Torn: Bound Trilogy Book Two (11 page)

A tiny, sharp object bounced off my head, followed by another. Hail. The wind was picking up, too, and the rays of sunlight were swallowed up as the clouds closed.

“Late storm,” Phelun called, and turned toward the gate. “You’d do best not to stay out in this.”

A memory surfaced. Rowan’s voice, and the fierce look she wore every time she put me in my place.
There have to be more people out there who won’t hate you on sight...don’t be afraid to accept help.

It hadn’t sounded like Phelun intended to help Severn. I reached out, but he was too far away for me to sense his thoughts, and I felt nothing of his emotions. No magic, either.

I focused on my magic, which gathered inside of me, coiled like a snake waiting to strike, strong as it had ever been. I would remain on my guard, though this man didn’t seem to be any threat. Simply a religious man kept separate from the world, only half of what the stories had claimed. I would have a warm place to wait out the storm, and if they were so keen on information, perhaps they’d have some about my father. They’d had their eyes on this land and its people for longer than my family had been in power.

Phelun raised his eyebrows and smiled as I stepped onto the road, leading my horse. As I got closer, I felt calm radiating from him. Peace. Satisfaction.

He reached into his pocket for his keys. “And I thought She had run out of surprises.”

Without another word, he turned and walked toward the gate, and I, filled with apprehension, followed along behind as the hail bounced and piled around our feet.

“
L
eave the horse
, we’ll take care of him,” Phelun said without slowing his steps. I tied the reins to the saddle and patted the horse’s neck. He snorted and wandered off to nose at the sparse grass as I followed Phelun into the building.

The heavy door swung closed behind us on silent hinges, and Brother Phelun led the way into a great hall where a fire blazed in the largest hearth I’d ever seen. Simple wooden tables and benches, enough to seat a hundred men, stretched in a single line down the middle of the room, dwarfed by the space around them. The ceiling arched high overhead, stained dark in patches by the lamps below. The scent of roasted meat and vegetables hung heavy in the air, mingling with smoke and floor wax.

A spiral staircase at the far end of the room led to a second-story mezzanine that stretched back toward us on the left side of the room. Closed doors behind the bulky balustrade would lead deeper into the massive building. To my right, the wall was broken by two levels of windows that let in faint, distorted light from outside. Otherwise the dark walls were bare, and far less ornate than the ones on the outside of the building.

Phelun and I were not alone, and yet it felt like we were. Dragonfreed Brothers stood around the hall, all clad in the same brown robes as Phelun. Some appeared to have been at work clearing dishes from the tables, others just passing through the room. Every one of them stood still as a statue with his open, empty hands pressed against his hips, former task abandoned. All had their hoods raised, shadowing their eyes and leaving only the expressionless lower halves of their faces visible. Not one of them spoke or moved as we passed, and I didn’t get the sense that any were watching us. They might have been statues for all I felt.

The sound of my boots echoed through the hall, bouncing off the wooden rafters high overhead.

I risked a look back over my shoulder to glance at the round window over the doors, which depicted a scene similar to the painting on the doors in town. Men, white dragon. She looked fiercer here, though.

My companion climbed the staircase, and I followed. We passed through a door into a well-lit corridor, and I heard the clink of plates below as the men returned to their work.

Here, away from the fire, the air felt as cold as it had outside, and my breath came out in puffs of white. Identical wooden doors lined the walls at uneven intervals, each of them a pointed arch with iron fittings. Ornately sculpted iron torches burned on the walls, tiny flames giving off more light than they had any natural right to.

Phelun knocked softly at an unmarked door, spoke to someone inside, and closed it again without comment to me. He motioned for me to follow as he continued down the corridor.

We walked for what seemed an impossible distance. Phelun finally stopped after we’d turned several times through the corridors and gone up another tight spiral staircase, this one enclosed and constructed of stone. He unlocked and stepped into a room, empty save for a narrow bed, a small table and chair, and a simple wardrobe made of the same dark wood as everything else in the place. He opened the cupboard doors, pulled out robes identical to his own, and laid them on the bed.

“You’ll be warmer if you put that on over your clothing,” he said. “I’ll excuse myself for a moment. Are you hungry? I missed breakfast, myself, and it must be near dinner time.”

“I am, thank you.”

“One moment, then.”

The door clicked softly as it closed behind him. I went to it and tried the latch, which lifted without resistance. The door swung open a crack when I pulled. Satisfied that I was not being kept prisoner, I slipped into the robes and sat on the bed to wait.

I rose to answer the door when Phelun knocked, then returned to the bed, offering him the chair. He set two bowls of stew and two cups of wine on the desk, then motioned for me to choose which I preferred.

Phelun closed his eyes and clasped his hands in his lap, and I followed suit as he said his silent thanks. He pushed his hood back, revealing short, gray hair that could have used an encounter with a comb.

We ate in silence, and I understood what he was so thankful for. The brothers may have had little in the way of material comforts, but someone among them understood the magic of flavor, and had elevated a simple spiced-beef stew to something resembling art.

“Do you eat this well every day?” I asked, and Phelun grinned.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he said. “We’d prefer not to be overrun. Do you think that’s selfish of us?”

“If the gods had wanted the masses to enjoy this, they’d have sent your cook to a city instead of to you. I think you’re safe to enjoy your gift as you all see fit.”

He took another bite and nodded. “Indeed. I’ll certainly not argue with that, except to say that we consider the Goddess herself our benefactor. We don’t concern ourselves with lesser deities here.”

The food warmed my body in a way that my clothing couldn’t, and the chill left the small room as we sat. Phelun continued to give off a sense of calm, touched with only a hint of wariness and curiosity. He obviously saw no need for small talk, which suited me.

“Talented cook, indeed,” he said as he stacked our empty bowls on the table. “I suppose we’d have to watch out for your brother, too, wouldn’t we? He seems to be taking talent from all over this country, whether it wants to be taken or not. He might not mind a fine cook.”

“Is your cook a Sorcerer, then?”

“Not in any traditional sense. He was here, you know. Severn.”

I leaned forward. “He came here himself? Why? And how did he find you?” Severn had never spoken to me about the Brothers. He’d always considered legends and such stories unimportant—or so I’d thought.

Phelun’s lips narrowed in a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “He sought guidance. Answers.”

“About what?”

“The nature of magic, and power.”

“So not moral guidance, then.”

Phelun chuckled. “Not exactly, no.”

“Why here? Why you?”

He shook his sleeves over his hands and clasped them beneath the fabric. “This is what we do. We worship the Goddess. We seek to know her through the natural forces at work in our world. Magic included, though we don’t possess it ourselves. We are passionate yet unbiased students of Her laws, and this gives us a perspective on magic that is not the same as that of a Sorcerer, or your learned men in Luid who are surrounded by its effects every day.”

He paused and shook his head slightly before he continued. “I didn’t trust your brother. Even without magic with which to read him, I could see there were things going on below the surface of his mind. Dark things. His gaze is unnerving. He sounded tortured when he spoke.”

Tortured
, I thought. Had I ever seen Severn that way? I’d seen him as brilliant and cruel, worthy of my hatred even as he earned my respect. He had closed his thoughts to me since the day he suggested I learn to manipulate minds, had set up his defenses before my first lesson. Lacking the ability to see into him, I’d stopped looking. Perhaps I had come to rely so much on my magic that I’d neglected to see what was in front of me.

Phelun cleared his throat. “Now, as to your presence here.”

“I did not seek you out. I wasn’t aware this place existed. Severn obviously paid better attention than I did.”

“Few people find us, even if they’re searching. The would-be king has resources available to aid him, but you?” He shook his head again. “You wouldn’t have made it here if you had tried.”

“So the stories of you aiding the ill and the wrongly accused are untrue?”

“Not at all. It simply seems to be the Goddess’s will that those who find us are the ones who are truly in need.”

“And my brother.”

“Exactly. Though perhaps his need was greater than he realized. We may have done more good than we know. That is not for me to judge.”

So it seemed the stories were half-true. Phelun didn’t strike me as a trained assassin, and my belief that those stories were all fiction grew stronger. But his words reminded me of the less far-fetched stories from my childhood, the soil of truth that the more fanciful tales were rooted in.

I took another sip of the wine, which was finer than most I had tasted. “And what good would you do with me, Brother? Why did you invite me in?”

Phelun leaned back in the chair, lifting its front legs off the floor. He scratched his chin. “That is the question, isn’t it? It could be that She wanted nothing more than to save you from the storm, but there’s likely to be more. Perhaps if you told me what brings you here. From the beginning.”

“Forgive me, Brother, but how can I know you’re not reporting to Severn? You might be keeping me here until his men can return, or collecting information that he’ll use against me later.”

Phelun closed his eyes and rested his chin against his chest for so long I thought he’d fallen asleep. “I suppose you have little enough reason to trust strangers,” he said at last. “You’ve been taught from an early age that those outside of your family are not to be trusted, is that so?”

“I suppose.”

His eyes opened, and he regarded me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “Hmm. So it has been with your family for generations, I think. But you have learned to trust others, or to mistrust your family, or else you would not be here.”

I thought of the servants who raised me after my mother’s death, until Severn took me on. I thought of the merfolk I’d known, who had helped Rowan and me on the strength of old friendship, in spite of the person I’d become. There was Rowan, whose magic had taken me by surprise, who had fought for and won my respect. A person I would trust with my life, without question, though I’d known her for only a season. I’d once trusted an old Wanderer to give me advice. I had allowed my grandfather to become a confidant, though on a much shallower level than Rowan.

Not one of them were the family I’d been raised to serve, and yet I trusted them. They were who I would fight and die for if it meant keeping them safe from Severn.

“There are people who have earned my trust,” I admitted.

“And?”

I reached out again and felt his mood unchanged. I didn’t try to probe into his thoughts. The storm was still building outside, and I had no desire to be tossed into it if he felt my attempt. Still, I thought his openness was sincere. “And sometimes it’s instinct that makes me trust people. My mind is always suspicious, but occasionally something inside of me overrides my better judgment. It’s the opposite side of the sense that tells me a situation is dangerous, even though I have no reason to believe it is.” Experience had honed my alertness to danger since my earliest childhood. I had barely begun to learn about the other.

“What do you feel now?”

“I feel safe enough, but I don’t trust it. It’s a feeling.”

“The sense of danger is also a feeling, and yet you trust that.”

Hard, icy snow rattled off of the window and gathered on the sill outside. I shivered. “I’ve had more evidence that my instinct for danger is reliable.”

And yet I continued speaking, my words punctuated by the wind gusting around the corner of the building and the snow tapping at the window. I explained my mission to him, why I thought I needed to find my father. I spoke cautiously, offering only the barest information. He listened, and nodded.

He asked why I’d been to Belleisle. To explain that I had to go back to when I met Rowan, and what I’d been doing for my brother before then. I skimmed over parts of the story. Some things weren’t mine to tell. Still, it was far more than I’d expected to share with him. Patterns became clear to me, choices that changed the course of our journey. As I spoke, I found it became easier to tell more.

“Is that what you wanted to know?” I asked.

Brother Phelun tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “Perhaps. There are so many threads to follow in your story. So many that you haven’t thought to tell, or that you’ve left out intentionally. The binding interests me.” He opened one eye. “Did you know that the formula and technique for that were stolen from us?”

“I didn’t.”

“By your grandmother, in fact. That was a carefully guarded secret. I’m sure you can see why we didn’t want it getting out.”

“I can now, yes." Even the imperfect version performed on her had crippled Rowan’s magic, containing it until it nearly killed her. "Dangerous thing.”

“It can be, depending on whose hands it’s in. I was relieved when your father stopped using it. It disturbs me to hear that it’s in the hands of people who hate and fear magic as the Darmish do.”

“I suspect that if their king and magic hunters had the formula, we’d know by now. Their magic hunters aren’t binding magic. Not yet.”

“Hmm. Nothing we can do about it for now.” He sat up straight and tilted his head slightly to one side. “I can’t help you find your father.”

“I didn’t think you would. That would have been too easy. Too much of a coincidence.”

“And yet I still believe there’s a purpose to you being here. Tell me more about this mind-control.”

Magic was always difficult to explain, like trying to describe the mechanics of walking to someone unfamiliar with the concept, but far more personal. It’s instinct, habit, and intuition. He seemed less interested in how I did it than in the results, though, and I explained what I could.

“You use this frequently?” he asked.

“When I need to. For years I used it to carry out assignments that Severn handed to me. It was the easiest, cleanest way to get information, or to get rid of his enemies.”

“Clean, you say?”

I looked down and studied my hands. It had kept them clean, at least, whatever that was worth. I heard the echo of the shopkeeper’s screams, the blank stares of a bystander whose memory I’d once cleared too much of.

“Since I left my brother’s service, I’ve made an effort to not harm people if I can avoid it. But in the past, I’ve used my magic to twist people’s minds, to plant ideas and control their actions long after I’ve left them. People have died because of it. Others have been saved. I’ve collected information and left people unaware that I’d done so, eliminating the need to dispose of them after they’d seen me. I’ve made it so people don’t have to lie when they’re questioned about me or about things that have happened.”