It was just a dream, you idiot, I told myself. Stop screaming.
The concoction my mother had tricked me into drinking had left my mind in a daze. I couldn’t seem to move, even to open my eyes. After a few moments I realised that the reason I kept screaming was because the pain I felt in my forearms was real. The bands. Something’s happening to the bands …
Instinctively I tried to raise my arms, but I couldn’t. Despite the thick fog in my skull, I managed to shout for my parents and force my eyes open. That was when things got worse.
I was no longer in my mother’s study lying on her settee. This was my father’s private chamber. I was bound onto his worktable, thick leather straps holding my wrists and ankles. My father stood over me, one hand pressing down on my chest as the other pushed something sharp into my forearm.
‘Father? What are you doing? Why does this hurt so much?’
He withdrew the needle then, but didn’t answer me. He just moved his hand and dipped the needle into a tiny metal cauldron sitting atop a brazier that burned with a fierce heat. When the needle came back out, it held a single drop of molten silver. I saw then that there were other dishes sitting on top of other braziers, each one a different colour, holding a different molten metal. Copper, brass, gold, iron … They were the metal inks used to tattoo the bands on Jan’Tep initiates as children, to connect us with the fundamental forces of magic. But when I looked down at the band for ember, I saw the reverse sigils burning there, dark and ugly, forever severing my connection to the magic of fire, of lightning, of energy.
‘Father, please, stop! Don’t counter-band me!’
When a child is banded, it’s done with only the tiniest amounts of the ink – so small you can barely see the drops on the needles. But my father was using much, much more. He was doing to me what he’d threatened to do to Shalla: counter-banding me permanently. Once he completed the process, I would never again be able to wield my people’s magics, not even the feeble cantrips that a Sha’Tep servant can still perform near the oasis. He might as well cut off my hands and tear out my eyes.
‘Don’t do this, Father,’ I begged. ‘I’ll do anything you ask, but please don’t—’
‘Stay calm, Kellen,’ he said, and pressed the needle into my arm, drawing forth another scream from me.
When I could again catch my breath, I tried shouting for my mother. Bene’maat was a gentler soul who loved Shalla and me more than anything. She would make Ke’heops see sense.
‘You have to trust your father,’ she said, her voice far closer than I had expected. I felt her hands pressing on the sides of my head, pulling it back down to the hard surface of the table. She was standing behind me. She’d been helping him do this to me.
‘There has to be another way,’ I begged. ‘Please, just try—’
‘We have tried everything else,’ my father said. ‘We have tried your whole life to—’
‘Ke’heops,’ my mother warned.
Whatever words she was going to say next disappeared into sobs. Her tears dripped onto my forehead, one by one, as my father continued to dip the needle into the metal inks and then drive it into the skin of my forearms. ‘You are my son,’ he said, his words sounding like those of a man confessing to a crime. ‘You are my responsibility.’
They had lied to me. They had let me believe that there was hope so that they could put me to sleep and strap me to this table. Nothing I said, no reasoned arguments or passionate vows, stopped them. My father just kept dipping the needle into the molten inks and then driving them deep into my flesh, sealing away my magic, making me a prisoner for life.
‘I’m your son!’ I screamed, pulling in vain at the restraints. ‘How can you do this to your own son? Why would you—’ For an instant I felt as if I were back in Mer’esan’s cottage, with the dowager magus giving me that look of hers. ‘Do not ask questions to which you already know the answer.’
Pieces of my life broke apart in my mind, twisting and turning as they took new form. How often had I been in this room, my mother and father casting the spells they said were to heal my magic? How many times had my mother traced an invisible line with her finger, going around my eye, always my left eye, looking at me so closely, telling me I was going to be fine? ‘You knew,’ I said. ‘You knew I was going to get the shadowblack one day. All those times you said you were trying to help me develop my magical ability … you weren’t, were you? You were weakening me.’
My mother tried to hold my hand. I clenched it into a fist to resist. ‘It was your grandmother,’ she said.
‘I inherited the disease from her? But why me? Why not—’
‘You did not inherit the shadowblack from my mother,’ my father said. ‘When you were a child, we found her with you, here, in this room. She had taken one of my banding needles and she was drawing the void from the marks around her own eye, using it to …’
He stopped speaking, apparently unable to say the words that came so easily from my own mouth. ‘Grandmother banded me in shadow.’
No one contradicted me.
‘She must have hated me,’ I said.
‘Seren’tia loved you, Kellen,’ my mother said. ‘But her mind was lost. When your father saw her, standing over you, piercing your skin with the ink of shadow …’
My father’s voice was hard. ‘I thought I stopped her in time. I thought I’d saved you.’
My mother reached out her hand to touch him. The intimate gesture made me feel sick and alone. ‘There were signs,’ she said to me. ‘Even as a child I could sometimes see the pattern begin to form around your left eye. We thought that the magic of shadow fed on the other six. We hoped that by suppressing your magic, we could starve the disease. It seemed to work for a time, but then the markings would come back. We didn’t realise …’
‘We were wrong,’ my father finished, his voice just as sure and strong as ever.
‘You only masked the symptom, didn’t you?’ I asked, not expecting, or waiting, for an answer. ‘By weakening my magic you allowed the disease to progress that much faster. You took away my life, piece by piece, and now—’
‘We had no choice!’ he shouted, his composure breaking for the first time, even as the needle stabbed into the skin of my forearm. ‘We never knew if the disease might spread on its own, if Shalla …’
And there it was. Of course. Shalla. The hope of our family. The most promising mage our house had ever produced. She had to be protected at all costs. ‘Because you love her,’ I said.