“We had a great day,” Sevastian said, “scouting out the ruins of the old Varigari manor, where father was building the new house, remember? We forgot lunch, and somehow you convinced that tavern owner to give us the full spread? She thought you were so cute.”
“I forgot about that,” Dazen said. Those events had been overshadowed by the night’s.
“A great day together,” Sevastian said with a smile. “But all day is a long time to be stuck caring for a brother so much younger than you. You’d had no breaks.”
“You’re trying to let me off easy.”
“You were mature for your age, but you were still young,” Sevastian said. “Would you judge any ten-year-old so harshly if it weren’t you?”
But Dazen couldn’t even hear him. “The storm was shaking the entire house. You were scared. You wanted to sleep in my bed with me. I was scared, too, but I thought Gavin would mock me if he found us. I called you a baby. You wouldn’t go. You held on to me, and I said you couldn’t stay because you’d pee the bed. You hadn’t peed the bed in two years, but I knew saying it would shame you. You didn’t get angry.” A hot tear coursed from Dazen’s good eye; the black eye was incapable of tears. “You hunched your shoulders, defeated . . . your little shoulders shaking, and you went without a word. Like you respected me. Like my word was law, and I’d just used my power to crush you. That’s who I am, Sevastian: I’m the one who finds himself in power by accident and then uses it to crush what’s good.”
The sun was almost all the way down now, and Sevastian’s eyes were merely warm embers, filled with such compassion that Dazen couldn’t bear to look at them.
“I knew I should go to you,” Dazen said. “But I hardened my heart, and I slept. I slept, peaceful as a man without a conscience.”
“Exhausted, yes. Petty, yes. Even cruel at times, as a child,” Sevastian said. “But a lack of conscience was never your problem, big brother.”
“If I hadn’t turned you away . . . If I hadn’t pushed you out . . .” Dazen said.
“I’d be alive.” Sevastian shrugged.
Dazen flared hot. “What? Like, ‘Oh well’? ‘Shit happens’? Like, ‘Water under the bridge’?!” He could feel the blackness growing inside him, like the black seed crystal in his eye was growing like a twining ivy, climbing down his throat, interlocking with the darkness that had so long lived in his heart.
He wanted to strike down his brother now with the sword. How dare he trivialize all Gavin had endured? This wasn’t Sevastian. This was madness indeed. He—
“If . . .” Sevastian said.
“What?”
“I’d be alive, if . . . C’mon, brother. I already gave you this. Show that mental flexibility that’s made you the wonder of the Seven Satrapies.”
But he hesitated only a moment, and Gavin couldn’t regain his bearings so quickly. He could barely disentangle his thoughts from his rage.
Sevastian said, “I’d be alive . . . if I’d been killed by a blue wight with some grudge against our family. If I were killed by a blue wight, as you’ve thought all these years, then your rejection that night cost me my life. Or maybe it would have come and killed both of us. A blue wight would’ve been able to handle two children, don’t you think?”
Gavin frowned, off balance.
“Father didn’t take any chances,” Sevastian said. “He could have framed a groom or a governess for my killing, easily. Instead, he emptied the house of nearly everyone through a dozen different errands and excuses. Why else would two young scions of the Guile house be alone? We were never alone. Brother, please. We didn’t fall through the cracks of a busy household. He arranged it to look like we had. But he didn’t want to murder any more innocents than he had to, not even a groom or a governess. But do you really think that if he found me sleeping in your room instead of my own, he would have given up the whole endeavor? All his plans undone so easily? Does that sound like our father? Or would he have had a backup plan? Do you think a servant left that wineskin we found after dinner?”
Dazen was reeling. He knew dimly that father had changed after those days, at the same time that his elder brother had, but Dazen had thought father’s hardening attitudes had been because he’d preferred his eldest son, Gavin—and that father blamed Dazen for not protecting Sevastian . . . from a wight.
But all that aside, Dazen didn’t know what Andross had really been like before he’d become the bitter, conniving spider of the second half of his life.
“I wasn’t even killed in our home, brother,” Sevastian said.
Dazen said, “That can’t be true. I came to your room. I tried to tell myself for years that I was coming to apologize, but I know that wasn’t true. I was wakened by a cry. I remember it.”
“Father carried me home. He was arranging the evidence in my room: the blue luxin shards, the torn window latch, the note. He’d donned the blue mask and cloak. But he faltered when it came time to arrange my body the way he’d planned. It broke him. I think he lost all faith that night, and yet his path was set. It was his cry you heard, not mine. And then you burst in and caught him . . . like that. His favorite son, catching him in his moment of greatest shame.”
Dazen couldn’t breathe for the longest moment.
“But . . . but, how could he?” Dazen said.
“The murder? The act itself? He didn’t. He made Gavin do it.”
Just when Dazen thought it couldn’t get any worse. It was an uppercut to the chin after a gut punch makes you drop your guard.
Sevastian said, “They didn’t and don’t understand exactly how the Blinding Knife works. What’s necessary. What’s not. They didn’t dare let me die for nothing. Prisms or Prisms-elect were always the ones who’d wielded the blade before. Father told Gavin that this was why we Guiles held high office, that this was what made Guiles worthy of all the power and prestige and riches that flow to us: sacrifice. He told Gavin that if he wanted to be great, he mustn’t shrink from his duty. He told him that they were literally saving not only the Seven Satrapies but the whole world, that all of this rested on Gavin doing what he must.”
And there it was at last. Not only why the real Gavin had changed so, so much after that night.
Here also was why Gavin must have felt betrayed—betrayed by Orholam Himself!—when Dazen had shared with him that his own powers were expanding and expanding. Dazen was a polychrome now, and adding new colors every day! Dazen said what if he could split light, too? Wouldn’t that be amazing? He was just like his big brother, wasn’t it exciting, Gavin?!
How could Gavin feel anything but threatened to his very core by the news? Gavin had murdered Sevastian to get those powers, Sevastian, whom he loved.
Dazen was telling Gavin that he’d been born with them?
Gavin had murdered their beloved little brother for nothing—and, without even knowing what he was implying to his guilty older brother, Dazen was telling Gavin that he was the one who should really be Prism.
. . . Or how had that happened? Dazen thought that he’d remembered . . . Hadn’t he himself killed the White Oaks to take their power? Hadn’t he stolen power with black luxin?