Mathias and Emrys had been fighting about his mother. Everyone said her death had been a terrible accident, that she’d taken a tumble down the stairs, but Emrys had accused Mathias of murdering her. It didn’t match Jesstin’s recollection of the relationship Emrys and Mathias had shared, which had been strained but not estranged. If Emrys believed Mathias had murdered Nara Skylark, he would never have forgiven him.
Unless.
Unless Emrys didn’t remember that day either.
Jesstin had been too little to recall the fight, the accusations, but Emrys would’ve been a teenager.
A long shadow crept over him. “I don’t suppose you know why we’re both here?”
Jesstin quickly pushed himself from the dirt to his knees, then to his feet. It wasn’t a conscious choice not to look up. It felt like something was shoving his head away. “Please say you’re an illusion.”
“I was helping a farmer in the Forty-Ninth when I was pulled here. An eccentric woman in a hideous suit said I was needed for a trial. For you.” Mathias stepped closer. “What trial, Jesstin?”
Jesstin held a hand out to protect his distance. “Stop.” He shook it at Mathias. “No closer.”
Mathias’s slow exhale was joltingly wistful as he shuffled through the moonlit garden. “I never expected to see this place again.”
Jesstin never expected to see him again, but as his wits returned, he recalled Mathias had been one of the three faces in the mirror, and he’d felt nothing but confidence he could handle whatever the especular threw at him. But that was before he’d heard Emrys’s hysterical accusations. “You took that day from all of us, didn’t you? From me? From Emrys?”
“I had no choice.” Mathias made a chiding sound with his tongue. “No, why lie? I had choices and I made them. I chose to kill your mother, and I chose to keep the truth from you children, and you all paid a terrible cost, but how was I to know that then? When I heard of your fate in Mythgarde...”
“You were always a coward, Mathias. My entire childhood is full of dark spots. Full of emptiness.” Jesstin’s eyes remained defiantly closed. He stumbled as he found his footing. “Rhiain nearly lost her fucking mind because of it. Emrys followed you like a little lapdog, aching for your attention... probably wondering why he was so damned desperate for it to begin with, and you must have loved it.”
“And you felt unloved.” Mathias sighed. “I tried to love you. I did love you. But I couldn’t disentangle my hatred for Nara from my affection for the sweet, lonely boy who was caught in the middle of the whole mess. I wanted Sestinn to suffer, but I couldn’t escape him, not when every time I looked at you, I saw him. Him and her. Keeping you was as much a punishment for me as it was for them. Rhiain was right to take you away from Riverhelm Citadel when you were ten. You’re better for it.” He sighed again. “It’s my fault you ended up in Mythgarde, and you could say the blame for your death there falls to me too.”
“I’m not dead, you sack of shit,” Jesstin retorted. His face twitched with the threat of tears, but he would not cry. Not there. Not in front of him. But it wasn’t only memories Mathias had stolen. That day had been the last time he’d spoken to his mother. “You don’t get to take my memories and the credit for my choices. When they told me you’d died, I just went about my day. Didn’t think of you at all until you showed up here, and I won’t think of you again after you leave.”
“I expect not,” Mathias said evenly. “You’ll come to terms with your own death soon enough. I’m told many start their tenure here in denial.”
“I’m not dead.” Jesstin shook his head. Why was he arguing with a monster? “Rhiain would never speak about any of it. She’d never... never answer my questions about you, about Mama. Said the past didn’t matter, when we both knew it mattered enough for you to steal it from us.” He laughed, dark and brittle. “You killed my mother because you were a disgusting, jealous madman who didn’t care about anyone but himself.”
“I was all of those things, yes.”
Mathias was being far too agreeable. Deny, deny, deny had always been his way. Obscure. Redirect. Manipulate. Now he had the gall to be so flippant? So casual in his acknowledgment of his crimes? “You don’t get to act like this! You don’t have the right!” Jesstin shrieked. “Your sins were not ‘washed away’ when you slipped that rope over your neck. You’ve destroyed so much and paid nothing. There’s been no retribution, not for us. Not for my mother. Not for anyone. You’re a farmer now? Must be lovely, Mathias, to enjoy such a peaceful life after running wreckage through all of ours.”
Jesstin glimpsed Mathias’s boots moving into a row of roses.
“I’ve guessed what my purpose is here. What your trial is,” Mathias said.
“Nothing you say holds any interest for me.”
“Forgiveness is never tidy, is it?”
The audacity of the insinuation was enough to break whatever force had been keeping Jesstin’s eyes from finding him. His head whipped so hard, it hurt. “You think I’d forgive you? You think you deserve that?”
“Deserve it? No, no.” Mathias faced away, his hands looped and resting at the small of his back. He wore the Skylark cloth, an insignificant detail that was unexpectedly painful to see. “But whatever brought you here requires something of you. Witnessing this day, this moment again... What else could it be? Trials aren’t meant to be easy, or they wouldn’t be trials.”
“You...” Jesstin’s nose flared as crystal clarity turned to incandescent rage, shooting from limb to limb, gut to skull. He heaved his anger through his teeth. “My three darkest truths. Of course. Of course one would be this. Of course it would involve you. I can’t escape you anywhere I go, can I? Fucking bloody hell.”
“If you fail?”
“Don’t pretend to care, Mathias.” Jesstin shook his head upward. Everything with Mathias was unhealed and still so raw, and he hadn’t even thought about the man’s death. When he was ten and Rhiain had taken him into her own home, when she had been freshly married and starting her own family, he’d had so many questions. His early life was all disconnected, nonsensical flashes that left him confused and angry. She’d only been trying to protect him when she’d said they’d all suffered enough, that it was time to move forward, but would things have been different if he’d been allowed to confront Mathias himself? Years of burying his feelings had led him to exactly where he was standing.
“Had Mathias not been such a cruel and spineless man, your paths would never have again crossed with the woman you’re here to save.” It was his mother again, but this was no stolen memory. It was as real as seeing her at the bazaar in Rivenholde—and just as gutting. “Pains are lessons. You’re here for a woman whom you cannot conceive you might love because you believe you don’t even know what love is. But did you not have all the love you required, in Rhiain, in Emrys, in Asterin, in my beautiful grandchildren? And has that love not been the heart of your courage now? Mathias’s treachery is his to bear, and he needs to bear it, for once. He’s already taken so much from you. Why offer him more?”
Jesstin strained through a dry swallow. His throat was so parched, but nothing could quench his thirst.
He’d been telling himself this was his mother, but he remembered so little of the woman he’d spoken to in the market, the one whispering to him now. Mathias sweeping their memories into a neat little bin was only part of it. Jesstin had been so young, they weren’t even referring to him as “child” yet. The gentle redhead of his mind’s image was a fantasy, an oiled portrait in the halls of Riverhelm Citadel... a dream his heart had turned into something real. But even if all his memories could be restored, he’d never know for sure what was truth and what he’d created to fill the loss of it.
