These Brilliant and Beautiful Lies: Ch9

Robinette’s lip was split, and she avoided Brinn’s eyes as he navigated his way between the other students. She sat at the very end of the bench, paying all the attention to her stew but not touching the spoon. Brinn grabbed two round brown breads from the long table by the windows, and smoothed a frown from his face as he sat opposite her. She said nothing, so he said nothing either, instead focusing on the food. He cut the top off both the round breads, picked out the soft middle and poured his stew into one, pushing the other across the table to her.

“Tastes better,” he said. She took it, turning it in her hand, but said nothing still.

Brinn chose to ignore her as he ate. He ignored the curls in her hair that the light from outside made nearly white; and a bruise forming on her wrist; and how her neck kept tensing like she was swallowing tears. She was another student — it wasn’t for him to do anything but ignore it.

“Will we always have to fight?” Her voice was almost too quiet to be heard over the clanking of others’ spoons against plates.

Brinn swallowed the piece of bread. “For what?”

“I mean, fight others.” She glanced up at him. “Like we did for Preliminary.”

“Oh.” He dragged another piece of bread through his stew in a spiral, thinking. “Probably not like that.”

Robinette frowned. “Probably. Like you don’t know everything.”

“I don’t know everything.” He caught himself before rolling his eyes. “Only what Reiner told me.”

“So, more than us.”

He shrugged, chewing. More than them — so what?

“How is that fair?” She pressed.

“How— how is knowing something fair?” He snorted. “You’re at the Academy. That’s the point.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but then slouched in her chair instead, still looking at the bread bowl as if it was a work of art.

“Schools in Isdia were different,” she muttered. “We didn’t get hurt.”

“There is no school like the Academy,” Brinn said carefully. He’d never heard of other schools before. Vague references, combined with logic, told him the Academy couldn’t have been the only one, but he’d never met anyone who’d be able to tell him more. He glanced right, towards a few masked second-years engaged in a heated but quiet discussion, before asking: “What’s it like, then, in Isdia?”

Robinette smiled a little.

~

“In Isdia, we start school when we’re five,” she’d said, “but at first we don’t do much.”

Her voice echoed through Brinn’s head as he walked through the house.

“When we’re little, we play and explore, mostly — and we visit all these places; where they make the oil, and the mines, and all kinds of other things.”

He glanced at Reiner’s locked door — Father’s old room — and sighed. No word, no sound. Brinn hadn’t seen him since the Preliminary. He considered knocking, now, but Robinette’s expression when they said goodbye and he went home still lingered in his thoughts.

She was so young. His age, but nonetheless somehow younger, and her reactions and questions made Brinn wonder how many others were there who’d enrolled at the Academy without a clue of what to expect.

“If you’d like, and if they allow it, you could come to our house and I could show you some things I took with me when we moved.”

He closed the door to his room and set a chair in front of it. He hated Robinette’s presence in his head: the girl was a distraction, and another student at that. He knew better than to get attached. Reiner had warned him about it; about what the Academy did, what friendships were like there. How impossible friendships were.

But then, he’s got Myres and Elrick, and Rykon, Brinn mused as he crawled under the bed. He stroke a roughly burned rune on the wall just above where it joined with the floorboards. Maybe I can have Robinette.

He pulled out again, and smiled at the book waiting on his pillow. Thin and light, it would’ve blended with the pillow’s pattern were there not for the rune on its cover.

“Brinn Rose,” he muttered, placing his hand on the rune. “I know it’s been a while, but open, please.”

The book stayed motionless. He took it from the pillow and tried to pry it open, but it stayed put as if its pages were locked together.

Brinn sighed. “Come on. I need a spell to help someone.”

The cover moved reluctantly. He sat back with a grin, leaning against the wall, and propped the book against the pillow in his lap. Its pages flickered gently as he turned them, countless runes and drawings moving up and down in endless motion. Arranged in the right way, they combined spells, fitting together like digits on a lock. He couldn’t dream of living long enough to figure out every possible spell this book could teach him.

There. His eyes caught it just as it appeared — the string of runes he was looking for. He chewed on his lip as he twisted his fingers and drew them in the air: the runes on the pages moved on as soon as he was done.

For a moment, as always, nothing happened. He sat there, book on his lap and the runes moving like water flowing in different directions.

He flinched and grabbed his wrist, feeling a bruise form under his fingers. His tongue touched his lip: it hurt too, but a dull throbbing quickly replaced the sharp pain. With a frown, pressing the cold sole of his palm against his lip, he closed the book and stood up — only to bend over with a groan. His side hurt. More than hurt: he was willing to bet someone’s fist was still punching it. He hadn’t counted on that.

Idiot. Of course she’d have injuries you can’t see.

Clenching his teeth, he pushed up and lifted his shirt, wincing as he pressed at the invisible bruise over his ribs. There was nothing to see, apart from some old scars left from his pre-Academy lessons, but the pain was there nonetheless. He guessed it wouldn’t go away for a while. He let his shirt fall and took a few careful steps towards the mirror, getting used to the sensation.

Curtains drawn, the dim light of the room made him look older and more tired. Were there not for his hair sticking in all directions, he could disregard the clearly-too-dark eye colour and imagine a much younger Reiner looking back at him from the mirror. His lip wasn’t split, the marks on his wrist weren’t visible. Dark circles broke around his eyes.

He swallowed, his throat tight with tears he wasn’t going to cry.

~

They were not seated, this time; neither on the benches like for the entrance ceremony nor the pillows like just before Preliminary. This time, they stood in rows, separated into groups depending on the door they’d passed through, from all three classes and before all three Masters. The tense anticipation in the air tickled at Brinn’s skin from all directions, making him nervous too. Reiner had told him about this — but then, Reiner had told him about Preliminary as well, and he’d left out the somewhat important bit about what exactly Preliminary was.

He glanced around, not for the first time wishing his height would allow him to actually see properly. There: to his left, in the group of more-or-less roughed-up students who’d agreed to pass through the first door, all but the tip of Robinette’s nose was hidden from him by her hair. He watched her for a few seconds, touching the invisible bruise on his wrist. It still hurt under his fingers. He blinked quickly as to not look at it, and focused on the back of the student in front of him.

I should’ve agreed to pass the first door too. He let out an inaudible sigh, closing his eyes for a moment.

“A Captor’s mask is a Captor’s identity.”

Brinn’s eyes snapped open. The Master whose name he didn’t know was speaking, her voice accented with something hypnotic that Brinn couldn’t place.

“You were born of the Order its creation and its part,” she said. “Today, you stand before it, ready to give yourself to it as is right of each and every one of us.” She broadly gestured towards the middle of their podium, where what looked like a shallow bowl stood on an elaborate pedestal. Brinn’s gaze followed her gesture along with everyone else’s, and he let his eyes travel over thin silver branches elegantly curling around the stone pedestal’s dark surface, as he listened to the Master’s words.

“The mask you are to be given today will be yours until the day you graduate,” she continued, “and it is not meant to hide your face.” She paused and slowly nodded to the other two, and Master Kirie continued where she’d left off:

“Your masks are who you are — to the outside world, and to your own eyes, for what lies underneath is only for the Order to know. They are yours and yours alone, and from the moment they touch your face that is the only place for them to be.”

Until they end up on the wall, Brinn thought. A hundred pairs of empty eyes, with Mother’s and Father’s Council masks in the middle, flashed through his thoughts. There was a wall in that room waiting for him, he knew, right across from theirs, between his brother’s and the dark veil that covered their sister’s.

The third Master called a name, and Brinn gave himself a mental kick to start paying attention again. One of the students in the first row, a boy Brinn didn’t know, walked up to the podium and stood in front of the pedestal as his Master instructed him. A moment later, a girl from the other group joined him, nervously wiggling her toes.

I pledge my body and mind to serve the Palace of Justice, Brinn thought at the same time as the boy from his group said it out loud. They’d all learned the words: some, like Brinn, from their families and earlier tutors; others, most likely from Apprentices the night before the ceremony. Listening to the rest of it, Brinn wondered what happened if someone stood up there and forgot what came next.

“Willing to bleed in the name of the Order,” the boy said, cutting a line across his palm. He held his hand over the bowl, letting the few drops fall into whatever the bowl held. He licked his lip before continuing, taking the other student’s hand in his own. “Prepared to spill blood in the name of the Order.”

He cut the girl’s hand too, and a second drop of blood joined the first. Then he turned to face the bowl, and dropped to his knees as the Master of his class stepped forward.

She took a mask out of the bowl: a dark-gold, perfectly smooth creation that fit the boy’s face and needed no strings to hold it. He stood up without a word, and Brinn watched as the ceremony repeated the other way around, with the girl getting her mask too before they both left the podium and reclaimed their places in respective groups.

Name after name, one pair after another, it went on. The words started to sound strange to Brinn’s ears, as he listened to them repeated over and over again, eventually all blending into a buzz that clouded his mind.

When Robinette’s turn came, he looked up from the back of the student in front of him, and tried to catch her gaze, but her eyes remained firmly on the floor. Her voice trembled slightly as she spoke her oath, and Brinn winced when the blade cut her skin. His own hand curled into a fist automatically.

How many times am I going to have to do that spell? The size of what he’d done weighed on his chest. She’d only been through Preliminary so far — the injuries left from that, even if they were more than she’d expected, were nothing compared to what was yet in store. He couldn’t protect her from the pain forever, not at the cost it came with.

You could direct it at someone else, a thought whispered, but he shoved it away. There were runes for it, he was sure, but magic was never as simple as transferring one’s pain to another — something always had to come the other way around as well, or the caster’s own mind would suffer, and Brinn had promised himself not to go that far the moment he’d figured how to open the book and read the warning on its very first page. He touched the tip of his tongue to the spot on his lip where he still felt the tugging of Robinette’s healing cut, remembering the cries of the heretics he’d seen burned for their crimes.

“Sabrin Rose.” His heart skipped a beat at the sound of his name. He hurried to the podium, casting a passing glance towards Robinette. Her eyes were still on the floor, now shaded by a bright blue mask that matched their colour as well as Reiner’s mask matched his eyes’.

The boy who joined Brinn on the podium was the first student so far shorter than him, but for some reason Brinn couldn’t find it in himself to be happy about that.

“I pledge my body and mind to serve the Palace of Justice,” he said, the words still a buzz even as they left his lips. He locked his eyes on the other boy’s freckles, the near-black dots across his dark cheeks, and blindly reached to take the knife. “As my soul belongs to the Order and my heart to following its will, I hide my face not from forces beyond me but from the mortals beside me, and stand to be judged worthy. For I am willing to bleed in the name of the Order,” he cut his hand and held it over the bowl, still watching the other boy, and then took his hand as he offered. “And prepared to spill blood in the name of the Order.”

Master Kirie stepped forward, and Brinn kneeled in front of him. The black stone and silver branches of the pedestal were close enough for him to kiss. For one fleeting, ridiculous moment, he almost reached up to trace his fingers over their surface.

The mask’s touch was cold against his skin. It was blue as well, but a deeper, darker shade than Robinette’s — the only detail he noticed before it found itself on his face.

“Is that the same ‘Rose’ as Elcanor and Leanra Rose, of the Council?” The memory shot through his mind so clearly he nearly answered the Master’s voice. He stared at the polished, grey floor of the ceremony hall, and just for a moment, his parent’s Council masks stared back.

Same as Reiner Rose, the prodigy, he thought, standing up. He could’ve sworn his legs were made of lead.

As Azrael Rose, the traitor. He held his palm up as the other boy recited his part, and watched his own blood drip into the bowl once again.

As Brinn Rose… The other boy kneeled, and another mask covered those freckles. The practitioner.

°