The Last Orellen - Chapter 48: Tomas & Kalen, part one

“Why can’t I just sleep in that graveyard I told you about?” Kalen whispered as soon as the door to the room opened and Tomas stepped inside.

The older boy held a finger up to his lips, though Kalen had spoken quietly, and he hastily shut the door behind him.

“Because it’s cold enough to ice your eyelashes out there,” he whispered back. “You’ll freeze to death in the night. And being caught lurking around doing spells in a graveyard would be more suspicious than just being caught without one of those bracelets in the city.”

He looked around the small upstairs room Kalen had once shared with Yarda. “This is a good place. I thought it the first time I followed you here. Did anyone see you sneak in?”

Kalen shook his head. A man had been hired recently to sit up all night and watch over the place for the innkeepers, but Tomas had distracted him with talk in the common area so that Kalen could go upstairs and secret himself away in the room Tomas had paid for.

“Then they think it’s only me here,” said Tomas. “It doesn’t look strange for someone my age to be traveling on his own. Now don’t talk anymore. Let me…”

He shed his coat and tossed it on the bed beside Kalen’s cloak and bags. Then from his own satchel, he pulled a box. It was twice the size of Kalen’s largest book, and it was made of rich red wood, polished to a high shine, with twelve flat black oval stones inlaid into the top in a grid pattern.

Tomas opened the box and pulled out a clear glass jar—one that was much too tall to have fit in a box of that size.

“How…?” Kalen asked in astonishment.

Tomas shushed him, so he stepped over to stare into the box instead. It looked like a box. It was lined with what appeared to be hammered gold, but it was still only a box. And it was full of a stack of thin wooden rune stencils. There was no way under the sky for it to have held the jar.

Tomas set the jar on the floor. It was filled with what looked like pearly white sand, and it was heavy enough that he used both hands to manage it.

Kalen stared at the jar and then back at the box. Tomas grinned at him and hooked his finger under the looped string that bound the stencils together. He lifted and the stack of stencils came out of the box, and kept coming out, the stack growing a foot tall before Kalen’s eyes, as if was being produced by the floor of the box itself.

Beneath the stencils, if beneath was even the right word when the box was defying all reason, there was a set of dull metal cylinders. Tomas examined them briefly, though they all looked the same except for differences in size, then selected one and shut the box’s lid.

Kalen watched, bursting with fascination and envy for what was clearly an elaborate set of magic tools, while Tomas filled the cylinder with the sand from his jar, capped it, and set it on the floor.

As if guided by an invisible hand, it rolled swiftly in a perfect circle, spilling sand from a slot until there was a thin layer of it on the floor. Tomas let it roll the path twice, then he refilled it and let it go again, building up a thicker coat. From his stack of stencils, he selected several. They were so thin that the wood would flex under the weight of a finger, and they all had multiple numbers painted on them by a very fine brush.

To keep them organized for different spells?

Thomas was obviously preparing to finish the spell circle for whatever was represented by the dark gray numbers, since he spread all the runes out on the bed and then ordered them that way while the cylinder finished drawing his perfect circle for him. Kalen knew what would happen next, but that didn’t make it any less interesting. Tomas laid out his stencils, poured sand over each one, then lifted them carefully to reveal perfect, quickly formed runes.

Then he took a handful of clear glass marbles out of his pocket and spaced them evenly around the circle, nestling them in the sand. When he was done, he stood in the center of it, studying it all closely, then he beckoned Kalen over.

“Don’t tread on the sand,” he said quietly.

Does he think I’m very stupid? Kalen wondered indignantly as he hopped over a rune and into the center of the circle. Even if he didn’t know that Kalen could do magic himself, it was obvious that you shouldn’t kick around a practitioner’s work, wasn’t it?

“This will take just a moment longer.” Tomas knelt and leaned forward to touch a finger to the activation rune. The sand for that one had been piled higher, and he’d drawn additional rays from it to connect it to the circle and the neighboring runes. He closed his eyes, and it wasn’t long before the rune began to glow faintly. To Kalen’s surprise, the glow didn’t spread to the whole circle right away; instead, Tomas kept his finger on the rune, a focused expression on his face, and the dim light slowly oozed along the pattern until at last it was complete.

Tomas sat back.

“I’m sorry that took so long,” he said. “It’s only a weak silencing ward, but that should be enough for us to have a real talk.”

A silencing ward. So their conversation wouldn’t be heard. Perfect.

“I thought it was fast,” said Kalen, crouching to peer at the sand more closely. “And so tidy. What’s the sand?”

“It’s ground-up shells that have been permeated with a potion. It holds magic about as well as silver magepaint. With the drawback of being more expensive and less permanent, but the benefit of being reusable.”

“You can just sweep it back into the jar when you’re done!” Kalen exclaimed. “That’s wonderful! What are the marbles for?”

“They detect interruptions in the ward. If someone tries to listen in with magic, they change.”

“Change?”

“They rupture or turn cloudy. It depends on how the ward is violated. It’s not something I’m worried about here; we just want the people in the inn to think I’m alone. But since I had the marbles anyway…”

“I see,” said Kalen. “How much does the sand cost?”

Tomas smiled. “I don’t know the exact price. It was a gift. Enough that I was advised not to show it off in the letter that came with it.”

Right. Letters.

“I’m sorry,” Kalen said. “About reading your post. It just appeared out of nowhere when I was exploring the attic, and when I picked it up, the seal…did something.”

“The seals respond to anyone who is an Orellen by blood or oath. Father and mother adopted you using blood magic, so that must count.”

“What will you do now, though?” Kalen asked. “How are you all going to leave safely if everyone’s scared about the letters being tampered with?”

“How do you know everyone’s scared?” Tomas replied. “Maybe they’re not worried about it at all.”

The circle was a small one. They were sitting rather close together, so Kalen couldn’t have had a clearer view of Tomas’s face. He didn’t look suspicious, so he must not realize Kalen had spied on them. Was he just brushing off Kalen’s worries…to be nice?

“How could people not be scared? They were obviously secret letters! With secret instructions for you to go somewhere safe, and now it might not happen because of me.”

Tomas sighed. “It’s fine, Nerth. It would be better if you hadn’t, but you didn’t mean any harm by it. And it’s done now. It’s our own fault for leaving the attic before the new instructions came. If we’d been there with the target, we’d have gotten the letters as soon as they arrived.”

“Target?”

“It’s hard to hit a very specific location with spatial magic. There are lots of ways to do it, but here we’re supposed to be using a targeting array. It’s the simplest way to make sure the Seniors can easily send us things. It’s in the attic at the church.”

“I didn’t see it there!”

Tomas pointed down. “It’s on the underside of the floorboards. When we decided to leave, they chose not to move the target. Arrays can be detected if someone’s deliberately scrying for them, so they didn’t want it to be anywhere near them. And leaving it in place at the church, which is still our ally, seemed safer than moving it to a less friendly location.”

“There was an Acress at the church today,” Kalen said. “Talking to the high priest. That’s why I ran. Should I have stayed?”

Tomas scratched his cheek. “I don’t…I would probably have run. But maybe it would have been better for you to stay if they’ll think you disappearing is suspicious?”

“Priestess Riat pays a lot of attention to me, but nobody else does.”

The older boy grimaced. “You’ve run now, so stay away I guess?”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“Should I be?”

“Don’t you know things because you’re…”

A practitioner with fancy tools who grew up here on the continent. An Orellen.

“…you.”

Tomas reddened a little. “You’re thinking I’m more in charge of myself than I actually am. I run all the time, but I always get instructions telling me exactly when and how to do it. I haven’t had to think about it so much before.”

“Don’t you understand politics though?”

“Politics?”

“For example, the church wants one thing and the practitioners who are hunting Orellens want another.” Kalen held out his hands to represent the two factions. “And then I guess the people of Circon probably want something else, too. Because of that, so many different things can happen. So that’s politics. And if you understand which thing is going to happen, you can react to it, but if you don’t you can’t…and I spend so much time worrying about it. But I can’t figure it out. So I can’t move because I don’t know what the right direction is. Do you?”

“No,” said Tomas in a surprised tone. “Of course not.”

“But you’ve lived here all your life.”

“In Granslip Port? I only arrived a few weeks ago.”

“Not in Circon. On the continent!” Kalen said, slapping the floor with a hand. “Where all these terrible things are happening! You have to understand how it all works better than I do.”

“Oh, I think I see what you…Nerth, when did you get to Granslip Port?”

“The end of the fall.”

“And you came here from home? From Tiriswaith?”

Kalen opened his mouth, then caught himself before his emotions could lead him astray. “I came here from home.”

“So you’ve lived far away from here your whole life. On an island. Somewhere really small if you didn’t even have politics. And then you travel here, and the way this place is must be completely different. And then your…was she your aunt?… dies. That must be…gods, that must be really confusing and overwhelming.”

Tomas stared down at his knees.

“Politics…” he muttered. “In Bolampor they have ziwer fights. They’re a big jungle cat, and the males are competitive. They capture them and pen them in the city circle and everyone watches from the rooftops and bets on which cat will be alive at the end of the day. It’s a bad tradition. But that’s what politics is like to me. Nobody guesses which ziwer is going to win correctly every time. Sometimes it’s the big one. Sometimes it’s the small fast one. Sometimes it’s the smart one. Sometimes, none of them win, and at the end of the battle there’s nothing but bloody bodies lying around everywhere.”

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He looked up and at the sight of Kalen’s expression he said, “But…um…I should add that everywhere on the continent isn’t as much of a mess as Circon seems to be right now! I’ve been to cities and countries where I could walk around freely, even if I couldn’t give my name. And none of the common people were seriously worried about the coming war or about Orellens at all.”

“So it’s just here that’s bad?”

“It’s this region. The Ossumun Empire is to the south. Our family was a major power around the continent, but especially there. Most of our Enclave vanishing overnight destabilized everything and ruined economies. Circon’s not part of the empire, but there’s just one tiny strip of land separating them. And Swait basically belongs to the Leflayns now. So they’ve started bothering the government here to formally denounce us and hunt us down. It wasn’t working. Eight years ago, when all of this started, the Seniors Council left a third of our merchant fleet in harbor at Tothsport, and they told Circon they could have it. As a goodwill gesture to make up for the sudden reduction in portalists.”

“They gave them ships?” Ships were a good gift.

“The family did things like that all over the place in the first year or two. Circon was an obvious choice. But they ceded lands, buildings, companies—everything that couldn’t be carried in our hands—to governments, people, and kings all over the continent. The portal network was the backbone of the Orellen merchant empire, but it wasn’t everything. The Seniors and my father gave it all away. I don’t know whether they did it to make sure all the outlying family members had to run, or if it was to build sympathy in the people who got part of the wealth, or to prove that we were weak and couldn’t do any real harm.”

“More politics,” Kalen surmised.

“Yes. Hopefully the Seniors council understands it better than you and I do.” He paused. “Well…maybe they don’t have to.”

“No?”

“They have Father,” Tomas said in a dry tone. “If he were betting on ziwer fights, he could probably pick the winner every time.”

“How?”

Tomas scratched his cheek again. “Do you know what kind of magic Iven Orellen does?”

“Don’t almost all Orellens do spatial magic?”

“Almost,” said Tomas. “It’s so funny. It used to be a well-known fact that father had trained as an enchanter. I remember it being brought up regularly when I was a child. And he would enchant things for people sometimes. And then after we ran, word did get out about what he really is. The family had to be told to get them to go along with the plan, and of course some of them split off and spread the story. So it’s not like it’s a secret still. But when I hear him mentioned, people usually say that he’s a spatialist himself, or even a blood practitioner.”

“I heard both of those,” Kalen said. “I didn’t hear anything about him being an enchanter.”

“I guess being an enchanter isn’t dramatic enough. Someone leaping out of portals with murderous intent or drenching themselves in blood and casting wicked spells catches everyones’ attention more. But they’re all three wrong. Father’s a luck mage.”

“Luck?”

Tomas nodded.

“Isn’t luck supposed to be useless magic?” Even Nanu had said as much.

“It is when everyone else does it,” said Tomas. “But not him. I’ve heard that even the sorcerers in the family can’t replicate the work he did as a magician. I’ve heard he’s approaching sorcerer himself these days, though that could just be something they tell us to make us all have more confidence in him.”

“You’ve heard?” Kalen said. “You can’t just ask him?”

“I haven’t seen him.” Tomas’s smile was bitter. “The day I met you, after I took you back to the Seniors’ study, I had supper with him. He sat with my siblings and I on the floor around mother’s bed, and we ate. It was all of the most expensive food in the Enclave. We were eating every last bit of the good things that were left. They even let me and Rella drink wine.

He was staring at one of the glass marbles while he remembered.

“Mother had given birth the day before, and she wasn’t exactly…she slept through a lot of it. And Father was so exhausted that he kept nodding off, too. And my older brothers and sisters understood what was happening better than I did, so they were miserable. That was the last time I saw most of them. Father gave us all our very first letters himself, and he explained how they were going to work.”

He frowned suddenly.

“He made us swear to him that we’d always do what they said. Every single thing. And that we’d never lose the coins he’d given us. And of course we all promised. But he didn’t tell us we were saying goodbye to each other forever. I wonder…”

Kalen found himself holding his breath. There was such a complicated and painful emotion in Tomas Orellen’s voice.

“I wonder if he didn’t know,” Tomas said finally. “I wonder if he thought the luck would lead us back to each other sooner. Maybe he meant for us all to be together again, but he couldn’t find a way to make it happen.”

He rubbed at a scar on his palm.

“I spent a few weeks with Quin a couple of years later. I saw Adora for a single day not long after; she didn’t seem to care that I was around at all. I’m still furious about that. Grandfather and I were together for almost four months when I was thirteen. And…that’s all I know. I assume they’re all just as separated from each other as I am from them. It’s not safe for us to know where others are, so we don’t. I used to get letters from Rella. I still do from Mother and Father once in a while. And gifts. But they don’t say anything.”

Tomas’s story scared Kalen, though he tried not to let it show. A life separated from your family, not even knowing if they were all safe or not…

“I’ve got your coin,” he said. “You can have it back.”

Tomas shook himself from his thoughts and stared at Kalen.

“You kept it?”

“You told me to!”

“I did. But you were practically a baby! And it was a giant gold piece. I just assumed you’d have lost it or had it stolen from you, or your family would have taken it to pay for your care.”

“My family don’t take things that don’t belong to them,” Kalen said in an affronted tone.

“No, I didn’t mean like that. It would be normal for a poor family to spend something like that. That’s all I meant.”

“What makes you think I’m poor?”

“Sorry…was your new family rich?”

Kalen found himself at a loss. “I’m not sure!”

“If you were poor or you were rich you’d know it,” said Tomas, hiding a smile behind his hand. “You must be somewhere in between.”

“I thought we were rich,” Kalen clarified. “And then I saw what books cost, and I wasn’t sure anymore.”

“In between,” said Tomas.

Kalen dug into the pocket that held the coin.

“You’ve covered it. That’s smart,” said Tomas, as Kalen pried open the bone case Dort had carved for him years ago.

He produced the enormous gold piece and held it out to the other boy. Tomas’s eyes widened. “I forgot just how big it was. It’s halfway to a saucer, isn’t it?”

He took it and stared at the markings on both sides for a long time.

“Does it work?” he asked.

“I can’t tell,” said Kalen. “I don’t use it very often. Only when I really can’t make up my mind.”

And even then, he often didn’t these days. Though I might have been if I knew Iven Orellen was some special luck mage!

“You probably should imbue it from time to time even if you’re not flipping it. Some magical objects break down if they go completely unused for too long.”

“What’s imbuing?” Kalen asked innocently.

Tomas looked up from his examination of the coin, stared at Kalen, and then laughed out loud. “Does that face of yours help you get away with your lies?” he asked in a delighted voice.

“What lie!?” Kalen paused. “And what’s wrong with my face?”

“Nothing at all is wrong with your face. That’s my point. You look precious. I’m sure ladies pinch you on the cheek still. I know you have to be at least twelve—”

“I am twelve.”

“I said I know. You could talk fairly well when we met before, even though you seemed drowsy and confused.” He was still grinning at Kalen. “I thought you were very sweet. Maybe you still are. But you’re also a liar. ‘What’s imbuing?’”

“What is it?” Kalen asked stubbornly. “I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Liar.”

“I am not.”

“Did you forget you already told me you’d been to the Acress bookshop?”

“They sell regular books there. Upstairs.”

“You looked like you wanted to snatch my supplies right out of my hands earlier and run away with all of them.”

“That fancy box is lined with gold, and it holds more than it should. Anyone would want it.”

“I watched you draw spell patterns against your choir robes while you sang. For hours. It’s a casting habit. And you keep staring at the activation rune for the ward like you’re trying to memorize its shape for later.”

A casting habit? Kalen glared at his fingers. Did he really do such a thing?

“It’s fine that you lie,” said Tomas. “I thought for sure I had killed you by telling you who you were. I…when I saw you singing in the church, and I heard your name, I felt…anyway, being a liar must have helped you. And I did tell you to keep who you were a secret. So lie all you want to, Nerth. Just keep track of them, and don’t tell foolish ones.”

Kalen flopped over onto the floor.

“It was only one big lie my whole life,” he grumbled. “And now all of the sudden it feels like everything has to be one.”

“So you confess! You are a practitioner.”

“You’re right. It was foolish to lie about it. You already know the worst thing about me, and it’s not like being a practitioner is a crime.”

He practiced privately now, but it was because he didn’t want any attention these days. Not because being a practitioner itself was a thing to be concealed. People found it interesting, but not suspicious. Though with the tensions in the city, there was additional reason for keeping it a secret.

“And I wasn’t trying to memorize your activation rune. I memorized it already. It was just bothering me that the lines you connected it to the circle with are a little crooked. You should have used a stencil for those, too.”

Tomas leaned over him. He looked absurdly happy for some reason.

“You’re not just a practitioner!” he exclaimed. “You’re a picky one.”

Kalen stared at him.

“What spells do you know?” Tomas asked eagerly.

“I know some heating spells,” said Kalen. “And I recently learned an enchantment that maintains temperature. I can use them together to make pots boil. And I can do a breath thrawning—”

“Oh, that’s surprising. I’ve never been good enough at body magic to bother learning any.”

“I can hold my breath a long time with it,” said Kalen. “I can draw water out of the ground, too. And make wood stick to other wood like magnets.”

“I’ve never even heard of spell like that last one.”

“I made it up myself.”

“You made it up?”

“I didn’t have enough books to keep me busy, so a couple of years ago, I studied the symbols on the coin. I tried out different combinations, hoping they’d turn into a fancy enchantment, and I ended up with wooden magnets.”

“You’ve just been learning a mishmash. You don’t have any spells for your affinity,” said Tomas. His smile had fallen a little. “Of course you wouldn’t if it’s spatial magic. The family’s beginner texts are probably the only ones around that aren’t a thousand years old and mouldering in some forgotten cabinet. I don’t have the novice manual, but I can teach you the first spell if you want?”

Kalen lay on the floor, gazing blankly at Tomas’s crossed knees. Somehow, in all his upset at the damage he might have done to Tomas by reading the letters, he’d forgotten that Tomas knew magic. Spatial magic. And he could teach it.

But here’s a problem, thought Kalen. If he believes I am a spatial practitioner, then I can’t show him my wind spells. If I had magician-level ones, that would be one thing, but casting mage-level spells as a magician? There’s no way to explain that away as me just being good at learning. It’s obviously my affinity.

Was it fine to just tell Tomas about the double affinity?

Kalen trusted the older boy not to mind. If he didn’t mind the other things, having two nucleuses and a complicated and difficult to manage mana structure shouldn’t disturb him.

But Tomas might be leaving in mere days, to go who knew where. What if he ran afoul of enemies at some point, and told them everything about Kalen?

“About spatial magic,” said Kalen, “when I was…when they made…do all the people like me do it?”

If they all did, then Kalen would obviously have to do it, too.

“I don’t know,” Tomas said quietly. “I’m sorry. We don’t even understand how practitioners are born really. Some say it’s in the blood. It is usually passed down through families, after all. Others say it’s in the soul. Maybe it’s a lot of different factors. But I would be surprised if they had deliberately made all of you practitioners, if they could control that kind of thing at all. It would only put you at greater risk of being found, since children going to Enclaves for affinity testing would be discovered almost at once.”

That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that.

If Kalen had found a master when he was younger and hadn’t discovered his affinities on his own…

“I think I would have heard rumors about it, at least, if many of the children like you were found to be magicians,” Tomas continued. “Possibly they have the potential, but they were all placed in situations where it would be hard for them to discover it or train it. Or maybe only some of them would be…if they had the necessary abilities before the blood magic changed them.”

“You’ve never met another one of the children like me?”

Tomas hesitated. “No.”

“The Acress who came to the church today told the high priest that they could prove your family raised the dead.”

“Maybe they can,” said Tomas in an unconcerned tone. “We did it, and a great many people suspect it, so one more city being sure of matters is only more of the same.”

“It must be different for you,” said Kalen. “Since it’s not you they’re calling a monster.”

He winced as he heard himself say the words, but he didn’t try to take them back.

Tomas was quiet.

“My mother wasn’t evil,” he said after a long while. “Nor was my father. And the Seniors were stuffy old men and women who were full of themselves, if I remember them all right, but they weren’t evil either. So I’ve never thought that what they did was wrong, the way everyone else seems to. Maybe it was because I was so young when I first heard about it, or it’s because I met you. I’ve just never been able to feel guilty or disgusted by the idea of bringing people back from the dead. Alive is better than dead, isn’t it? Even if they made it happen in an unusual way.”

“That’s true.” Kalen was hardly going to argue against his own existence, no matter how difficult it had been lately.

“I was offering to teach you a spell…unless you think your affinity is something other than spatial magic? I just assumed. Do you know it already?”

“I love learning spells,” said Kalen, choosing to ignore the question about affinity altogether for the moment. He sat up. “But right now, aren’t there more important things? What are you going to do?”

“About what?”

“About the letters. How are you going to persuade the people you’re with to follow them? Your father makes the letters lucky somehow. Is that how it works? So if you don’t follow them you have bad luck and you die?”

“That’s not exactly how it works. It’s complicated. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter what I want. Me trying to persuade the third circle members here in Granslip Port to do what I think is right almost guarantees that they’ll insist on doing something else. I just have to hope Wether can manage it on his own. And now I’m not even sure I want him to do that…”

“Why can’t you persuade them?”

“They hate me,” said Tomas. “A lot of people hate me. It’s inconvenient.”

“What did you do?”

Tomas chuckled. “I was born to the wrong man. At the wrong time.”

Kalen didn’t understand. “Isn’t your father trying to keep them safe?”

“My father is trying to keep as many Orellens safe as he possibly can. According to him. And according to the Seniors. But for some reason, everyone suspects he might sometimes let a few less important family members die. For the sake of maneuvering his own children into more secure positions.”

“Does he?”

“I have no idea.” Tomas looked toward the dark window. “I used to think he did, and it made me love him more.”