Garden of Embers: Beneath Devouring Eyes #2

Chapter 7, Part A

Daedalus would have flushed if any blood still lingered remotely close to his pale face. His knees felt like broken hinges as he made his wobbling way to a bush.

Years of exercises training him to notice details, to capture the feelings they evoked in mind and body, and store them away in his memory for later use in his visualizations drew his attention to the tiny icicles dangling, translucent and glistening in the glittering golden Trellis light, from the cyan night-side leaves.

He vomited on them and felt much better then in body even if he was mortified in spirit.

His classmates drew back, making disgusted noises, and Serenitas stepped forward with a sympathetic smile. "You really don't do well with heights, do you? I remember you had trouble with the skychariot as well."

"Erm, yes," Daedalus said, pulling a handkerchief from his paenula pocket and dabbing at his mouth. Belatedly he realized he ought to have said "yeah", as his brother would have done. Cerasus, without ever once admitting out loud that he knew Daedalus's true identity, had told him at supper that first eve to "lighten up a little" and "not feel the pressure to abandon his Pullati roots" in speech and manner.

Daedalus was still trying to determine what precisely that meant, but he suspected he was being told he ought to try harder to speak like a feral Lightholder.

Serenitas patted his back. "Believe it or not, that counts as real progress, Domi. When we started earlier this week, you wouldn't even climb up to the roof, let alone jump. I'm sure you'll fly tomorrow or the next day."

"Wonderful," Daedalus said, his voice weak in his own ears.

<>

Edera peeked up from her lesson book as she heard the door to the family wing open and a familiar voice murmur a polite greeting to the two Electi on duty.

Domi was home.

He was not Domi, of course. She had no idea who the hell he was, other than the other boy's twin. Someone important though, obviously, given her Pa's exceedingly odd behavior around him, the fifteen-year-old's cultured words and demeanor, and the tantalizing secrecy around his identity.

In this week since his arrival, she had been speculating about who he might be, spinning up ever more unlikely tales to explain his origins.

Robbers hijacked a skychariot, holding a Trueborn family hostage. The villains kidnapped one boy and sold him to the Pullati gangs and ransomed the other back to his noble parents.

The twins were the illegitimate sons of a Praetor and his secret Pyrrhaei paramour, separated at birth so that each forbidden lover might look upon their child's face and see a reminder of their one true love.

They were the bastard sons of the Rex and the late Princeps Worldholder, an epic love unconfined by age, legality, or social convention. Their royal parents raised them in utmost secrecy in a remote night-side domus, where the boys were trained as spies and assassins in service to the throne.

She liked the last story the best out of all the ones she'd dreamed up. She had always fantasized of being a spy and assassin, her lifeholder powers making her a master of disguise and a deadly, seductive foe.

Alas, she was a botanist. Pa said that he needed lifeholders to attend to the agricultural needs of the provincia, not an army of physicians and certainly not spies and assassins.

Yet he let Aix be a spy, and the impure old man wasn't even a full lifeholder but a worldholder too. It wasn't fair that her life should be so boring and the geezer's so fun. She would make a perfect spy, but her talents were wasted without ever being truly nurtured.