CHAPTER NINE
Answered
“How are you not skinned alive? I’d be skinned alive. Not fair. Not fair at all,” Luke said, where he laid down on the floor, blankets bundled under him. He was beside Coh’s bed, an arm’s length away.
Coh shrugged. “I’m lucky like that I guess.”
“Psh, lucky. In that sort of regard, I guess. Think you’re her favorite--which is weird. Or, I guess not. You didn’t cause her pain.” His brother looked thoughtful, eyebrows close together as he stared up at the ceiling.
“Eh?”
“She didn’t bear you, remember?”
“Plus, I’m not a jerk.”
Luke swatted at Coh, who easily avoided the giant, long-fingered hand. “Oi, shut it,” Luke said, smirking. “So, anyway, you met some girl? Didn’t think you had it in you.”
Coh barely avoided rolling his eyes. “Her name’s Sadira, Luke. She’s nice. You probably know her. She’s one of the neighbors.”
“I don’t keep track of the neighbors, idiot. Most of them are crazy and live miles off. ‘Course, if they’re female and mind-blowing I may have to change that.”
Coh flushed. “I, uh, never said what she looks like.”
“Yeah, but she caught your attention and you never notice anything, so that’s saying something.” Luke winked.
“Very funny.”
“You know it,” Luke said, with an odd drawl to his voice. “So, can you tell me what she looks like, what she’s like?”
“You care what she’s like?” Coh raised an eyebrow.
“She has her claws sunk in you already. I can tell. Hence, I need to know. So she doesn’t drag you into a swamp.” Luke looked oddly serious saying it, but by the way his mouth and arms twitched Coh knew he was about to crack up, so he scowled.
“The fact you think like that--it’s sad. Anyway, huh,” he said, humoring him, “well, she’s a blond, pale, um, she’s got these really blue eyes--”
“Are you serious?”
“Her dress was ripped,” Coh said, knowing that might make Luke shut up. Shut up long enough to wolf whistle or something equally idiotic.
Luke’s expression turned smug, a certain type of smirk Coh instantly hated stealing the show. “Need I worry?” Luke asked, innocently.
Coh’s eyes popped wide, shock making his mouth open, dry out. He finally caught his breath again and managed to spit out, “Oh, not like that!”
“So, uh, Coh, on another topic, have you noticed Mum acting, I dunno, odd? Lately?”
Coh frowned. Luke’s tone had changed in an instant, gone softer. He automatically got worried. If Luke was worried, you had to be concerned. He was never worried. “Odd how?”
“Too emotional?”
“Isn’t that normal for girls?” Of course, Sadira hadn’t been very emotional and Gladys was just plain fierce, but his mother wasn’t exactly stoic. He didn’t think many of the girls in town were, going from how upset they always were when Luke told them it just wasn’t working out.
Luke snorted. “What? Being too emotional? No.”
“But they always--”
“They have to wear three layers, one involving hard things like bone and wood on occasion, as well as wear funny, hopeless shoes--Mum wears old, boy’s boots for a reason--and sometimes feathers. I wouldn’t be emotional, I’d be homicidal. Let’s not stir the pot, eh?”
Coh let out a weak chuckle. “Sure.” He remembered Sadira, in her boxy white dress, and then Gladys in that odd thing that looked like she’d made a dress from blankets. How was that supposed to make you feel?
He wasn’t exactly buying it.
“Don’t look at me like that. Anyway, have you noticed?” Luke asked, fiddling his fingers together as he sat up straighter, locking a rather intense gaze on Coh.
“I’ve noticed a change. She’s more--clingy. Like, towards me. I figured that was normal.”
“Yeah, I guess. But--” Luke trailed off. “I asked Mark about it.”
Coh turned and faced Luke, twisting his torso. His wool covers slipped down, some of them brushing or falling onto Luke’s legs; Luke, the odd man of the hour. “Who are you?” he asked, only half joking.
“Shut up. Anyway, he said she sort of acted like this when he was little. Like cried for no reason and got upset with him a lot.”
“He say why?”
“She was pregnant with me.”
Coh’s mind went paused for a second, going back to the time Elena’s sister had stayed with them for a bit, gotten away from her abusive husband. He remembered how bruised and scared she was--and how much more scared she was when blood was suddenly all over her skirt.
Coh shuddered, unable to help himself and wished--well, it didn’t matter. His mother wouldn’t be like that and it was doubtful she’d even be pregnant, not now. It had to be too late for that.
“I’m sure that’s not the case,” he said, more so to convince himself.
By the way Luke looked at him dubiously he was pretty sure it hadn’t been effective in either direction. So, he tried to forget about it. He asked Luke if he had any girls in his life and things went back to normal from there. Him, bored but listening anyway, and Luke, skeevy but generally nice. He was kind, if much, much too suggestive to the girls and to Coh, explaining things.
It didn’t surprise him those nice girls ran off. It wasn’t normal, Luke’s way of thinking about things. Well, it was Luke’s version of normal. A very warped place to live, maybe.
Not that Coh could judge.
***
Jacob didn’t look convinced.
“The last time--”
“It was a mistake,” Coh said. “I know what I did was wrong, whatever it is I did. It won’t happen again.”
Jacob pursed his lips and looked close. “You’re certain?”
“I doubt something that strange could happen again.”
Jacob nodded and finished lacing up his boots. He stood from the chair he sat in and patted him on the shoulder.
“Sure. Tell your mother, though. You scared her yesterday.”
Coh nodded, a smile coming to his face. So he wasn’t in lock down because of an unfortunate mistake. If meeting that girl, Sadira, was a mistake. Sure, he was upset about scaring his adoptive mother, but, really, it wasn’t fair that everyone wanted to coddle him because he got attacked once. That would be like not letting someone being outside because they got struck by lightning once.
Anyway, he missed being out of Tariq. Getting to go to Savena again--it would be amazing. Sure, it was depressing and you didn’t exactly breathe fresh air there, but it was somewhere different. He needed to get away from the farm as it were. It was his parents, Mark on occasion, Luke, and a plethora of farm animals. Anwar and Sadira, while a bit weird, the first more so than the latter, were the first nice people he’d talked to in weeks that weren’t family.
He blinked. That was pathetic, wasn’t it? It probably was. Not that he’d know much different. He didn’t have a job to go to like Mark, or old friends like his father or mother, or a posse of guys and a constant supply of girls like Luke did whenever he got off the farm. Those family friends didn’t much like him, either. It was all sort of hopeless, really.
Maybe he should be glad both the non-relative people he’d talked to last were freaks. They probably wouldn’t judge him, like he’d learned to judge everyone else; if they’re like me, look different or act different, there’s something wrong with them.
“Are you coming, son?” Jacob stood in the doorway.
Coh hadn’t even heard him open the door. He only now felt the hot, dry draft, too.
“Sure. I’ll go tell Mum. One minute.”
It really was great he was going to Savena, he decided, if only to get away from his own thoughts and all the stress.
***
They’d made the few stops Jacob needed to make; gone into a few stores, sold a few things, bought a few things, and Jacob had talked to a guy who planned to buy up their crop in the fall. Everything had gone smooth. No accidents, magical or otherwise, and the Kall family was nowhere to be seen. Sure, seeing Mark’s girl might have been nice, but otherwise? The rest were comparable to bug-infested rotten wood, with dirty, rusty nails. Equal parts useless and fatal.
Then Coh saw Anwar, walking down the street right towards him. He was wearing a black coat today, velvet and with its collar sticking up. He’d never seen a thing like it except in winter. Anwar kept his gaze on the cobblestones and had his hands in deep pockets. Oddly, he was also walking down the same street Coh had run down after the incident with Adair.
Coh raised an eyebrow without thinking about it and pulled the sack of goods he was told to carry closer to his body. It was a common practice in Savena, trying to avoid someone stealing things, just as it were an even more common practice to steal things. Best to be safe, really. Even if it was someone he somewhat knew.
Coh jolted as Anwar bumped into him. He never looked his way, just gave a muttered, “Hello, Mr. Gray.” He didn’t do anything else. Coh felt himself bristle despite that. He didn’t want Anwar doing anything, making contact, if he wasn’t going to be useful. They didn’t really have anything to bind them, except the fact they both scared people in Savena.
Speaking of, no one had come near him his whole time here. There went his idea of perhaps trying to make friends with, well, anyone.
“What was that about?” Jacob asked.
Coh froze, looked up at his dad. Jacob’s dark eyes were concerned.
“What was what?”
“Never mind.” Jacob paused, looking ahead. “Did he try to pickpocket you?”
“What?”
“He’s no good, Coh. Name’s Anwar. Lives in the woods like some beastie--like the thing that attached you, even--and steals. He’s a complete nutter.”
Coh forced himself to feign horror, even as he started walking again to keep up with his father. “That’s awful.”
Jacob hummed in agreement. “Yeah. Mrs. Alyn down the road, you know her, she said last time I was in town that he even cursed her cattle, like thievery wasn’t enough.”
“Cursed her cattle?”
“Every calf this year has been stillborn. She said she didn’t want to believe it, bless her soul, but she can’t deny it now.”
“She didn’t want to believe it?”
Jacob frowned. “Wants to see the best in people, you know? You just can’t do that with some people.”
“Huh,” Coh said. “So, did she say why?”
“Why?” Jacob’s expression turned puzzled as he glanced down at Coh.
“Why he’d curse her.”
Jacob blinked twice and seemed to struggle to find an answer. Coh wondered if he’d considered such a thing before.
“Why would he need a reason? He’s a wizard. They always take advantage. Think they’re better than everyone else.”
Coh swallowed hard. “You ever met a wizard?”
Jacob laughed. “Well, if that trash is one, I wouldn’t want to meet another.” He smiled down at him. “Why so curious, anyway?”
“Bored,” Coh said, shrugging.
It was needless to say his thoughts were in a very dark little corner of his brain, but if you wanted to know he was considering finding a way to get rip the magic out of his being. Yet, if it flooded your veins, parent to child, like all the legends said, what could you do?
Nothing. You could do nothing.
So he merely walked and made small talk with his adoptive father, wishing he could say something but forcefully refraining himself from doing just that by biting the inside of his mouth.
It was quite effective.
***
True to his father’s and Coh’s expectations, he found things in the bag he’d been carrying weren’t the way they had been. Only something had been added, rather than taken away. Coh had snuck said thing up to his room and was now flipping through it. The mysterious object was a book. Rather anticlimactic, but a long spell for burning grass had been included in note form. The note itself was yellowed and almost brown at the edges, a worn and brittle papyrus that left him wondering where Anwar even got it from. But fresh lack ink was scratched across it, explaining how spells worked--the longer it was, the less energy it took up. Coh had no idea how that worked, but he felt like it was somewhat less crazy that staring at grass and repeating one word at it until it worked. Otherwise, he ignored it since it was making something at the back of his mind itch and he shoved it into the bottom of his trunk.
Now he had the book in his lap, its older, yet still bone-white pages crinkling as he flipped them. It was all so useless, though. It was all in what was referred to as Old Tongue and though his mind kept seemingly rearranging things so he could read it, a trick of the candlelight maybe, it was hurting his brain. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. The only thing he’d noticed that really caught his attention, except for pages on the spells for aphir and lyarket and what you could do with them, was one that seemed so familiar. At least the title was familiar.
He had the funny feeling it had nothing to do with spells, though.
He flipped back to it and thumbed the paper where an illustration was, a black sword with silver mist-like substance climbing it. It was blurred, but things were obviously written on it. The image looked like ants were crawling in it, so he looked away. Looked away and his gaze went up to the large-lettered title.
That’s when it clicked.
Coh closed the book and slid it off his lap, before leaping to his feet and rushing over to his box of books. He pulled off one and looked at the cover. Same title, but with a subtitle in his language, same as what was inside the book. Old Tongue in bigger letters mixed with Viren’s native tongue in scratchy under writing.
He stared at the book in his hands, at the eleven swords decorating the cover, and he closed his eyes.
He may have just found his key.
He’d clambered onto his bed after that, still in his attic room, and started reading, going through the well worn storybook, textured pages shifting through his fingers, lovely ink drawings gleaming at him. The plot of the book was rather simple and it read like some myth, but it had a logical spin, rather like some of the history and alchemy books that were also in the box. The book involved eleven nations each with a king or queen to rule them, each having a sword, a sword that held something otherworldly. Now that sounded completely insane to Coh. Magic came from people, not objects. Spells were just your mind willing something to happen and it actually happening, some glitch in your brain letting you use something there that maybe other people couldn’t tap into. You could put magic in an object, same as he put his in his amulet, but to claim magic came from something as simple of a sword was mental. Still, he’d seen a smoke beast and come to find himself a warlock. Maybe he shouldn’t be so doubtful of old legends. Anyway, apart from that those special swords were luck, of course, because in Sadunn the number eleven was lucky. Supposedly the emperor of Sadunn brought over eleven swords on his ship--hand-picked by his right-hand man. Coh remembered that from one of the books. There was a lot more detail, sure, but he didn’t care to go over it in his mind. He’d read it and recall as he went along.
In the end, only a few details mattered. It was about a wizard named Athair and his sister, Dione. Athair, the first to have the mark of a black snake wrapped around his body; Dione, the first and only female known to have the mark, a pale, brown-toned one, but a mark nonetheless.
Athair, the first to wield the sword called Morder--one of the swords brought over the Ocean.
It was chilling, to say the least. They were also the only magical people mentioned, which suddenly made Coh not so nostalgic, even though he was well-aware it would continue to be his favorite book, if only because all the other books gave him allergies.
Yet, the fact the main character was a witch, a good witch, maybe explained some of the continued intrigue. Why he liked it, why he didn’t mention that something like that had ended up in the books Mark had given him.
He probably had already expected the fallout then.
On top of that, he realized as he stared down at one particular picture--Dione meeting Somnus--that he’d never even mentioned it to Luke, maybe because he’d never been too good at the whole reading thing, he wasn’t even sure he could, and because he hadn’t wanted to give the book away.
He wasn’t sure what to do about that, either.
He gave his head a minute shake and looked back down at the page, at the scratchy grayish letters, and went back to reading.
He kept at it, going through the old favorite of a book, until he reached an illustration almost at the end, at the battle between Athair and Dione. He swallowed as he took in the illustration that took up the left page. It was an illustration he had mostly ignored before, ignored somehow. Athair, a whitewashed madman, stood with wild, lightning eyes; a sword held aloft with the gleam of metal the only thing seen. Dione, a tanned girl with a waist-length braid, had two knives in her hands and a ruddy-colored sword at her belt. She appeared to be wearing trousers, like a man. He blinked. And, yes, he was right. She did have a pale snake twisting along her back, same as Athair had a black one across his chest.
He let the book flop onto his legs and shook his head.
How could he have not noticed all the wrongness? Sure, he’d known, he remembered, but how did he not notice all the strangeness? Her having her hair done up like that, so rare, and then there was the wearing pants thing and the fact she had a mark. Surely he hadn’t noticed that as a kid, otherwise he would have dropped the book like it was hot.
He frowned, brows knitting together, as he watched light dance across the page. His shoulders tensed and he looked over at the two candles he’d lit. Their fires were twisted together, two tiny forms locked in combat--literally. Athair and Dione.
He hadn’t even thought a spell.
He hadn’t even thought a spell and he’d scarfed those bitter and then too, too sweet flowers Anwar had given him when he’d gotten home last night, despite the fact Gladys had given him some odd herb tea. Completely impossible--unless Anwar had planned something like this and gave him the wrong plant or herb tea was a no-no with nasrin. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He just let the book get tossed to the floor as he moved fast to snuff the candles.
For some reason, with the smell of smoke in the air and darkness in all directions, he felt betrayed.
