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Riel's Story - The Time Between Dog and Wolf
🕑 Added 2021-04-29 20:21:13 +0000 UTC[CONTENT WARNING: off-screen torture and violence, mentions of vomiting, gay characters concealing their gayness from their parents, dark characters, rich people being rich.]
Spoilery note: I wrote Riel as way more apeshit in the last scene, but toned it down out of cowardice. This is, of course, him on the path to being present-day Riel, so he might seem very different from the Riel you now know.
Also, I highly recommend reading Riel's first short story, Mid-Fall, before reading this one!
*~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*
The Kingsford Social Club was the premier location for the wealthy elites of Leore to mingle with each other, compare trade secrets, and—if they were lucky—offer up their young heirs for marriage bids and maneuvered engagements, like so many pawns on a chessboard or invested stocks up for sale. Businessmen gathered here to conduct their exchanges in sophisticated, secure surroundings; mothers came to socialize and trade gossip; young heirs and heiresses cut their teeth on the connections they made at the club, some of which would remain valuable to them for life. It was even said that, in Leore, laws were decided and trade treaties were made at the Kingsford before they ever reached the official Consortium halls. Only the cream of the crop could afford the club’s membership fees, and its exorbitant barrier of entry ensured that anyone available for socializing within was of the upper crust, a correct and equal class, and therefore also suitable for marriage—if that was what the intrepid Kingsford member was seeking. Which they almost always were.
The club doubled down on this advantage by making a spectacle out of the engagement season, sometimes unflatteringly called the “bargaining” season. It had a dedicated hallway called the ingenue’s gallery, which sported enormous paintings of all of the eligible young women whose families were members of the club year-round. The prettiest, wealthiest, and most accomplished young ladies had their canvases placed in the center of the wall to draw the most attention. The more plain-faced (but still obviously wealthy) heiresses were banished to dustier corners of the room.
Riel Syndran found himself standing in one of these corners, contemplating the huge portrait before him with his hands clasped seriously behind his back—as if the poor young lady in front of him were an abstract picture, some convoluted piece of art for him to untangle.
The proper protocol from here would be to approach the club’s hired matchmakers and ask to arrange a meeting with the aforementioned lady. This was a chapterhouse night, a time when all of the intended bachelors, bachelorettes, and bachelorexes mingled in groups, testing out the waters with certain prospectives before embarking later on more serious courtships. Mr. Makepeace had referred to it as “speed-courting.” Riel was to find a portrait of an heiress who caught his eye, arrange to sit with her when the event started, and make his introductions. If she liked the look of him, she would remain at his table. If not, she would move to another’s, the entire night a rotating carousel of light conversation and new faces.
(These meetings, of course, would all take place simultaneously in a large room reserved in the club for this purpose; they would act as each other’s chaperones, one eye reserved for watching the rise and fall of other dynamics even as the other was trained on the winsome face before it.)
This opportunity to personally observe the goings-on among Leore’s rich and powerful was the only reason why Riel had consented to come to the season’s first chapterhouse night. His mentor, Lysander Whitten, had pressed him, insisting that it was Riel’s duty to his quasi-adopted family to seek as advantageous a connection as possible. This insistence had greater implications that it seemed at first glance: Riel had been with the Whittens for only six years, but he was one year older than Ashcroft, the only Whitten scion. If Lysander believed that a marriage of Riel’s would be advantageous to the family, it implied that Riel could be in the running to inherit and ultimately control the vast Whitten Trading House; otherwise, it wouldn’t matter who he married. All of the focus would be on securing Ashcroft’s prospects, not Riel’s.
Of course, Riel had no plans of allowing any of this to happen—a marriage or an inheritance. But he had kept this to himself, and so, to play along with the narrative and appease Lysander’s famous temper, he found himself here, contemplating a row of women that might make suitable wives for a man who would never marry.
The other portraits were beautiful but lifeless, glimmering with a varnish that leant a dewiness to its subjects’ skins. Young ladies dressed in deep turquoise, buttercup yellow, or pale spring green—the colors of the season—stretched their hands out to butterflies in the garden, petted lap dogs, played the plinith, or showed the viewer the dainty embroidered pillows on their laps. Their eyes were demure, downcast—he could see no life in them. They were like ornaments: silent, distant, and there to be observed. Something in the back of his jaw ached.
The portrait he was standing under was different. Perhaps its difference was affected, but he could not help but be intrigued by it nonetheless. Its subject—one Minerva Valserre—sat primly in a velvet chair, but what was cradled in the crook of her arms was not an aplanea harp or sleepy cat… but a rifle. Miss Valserre had a sunhat on her face, but it was tilted at a rogueish, cocksure angle, and her eyes were challenging, her smirk confident. It was as if she was saying: I know this won’t be popular, and popularity can hang.
Riel half-smiled. He had to admire that, on some level. The peons milling about in the lobby behind him would never appreciate a wife who could shoot, who didn’t care what other people thought of her. The future businessmen of Leore wanted timidity, gentility—and compliance in the face of their husbands’ obvious corruption. It was a reality of life: everyone in Leore was corrupt, was scamming their clients or the Autarchy or their neighbors in one way or another. It was part of the reason why Riel wanted to leave.
“Of course you would pick her. A farm imbecile’s the only one that would even consider returning your ‘affections.’”
Riel looked back without turning around, his posture relaxed, unaffected. Ashcroft, his semi-adopted brother, stood there with his arms folded and a nasty sneer on his face. He was about the same height as Riel, thin, slender-wristed, blessed with cherubic blonde curls and blue eyes that could smooth into a look of innocence in a heartbeat. Riel wasn’t even sure why Ashcroft was there at all. He was nineteen, one year off from being able to participate in a chapterhouse meeting.
Slung across Ashcroft’s admittedly-well-dressed shoulders was the arm of his visiting college friend, Ozias Flyn. Ozias was taller, older, and broader than either Ashcroft or Riel; he had the tanned, friendly look of a grocer or the newspaper boy who came to the house to deliver papers. Riel had no idea how their unlikely friendship had started: Ashcroft was the probable heir of the wealthiest and most powerful trading family in the region, and Ozias came from a low-class family, judging by his accent. He couldn’t imagine they had much to talk about, even at college—and, in fact, he wondered how Ozias could afford the tuition at Ashcroft’s college at all.
It was a subject of some personal intrigue: he had looked into the matter and quickly discovered that Ozias’s family was destitute. How, then, could he attend Ashcroft’s well-off school? He had deduced that the two of them were sleeping together from the moment Ozias first arrived at the house (though Lysander and his wife Aemilia were clueless)—he just couldn’t figure out if the relationship had started when they’d said, or if they had met sometime before their enrollment. Ashcroft had shown an odd and sudden eagerness to further his education at the time. Was he secretly funneling Whitten money into paying his lover’s tuition, or was it all just meaningless happenstance? Riel didn’t know, and he hated not knowing things.
“‘A farm imbecile’s the only one whowould consider returning your affections,’” he corrected, turning finally to face the pair. He saw Ashcroft scowl and smiled internally; he abhorred poor grammar and enjoyed annoying “Asscroft,” as Mr. Makepeace called him. Then he glanced at Ozias, who was not a member of their club. “What is he doing here, anyway?”
Ashcroft’s scowl deepened, and he looked away. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“I would, yes, which is why I asked.”
Ashcroft didn’t answer, so Riel looked expectantly at Ozias, who cleared his throat and said in his deep baritone: “It was a favor to me. I asked Ash to bring me here, and perhaps I could make some connections.”
Riel raised a brow, a genetic blessing from his ancestors; it could make him look piercingly skeptical. At his stare, Ozias’s ears began to redden. Was the dolt saying he intended to capture the heart of some wealthy heiress and elevate his fortunes that way? And Ashcroft was helping his lover do it?
“Really,” he said dryly, causing Ozias to redden further. “I can’t see you, of all people, volunteering to marry a high-born lady.”
Ozias cleared his throat again and looked this way and that, before finally turning to meet Riel’s eye. Surprisingly, his face was somewhat defiant. “I could say the same to you.”
Touché. Before Riel could respond, however, a servant near the front of the room rang a tiny, handheld bell. Ten minutes before the event began; if he wanted to pair up with Miss Minerva and not some insipid sycophant, he needed to speak to the matchmaker now.
As he moved away without saying a word of farewell, Ashcroft spoke up again.
“Don’t even bother,” he said with an ugly, noxious smile. “Any lady worth her salt will puke after five minutes of talking to you. I wouldn’t bother showing your pale, mealy face in that room. Save yourself the humiliation.”
Well, Ashcroft was in fine form today. He had always been unpleasant, even cruel, threatened by his parents’ sudden adoption of Riel—their enemy’s only son. But today he was further emboldened by two things: his lover’s presence, and the fact that he knew what would happen if Riel actually succeeded in snagging a well-connected fiancée tonight. The odds of the Whitten inheritance would tip even more in his favor, and in Ashcroft’s hostility, Riel could read the thin undercurrent of fear and desperation.
Still, he had never been one to exercise mercy towards his enemies. He fixed a pleasant smile on his face, which he knew unnerved other people. “When I am leader of the Whitten house,” he said brightly, “I will be sure to remember to invest a small sum into acquiring a tan. But no amount of money is going to help you when that day comes, brother.”
Ashcroft’s face contorted, and even Ozias looked uneasy. “Is that a threat, brother?”
Riel’s smile turned ghostly. “You should know by now, Ashcroft. I don’t threaten. I warn.”
And then he turned on his heel and walked away. He didn’t need to look back to see the fear in Ashcroft’s eyes.
And he had, of course, no intention of carrying out any such warning or threat: the fortune and power of the Whitten family was Ashcroft’s, always had been, whether he knew it or not. But Riel couldn’t resist. He never did. He had a very underdeveloped sense of humor, but he loved fucking with people. It was one of his few pleasures in life.
#
Minerva Valserre—an animated, curvaceous young woman with lively copper ringlets—turned out to be anathema to the bachelorexes of Leore for a plethora of reasons, not just because of her “unfeminine” fondness of guns. She was strikingly chatty, uncouthly blunt, and had a habit of posing direct and careless questions regardless of concerns of privacy.
Still, it was a more interesting conversation than he would have had with some dainty heiress who would politely agree with everything he said. He charmed Minerva by starting their talk with a discussion of gunpowder and the best manufacturer of firearms—an obvious diversion, but one that previous suitors hadn’t found fit to use. Then they sat together at the white-clothed little table and made pithy—sometimes scathing—comments about the other attendees, sometimes stopping to eavesdrop on nearby tables. Beside them, Danton Sixton, the unbearable heir to the largest capital investment firm in Leore, did his best to harangue his partner, Miss Xiomara Maisonette.
“Can you sing, then?”
“I have trained, like any student at Lady Irwin’s Finishing School.”
“Yes, but are you any good?”
“…Yes.”
“You’re rather sure of yourself. But I believe you.”
“I’m honored.”
“My sister sings. She’s won awards. Have you won any awards?”
Deplorable. Riel had a reputation for being rude, but only when people deserved it—but Danton Sixton had had everything handed to him, so his manners meant little when few would say no to his wealth and influence.
“You know who else is rude?” Minerva asked then.
“Who?” he asked, though he already had an idea of what she was going to say.
“Your younger brother, I’m sorry to say. Ashcroft, was it?”
She was from the country, so she didn’t know many names by heart. It was charming, in a bucolic way. Riel smiled thinly. “I am lucky to say that Ashcroft is not my brother. Not by blood. I can take no credit for his behaviors or how he was brought up.”
Minerva blinked for a moment in surprise, then recovered. “Are you adopted, then?”
“You could say that.” When he was fourteen, he had helped Mr. Makepeace, a spy for the Whittens, turn his parents in to the authorities for laundering drugs throughout the Continent; it was also his revenge on them for keeping him locked up for fourteen years and using his name to cover their tracks. He had been painfully isolated, awkward, and adverse to the outside at that point, so unused to being away from his home that even strong sunlight had startled him. But Quentin Makepeace had saved him, had brought Riel to his employers the Whittens, and had convinced them to take the penniless teenager into their home out of mercy. The Whittens had agreed, though only after Riel had demonstrated his genius and business acumen to them, proving his future worthiness; and, he suspected, they drew some satisfaction from adopting the waif son of their mortal—now convicted and imprisoned—enemies. It was almost like their small penance for orchestrating the Syndentons’ downfall in the first place.
He had changed his surname to Syndran, the name of his ancestors before some immigration or another—though he needn’t have worried, as very few people outside of the Syndenton manor knew of his existence to begin with. They wouldn’t trace him back to his biological parents. And the Whittens had clothed him, fed him, educated him alongside the resentful Ashcroft with the best tutors and let him work in their offices, cleaning up the account books and eventually orchestrating business deals of his own.
In return for their generosity, he had increased profits of the Whitten Trading House by ten percent a year—and the number was climbing. He had also expanded and diversified their portfolios, arranged one of the most complicated transactions in their history with a silk trader from Jalis, and sold the syndicate his first three patents.
It was an equal exchange of services, he thought, and more than enough to buy him his freedom guilt-free. Still, everyone had made it clear that they expected him to stay on, plying the family trade forever; the thought that he could have other plans apparently never occurred to them. Not even to Ashcroft, whose inheritance he supposedly threatened by remaining at the house.
“So that’s why he hates you,” Minerva said when he gave her a very shortened rundown of the situation—leaving out, of course, the arrests of his parents. “You came along and usurped his place before he even got a chance to grow into it. And you’ve accomplished so much, and you’re so young—how old are you, again?”
“I reached the age of majority last month.”
“And he hasn’t. And Master Lysander expects you to marry—oh, of course Ashcroft would despise you. I rather think I would, too.”
“Thank you for your honesty,” Riel drawled. “But envy doesn’t excuse some of his behavior towards me. He ought to get rid of me permanently or leave me be, one or the other. The bad behavior and sneers are tiresome. Imagine six years of having mouse droppings left in your slippers, shaking peppers sprinkled into your food.”
“That is quite juvenile.”
“Quite.”
They fell silent for a while, looking again around the room. A few tables away, Ozias was in deep conversation with a relaxed-looking bachelorex; they kept leaning closer and closer to each other over their wine glasses, just skirting the line between scandalous and intimate. Riel frowned to himself again, though in that moment, he couldn’t say why.
“I take it the family doesn’t know,” Minerva said after a moment, eyeing Riel as he watched the others.
Riel stirred. “What don’t they know?”
She gave a toss of her ringleted head. “That you like men, of course.”
For a dangerous moment, Riel thought he was going to choke on his cider. He had never choked on anything in his life, though, so he plowed through the disconcerted surprise and swallowed without incident. Very smoothly, he said, “Only Ashcroft knows, because he’s the same way. He’s never said anything, though: a small mercy. He probably knows that if he reveals it, I’ll expose him, and vice-versa. So we’re at a stalemate in that regard.”
Minerva nodded, as if this conflict between adopted brothers all made sense. She said, “Would the Whittens be upset, if they knew?”
He considered it for a moment. “I’m not sure,” he admitted after a moment. “To be honest, I think not. Our business skills seem even more important than our eligibility as bachelors; if we can prove that, we can overcome anything else, make the rest seem irrelevant. I don’t think they would care on a personal level. But that’s not the reason why I haven’t told them.”
“It’s because you like playing your cards close to your chest,” Minerva guessed, placing her chin in her gloved hand. “Having aces up your sleeve, all that. If they think you’ll marry someone on their account, you have the maximum amount of opportunities, advantages, and understanding of whatever’s going on behind the scenes. You have control of the situation, all the power; you can stop the ruse at any point, because you’re the only one who knows the truth.” She paused, thinking on it. “You like to act a certain way if it gives you a leg up, rather than exposing any secrets or vulnerabilities. Even to the people who adopted you.”
Riel was surprised: she said it so plainly, so matter-of-factly, that for the first time it seemed like the byzantine maze of intrigue surrounding him was actually very simple and straightforward. But then he remembered how loyalty and service was everything to the Whittens, and how they were willing to exploit anything from anybody, even their own nominal allies. And how, when a rival family had poached their long-time accountant, that accountant had been found by the river with his fingers cut off. How the family motto, stitched on all of their napkins, translated to absolute and ruthless dominion. He could not even tell them about his plans to leave the family and make his own way, not without fear of their reaction. Their retribution. He certainly did not want to know how they would exploit his being gay. There was a small chance they wouldn’t, but he wasn’t willing to take that chance. Even Ashcroft wouldn’t.
“The people who adopted me put my parents in prison for twenty years,” he said after a moment. At the change in Minerva’s expression—to one of shock and even horror—he added, “I helped them do it, of course. But I’ve always been aware that I couldn’t fully trust them. Not with everything. No matter how generous they are, no matter how much they’ve given me. I am grateful to them for taking me in, of course—but I carry the same blood in my veins as my parents, their mortal enemies. I have no doubt that when it really came to it, they would throw me to the wolves to save their own skins. Even for Ashcroft’s skin.” He paused, smiled bitterly to himself. “You don’t reveal such things to people like that. Their kindness is only conditional.” Family doesn’t expect you to pay kindness back—to work off your debt to them like an indentured slave.
A silence fell over their table then, even as the room swelled with the chattering of other couples, the celebratory clinking of glasses. To the left of him, Danton Sixton kept talking and talking, and Riel couldn’t stop noticing that one of his cufflinks was undone. Sloppy.
After a moment, Minerva said softly, “Why don’t you leave, then? Can’t you strike out on your own and… and be free? Be your own person?” She stopped. “Is it the money?”
Another long pause. Riel weighed the pros and cons of the situation, of telling her the truth and “laying his cards down on the table,” to borrow her analogy. But he liked Minerva, a feeling that wasn’t all that familiar to him. In another world, he thought, they could have been good friends. He said, “Can you keep a secret?”
She nodded eagerly. “Of course.”
He leaned in, and so did she, so for a moment they pantomimed the intimacy between Ozias and his partner down the line of tables. Riel said, so softly that the words felt like ghosts against his lips: “I am leaving. Four sennights from now. I have enrolled secretly in the University of Haven, and I will leave Leore and the Whittens just before the semester starts to take up residency there.”
Minerva’s chestnut-colored eyes were wide and round. “Really?” she breathed. “Oh, that’s—that’s admirable of you! But how will you survive by yourself? Do you have money?”
“Of course.” He had set aside and built up a savings account for years, precisely for this purpose. It was more than enough to pay for his tuition and lodging, and leave a sum for investments besides.
“What will you do after you graduate?” she asked.
“I will found my own business, most likely a syndicate. From there, I aim to become master of the Merchants Guild in Haven.”
From the look on her face, Minerva didn’t know the significance of this, didn’t understand exactly how high and difficult that particular aim was. Her gloved hand came up to rest on his slim pianist’s fingers. “But, my friend, why are you here, then? If you plan to leave in a month’s time, why are you acting like you’re going to stay and marry someone for the Whittens?”
Riel smiled and gently extracted his hand. “They would try to stop me if they knew,” he said. “I have a feeling that they would deploy guilt, or would feel betrayed, at my sudden departure. They’ve invested years of resources into me, groomed me into becoming the perfect Whitten leader. They will be devastated once they discover I’ll be striking out on my own, returning no further benefit or profit to them.” He shook his head. “So, to prevent any… troublesome delays, I have to act as if all is according to plan for now. The path of least resistance. When it’s closer to the start of the school year in Haven, I’ll make my move. It will be too late for them to stop me then.”
Minerva looked slightly scandalized. “Oh, my dear, that sounds awfully cruel, just upping and leaving with no forewarning like that.”
Riel took another sip of his cider, finding it sickly and heavy on his tongue. “Trust me, Miss Valserre,” he said. “A quick and painless exit is the least cruel option I can take.”
But he knew it wasn’t true. He wasn’t planning his abrupt departure out of mercy—it was out of selfishness, self-preservation, and he wasn’t sure why he was lying about that. He ought to be proud. He had used the Whittens for his own personal gain, and would discard them now that they were no longer useful to him. But, if anything, he was only applying what they had taught him; they would have done the same to him had they only thought of it first. The Whittens were a study in cruelty, and Riel was only carrying on their legacy, like the true heir they always wanted.
The only difference was that here, now, talking to Miss Valserre—he was ashamed. The Whittens wouldn’t have been, in his position. Shame was the only thing that made him Riel.
#
The night slowed down to a crawl after their talk. Out of mercy, he shooed Minerva Valserre away from his table; she did not have the luxury of simply being there to observe, and he thought it better if she actually tried to find a suitor who was interested in her. A few women floated to his table, too, but the conversations with them were unremarkable. Once, he glanced over and saw Ozias trying to work his charms on Miss Valserre, too—though she looked less enchanted than the others.
At the end of the night, he stepped outside of the Kingsford to find Mr. Makepeace waiting atop the horse-drawn Whitten carriage. Riel slid in and pulled the door shut—Ashcroft and Ozias had taken their own transportation, and doubtless they would nip out for the privacy of a rented room before returning to the manor. Mr. Makepeace (Riel still struggled with the idea of calling him “Quentin”) urged the horses into motion, staring straight ahead and remaining professionally silent as the sounds of the party faded behind them into night.
Finally, once they were on the private road leading to the sumptuous Whitten manor, Makepeace spoke. “How did it go?”
Riel was staring out the window, looking at the moon. “Fine. It was mostly uneventful. I encountered a young woman my age who wasn’t a complete bore. Minerva Valserre.”
“Ah, with the father who gambles.” As the Whittens’ current spymaster and general jack-of-all-trades, Makepeace kept himself apprised of valuable information—usually blackmail material—regarding all of Leore’s wealthy families.
“Yes. Other than that, not much to speak of occurred. What about you?”
“Everything was fine on my end. We needn’t have worried.”
Riel nodded. Mrs. Whitten was convinced that servants were stealing valuables in the manor and had tasked Makepeace with catching them over the last week or so. There were spots of carelessness, to be sure, but they all seemed coincidental: a window left open here, a missing book there, fraying threads on a carpet she claimed had never frayed. But madness was said to run in Aemilia Whitten’s side of the family, and it was of Makepeace’s opinion that she was being consumed by paranoia and hysteria—not that he could ever say so.
In any case, Riel hoped this phase of sudden scrutiny would blow over soon, as he himself was planning on squirreling away certain items and valuables he would need on his upcoming journey to Haven, and he did not want to contribute to the chaos running the spymaster ragged. Of course, Makepeace knew about all of his plans beforehand, because he was Riel’s only, oldest, and most trusted friend. So, at least, one person was prepared for the surprise he was about to drop on the Whitten household.
The tan-skinned driver rubbed his hand over the stubble on his chin; he had been growing out facial hair again at the behest of his new husband, Domovoi. “How was Ashcroft? I saw him slip in with his college friend.”
“He was unpleasant, as always, but it was nothing new. Ozias, strangely, took part in the activities.”
“Really? Man’s got balls, if he’s as poor as we think. Befriending one of the wealthiest heirs on the Continent, and then using his connections to seek a bride?”
“Mm. He must be desperate for gold, I should think.”
“For tuition? You’d think a few gifts from Ashcroft would take care of that, at least for the year.”
“Perhaps his ambitions are higher.”
But Riel was tired, and he did not want to waste any more brainpower on trying to ascertain the bizarre nature of Ozias and Ashcroft’s relationship. The sway and dark warmth of the carriage lulled him, and he felt himself relaxing against the seat.
Mr. Makepeace said, “I will never understand that. Aiming too high. It’s like aiming for the sun. You’ll only get burned.”
Riel smiled to himself. “I will miss your soliloquies and adages, my friend.” After he moved to Haven, Quentin planned to retire and move to a little cottage outside of Ambryn with Domovoi and a dog.
Makepeace grunted. “Not that you ever listen to them. You’re the worst when it comes to ambition and pride, young buck.”
Riel closed his eyes. “That is true.”
“Just promise me your wings won’t melt, will you?”
“You’re getting your analogies mixed up.”
“You rotten egg. Scoundrel.”
“I am that, too.”
#
The next week eked by with the same slowness all the previous weeks had. Riel felt a thrumming tension building up in his spine, his chest, as the days crept closer to his coming departure. Everything made him twitchy, nervous; loud sounds and sudden movements made him flinch for the first time, and he kept expecting some disaster to strike. There was the famous story of a mythological figure, Taran of the Armored Islands. Legend had it that every time he prepared to set sail on an epic voyage, lightning struck, and fire wiped out his fleet of ships. The gods were angry at his hubris, it was said, and set fire to his transport in order to prevent him from exploring the Uruoa—the Things All Humans Can Not Know. The only way Taran could get around the issue was, variously, building a ship that could swim underwater and riding in the mouth of a whale.
Riel felt like Taran, waiting for that lightning strike from nowhere. But nothing happened: Aemilia was too preoccupied with claiming that the locks on the old study and one closet were broken, even when Quentin checked the grounds and found no signs of break-ins or theft; and Ashcroft was too busy with Ozias and Lysander too preoccupied with his business to care about her fretting. And no one paid any attention to Riel, who was generally left to his own devices anyway.
One late night, he slipped out of his room and padded down the corridor on silent footsteps. He often stayed up until dawn, toiling over his workbench on some invention or another: his latest project was a pill that could improve vision—though he was getting nowhere with it at the moment, and his room smelled horribly of various herbs and tinctures. He went down to the kitchens, where he often brewed himself a cup of tea without waking the servants: it was the only thing he had ever managed to accomplish in a culinary sense, the last time being the infamous sandwich incident with Mr. Makepeace.
But when he made it to the door to the kitchen, he paused; there was a dim light underneath the crack, and he could hear murmuring voices from beyond the door. It was a few hours before dawn—too early for the cooks to be preparing breakfast. For a moment some strange instinct gripped him, and his heart picked up a little. Could this be the thieves Aemilia was so convinced were terrorizing the manor, slipping in when everyone else was asleep after all? Well. Mr. Makepeace lived in a separate cabin on the estate grounds. If the thieves had slipped past the guards, no one would reach Riel in time if he shouted for help.
But then his nerves settled, and Riel reached for the door and pushed it open smoothly. He had not allowed fear to touch him since he was a young boy. Whatever was beyond the door, he would figure out a way to handle it. One way or another.
Two figures, lit only by a single candlelight, leaned away from each other suddenly as Riel came in on his slippered feet. He paused, taking in the situation while his head buzzed with adrenaline: there was Ozias, wearing Ashcroft’s monogrammed pajamas—too small for his body—and one of the kitchen helpers, Aloric or Alec or something or the other, with gritty eyes and sleep-tousled hair. A piece of toast on a plate lay untouched between them.
Riel frowned. “Late for a midnight snack, isn’t it?”
Ozias turned, laughing uneasily—Riel picked up on the unease like a predator catching the scent of prey, but he could not ascertain what it was about. Getting caught with a strapping young servant in the middle of the night, probably. “I could say the same thing to you. Up working again?”
“Quite.” He looked at the kitchen helper, who was avoiding his eye. “Something wrong, Aloric?”
The young man cleared his throat. “It’s, er, Alric, sir.”
“Of course. My apologies.” He continued to bore the man with his stare, however; he found it hard to believe that Ozias had woken the servant up in the middle of the night just to make him toast. “Is this a usual time for you to be… working?”
Alric bobbed his head. “Yes, sir. Cook told me to peel potatoes this morning, sir. For the dinner tonight, sir. Master Lysander’s dinner.”
Of course; he had lost track of the days. It was Lysander’s birthday today. “I see. And Master Ozias generously decided to help you prepare?”
“I got hungry,” Ozias put in. “And good Alric volunteered to help me. I’m a disaster in the kitchen, if you can believe it.”
“I see.” The two men looked at each other, signaling something silent with their eyes, and Riel stood there, feeling awkward suddenly, as if he had been the one caught doing something illicit. He smoothed the feeling away to examine later and said, “I had a want for tea…”
“Ah. I’ll see to that right away, sir.” Alric hurried into the pantry, leaving Ozias and Riel to stand there staring at each other in the half-dark, like two cowboys deadlocked before a duel.
Riel said softly, “I trust Ashcroft is unaware of your… indiscretions?”
For a moment, Ozias said nothing, his eyes looking only like dark, shadowed holes in his face. Then he started a little and laughed. “Wait—it’s not what you think.”
“I find that to be unlikely.”
“Are you sure?” Ozias was grinning now, good-natured—but there was something a little mean about the look. “Riel, there was nothing romantic going on just now. I could see how you misinterpreted it—”
“I never misinterpret things.”
“—because Ashcroft says you have no experience with these kinds of matters. With love, relationships.”
Riel felt his spine stiffen; the candlelight flared, as if his vision had suddenly sharpened. “I see.”
“You always assume the worst of people. It’s all right: I find myself doing that, too. Ashcroft told me a little about your family…”
“Let’s get to the point, please.” His voice sounded too flat, as if the sentiment had actually offended him. He hated that.
Ozias shook his head, held up his hands placatingly. “All I mean to say is, I don’t blame you for getting the wrong idea, but it’s still wrong. You think I would be having an affairwith one of Ashcroft’s own servants, in his house? You think that lowly of other people? I asked Alric to help me bake him a cake. It’s our anniversary, the day after tomorrow.”
Lie, Riel’s mind whispered, picking it all apart: the timeline didn’t work, the midnight snack, Lysander’s birthday. But he saw a sack of flour lying by Ozias’s feet, some eggs on the counter, and he suddenly felt a flicker of doubt. He did think the worst of people, and Mr. Makepeace always said it made him cynical, brittle and contemptuous. Could this be the one time he was wrong? Ozias confounded him in many ways; he was poor yet powerful, sly yet guileless, clever somehow but also oafish, and Riel was suddenly unsure of why he had been so suspicious of him and his relationship to Ashcroft to begin with. Was it truly that love was such a foreign concept to him that he had to pry it open, examine its guts the way a scientist might dissect a frog and wonder why its organs were arranged here and there? Or was he dead on the money, and there was something genuinely strange about whatever was going on here?
He had always considered himself good at ferreting out other people’s insecurities; but it seemed Ozias had found one of his, instead. Riel felt suddenly unmanned, unsteady. Pushing this aside, he said: “You talk as if I particularly care what you do, Ozias. Let me make it clear: I don’t.”
Ozias smirked a little. “Whatever you say, Riel.”
He turned, ready to flee back to the safety of his room. “But if you hurt Ashcroft, you hurt the family. I won’t stand for that.”
“Really?” Ozias folded his arms, looking smug. “Because a little birdie gave me the impression that you don’t much care what happens to the family. I’d be surprised if you lifted a finger to defend them—they’re not yours, after all. You’ve made that abundantly clear.”
He knows. Riel paused, remembering Ozias deep in conversation with a copper-haired heiress during the chapterhouse night. Minerva. Had she betrayed him so quickly, or otherwise let the secret slip? She was careless; he shouldn’t have trusted her. Or had someone else overheard the conversation and passed it on to Ozias, the gossip spreading like a contagion?
Well, if Ozias knew, then Ashcroft most certainly knew. Then Lysander— Damn, damn. He said, “I don’t recall ever having a conversation with you about this subject.”
Ozias grinned. “Not me, no.”
“Not anyone. Do I strike you as the kind of person to confide my secrets in others, Ozias?”
The grin widened. “Not usually.”
Yes, he definitely knew. Shit! He’d been bested; lying with a straight face was going to do no good here. He needed to think, needed to prepare. Lysander had given no indication that anything was amiss, but if Ozias thought Riel was going to spill any secrets of his, including this clandestine meeting with the kitchen help, he was going to get to Lysander first, pre-empt Riel to conceal his own schemes. And there was nothing Riel could do to stop him, short of asking Mr. Makepeace to make the man disappear. But the soonest he could leave was tomorrow; there were arrangements to be made, things to be packed…
Ozias laughed softly. “You have a bigger secret than I ever could, Riel. And you look like someone who’s been outplayed.”
Riel forced a smile, even as he turned to retreat to his room, his thoughts whirring. “I wasn’t aware we were playing a game, Ozias.”
The man watched him run with a self-satisfied expression on his face. “It’s always a game to people like you.”
#
The next day was Lysander’s birthday, and Riel was out of time. He had tried, desperately, to arrange transport for himself that afternoon, bodyguards and protection from whatever punishment the Whittens might dole out—but few services were available on such short notice, even for someone as wealthy as Riel. Mr. Makepeace had been dispatched to negotiate on his behalf while he attended Lysander’s dinner, dread plucking at his stomach all the while.
Riel picked at his food as he listened to Aemilia gossip about some other family or another—Miss Valserre had already gotten engaged to a wealthy merchant from the South—while Ashcroft sat with a grinning look like a cat who’d just swallowed a canary. At the head of the table, to Riel’s left, Lysander Whitten moved stiffly, with purpose, as if any sudden move would set off the hairtrigger temper he was so famous for. Ozias and Ashcroft had told him what was going on, and anything Riel said—“But I caught Ozias in the kitchens talking to a servant, that’s why he’s saying these things about me!”—was not going to get him out of what was to come.
He knew this, so when dessert came—chocolate cake, baked fresh in the kitchens—he said, “Let’s just get it over with, shall we?”
Aemilia Whitten looked up with a frown, saw the expressions on both her husband and adopted son’s faces, and then shut her mouth again. Across from him, Ashcroft squirmed in his seat, like a child awaiting an exciting present. Ozias, who looked oddly grim and subdued, said nothing. None of them were eating except Lysander, who had to be the first to sample the food: that was his right as the man of the hour and the guest of honor.
Lysander Whitten—a broad-shouldered, platinum-haired man with a powerful, booming voice—set his fork down with forced calm. He had a face like a boulder, no emotion showing on it whatsoever: an old trick he used to conceal his feelings from his business rivals. But when he spoke, his voice was already loud with anger.
“You would like that, wouldn’t you,” Lysander said. “Getting it over with, moving on. Like so much dust for you to shake off of your sleeves.”
Riel said nothing. Ashcroft looked back and forth between him and Lysander, as avid as an audience member at a sports match.
Aemilia said, “Dear, what’s going on?”
Lysander said, “Riel is planning on leaving us, Aemilia. The week after next. He enrolled in Haven University and has plans to abscond.”
She gasped, turning to him. “But—but you never said! And what about the business?” A pause. “The club—marriage!”
“Ashcroft can lead the business, as was the plan all along,” Riel said, pushing away his cake. He had rehearsed every argument, every debate tactic—but he knew it was all in vain. No matter what he said, Lysander and Aemilia would be outraged, and nothing could change that. And when they were outraged—when their Whitten pride was stung—they stopped at nothing to exact revenge on the source of their anger. Still, he plowed on. “Ashcroft can take over any duties I was expected to assume, as the true Whitten heir. It’s only right, I should think.”
At this, Ashcroft’s brow furrowed, as if he would have never expected to hear this. But Lysander slammed his hand down on the table, making Aemilia jump. “And you just made this decision on your own, did you? After all we’ve done for you? The thousands we’ve spent on your schooling? All the years you’ve slept under our roof? You didn’t even want to do us the courtesy of disclosing your plans?”
“I thought you would try and stop me.”
Lysander stood suddenly, the veins bulging in his neck. “Stop you!” he spat. “How dare you! You should have never have had the thought in the first place!” He slammed his palms on the table, making the plates of cake shudder. “If you try and leave this place without paying us your dues, repaying the debt you owe us, I’ll make your life such a living hell that you’ll come crawling back to us a beggar! A pauper, just the way you first came into our lives!”
Staring into the man’s purple face, Riel was reminded of just how many times Lysander Whitten had made good on a threat like this: he was the most ruthless businessman this side of the Shield Peaks. He had told Mr. Makepeace to have countless rivals, saboteurs, and enemies killed, snuffed out as if they were little more than flies. He wondered suddenly what Mr. Makepeace would do if it was Riel on the end of that sword. If there was really any way to avert this coming disaster, the war that would unfold between them. He would not, could not, stay with the Whittens any longer. But that did not mean this next part would be easy.
“Lysander, sit down,” Aemilia said anxiously, her face pale where her husband’s was red. She held a hand to her stomach, as if she wanted to be sick. To Riel, she said: “Why didn’t you tell us this was what you wanted? Why didn’t you ever say a word?”
“Look at his reaction,” Riel said, nodding to the quivering Lysander. “Can you blame me for keeping my plans discrete?”
“But, Riel, you have never been a coward,” she said. “I can’t believe that you were afraid of our reaction.”
Not afraid, Riel thought then. Guilty. Doubtful that he was making the right choice. Afraid that they would somehow persuade him away from his path, compel him to stay. Terrified that he would let them, that he would go along with it. Ashamed of the ruthlessness by which he was willing to cut them loose.
“What are you going to do to him, Father?” Ashcroft pressed, gleeful, watching the whole thing like it was a dinner show.
But Lysander Whitten didn’t say anything. His face only reddened further, more veins popping in his temples, and he stared at Riel with an intensity the young man had never seen in him before. There was rage there, hurt, confusion… and, for the first time, Riel realized—fear.
Fear? He felt a prickle of anxiety. What is he so afraid of?
And then Lysander brought a hand to his heart, clutching at his chest as violently as if he might tear his cravat off and fling it at Riel. He choked, spluttered. His eyes rolled back, the pupils showing white.
And then he fell to the ground with an enormous crash, bringing the tablecloth, the plates, and all of the food down with him in one incredible storm.
#
Everyone was screaming. Aemilia was hysterical, Ashcroft was now sobbing, and Ozias was shouting something. Sabotage, sabotage!
Riel sat there amidst the chaos, thinking. Lysander was still on the ground. He had been poisoned, that much was clear. There was likely no helping him now.
If he died, Riel thought, his life only got that much easier. He would no longer have to worry about the Whittens’ revenge, about his past dogging him, about whatever retribution they might have in store for his abandonment. For his betrayal.
Lysander choked and choked, convulsing as the poison worked it was up his body, locking his jaw in a terrible rictus. Riel watched, and Ozias was screaming, He poisoned him, he poisoned him! Riel poisoned Lysander so he could get away!
All at once, Riel felt a cool, disconnected clarity settle over him. It was the same detached lucidity that allowed him to attack his rivals in any way that gave him an advantage; it was an unfeeling awareness of every little component around him. The only emotions this state of mind could inspire were, at times, cold impatience for stupidity, violence, and the vices of men. But he felt none of that now. It was as if the gods had touched his brain. The lightning strike from nowhere. He was Taran, looking into the storm.
Everything made sense. Ozias Flyn was not a schoolmate—not only a schoolmate—but a spy sent in to ingratiate himself with Ashcroft. A rival business family must have hired him, the same way the Whittens had once sent Mr. Makepeace to act as Riel’s tutor. The plan must have been three-pronged. Kill Lysander Whitten, dispatch Riel by framing him for Lysander death, and then control the Whitten Trading House through Ashcroft: malleable, gullible second son Ashcroft.
Ozias had been laying the groundwork for this all along. He had already been stealing things, or sabotaging things—Aemilia hadn’t been wrong about someone getting into the Whitten’s belongings. She had only thought the threat had come from outside, not from within. No doubt Ozias had gotten an eyeful of all manner of information to feed back to his employers.
And then he had gone to the chapterhouse night, probably to sabotage Riel’s efforts of gaining a fiancée: a rival family wouldn’t have wanted him to gain allies, not for what was to come. But it was there that he found out that Riel planned to leave the Whittens altogether. What a wrench that must have thrown into their plans. Was it still worth ruining his life if he exiled himself from Leore?
But they would have had to go through with killing Lysander, giving control to Ashcroft. And Riel might have come back, seeking revenge. And when he stumbled across Ozias, the enemy’s invisible hand had been moved. Riel could not live to put the pieces together; only he would know that Ozias—and whoever had hired him—had killed Lysander.
And so he must be gotten rid of, and this was how they did it: inflaming Lysander by breaking news of Riel’s departure, and then killing him. It would pin the blame very handily on Riel—he had been planning his escape, knew Lysander would never let him go, would never let him have a future without hounding him, and so Riel had killed him to earn his own freedom. It would explain the pilfered valuables and information leading up to this night: he had been preparing, he was a sneak, he was a cold and ruthless traitor who had no issue betraying the family who had taken him in.
It all fit perfectly. Even last night—Ozias in the kitchen, meeting with the help (whether by bribery or seduction). Concocting a cake with poison in it, knowing Lysander would be the first to eat. He hadn’t expected Riel to come across them, but no matter: all he had to do was reveal Riel’s plans to Lysander early, and everything proceeded along the track he had already laid out. Even Ashcroft would believe it all: he had no reason not to.
I can still get away, Riel thought. Mr. Makepeace will help me. I could change my name, move somewhere else; Ashcroft and Ozias combined are still too stupid to find me. It would still be easier than if Lysander was chasing him.
But then he looked down at his adopted father—it had only been twenty seconds or so—and he saw the foam dripping out of his mouth, the wide and frightened eyes. The tension that had been building in his chest snapped. Starborn gods. Was this the future that was awaiting him? Would he, too, be so caught in the web of treachery that one day he would be consumed by it, blindsided by some stranger he had welcomed into his home? And did he really want to be the man who sent his parents to prison and let a man die on the floor like an animal? All for his own gain? Was he allow himself to become that?
Riel pushed himself out of his chair just as Aemilia began to really scream, a terrible, keening, monotonous wail that issued forth from her mouth like a gong. Riel brushed aside her fluttering hands and put his ear to Lysander’s chest. Pulse was sluggish, but still strong. Then he smelled his breath, looked at his eyes. The muscle of his eyelid was stiff: a paralytic toxin, then. And his breath smelled coppery, metallic. Either thulaine, thalot, or ygramul’s poison. The last was rare, imported far away from the Jalis desert, but there was a small chance that they’d bought it to cover their tracks—and if that was the case, there was nothing Riel could do to help him. But if it was the first two…
“Ashcroft,” Riel snapped. The young man was just standing there, looking shocked and pale. He barely moved, so Riel grabbed Lysander’s wine glass and threw it, hearing the glass shatter spectacularly. Blood-like liquid splashed all over the floor. That got Ashcroft’s attention; he stirred, blinked many times. Ozias had disappeared somewhere. “Ashcroft. If you want your father to live, you need to go to my room. There will be several vials on my desk.” Belatedly he realized just how bad this would look: the strange occurrences around the manor, Lysander’s poisoning, and now his workbench full of foreign tinctures. But he would deal with that later. “Find the one labelled malloreon. It will be green and will smell sweet. Bring it to me right away. Now. We have only four minutes before his brain shuts down.”
To his credit, Ashcroft fled like the hounds of Hael were after him. Aemilia was crying; she grabbed Riel’s hand as he moved to loosen Lysander’s starched collar.
“You didn’t do this, did you?” she wept. “Riel, Riel, tell me you didn’t.”
He yanked his hand away, pried open his adopted father’s mouth, and readied two fingers. This was not going to be pretty, but it was the only thing that would save the man’s life.
“Of course I didn’t,” he spat, moving Lysander’s tongue. “This is sloppy. If I’d wanted to kill him, he’d already be long dead.” The Whitten way, just as they’d taught him.
Aemilia shivered; her eyes were focused, and she was in shock. She must have still thought that Lysander was suffering an attack, cardiac arrest of some kind. “He’s not already?”
“Not if I can help it,” Riel said. And then he plunged his fingers down Lysander’s throat.
#
There were many people outside of the Kingsford Social Club who thought the Whittens were the picture of a wealthy, upstanding family of honest merchants. On all fronts, they projected an idyllic picture to the public. The younger Whitten boy, with his angelic looks, was by all accounts an avid badminton player and hardworking student at the Finch College of Higher Studies. The older boy—although he looked nothing like his relatives, with jet-black hair and an angular, shifty look—was a philanthropist who had urged his family to donate large sums of money to charities throughout the city. Not much was known about Aemilia or Lysander Whitten, and if Lysander had a reputation for being a bit of a tyrant, that could be forgiven: few could imagine having the amount of wealth and influence he possessed. But, thanks to many bribes to the Leore Vice Guard, the activities of the Whitten family seemed, to many in the city, forthright and by the books.
If these optimistic supporters had ever gotten a glimpse of what lay in the basement of the Whitten manor, however, they would have been forced to revise their opinions.
This was on account of the fact that a large part of the Whittens’ basement had been renovated into a prison cell and interrogation room. Great care had been taken in the construction of this room: the walls had been sound-proofed, and a two-way mirror was installed in the far wall so Lysander Whitten could look upon the terrified faces of his enemies as they were tortured for information. The Whittens were at the forefront of a new movement in Blest: merchant-princes were becoming racketeers, and, like the dark basement of a sumptuous manor, criminal empires were being built beneath the opulent sheen of sophisticated wealth.
On this auspicious night, Lysander Whitten’s fiftieth birthday, the man who stood behind his oft-looked-upon mirror was not Lysander himself, but his oldest and ex-adopted son, Riel Syndran. He turned away from the mirror just as Ashcroft approached, his hands clasped behind his back in the same way they had been when he’d gazed upon Minerva Valserre’s portrait.
“Your father?” he asked softly, as if they were in the depths of a quiet museum or mausoleum.
Ashcroft winced. “He’ll live,” he muttered, trying to keep his eyes from what was going on behind the mirror, behind Riel. “The physicker said the left side of his face might be paralyzed. Maybe even his body. He might not be able to talk for a while. But he’ll live.”
Riel’s expression didn’t change; he took this in calmly, as if they were discussing a book they had both read. He said, “You may have to take the reins sooner than you were expecting, Ashcroft. Are you prepared for that?”
Ashcroft didn’t answer. He was feeling very queasy, which was no surprise, given the things he had witnessed tonight. His father vomiting up the poison, Riel force-feeding him the antidote. (“Not an antidote,” the genius had said in his condescending way. “But a fast-acting absorbent antigen that will neutralize the worst enzymes of the poison.”) And now… Mr. Makepeace and Ozias. Together in that room. The things his lover had already admitted to. The lengths he had gone to prepare this night, only to be foiled in a few minutes by Riel.
Riel shifted so that Ashcroft’s view of the room was blocked by his body. A thin kindness, but it didn’t cancel out some of the things Ashcroft could still hear through the mirror, the only part of the wall that wasn’t soundproofed. Ozias, a spy and a saboteur, the one behind the incidents terrifying Mother… the one who had poisoned Ashcroft’s father and tried to pin the blame on Riel…
Ashcroft still couldn’t believe it. On some level it was much easier for him to believe that Riel—loathsome Riel, emotionless Riel—was the one behind all of this chaos, was the one willing to betray the Whittens and utterly destroy their lives. It was so much more palatable than thinking… than thinking…
He broke away from those ugly thoughts, swallowing the bile that had been rising up his gorge all night. In his heart of hearts, he knew none of Riel’s actions would have made sense if he were the one who had tried to kill Lysander. He wouldn’t have saved him, for one thing; and for another, it was as Riel had said to Aemilia. Poison wasn’t his style. He could find more efficient ways to destroy people if he wished to. He rarely made mistakes.
The door to the interrogation room opened then, drawing both of their attention to Mr. Makepeace. The spymaster had his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows; he was wiping his hands on a clean kerchief. Behind him, Ashcroft could hear Ozias crying, and his own heart was breaking apart like an icefloe in a river of warm tears. How could any of this be happening?
“He broke,” Mr. Makepeace said, his voice very flat as he addressed Riel, who nodded. “Admitted to everything. The sabotage and theft, the conspiring. His employers were planning this for a long time. They funded Ozias’s tuition so he could deliberately place himself in Ashcroft’s path. He was desperate for the money, trained as a thief for the Leore Thieves Guild before he got booted out for some reason or another. If he saw the job through, he would have been a very rich man indeed.”
“So he thinks,” Riel said quietly. “More than likely, he would have ‘vanished’ afterward to prevent his talking.”
Ashcroft’s stomach rebelled; he found himself clutching the half-empty vial of malloreum in his pocket, hard enough that he felt the glass might break and cut him.
Then Riel said, his voice as clipped as ever: “And his employers?”
“The Sixtons.”
“Ah. Danton Sixton sat beside me at the chapterhouse event. Of course.”
They talked in soft tones for a while, but Ashcroft tuned it all out. He was looking through the mirror, now, trying to meet Ozias’s eye, though the man was tied to a chair and slumped over. Is it true? he wanted to demand. Has all of this been a lie? You meant to kill my father this whole time—how? How could you do it for so long? Look me in the eye and tell me that it’s not true, please! I need to know it’s not true!
But really, deep down, there wasn’t much Ozias needed to say: Ashcroft already knew. He’d known since Lysander had fallen over. Maybe even before then. He’d woken up in the middle of the night to find the bed empty one too many times. Fool. Fucking idiot. He was not going to let anything like this happen ever again.
Riel was rolling up his shirtsleeves, now; from the changed tone of his conversation with Makepeace, it seemed like they were wrapping things up.
“What do you want me to do with Ozias?” Mr. Makepeace was saying.
Riel glanced at Ashcroft, whose face felt like it was carved from stone. “Ashcroft?”
“I don’t—I don’t know.” He needed time for it all to sink in, but at the same time, it felt like he already knew enough. He suddenly felt a flaring of vinegary hatred, deep down in his gut, in his heart, burning him through, and he croaked, “I suppose you can get rid of the bastard. Somehow. I never want to see him again.”
Then, realizing how that could be interpreted by a spymaster who “got rid” of people at least twice a year, he shook his head. “No—don’t kill him. But I don’t want him to just waltz away scot-free. Beat that bastard up for what he did to us.”
“I already did,” Quentin Makepeace said, glancing at Ozias’s limp figure.
Then Riel turned smartly away, buttoning his sleeves at the elbow. “Break his kneecaps and let him go, then. That’s a fitting punishment for a year of deception and attempted murder, I think.”
“Yes, Riel. And what will you be doing?”
Riel was straightening his tie—how was he still wearing a tie, after all this? “I will be finding that kitchen boy,” he said coolly. “And devising a way for us to send a message to the Sixtons. A warehouse fire, or perhaps blackmail, would get the message across.”
“W-wait,” Ashcroft said then, as Riel made to walk away. “Why… why are you doing this? Aren’t you leaving? Or was that all a lie, too?”
Riel paused, as if he had forgotten Ashcroft was there—and then, for once, he smiled at his adopted brother, very faintly, his eyes looking tired and very blue. “For the entire time I have been here,” he said after a moment, “I have used a different surname from yours, but I have been a Whitten. Before that, I was a Syndenton. Under my parents, I was weak, unquestioning. Under yours, I was cruel, indifferent, and conniving. I still am, in a way. It was only the influence of my old friend here that made me feel I could be… more.”
He paused again. “When I go to Haven, I will no longer be Riel Syndenton, nor Riel Whitten. I will be my own man. But living in this world… I should have known. To survive here, one must be cunning, ruthless. Harder than your enemies and flagrant about it. I ignored this law, kept my departure a secret from your family, because I was ashamed of how cruel the action really was. I tried to convince myself… that it was not truly me, not my fault, not callous and cruel and manipulative. In so doing, in trying to be… half-hearted about it, I brought suffering to you and to others.” He stopped, then continued rolling up his sleeves, meticulous. “So, for the remainder of my time here in Leore, I will be… all-in, as the card players say. Let me indulge in the Whitten way one last time. A last parting gift to the family. And then I’m done.”
Ashcroft blinked rapidly, working his jaw. So Riel meant to put all of this behind him, after? Could he even? Could anyone? “And how exactly are you going to accomplish all of that?”
Riel’s smile turned sharp. “I have three weeks before the semester starts. I’ve done more with less.”
Ashcroft believed it. He’d seen it for himself. “And… after?”
“And, after,” Riel said, “I go my own way, you go yours. No hard feelings, no revenge. Gradually, I think this part of me will fade—the vicious, wolfish part, the Whitten part. I hope yours does, as well, and we’re both able to forge new paths.”
Ashcroft thought it over for a moment, staring at nothing; he did the numbers in his head the way his father had always taught him, examining the proposal this way and that. Then, finally, he stuck out his hand. “Fine. It’s a deal.”
Riel smiled.
Comments
Lena Nguyen
Wow, thank you so much for this incredibly lovely comment, it’s exactly what every writer is stunned to hear and totally made my day!!! 🥺🥺🥺 I want to take this comment and frame it! Thank YOU so much for your support and for your reading and enjoying the short stories! ❤️❤️❤️
snowthornes
JDKGJSGS These short stories are so, so good!!! It's... it's hard to put it into words, but it makes the characters feel so alive, more than they already were — like words jumping off a page and coming together to form a living, breathing, being; like dolls come alive with sparks in their eyes and pasts behind their smiles. I'm just. So!! Wow! Wow!! Everything here is just... amazing. You are such an amazing, splendid writer and I am so so glad that you've shared your wonderful gift with us.
Lena Nguyen
Ahhhh thank you so much, Stephanie!!! Your praise always blows me away, I'm so honored! It makes every short story worth it, I'm so glad you enjoy these honest takes on their characters! <3 Thank you so much for being you! 😄♥
Stephanie Beth
👀 Hot flaming balls of mozzarella Lena, I swear to you these side stories blow my mind every single time. It completely changes the way I see the characters in the story after reading these, in an amazingly good way. It feels like the stories fill in details in their portraits, very minute and hidden things one might not even think to see or look for otherwise. Dang, yeah, these are just amazing. 😄🎉
