“Except Sestinn and Castien.”
Sesto sipped his tea. “Except them.”
Elloven drank her own as she continued to wake up. Sesto seemed to be waiting for the right moment to speak, so she went first.
“Are you going to explain to me why Jesstin was there and why he killed Castien?”
Sesto dabbed his lips with a napkin. “I may have told him you were overheard saying you intended to visit the manor.”
Elloven balked, but maybe she had said it out loud. The night she’d stayed in Oldcastle wasn’t entirely clear to her. “And he wanted to deny me my revenge?”
“He wanted to spare you the inhumanity of it.”
“Why?”
“Are you truly asking?”
She retreated. It was a lot to think through, and she wasn’t even fully awake yet. “Is this what you wanted to talk about?”
Sesto nudged his tea aside and folded his hands over the table. “I’m risking a friendship that means as much to me as my love for Daire, so I hope you’ll understand everything I say to you now is absolutely and completely true, because I would never risk something irreplaceable for a lie. Will you hear me out?”
She turned her hands up in tired affirmation.
“I’m aware of what tore the two of you apart. I’d never belittle your pain or the shock you must have felt, must still feel, at what he’s done, but it would be an offense against the Guardians themselves for you to live with a half-truth.”
Elloven shook her head. “What are you saying? He didn’t kill my brother?”
“I wish I could say he didn’t, Elloven,” Sesto said. “Gennady was the first to learn what the Edevanes had been up to and, for months, slowly and discreetly snuck the girls and the children out of the cellar and set them up with new lives.”
“Yes, this I know.”
“He knew how Jesstin tortured himself over their actions and didn’t want him to suffer further. He also knew Jesstin would ride to the manor and kill them both, so he said nothing. While no one would lament that outcome, their power and influence would demand justice be served, and Jesstin would have been locked away the rest of his days. If nothing else, the two owed a great deal of money to some very powerful people who would want to be made whole. So your brother did his work in secret, and Jesstin... Well, I know he can be daft, but when he’s keen on something, he won’t let it go. His suspicions led him to the fateful night he told you about.”
Little of Sesto’s explanation was new to her, but she let him speak.
“Jesstin’s memory of that night was fractured and unreliable until he saw the full truth of it in the Infinitum, during a trial he endured on his way to find you. We often bury our trauma, sometimes as penance for an act we could not otherwise live with. That night, he followed Gennady to the manor and heard for himself how dire matters were. But he misread the situation because he’d worked himself into such a stir with his suspicions that he wasn’t in the right mind at all. He thought Gennady’s secretiveness was complicity. And so, in the midst of a heated exchange, he shoved Gennady, hard enough to send him across the room but not hard enough to kill him—or shouldn’t have been, but your brother’s head struck a table and his neck broke. He died immediately.”
Elloven’s hands crossed over her mouth. Sesto was now the second person to describe her brother’s death in explicit terms, and she’d never get used to that.
“In the Conductor’s tests, he saw the details he’d suppressed, as well as some he couldn’t have known. Gennady conspiring to help, not hurt. Gennady trying to explain. The reality that the poor girl, Bellessa, had died not by Gennady’s hand but by her own.”
“So... So you’re telling me—” Her voice choked. Hot tears slid down her cheeks. “His impulsiveness is why my brother is dead?”
“Castien and Sestinn Edevane are why Gennady is dead, Elloven. Never, ever lose sight of how it all begins and ends with them. I won’t excuse Jesstin’s hotheadedness that night, but it came from a place of unfathomable revulsion at the horrors done by his own kin. The terror, deep in his soul, of thinking he was just like them. He asked me, when we were on the road to Rivenholde, about how he should tell you. He wondered if you’d be more hurt by the act, or that your brother was guilty of the same crimes as the men who had hurt you.
“He’d spent the next two years continuing Gen’s work, which I know because I helped. For every three we rescued, we’d discover one more we didn’t know about. Those monsters churned through girls like it was nothing.” Sesto stopped for a moment. “Jesstin is still obsessed with saving those girls. He doesn’t think I know this, but he donates a significant portion of his own earnings to helping these young women.” He sighed. “Though after last night, we can all safely say it’s done.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to think, Sesto.” Elloven’s face furrowed in anguish, and more cursed tears flowed. Always the tears. They never ended. “Tell me what I’m supposed to think. Please. Please tell me.”
“You know I cannot,” he said gently. “But now you have the full read of the situation. It is yours to decide what to do with it, and I’ve said what I needed to say. Ah, but there is one more thing, and this, I believe, will offer you some modicum of comfort.”
Elloven sniffled. “All right.”
“Jesstin told you Gennady visited him after his death? Rather frequently.”
She nodded.
“I suspected in the beginning it was an authentic haunting. Had our share in the Reliquary. They’re nothing special.” Sesto chuckled as he glanced aside in thought. “But it was Jesstin’s guilt and his power as a necromancer that kept Gennady from moving on. After Jesstin’s experiences with you in the netherworld, and his confession, the tether disappeared. And now Gennady has moved on and is finally at peace, not in the Infinitum but in the place beyond, because if no one has told you, Jesstin did succeed in freeing the dead before he saved you. He waited hours to watch them leave, taking years away from him here.”
