“Is it her?” Mathias asked. The shuffling of his boots screeched between Jesstin’s ears like an old, splintering chair skating across a floor. “She’s here, isn’t she?”
Jesstin pressed both of his hands to a wall that felt real, as real as the sweat coating his palms—as the soul glowing just a little less bright than before against his chest. If a vision could be so visceral, what distinguished it from reality? In his dreams, he knew he was dreaming.
“Jessie, my anger followed me into a world between worlds and then I landed here. I could tell you all the lessons I’ve learned while waiting for my anger to fade, but the only one that really matters is the sad but inevitable truth that anger is only a cloak for pain.”
“Am I right? Jesstin, is your mother here?”
“It’s a rationalization for stasis. You aren’t angry with Mathias; you’re wounded by him, and you wear these wounds like armor, armor with gaping, rusted holes that cannot be repaired with more rage. The holes cannot be repaired by Mathias at all. They were never his to mend.”
“So I’m the one with a problem? It’s my fault? This—” Jesstin’s mouth slammed shut as a sickness welled up with the word he couldn’t say. Rejection. “And you? You deserved what he did to you?”
“If we only received what we deserved, who can say what the world would be like? Not the peaceful meadow you’re imagining.”
“Are you hearing me? Jesstin, I’ve been searching for her. I must talk to her. Do you understand?” Mathias’s hand gripped his shoulder.
Jesstin spun and shoved him, the scream rolling ahead of his words. “Don’t you ever fucking touch me!”
Mathias lifted both hands and backed off with a stricken, wounded pucker.
“You would look at me like that? I’m the predator?” Jesstin swept his gaze over a man he hadn’t seen in almost a decade, except in passing. There’d always been a patheticness about him, something not easy to put into words, though Jesstin had once heard one of the kitchen staff call it weak about the eyes. Only a weak man could be the catalyst for so much destruction and still see himself as the victim of it.
For all the wreckage left by his birth father, Sestinn, the one thing Jesstin could say for the man was he left nothing to misunderstanding. He was a proud sadist. He wanted others to know what he was capable of.
It was in these differences that Jesstin’s view of Mathias reshaped into something that made, for all its confusion, some sense. He’d watched all sorts of men filter in and out of the Azure, the many facades they wore, but he’d also caught them in the moments in between, when they thought no one was looking—their desperation and sadness, clinging to whatever narrative best ensured their survival.
Evil was deliberate. Sestinn was deliberate.
Mathias was spineless. The cowering bastard had never questioned his role in the misery of himself and others. Both men had coveted Nara and then destroyed her. Neither had loved her. Sestinn’s lack of remorse was appalling, but somehow more insidious was Mathias’s refusal to see himself honestly.
Jesstin realized he’d been waiting ten years for an apology he would never get—and shouldn’t need.
“I don’t think that about you, no.” Mathias’s voice retreated with him as he took another step away. “Why are you here? To punish me? Remind me of my offenses, so I’m forced to relive them, again, as if I haven’t... haven’t lived with them for years?”
Jesstin shook his head at the stones, laughing. “That honor is yours alone, Mathias.”
“How you loathe me.”
“It feels better when I do.” Jesstin’s mother had been quiet for a while, but he felt her love like a sacred flame. “Even in death, you’ll never change. That’s sad, Mathias. I’d rather spend the rest of my life in prison, in penitence, than exist freely in ignorance.” He emptied his lungs. “You’ll never find peace this way. You want my forgiveness? It’s yours, though I can’t guess what good it will do you.”
A gust of air knocked Jesstin back. His feet swept from under him, and his arms flailed as he was carried away from Mathias, from the old days of the keep he’d been born in, from the only memory of his that had ever been restored.
Around him, beneath him, and above him was all inky darkness.
When he was confident he wasn’t going to freefall into another murky abyss, he sat up.
His first challenge was over. He’d survived. Seeing Mathias again like that... returning to a memory... Who would he have been had he remembered who he was?
He kneaded the heels of his palms against his eyes and weighed the irony of wishing the memory had stayed buried, when his entire life had been a response to the theft of his past. He’d never forget the agony in Emrys’s shrill pitch. It was embedded in him now, alongside Mathias’s quest for absolution without contrition.
Jesstin’s hands fell away and, with them, the darkness. He was sitting at a table in the Marlow District of Riverchapel, in the center of the market. Gennady sat across from him, chewing animatedly through whatever he was saying, which Jesstin couldn’t hear. The moment was still forming.
The table was the one the boys chose every time. It was tradition. Damn near superstition. And they always ordered the same: the sausage of the day cased in fresh, sour roll bread. If they arrived early enough, they’d also get a bowl of the string greens soaked in Madame Teller’s famous cream sauce.
“And I told him, Jess, I told him it would happen. You know I told him. You were there, right? You can defend me. He doesn’t listen to a damn word though. Never did. What did he expect, that Bertie wouldn’t get revenge?” Gennady’s cheeks puffed in a quiet belch. He paused to swallow. “Pass me the pitcher, would you?”
Jesstin numbly nudged the ale across the wooden surface. Gennady was gossiping, a regular occurrence, but the dim look in his eyes didn’t quite match his enthusiasm. He kept on and finished his story with the same energy, but his heart wasn’t in it.
With Mathias, he’d been physically unable to look at him at the start of the trial, but the opposite was true with Gennady. He couldn’t stop looking at him. His heart ached for the past—pined, really, if men could pine for their friends, and he wasn’t sure if they could or not. He missed Gennady. He missed their comradery, their trust. His betrayal had wounded him deeper than any cut Mathias had made, and he understood now that he’d never healed from it. The hurt was just as fresh. The blade still buried.
