Cinders of Magic

Chapter 6-2

“You make a trip of hundreds of miles sound boring.” Gillan looked about to chuckle but stopped. “Who are we?”

“I’ve brought your mortal enemy. He wanted to pay his respects as well.”

“I’m sure.”

“We need to speak about other matters,” Alara said. She drank half her glass of whiskey in a single gulp, trying her damndest to give no sign of how much it burned her throat and stomach going down. She hated the sensation, but it did wonders to loosen the knot in her gut.

“We do.” Gillan picked up his own glass, ready to drink but paused once more. He swirled the amber liquid a moment before setting it down. “I honestly didn’t know if you would return.”

“I didn’t want to,” she admitted. “Lords, I hate to say that. I did not want to come back to this house, but I had to know. What happened to Hessaux?”

“He died honorably.” Gillan pulled the spectacles from his face and rubbed his eyes. They were red and bloodshot under his glasses. “They said that as if it should make it better. I suppose it does, in a way.

“There was a battle to the far north near a lake town called Orailse. Hessaux was there to assist with an operation that was occurring, though, of course, I was told nothing about it. The business of the Adjudicators is nothing that I have ever been privy to.”

“You should have never given him that ring,” Alara said. She drank the rest of the whiskey, not bothering to hide her disgust at the drink.

“There was no choice.”

“As you’ve said before. But there was a choice. You could have sent it back to the family that rightfully owns it instead of forcing it on your sickly eldest son. Hessaux wasn’t even a channeler.”

“That ring belongs to this family.” Gillan slammed his glass hard enough onto the desk to send a c***k up through its side. There it was, an old, scratching wound torn open to bleed anew. “Is that why you’ve come?”

“I told you why I came.” Alara forced her eye to twitch in a show of shaded anger. “I’m only stating the obvious.”

“If you think your grandfather wants anything less than the destruction of this house, then you are blind. You can tell him that when next he tries to convince you to steal the ring for him.” Gillan settled back into his seat.

“It belongs to the Di’Vinincia family. Return the ring to its rightful family and rid this house of the cursed thing.” Alara tried to reach for her father’s hand, but he pulled away.

“Now you talk of curses again.”

“Hessaux knew it too.” Alara pulled a fold of letters from her pocket and set them on the desk in front of her father. “There is something wrong with that ring. Be rid of it.”

Gillan reached a tentative hand forwards and took the letters. The man’s eyes dashed across the pages faster than Alara could trust, and he read the sixteen pages of correspondence in five minutes. He looked back to his daughter and took the time to read the letters in full once more.

Father and daughter both sat in silence when he finished his reading. The count set the letters down with the same reverence Alara had kept them neat and stored for the past year and a half since she had received the very first. The clock in the corner ticked away seconds that folded into minutes while emotion played across the man’s face. He sighed and dropped his eyes to the stack of correspondence once more, eyes too unfocused to read the damning words there.

“It was the first thing they brought back you know,” Gillan said. He pulled a drawer open on his desk and removed a small velvet box. “A flying man came to our door and returned it to us. We didn’t even receive his body for fifteen more days after that.”

“When was this?” Alara asked.

“A month and a half ago.”

Alara felt her anger flare at the words. A heat that lasted for no longer than a second before it cooled away to only a dull aching in her chest. She wanted that anger. Wanted it terribly, but she forced it away. The situation before her was too precarious to allow emotion to take her.

She studied her father closely and could not find the man she had known as a child. She saw the space beneath his shirt where once he had been able to fill it out. His cheeks had sunken since last they had met. Alara knew, if she pushed him, she could get him to return the ring right then and there.

“Well then.” Alara reached forwards and retrieved her letters from her late brother. “You have an ask to make.”

Gillan pulled the brown hair from his face and tucked it behind his ears. “I do.”

“Ask then.”

“I’m sure you’ve guessed it already.” Gillan stowed his papers away in the drawer of his desk and retrieved a single document. Gillan Moritt had already signed the bottom and marked it with his seal, a serpent’s head. Alara doubted he had waited for the ink to dry before signing and sealing the bottom when he first wrote it some time ago. “Leave the Di’Vinincia name behind and take Moritt. Become an Adjudicator for this family so that we can be free of the hound that stalks this house. Give us the protection that we need for this family to thrive.”

It was something she had long suspected since before leaving the Haivelands in the north that her mother had gifted her own father after she had been awarded them for meritorious service during the Haive campaign. The Di’Vinincia name was sparkling silver, passed to her through her maternal lineage while her brothers’ had been bestowed their father’s name. The ask was a simple thing, done on occasion in the houses of high nobles when one name carries more prestige than another. Moritt was unknown, the name of a man that had bought his way into his position. There was no way to see it as other than a step backward.

Alara read the document over. She started to suspect that an actual calligrapher had been hired to write the flowing words that swam over the vellum. Not every day did the granddaughter of an Archduke Adjudicator forfeit her noble standing; the document would need to be sufficiently ostentatious.

“As it is, father, we are of equal title, count to countess, and I would appreciate you treating me as such.”

“It is a courtesy title that you bear only.”

“And you would have me reduce that to what...viscountess?”

“Is that so terrible?” Gillan rolled his eyes. “Is this your true worry?”

“No,” Alara said simply. She tossed the document back to the desk.

“No?”

“What are you offering me other than familial obligation and a cursed artifact that devours the mind of whoever possesses it. Give it to Agillan if you are so set against returning it to those better able to handle it.”

“You aren’t serious.” Gillan shook his head and stepped away from the desk. He found a portrait on the wall to stare at. It was of her mother; the woman was still young and standing in a virgin white uniform with her infamous red hair draping her shoulder, the Red Rose in all her glory.

“Give something like that to Agillan. It is difficult enough to keep the boy’s indiscretions in check now. You would have him given authority on level with the king?”

“You have my answer.” Alara pulled herself away from the desk and the cursed ring that sat in the closed box on top of it.

She saw her father wince at her words but remain turned away. Her short-lived anger flowed away from her, and she moved to the door.

“If you don’t take it,” Gilan said softly, forcing her to stop halfway out the door, “Jira will have to.”

“I know.”

Alara left her father’s study. She burst out the back of the estate to the garden behind it. Workers fled from her path as she headed for the far western corner of the green works. A mausoleum waited for her there. Inside of it, she found the body of her brother.

Strong incense had been left burning over Hessaux as he rested on a granite slab in the stone enclosure. He did not look like a man dead for nearly two months. Something had been done to his body to keep the rot away, and his face had been made up so well that Alara could almost fool herself into thinking that he was merely sleeping; he never could sleep on his back, however.

It wasn’t a real thing until she rested her hand on his face. Under her hand, his skin was cool as a stone in the shade. No hint of the life that once filled him so vibrantly remained. The pain in her stomach expanded to a boulder. It pulled her to her knees on the floor as cold and hard as her brother. She couldn’t help but grab onto him as she had done since she was a child. Her arms shook as she clung desperately to his lifeless hand.

Tears refused to come.

Alara remained in the mausoleum until night came, sitting on the floor with her back to the slab of stone that held the corpse of her brother. She did not care for the blanket that the unfamiliar lady’s maid brought her long after the sun had set. When morning came, she somehow found the strength to stand and the conviction to return to the suffocation of the house. She pulled herself from the ground and headed back towards the foreboding building. Around her, people worked to make sure that everything was set properly in place. The burial was to be that day.