyone in the citadel to save.”
Davram heaved. His muscles tightened and relaxed, over and over, though nothing stilled his trembling as his hope fragmented, cleaving like brittle shale hammered by iron.
“But you survived,” Alize reminded him. She needed something to strike the anguish from his eyes, “How did you escape the Silver City massacre?”
“Yes. My second brother fell ill when I was five years old. My parents were desperate. I remember watching him suffer…” Davram shifted on the sofa. “And then a Deku came to us. A Conjurer. His name was Patair. He said he intended to repent for the sins of the Deku sect. He removed his veil.”
Alize dropped her jaw. In all her time at the citadel, she had never seen a single Deku’s face. Indeed, they had forced her to wear the veil too. The only time she had stood without one before them was when blind Iedaja found her on the mountain slope.
“Patair told us what binds the Ginmae and the Deku together. A powerful curse, stemming from the origins of both lineages. Rehsan herself tried to break it, but could only soften its power. She gave the Ginmae some type of protection, but it appears we no longer possess it. And my family, perhaps we knew the Deku crimes once, but that information too was lost. How could we protect ourselves when we didn’t even know we were targeted?”
Davram’s voice hardened. “We had trusted the Deku, granted them their protected mountains within the Ginmae province. Patair told my father that the time had come to stand against them. He could not save my brother, but he provided me and my elder sister with some sort of child’s protection. He promised it would keep us safe from the Deku until we reached adolescence.”
Alize furrowed her brows. As far as she knew, only the Hrumi had the ability to grant children protection from soultrussing.
She drew her thoughts back to the Deku Conjurer. “But why would a Deku come to your protection?” Alize asked.
“I was young, you understand, but I always thought it had something to do with a Mage. A woman named Saikal.”
Saikal. Where had Alize heard that name before?
“Onder knew Saikal, Alize, we mentioned her to you. She tried to learn to call the echoes. I think she and Patair believed that together they could protect the Ginmae, defeat the Deku.”
“A Mage?”
“Right, I think the Magi disavowed her fairly quickly, but you can imagine why Onder had such a fondness for her.”
“Because she wanted to fight?”
Davram shook his head. “She wanted to help, and for Magi, that can be sacrilege. My father’s initial attacks sent the Deku cowering to the citadel for two years. When they retaliated, they targeted Patair. My family retreated with Saikal back to the Silver City and my parents decided to send me and my elder sister into exile. She went by sea. The Deku ambushed her ship before it even cleared the bay. I went by land, arriving to Parousia as an orphan, nearly twenty years ago.”
“And what happened to Patair?”
“I doubt he received mercy from the Deku, and I certainly never heard of him returning to my family. I was far away by the time the Kogaloks entered at the Silver City. I believe that my father gave them sanctuary because he was so desperate to repel the Deku. He needed protection and no one knew then what monsters the Kogaloks were to become. I had barely started training as a Sargon when I heard news of the massacre.”
The massacre. That story ranked the most sorrowful of all, but Davram had a right to know. Alize forced her words out. “The Deku say the Kogaloks weakened the Ginmae prince’s mind to mush before they locked him up in the Southern Tower. They say your mother prayed to the Deku for the swift glory of a soultrussing, so her soul could escape the confines of her Kogalok prison.”
Alize needed to hear Davram’s objection, to hear it match her own, affirm her in her refusal to accept their story.
“Never,” he whispered, his eyes sharp. “How dare they tell such lies?”
Alize knew the Deku perspective too well, their unshakable self-certainty. “Everyone is the hero of their own story,” she said sadly, remembering Iedaja’s soft optimism even against Alize’s bitterest denials.
“The Deku proudly recount how they mounted a force, stole through the Silver City, risking everything to rescue the holy Ginmae. But when they arrived in the family prison, the tallest spire of the city, there was so little left of the Ginmae prince, they could not salvage his soul. They killed him as a mercy from his mental torment, though it much aggrieved the Deku. They say too that his queen was so consumed by madness, she killed the infant at her breast before the Deku could save her. They worship her soul as the ancestor of self-delusion, and the three children who they soultrussed that day as resilience against adversity. I didn’t want to learn about all the others, all the cousins, aunts and uncles assembled there.” Alize blinked rapidly in anger. “The Deku never use the word ‘massacre’ to describe their actions that day. In their version, they strove valiantly to save the last Ginmae. They call it the Deliverance.”
“The crueler the crime, the stranger the story,” Kell muttered. His voice was soft, the way Alize remembered it in her mind. The voice that made her want to lean in. She shook her head. Kell’s anger made those memories painful.
“All they left behind were bodies. Harvested bodies.” Davram looked up, the personification of pain. “That’s the most vivid description I’ve ever heard of my family’s deaths, and I wish more than anything it wasn’t told from the perspective of the people that killed them.”
“What happened to Saikal?” Kell asked.
“Saikal.” Davram shook his head. “In the autumn, the Eastern Priestess sent Onder to look for her. But it was you, Alize. The signal he followed was you. So I’m sure if it wasn’t the Deku that killed her all those years ago,” Davram shook his head, “then the Kogaloks certainly did. Onder said he had felt her death, through the Mage connections, and it was roughly the time of the massacre.”
Alize stumbled in her words. “I’m sorry Davram.”
“I didn’t even know my mother had another child.” His voice hardened. “I bet my father killed himself to protect his soul, and my mother didn’t have the chance to. This has been the fate of my family for all our history.” Davram murmured. “And it will be mine.”
“Fight it.” Alize commanded, surprised by the vehemence she had not even known rested within her. “Everyone has the right to fight for their family.” Alize glanced at Kell and wondered if he recognized the double meaning in her words. There was a third meaning too, but that one she herself could not confront.
“Alize,” Davram’s eye met her, this time rife with intensity, “What did the Deku want from you?”
Alize bit her lip. She stilled the movements of her restless fingers as she prepared to lie. “They sought to understand what happened to me at the Temple. And that makes two of us.”
“More than two, I’ll wager,” Davram’s lips danced upwards, almost a smile, but it turned into a grimace instead. “If you could harness the power you called at the Temple-”
“I can’t. And it doesn’t matter because I can’t call the echoes anymore. All that power, gone.”
“That may be a small mercy – after all, the Deku didn’t soultruss you like the other prisoners.”
Alize forced a smile. “Indeed.” She held her breath in her throat, all too conscious of her elegant falsehood. The Deku could not have soultrussed her because she arrived at the citadel without her dagger. Without her soul.
But Sargons could never be trusted with that information. Not even Davram and Kell. The space between the truth and her revelations was a gaping chasm, but her friends accepted her explanation without comment. And even that mercy gnawed at her conscience.