Spellslinger (Spellslinger #1)(61)

‘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.

He became furious. ‘I am doing what is right for our family! For our house. For our people. If the shadowblack takes you fully and your magic recovers, you’ll become a threat to our clan, as my mother was! I cannot let that happen. I will not let that happen.’ He pushed the next drop of ink into my arm. Even enraged as he was, the motion was careful, precise. Controlled.

A thought occurred to me then – the sort of desperate, futile sliver of an idea that you think up when you’re so frenzied that your mind can’t understand that you’ve already lost. ‘You swore!’ I said. ‘You told Ferius Parfax that you would pardon me! You gave your word.’

My father stopped then, just for a moment. His eyes were full of guilt and sorrow when he looked at me. He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. ‘I have pardoned you, Kellen, for shaming our family this way, for bringing this darkness into our house.’ Then he turned back and dipped the needle into the molten ink. ‘Now it is your turn to forgive me.’