She nodded and mustered some patience. “I trust you. I’ll try.”
He raised an arm toward the other side of the room. “I had some of the other cider brought up while you were sleeping. Not the lingonberry. If you get thirsty.”
Elloven smiled at his thoughtfulness, especially with how scattered he was. “Thank you. I’ll try some in a bit.”
Jesstin adjusted his posture. “First, if I could have brought her to you, El, I would have. She didn’t tell me these things. She showed me through some magic that exposed the past, but it was all over the place. It was like watching a play while drunk on backyard brandywine. I saw conversations... interactions. Most happened long before you or she were born. I don’t remember falling asleep, and I’m not convinced I was even awake when it happened, but when I came to my senses, she was gone.”
“Did she say why...” Elloven flattened her mouth with a contrite look and raised a hand. “Sorry.”
“Why she hadn’t sought out her daughter herself?” Jesstin asked. “It’s not that she didn’t want to. Someone or something cursed her from ever being near you again. She waited for me because of you. She’d been waiting a long time.”
“Who would do that?”
“I can only tell you what she showed me. Guessing would be careless.”
“Yes,” she said, quiet.
“I can’t remember what you do and don’t know. If you’ve heard it before, just let me talk, so I don’t lose my place, and I promise you can ask as many questions as you want when I’m done.”
Elloven nodded.
“First of all, ‘prominence’ is a little more complicated than Estelar let on. You already know each curia has a house of magic they specialize in, and that they can dip their toes in others, like Taven with his healing, but they can’t practice it the way someone with prominence can. But it wasn’t always like that. At one time, the curias didn’t even exist. There was no such thing as prominence because everyone could tap into any house of magic. The Seven Sisters were outposts, not separate communities. Most of the people lived in Ilynglass and traveled between worlds regularly. All very serene and democratic, right? But you can imagine what might happen when thousands of people with that much power... There were wars fought, borders drawn, other predictable chaos. They were on the brink of annihilation. An emergency council was formed, and they decided the best option was to give every citizen the choice of one magic to keep. The choice was binding, and they sealed it with a mark of their new prominence, which was passed along through their descendants. So the Sisters were split, the curias formed, and magic was broken up. But something else happened, and everything that’s happened since started there. There was someone on the council, an extremist who believed they weren’t doing enough, who’d been saying throughout all of this that none of what they’d implemented would work unless the portails between worlds were closed, and the people of the curias barred from ever going back to the source of their magic. No one listened, and he decided he didn’t need the council’s approval. It’s not clear to me how, but he’s the one who closed the doors between worlds, and it seems like what happened here, in the Infinitum, was caught up in it. Maybe they didn’t know how to be selective and just closed them all to be safe? I don’t know.
“Most of those who’d agreed with the initial plan were, as you can imagine, pretty fucking unhappy about being barred from their homeland. There were insurgents in every curia and some unsuccessful uprisings, never anything too serious, but over the next generation, those sentiments gathered momentum, and a new order was formed. They made another council, Defenders of the Glass Tree, inviting individuals from every curia who shared their goal of reuniting the worlds, and there were thousands who joined, but none of them knew how to do it. But at this first council, the silver tongues of Eversong brought ten of their best storytellers. All ten were separated, and the council hammered them with question after question, hoping for an answer to the problem. On most questions, the storytellers were divided. But on one question, they all said the same thing—the exact same thing.”
Jesstin cleared his throat. “The Silver Deca, as these ten prophets came to be known, claimed that the one who had cursed the portails had a very specific pedigree that made it possible. Think one in a trillion. There hadn’t been anyone like them born since, but through a selective and intentional breeding plan, it was possible to create another. The child wouldn’t just have all the curias in their blood, which isn’t uncommon, they’d have the perfect mix of all seven. Not all seven equally split either. There was a particular importance put on time and chaos... The math seemed complicated. It could be anyone, many people even, it was all about the perfect combination of ancestry. This person would not only be able to reopen the portails; they’d also be able to recombine the magic.
“The process was overseen by the silver tongues of Eversong, who could see the many paths available and guide the leaders of this breeding program down the right ones. But then the silver tongues produced a list of thirty children across the curias whose descendancy was most likely to produce this individual, and all of those children were kidnapped from their beds and placed in a hidden encampment in Skyfire. The silver tongues claimed that between their sight into possible futures and Skyfire’s blood magic, there’d be no doubt of their success. As soon as each child came of age, they formally entered the program, and... What happened next was exactly what you’re thinking. When they aged out of childbearing, they were murdered. Couldn’t have them going home and telling everyone else how Eversong and Skyfire were imprisoning and breeding children, could they?”
Elloven knew where he was going, and she needed to hear it, but she almost wished he’d stop there.
“Hundreds of years went by, and nothing happened other than a trail of dead children. So many generations had passed that the insurgents eventually fissured and formed two new groups. The first were zealots from Eversong who’d never wavered from their belief. They rebranded themselves as the Disciples of the Reunification. The second group, which became the Champions of Truth and Light, or Truthers, mostly made up of Skyfire rebels, believed the first group was keeping secrets from the rest of them. They believed the child had already been born, and the program was trying to gain an advantage by consolidating power. After a spy network failed, they decided the only way to infiltrate this ‘cabal of liars’ was war, which went on for years and decimated the population. But the Disciples won, and the program continued.
“But the Disciples had been lying their asses off, the entire time, working with yet another covert group from Duskmaw and Ashwind, who had secretly joined the Disciples years before. The silver tongues had seen a future where reunification would lead to total annihilation of all the curias, which is essentially what the original guy who created this mess had said. No one had ever listened to their caution in the past, so they did what they could on their own to stop it. They managed the breeding program just well enough to maintain credibility, modifying the line slightly to keep it from succeeding. Skyfire never gave up trying to prove it, but they didn’t have the strength of force that the Disciples did.
“About a hundred years ago, Skyfire took a risk and appealed to some Rivenholde nobles to join the Truthers and find out what was really going on. They agreed the Disciples would only reveal the truth if forced, so they kidnapped important children from Eversong, Duskmaw, and Ashwind—children of their leaders, of prominent families. This would be like... like imagine the children of every steward, every lord, and the king himself taken. This was a pretty incendiary move, a declaration of war on another level.
“It was a punishment to their parents, a lure. Open your doors, prove we’re wrong, and we’ll release your children. If they complied, everyone would know the truth. If they refused, it would be another kind of truth, wouldn’t it? So everyone waited to see how the test would end. Would the Disciples put power above their own children? In the end, that was exactly what they did. They abandoned their children and refused to comply.
“From then on, the curias were split down hard lines. Eversong, Duskmaw, and Ashwind in the Disciples, Skyfire and Rivenholde in the Truthers. Rosedown and Grymwood stayed neutral, which I guess is what they’ve always done.”
Jesstin’s hands were a whorl of nervous energy as they supported his retelling. The entire time he’d been talking, he kept his focus trained just beyond her, like he was speaking to someone else.
“But Skyfire has the blood magic, right? And without the meddling from the Disciples, the Truthers were in full control of the process. They started a new breeding program with the offspring of the nobles, who were just sitting there anyway, and realized it didn’t take thousands of years to mix and match bloodlines. The pretors and curatrices who lost their children made more to replace them, but their lines thinned after such a loss, and over the next hundred years, even more were taken and brought into the program. Among them... you, Gen.” Jesstin paused. “And Taven.”
Elloven’s resentment had never edged so close to the surface. Esme had known all of this. There was no other reason for her to abduct the children otherwise. Elloven had a right to know how close she’d come to being “bred” with other children, and she certainly should have been told about it before returning to the place responsible. Laxius had had a clean opportunity to offer Elloven a full confession and had instead been egregiously evasive. Shioven didn’t escape her frustration either. Maybe this “curse” was real, maybe it wasn’t, but if Elloven were a mother, no magic existed that could keep her away from her child.
She was an orphan, and now she knew she always had been. It was another wound she and Jesstin shared.
“And you weren’t taken by the Truthers, Elloven. Estelar sent soldiers to Duskmaw to bring his brother’s children home and then handed you over himself, because by then he was the pretor of not just Rivenholde but the entire Truther movement. He spared Acheron because he wasn’t a candidate for the program. Estelar is the one who had Shioven killed. Where was Laxius, you might be wondering? I have no satisfying answer.”
Elloven didn’t know what to think. The Cry of the Ancestors had been a lie too.
“The Disciples eventually scried something worrying. They saw a little girl in the Truthers’ camp who would almost undoubtedly produce the child prophesied over two thousand years ago. There were four little boys in that camp who had equal odds of being the right mate for her. They couldn’t risk Skyfire or Rivenholde realizing how close they’d come, so they kept the information to their innermost circle. But it got out. The Truthers were ecstatic. They decided this little girl...” His nose flared. “That you would breed with all four, to leave nothing to chance. They wouldn’t wait a day longer than they had to. From the time you were around seven or eight, daily reports were made on whether you’d had your first moon flow. Some in Skyfire even tried to come up with a means of escalating the process. Thank the Guardians they never found one.”
Jesstin climbed from the bed and went to the table. He pressed his palms to the edges and bent over it before pouring some cider.
“Drink,” he said and handed a mug to her.
