Chapter 21

“More tea?” Rose asked, pouring before I even answered.

“You really like this tea,” I said with a chuckle as I took a sip. I certainly couldn’t blame her for the repeat; it was really good tea.

She met me with a smug grin. “Here I can drink as much as I want.” She took a big gulp. “I think I would chalk up today as a great success. I felt you do magic, and you’re still alive.” She looked quite proud of herself as she gave her biased assessment of the day. “It fits that you’d do well with clothing magic; I was pretty good in my seamstress training.”

‘Was’. I tried to ignore that word. Instead I just nodded while it took me a second to recall everything that had happened. My magic reassessment. Changing my clothes. Captain Hector. Father.

“Father!” I shouted, jumping up from my seat.

“Wah!” Rose’s chair clattered as she fell backward. “What? What about him? Don’t scare me like that!”

“Today was not a good day. There was… there was so much that went wrong. And I need to tell you, starting with something important.” I looked in the eye as she paled, unsure of the magnitude of what I could say. “Our mother didn’t die in childbirth.”

It took a while but I recounted what I learned and saw: who the captain and our uncle was, what must’ve happened when we were still infants, and father’s attack.

“Then, if he’s our uncle, then that’s why…” She slowly put the pieces together. Little comments from the neighbours, small bits of the story that didn’t always seem to line up, and father’s hatred of mages; it made perfect sense in retrospect.

Well, I doubt that his hatred for mages is unique to him or biased, I thought.

“Will he be released or something? You said they captured him alive, right?” Rose asked, focusing from the past to the present.

I nodded, hesitantly. “I begged for his life, and Hector held off on executing him. But I’m certain he won’t hold back for long.”

“No, no no no,” Rose muttered, standing from her seat. She began pacing, wearing a circle into the grass. “He can’t do this.”

“He can though,” I muttered. “I don’t know how long he’ll indulge me.”

“Is father ok for now? Did you see him? Where is he? You’re sure they took him alive, right?” She didn’t wait before stacking on each question.

“Yeah, he’s ok, enough. I saw him, but he… it didn’t go well.” I didn’t want to say what happened.

“What do you mean it didn’t go well!?” she panicked. “Did they hurt him? Really badly!? Let me see!”

My stomach turned as I felt the world begin to spin. “Wait, Rose, don—”

I didn’t get a chance to finish that before I was there again. His grasp was just as familiar, those hands that once caressed my back now squeezing, seeking to strangle me.

Please! Make it stop! I cried in my mind, pained in more ways than one.

The memory ended. I wrenched, on my knees in a now grassy field, doubled over. “Rose, I—”

“He thinks you killed me.” She paced, her head in her hands.

The guilt tasted like bile. “I did kill you,” I muttered back.

“I mean purposely," she retorted, giving me a dirty look. “Hmm… I take it the rest didn’t go well?”

Somewhere in the back of my mind I felt an appreciation that she asked, rather than just checking herself. “No,” I told her as I got to my knees. “He couldn’t do it; let me go and told me to never see him again.”

She kept pacing, wringing her hands as she muttered under her breath. “Come ON!” she shouted as she suddenly kicked her chair. It flew up and up and up before disappearing into the sky. “Surely we can let him know that I’m fine.” I just gave her a blank, empty look. “…in a manner of speaking,” she elaborated, rolling her eyes.

“He’s not wrong though…”

“You’re not helping here!” she snapped, pointing a finger at me. “We have to figure out how to get him out. You’re learning your way around there. And you have magic now.”

“Barely.”

“Well it’s something. If he’s in the cell, then maybe you can sneak him out when nobody’s around.”

A laughed, the sound dark and hollow. “Doubt it. There are mages all around now, and the cells are a good distance away from the doors. This place isn’t just a free come and go; I’ve only seen one door. And there’s no possibility we can just sneak out when pretty much everyone seems to want a piece of him.”

“Ok, so what? We can’t break him out, not just us. Maybe we can get Hector to let him go?”

“Haven’t you been paying attention? Hector is evil! He wants to kill him himself. He’s not going to just ‘let him go’.”

“Then what do you want, to just force him to let father go? You think that we can do anything?”

“I won’t let him orphan us, Rose! He’s not going to finish the job!”

“She’s not important here!” Rose yelled, cutting through my words.

I gawked at her. “He killed our mother, Rose! Doesn’t that mean anything to you!?”

“And Tobian killed me but I’m still trying to keep a level head about it!”

I froze. There was pain in her eyes, that same raw anger and despair that I had been trying to bury the memory of. I knew what she meant, even if what she said wasn’t the genuine truth. And she was right.

“Ren, please.” Her hands went to her forehead and she started massaging her temple, something she always did when genuinely stressed. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that we barely knew her. I’m obviously grateful that she gave me life in this world but I still don’t remember her, even if she lived for a little while after we were born. But we can’t let the past get in the way of planning. And father… don’t think for a second that I’m willing to let this go.”

I sat back down. “You’re right. We need to think this through.” I hesitated, trying to find a chink in the wall of armour against us in this situation. “You might have had an idea there, actually.”

She looked up, lowering her hands, perplexed at what I was alluding to. “What do you mean?”

“About forcing him. He’s not a good person. There’s no way everything he does is above board, but while he might be in command here, he’s only a captain; not a general or a commander or anything like that.”

Rose nodded, following my logic. “So, we find something out… and blackmail him?”

“Yeah!” I nodded back. “If we can find something incriminating, we’ll sell our silence for father’s release.”

“That… that could work!” She smiled, genuinely excited. “You will have to hurry though. It will be risky.” She sobered the mood by thinking of the risk. “If you’re caught—”

“Then I won’t get caught,” I told her, not wanting her to finish that sentence. “I’ll be discrete and try to find out what I can. I’m sure that if I can ask the right questions, I might catch something.” I knew it was naive to be so optimistic, but I couldn’t let my hope die.

“Mhm.” Rose nodded. “I’ll support you as best I can, so be careful. And use me whenever you need.”