8: Memory

Corvus paced, his saber knocking against his thigh.

He was almost out of time.

He peered down the narrow hall to make sure nobody had followed them. Thankfully, they were alone. Most of the other guardsmen, Petrov included, were elsewhere, celebrating the holiday night with spiced wine they had snuck in a service entrance.

Emrhys slumped, a heap of gray cloth and exhausted limbs.

“Emrhys, wake up!” Corvus whispered as he fought to stay upright, hand clenched to his gut.

Something had changed. Tonight, the wards were deafening. He was getting weaker.

“Corvus?”

He looked up at the sound of Emrhys’ voice, barely audible.

“I think I’m dying,” she whispered, surprised.

“I need for you to listen to me.”

She shuffled to the wall of the cell, her eyes shadowed and dull. “What is happening?”

“You must do as I say. Our lives depend upon it.” He winced in pain and watched her expression shift in sudden understanding.

“You really are like me. Affected by the wards,” she said.

“I am. I know more about what you are, and what I am—and this magic is killing me. Killing us both.” Corvus held his left hand to the mechanism that released the portal for prisoner transport. He muttered a magical command. Ugly, harsh—a word no honest person should know and which he’d learned his first week of his training. Corvus gritted his teeth against the pain as the seal on the door vaporized.

“Now,” he said and reached for Emrhys. He pulled her forward, heart hammering painfully in his chest. Failure meant more than his capture—it meant losing Emrhys. He refused to let that happen.

She stumbled to his side, murmuring under her breath. Fast and low, her own magical command words. She understood the situation and was working to help him. Corvus smiled as the air around both of them shivered with leymagic.

They might just have a chance.

“It’s a spell to hide our presence from others, at least a little. Where to?” Emrhys said, gazing up at him, alert and awake.

“The Priory. I have to help Lenore.”

“Lenore? I don’t understand.”

“This is her doing, our being able to leave. She had someone send spiced wine from the Priory to bribe the guards to wander off—and she can help us.”

He winced as Emrhys pried free, her fingers so cold from her leymagic that they burned his skin through his woolen uniform. She stared up at him, confusion blurring her features.

“What do you mean, Lenore can help us?”

“Please, there’s no time.” Corvus said, urging her to follow.

He could feel her doubling her pace to keep up, gaining strength the further they moved from the wards. Corvus steered Emrhys down the narrow stone stairs leading to hidden stables where prisoner transports departed. A black horse waited by the exit, free of jingling tack.

“Can you ride in this condition?” He asked as he fitted a simple rope bridle over the animal’s head.

“I can.” She looked up at him, expression now strangely calm.

Corvus helped her climb onto the heavy blanket that passed for a saddle, fighting not to let the sensation of her hand against his cloud his mind with thrills.

He shrugged off his uniform coat and hat. Corvus dug in a satchel that lay hidden under the mounting block, switching out his assassin’s gear for a nondescript brown coat and knitted cap. He swung into his seat in front of Emrhys, fishing in his trouser pocket. He popped the cork from the square-cut crystal bottle he’d retrieved and took a careful sip.

“Happy Melt-Moon, Emrhys. It’s the kind the Dominar herself uses,” he added, passing a bottle of rare restorative potion into Emrhys’ waiting hand.

“Happy Melt-Moon indeed. I’ve heard of these, but never seen one,” she said, and Corvus swore he heard a smile in her voice.

“Now, I’ll need you to hold tight to me.” He coaxed the horse into a brisk trot out onto the icy streets. As soon as he could, he diverted them from the thinning flow of late traffic and urged the horse to a faster pace, bearing south toward Halidom’s Way.

Emrhys spoke from behind him, her voice trembling.

“How and why is Lenore helping us? What is happening?” Her fingernails dug into his waist as she gripped him tighter, chilled and sharp. Emrhys leaned close enough for her breath to tickle his neck.

“Lenore told me you might not know the extent of your situation.”

“That does not surprise me.”

“Do you know what those phials were, the ones he entrusted to Lenore? The ones Felsin is after?” Corvus’s breath hitched at the pain in his own voice. He was actually angry—not at Emrhys, but at the ones who had put them through all of this.

“Soul-pieces Father promised to stitch back to me through pneuma-fusion someday, though I do not know how. He blew up everything we needed, all of his experiment notes when he died.”

“Is it news to you that your father also split my soul? That he shattered me, like you?”

Emrhys stilled behind him.

“I… I had hoped it was not the case. I was told I was the only one,” she said, voice breaking.

“There are more out there—orphans like me, mostly. Younger than me by years, and I’m not over twenty and two. The phials you thought you lost were not real, and they never existed to begin with. General Acton, Felsin—they are to this day looking for the phials to study them. To make more people like us, to learn more about what your father knew at such terrible cost.” He trembled, heating. “But the phials were never relevant.”

“What do you mean?”

“They drafted me for a secret project your father offered to General Acton, working behind the Dominar’s back. Soul fission for soldiers like me to make us obedient. Soul fusion for generals and politicians to make them bigger than life. I was a nobody—they could afford to experiment on me, make me whatever they needed.”

The image of it was now bright as fresh blood in his mind since the wards broke his memory-block, and now that Lenore had told him more about what he was.

He now remembered the bodies of the three assistants in the Dominion Experimental Laboratory. He’d shielded himself in protective spells, mixed forbidden reagents into Emrhys’ prepared compounds and backed away as they died, all at his commanding officer’s orders. Acton and Felsin had muddled his memory, and then sent him down to guard Emrhys where they assumed he would waste away after this one last assignment tonight. Kill Lenore, then die by the side of the only person he loved.

“How do you know this? How can it be true?” Emrhys asked, disbelieving.

“Lenore told me some of it. The rest, well, the power of those protective wards in the prison broke the spells they used to bind my mind, and I remember things I didn’t before. I’m physically weak, but that means Acton and Felsin’s memory-block spells failed, too.”

“You are the one who killed those people in the lab, aren’t you?” Emrhys murmured in horror. “They made you do it, and then blamed me.”

“I was the ideal assassin. My soul shard was supposed to be stored in a phial to use later in other experiments, but your father took it for himself and—” he paused, shuddering.

“What?” Emrhys moved closer, pressing her small hand to his chest, a mote of warmth in the frozen night. They rode together in the near darkness, the skies obscured by clouds full of waiting snow.

“It was magic of a type beyond what anyone thought could be possible. Forbidden magic that was supposed to be just fairytales because Kraah were not real. Using such spells comes at a horrific price. Lenore told me that, on top of everything else when the accident happened in your father’s laboratory, she unwittingly pulled shreds of your soul into her body, as well as the remains of my soul in your reagents and chemicals kit on the workbench nearby. Her own natural leymagic drew it to her, and not into the phial your father had worked so long to prepare to use on himself. Now, the magic in the wards you designed hurts those of us who went through this mess—wounds us physically, but with the added effect of shattering memory blocks placed on us.”

“When I created them, father told me the wards were to keep people from hurting those like me,” Emrhys sighed wearily. “Not the other way around.”

“It’s a fail-safe to control us, to sap our very life-essence if we become a liability. Acton and Felsin were the only ones besides your father who knew details of the project, though apparently Felsin’s mentor was the one who put the idea in her head. A pliant, easily punishable army is exactly the thing the Dominion military would want, and Acton and his flunky intended to broker the secret for power.”

“This is beyond anything I had feared,” Emrhys said.

Corvus struggled to keep his voice even.“Your father told you that a theoretical fusion procedure could fix you someday, right? If that’s true, there is hope for us.”

Emrhys didn’t reply.

“I’ve killed more men than most soldiers in the Dominion, and I’ve felt no remorse. I’ve felt nothing much until now, until you. The parts of me that should care were dug out by your father. And your own sister continued your father’s work while she was pretending to be a dull-witted socialite—but she didn’t know the cost, not until recently. She didn’t know they were out to kill all three of us. That she is why you and I are like this. But she knows now. I told her everything the moment I remembered. Curse it. We are out of time.” He realized he was shaking, his eyes leaking salt, blurring the surrounding night. “I’m sorry. It’s all true. I killed those people. General Acton tried to make me forget. He failed.”

Emrhys leaned in and wrapped her arms around him, so close he could feel her heat.

“I should have seen it. I should have known that I never miscalculate. We must make this right,” Emrhys whispered in his ear.

“Yes. Yes, we must.”

“This was all a plan to get the details of the magic and kill us?” Emrhys asked, understanding dawning in her voice.

“They only left us alive till now because it would look far less suspicious than if we keeled over so soon after your imprisonment. It would have been an easy sell. And General Acton wants every scrap of official proof of your father’s work in his hands only—notes, reagents, all of it. I was to go to Lenore tonight, make it look like she had taken her own life. I would steal her blood to study for any clues—blood where the actual power is, but they did not know this. Not yet. Now we live.”

“So Father did it. He performed pneuma-fusion, even if by accident, with our own souls on Lenore. No wonder she is larger than life.” She almost smiled.

“Emrhys—we must go. Lenore and I have plans for our escape, a way to disguise me so that I can get us south into Tanahr, and to safety. I even have a contact in the Tanahr capital city. It’s the only way you’ll live.”

“The only way I’ll live?”

“The only way we’ll live,” he corrected himself. “All three of us.” He coaxed the horse to speed up, taking them from the city proper towards the wooded fringes of town. After traveling in silence, they made their way into a grove of firs in view of Saint Eskala’s Priory.

“Here we are,” he said, feeling strange. It was the end of a nightmare. “Go in and speak to Lenore—pull up your hood, and be discreet. I have a few last things to take care of. Meet me back out here as soon as you are able.”

She dismounted easily, the potion’s effects clearly already taking hold. Emrhys smiled up at him. There was a radiance underneath her tiredness that he had never seen.

His heart kicked into a lively canter, a new warmth suffusing him to his very soul.

“Oh, reach into the right pocket before you leave,” he said. “The restorative potion—you might need it again.”

“Be warm, Corvus Sevens,” Emrhys said sweetly. The air shimmered with her rare aethermagic. The ice on his boots thawed, and warmth crept over his limbs.

“I promise you, I’ve never been so warm in my life,” Corvus murmured as she walked toward the priory, snow whispering in the surrounding air.