I felt my mother shift a little from where she stood behind me. The silk of her sleeves made a soft sound as she brought her hands out in front of her and I knew she was preparing a spell. ‘Would you fight me as well, Abydos?’ she asked. ‘Shall I set my magic aside and you can strike me with the resentment I see burning in your eyes?’
My uncle looked so shocked it was as if my mother had struck him twice as hard as my father had. ‘Bene’maat … Kellen is your son. Surely there is some other way to—’
‘There is only one other way,’ my father said. He looked back at me. ‘Either I finish banding Kellen, sealing in his magic so that the shadowblack can never feed on it, knowing that I must then send him into exile forever, to wander alone far away from those who would recognise the disease and try to hunt him down, or I can kill my boy with my own two hands in order to protect our people.’ He turned back to Abydos. ‘Which would you have me do, brother?’
My uncle hesitated for a moment, and I saw all his rebellious strength drift away. His eyes returned to the floor, where they remained when he next spoke. ‘I will prepare something to eat. Kellen will need to regain his strength after you’re done for the night.’
For the third time, Abydos was going to break the rule regarding meals being eaten at the family table. This was, in its own small way, my uncle’s last line of resistance.
As though nothing had happened, as if order and civility had somehow returned to the world, my father said, ‘That would be most welcome, Abydos. Thank you.’
Then he returned to the worktable, where I lay held down by leather straps that bit into my skin whenever I struggled against them, and continued the careful, methodical destruction of my future.
Sometime the next morning I woke groggily to sunlight streaming through the window, and a voice floating up from the gardens below.
‘Kellen?’
The voice was female. Ferius? I thought. No, too young. Shalla? No, not nearly arrogant enough. Since there really weren’t very many women in my life, I should have figured it out sooner, but in my defence I was quite heavily drugged and, really, who would have thought she’d ever speak to me again?
‘Nephenia?’ I asked, my voice a raspy wheeze that probably hadn’t carried as far as my teeth, never mind the fifteen feet below the window to where she must have been standing. I tried again but still couldn’t produce anything so grand as a moan, never mind a shout.
‘Kellen, it’s … me.’
There was a lot of weight in that ‘me’, I thought. I had no clue what it meant of course, but it was somehow nice to feel that I warranted that long a pause just for such a simple word.
‘Kellen, I know you’re angry, but …’
I think she said something else but I got stuck at ‘you’re angry’. What was I supposed to be angry about? Had Nephenia drugged me and then tied me down to a table in my mother’s study only to start jabbing me with needles night after night?
Copper. The word came out of nowhere. Copper for ember. Copper for fire spells, for lightning. Last night my father had finished the copper band around my left forearm, forever cutting me off from one more form of magic.
‘… Ferius,’ Nephenia said.
What about Ferius?
I tried to concentrate on what she’d been saying during the time I’d been ruminating about copper magic.
‘… masks, but no one is …’
Someone had seen Ferius attacked by a group of men in masks outside the city – that was what it was. Unless I had just made that up? Damn it. Why couldn’t I think straight?
Mother’s potions, stupid. You can’t think straight, so stop trying.
‘… Two days since …’
Okay, no focusing, no thinking straight. What did that leave? Think sideways. Nephenia was outside my window. She wouldn’t be there if she knew about the shadowblack, so my parents had kept that quiet. She was calling from outside, in the garden, which meant she must have already tried to visit me but had been turned away from the front door.
‘… when are you and Shalla going to …’
Damn it, what had she just said about Shalla? Something about Shalla and myself, which meant Nephenia thought she must be here, so my parents must have told Osia’phest that they were keeping us both home from our lessons.
Unless Shalla really is back?
No, no way that was possible. She would have come to see me somehow. Even if she agreed with my parents’ decision to counter-band me, she’d have found a way to sneak in and tell me this was all my fault and I just needed to try harder somehow.
Okay, what have we got?
Shalla was still missing and my parents had kept it secret, just like they’d kept secret both the fact that I had the shadowblack and that they were counter-banding me. Somebody had reported seeing Ferius attacked and taken away by men in masks, which had to be connected to the men who’d attacked Shalla and me in the forest when we’d tried to summon familiars.
Not bad for someone who’s completely dazed and drugged, I thought. Not bad at all.
Except that I was also pretty sure that nobody would be looking for Ferius and nobody would care that she’d been captured.
‘Nephenia?’ I called out, my voice a little stronger now.
No answer came, which struck me as very rude until I noticed that the bright yellow sunlight was gone, replaced by the purple-grey of dusk.
Hours had gone by. I had nodded off. Darkness felt like a blanket being pulled over me. Soon my parents would come back into the room and start on the next band. Would it be blood magic this time? Or maybe breath? Were they down to the last and weakest band already?
Despite the dull thud of the drugs that kept me docile and the leather straps that held me down, I felt an overwhelming desire to do something, anything, to hurt my parents. Lacking the ability to actually commit any act of violence, I started crying, and in between my feeble sobs I said, ‘You aren’t my father any more, Ke’heops. You aren’t my mother, Bene’maat. You’re just two horrible people who strapped me down and took my life from me. I’m going to kill you both one day. I’m going to kill everybody in this stupid rotten town.’
Even as I spoke the words, I knew this was nothing more than the wasted utterance of a child lashing out at everyone around him. That was why I was so surprised when a fuzzy brown-and-black face suddenly appeared at the edge of my window and, in a chittering, growling little voice, said, ‘Kill everybody in town? Now you’re talking my language, kid.’
28
The Negotiation
There was a moment when the squirrel cat had first appeared at the window when I’d thought I might be hallucinating. I was still drugged, after all, and I’d been strapped down to that table for several days.
‘Are you simple, kid?’ the creature asked.
‘Simple?’
‘Slow. Dumb. Thick. Stupi—’