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k_a_webb“How did you come to that conclusion?” Ash asked, as someone new stepped into the room.
Kestrel kept her attention focused on Ash, strangely certain that he wouldn’t let anyone hurt her, even though she wasn’t entirely sure that she was right. “It’s not hard, Ash,” the new arrival said, sounding amused. “You haven’t exactly been careful with what you were saying and neither was Kestrel. Being tired and stressed isn’t good for either of you.”
“Kestrel, this is Jasper. Jasper, you met Kestrel before, but she was asleep then, so now you can meet her properly.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Kestrel.” He still sounded amused, although he seemed more wary of her than he was expecting, when she couldn’t actually do anything to him. “Ash was never going to be sensible when it came to you, because of his sister.”
“Mina?” Kestrel asked. “What happened to her?”
The look of surprise both of the mages in her room gave her was unexpected. “How do you know about Mina? She wasn’t born until after Father left the Hollow.”
“My ability to overhear conversations I wasn’t meant to is something I will always be grateful for. Father mentioned getting a letter from Uncle, telling him about the arrival of a new baby girl, even though by that point Uncle had about nine children… and that’s something your probably don’t know about, because they were all sent from Ildieu before you were born and Uncle, as far as I know, was told not to tell you about them.”
“He never did. Father’s still out there and now I can’t help thinking that he’ll arrive to help at the solstice, the same way your brothers will.” Ash sighed. “How many conversations did you manage to overhear?”
“More than I realised.” Kestrel bit her lip. “There are certain things I don’t know I know until you say something and then it comes back to me, as though I didn’t need to remember it until now.” Their eyes met. “I’m sorry, for telling you things that I probably shouldn’t, but would you tell me about Mina? Before you said anything about her I had this hope that one day I might meet her and we could talk about being the only daughters of mage fathers.”
“You’ll never meet Mina, Kestrel.” Ash glanced at Jasper, who stepped forward and put a hand on Ash’s shoulder. “Father taught her how to be a mage, even though it was something he kept saying he shouldn’t be doing, and she made a mistake one afternoon, not long after she started learning about how to study the past. She went too far back, something she had been warning against doing, because going too far back… well, there are times when it will just hurt, but she wanted to go back to the time when Ildieu was created. I tried to convince her not to, but she wouldn’t listen to me. As far as she was concerned I was always too careful.
“She made sure that Father wasn’t around, because she knew he’d be able to feel what she was doing if he was close enough, before trying. The crystal she had was the only one we took of Mother’s when we left, as Father told me it was unlikely we’d ever see her again, so we took something with us, in order for me to remember her. I don’t know why she didn’t come with us, but I always hoped the time would come when we’d met again and I could get to know her properly, rather than just knowing her thanks to Father’s stories of her – we left Ildieu before I was old enough to make any real memories of her or of the rest of our family. Now that I’ve found out that this might all have been part of some plan our fathers concocted I’m beginning to think that we left then for a reason.” He shook his head. “Mina was an accident, apparently.
“Father met someone else, someone who wasn’t Mother, and they had a relationship. Mina was the result of that relationship. I know, even though she was an accident, Father adored her. He’d always wanted another child, while Mother hadn’t, so to have Mina…” Ash bit his lip. “I remember him being happier than I’d ever seen him before when he realised he had a daughter. After she destroyed herself, and the crystal, by doing something so stupid, he kept telling me, in a way that made me think he was telling himself, that everything happened for a reason. Mina’s still alive and he’s still looking after he, but she isn’t my sister any more. There’s nothing of who she was left. Father said there might be a way to fix her, one that hasn’t been used in at least a millennia, but he won’t tell me exactly what it is.
“I’m not certain he knows. It’s something he’s heard of or read about, but not something he actually really understands.” He studied Kestrel. “He told me, before I left the Ildieu, that I needed to convince you, or another female mage, to reach black. Preferably you, although he didn’t tell me why, and now I’m beginning to realise that there are a lot of questions that I should have asked – I just didn’t have any idea what they were at the time. Could he have been telling me to focus on you because we’re family? Or is it something about you, as it’s obvious that Falcon wants you here, otherwise he would have tried to get you out by now?” He sighed. “I now have even more questions that I don’t have the answer to and I have no idea where to get them… apart from Falcon.”
“He might tell you.” Kestrel slumped against the wall, wondering how she’d found herself in such an unexpected position. Instead of sitting on a bed in a magicless room with a mage who should be her enemy he was her cousin and someone she’d been told, several times before, to trust if she ever met. “Tell him that you know who he is, that our fathers planned for this to happen, and he might be honest with you, but I don’t know for certain. It might not be time for him to be honest with you, if we’re right, so I just… I’m not sure what we should do. We might be wrong.”
“You’re not.” Jasper sat on the bed, next to Ash. “There are things that I heard, before I had total control over my ability to hear other people’s thoughts, that are starting to make sense now that the two of you are in a room together. I’m certain that I wasn’t meant to hear them. Not if this plan is going to work. I also don’t think you were meant to work things out this quickly, but that’s something they never had any control over. You both need to talk to Falcon, tell him what you know, and then the three of you need to work out where to go from here. Lars already knows, the three of us know, and, from what I’ve overheard, there are three people in the Moon who know as well, although I don’t think they’re supposed to.”
“Falcon mentioned something about the Moon, but I didn’t hear much of what he was saying. It was another thing he didn’t want me to know. I just know that he was worried, because the Moon seemed to be turning against the Hollow, which was something that hadn’t been prepared for.” Kestrel shrugged. “Even though I realised it was unusual I didn’t know that it was something that I should have been paying more attention to.”
“No, but now you’ve told me I can.” Jasper smiled. “I thought having you here would turn out to be a huge mistake, Kestrel, and it appears I already need to apologise for being wrong. Thanks to you we’ve learnt more about Falcon that we ever would have done if someone hadn’t grabbed you.”
“Even though it was a mistake.”
“It was something I mentioned after I’d had a long conversation with Falcon that went nowhere. Kidnapping you, or someone else close to him, seemed to be the only option to make him listen, so I said that’s what we should do.” Ash laughed. “I scribbled it down on one of the chalk boards we have in the meeting room, in big letters, and I think someone took it to heart. When was first told that you were here… well, you know how I treated you, and now I’m glad. I might actually have an ally within the Hollow now, someone who’s always been my ally and simply pretending that he wasn’t, because of some scheme our fathers came up with that may or may not work.”
“So what’s the next step?”
“You need to stay in here for at least a couple of weeks, although I can make sure that it’s not too boring in here for you, because we can’t let anyone else know what’s happening. Especially as you haven’t been trained in how to hide your thoughts from people.” Ash ran a hand through his hair. “I’ll start by bringing up a couple of journals, from early in the history of the Gardens, written by the first mages to be born in Ildieu and raised as what they were. When I do that I’ll bring up the crystal I use to communicate with Falcon. It works even in a magicless room, which is why I have it, so we can talk to him about what he thinks we should do.” He glanced down at the bed. “Although I don’t think he’s going to be honest with us it’s worth a try.”
“He’s much more likely to be if it’s the both of you,” Jasper said. “If you want, Kestrel, I can begin teaching you how to build blocks in your mind. They’re basic magic, something that every young mage should learn, but we seem to have become too connected to the level system to actually do such a thing, even though that’s something I’ve been trying to convince people to change got a long time.”
“I remember you.” Kestrel looked at Jasper, wondering how she hadn’t recognised him before. “You were at the Hollow.”
Jasper nodded. “Falcon was a friend of mine and then he became the leader of the Hollow. When that happened… he stopped being Falcon. All that mattered was being the leader – he asked me to become one of his advisers, and if I had I might have known about all this before, but I turned him down. I said I wasn’t ready for that, I was too young, but it wasn’t long after that I heard rumours of a young black mage who was beginning to make his way up the ranks in the Gardens, and I decided that I wanted to work with him to change Ildieu.” He smiled. “Even though I was one of Falcon’s friends I had no idea that you were his sister. It wasn’t something he ever talk about.”
“We never talked about each other. Father told us that in order to protect both ourselves and each other from any enemies of the Hollow it was much better for me, and for him, not to think of Falcon as my brother. I didn’t know then what Father was so afraid of, because the houses in Ildieu all accepted the leader of the Hollow the one who made the choices for the city as well, but it must have been the mages outside of the city, and when I look back to my childhood there were all these weird things he said that never made any sense and I just accepted it as Father being Father.”
“You didn’t know to think otherwise.” Ash gently squeezed her hand and she found herself smiling at him. “If you’d have known what you know now you might have seen things differently, but then you were just a child who had no idea of what was happening in Ildiue or outside.”
“There were things I did know, Ash. Everyone said Father had killed Uncle, so he didn’t have any competition, and I never said to anyone that they were wrong, that Father and Uncle had planned for him to leave, with his son, because it was something that needed to happen. Now that I know I might have entirely destroyed their preparations I’m glad that I didn’t, but I always felt guilty for not sticking up for him. Especially when he died.”
“If he is dead.”
Kestrel rubbed her forehead with her free hand, wishing that the headache she still had would go away, because she needed to be able to think. “I hate secrets.” She bit her lip. “Get the crystal. I need to talk to Falcon.”
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.
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Date: 2014-04-22 04:00 am (UTC)