Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1)(48)
It was as if she touched him with a hot brand. Brishen jerked forward, back stiff as a spear haft. He gained his feet in one fluid motion and turned to Ildiko with his hand outstretched. “Come with me,” he said.
She stared at him, then took his hand without question. He led her through the manor, down to the first floor and out a door that led from a buttery to the bristling thicket of brambles and wild oranges that hemmed in one side of the estate.
A pale moon hung thin in the sky and did nothing to illuminate the earth below it. Ildiko stumbled along behind Brishen, blind as a mole in daylight. Her husband moved surefooted in the suffocating darkness, guiding Ildiko toward a destination she assumed would answer a question she was starting to regret asking.
They stopped before a patch of wall that surrounded part of the manor’s loggia. Brishen uttered a word in a language Ildiko was certain couldn’t have been bast-Kai. A shadow, paler than its siblings, parted from the stone, exposing a set of three indentions cut shallow in one of the masonry blocks.
Brishen placed the three fingers of his right hand into the depressions and whispered another arcane word. Ildiko gasped as the block softened until it melted into the stones on either side of it, leaving an opening black and deep.
She almost batted his arm away when he reached inside the hollow. For all she knew, something with teeth longer and sharper than a Kai’s lurked in that space. Brishen didn’t hesitate and pulled out a small urn. He faced Ildiko, gently cradling the urn.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The answer to your question.”
He lifted the lid. For a moment nothing happened, then suddenly a feeble light no bigger than a dandelion puff and just as delicate floated upward until it hovered above its housing.
The glow of Brishen’s eyes provided the only illumination between them, but it was enough to gild the tiny light as it flickered and bobbed between them. “My sister,” he said softly. “Or her memory at least.”
Ildiko gasped softly. His sister. He’d never spoken of another sibling, only the indifferent brother she met briefly in Haradis. Brishen’s revelation begged more questions, the first being why would his sibling’s mortem light be here at Saggara, hidden away by spellwork, instead of at Emlek where the Kai held the memories of their dead?
“She was never formally named, but I call her Anaknet. I’d seen eleven seasons when she was born.” The tiny mortem light floated toward him and balanced on the back of his hand. “She was born with a club foot, an imperfect child and unacceptable to Secmis. I thought her pretty.”
A sinking dread grew in Ildiko’s chest. He would tell her something terrible, something to bind her insides into knots . She was tempted to cover her ears, tell him to stop and apologize to him for asking her silly questions, but she stood silent before him and waited for this childhood tale to unfold.
“Secmis murdered her four days after her birth. She broke her neck. I saw her do it.”
“My gods,” Ildiko breathed, horrified at Secmis’s monstrous cruelty and the knowledge that Brishen, a young boy, had witnessed it.
Brishen continued, his voice flat and distant. “Secmis is a mage-leech. She gains power and long life from forbidden spellwork and the consumption of souls and memories. She was old when my father was a child, though now she goes by a different name and claims lineage from another clan.” Anaknet’s mortem light danced over his palm.
“I took Anaknet’s light and released her soul before my mother could steal both. Anhuset and my old nurse Peret helped me with the lamentation and got me through the memory sickness. Peret kept the light for me tucked away in the hollow of a birch tree in her sister’s garden. When I was given Saggara, I brought Anaknet here.”
He coaxed the mortem light back into the urn, closed the lid and returned the vessel to its hiding place. Different spells reformed the masonry block until it hardened, leaving only an expanse of blank wall.
Brishen faced Ildiko fully, and even through a vision compromised by darkness and tears, she still saw the sparks of red that danced in his eyes. “I hate my mother, Ildiko,” he said in that same flat voice. “Down to the marrow of my bones. One day I will kill her. She knows this.” He looked at the place where the urn rested. “Anaknet is why I am who I am, wife. Because I refuse to become like the monstrosities who bore us.”
Ildiko sniffled and scraped her sleeve across her cheeks in the futile effort to staunch the flow of tears. She reached out to Brishen, carefully, as if he were an injured animal caught in a trap. He accepted her touch, and soon she was wrapped in his embrace.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed into his shoulder. “So very sorry.” She stroked his hair, holding him for what seemed like hours, listening to the rapid hammer of his heartbeat and the shallow breaths that sometimes verged on sorrowful moans. The Kai didn’t weep, but they mourned just as deeply as humans.
When he finally stepped away from her, his eyes had lost their red sparks and Ildiko’s had dried of their tears. She grasped one of his hands in both of hers. “I swear I will take this knowledge to my deathbed, Brishen.”
One corner of his mouth turned up, and he meshed his fingers with hers. “I know. It’s why I told you.”
They walked back to the manor in silence just as a thin line of crimson spread across the far horizon to announce the dawn. Sinhue greeted Ildiko at her door. “Your Highness, are you unwell?” She ushered her charge inside and made her sit on the bed while she poured water into a cup and handed it to her. “This might help. Do you need a cloth for your eyes? They’re swollen and red.”