Chapter 19

“Hm,” Lornysh said.

The steam wagon turned off the main road, and Jev’s stomach flip-flopped

in his belly. He watched the cottages, shops, and smithies they rolled past, the

buildings leased from the Dharrow family by commoners who traded their

labor and a portion of their crops or wares for reduced rent and protection

from invaders. Jev thought he recognized a few familiar faces, but he didn’t

call out or try to draw attention.

As they left the village, Jev did his best to muster his courage, reminding

himself that he’d fought countless times and commanded two different

companies during his years in the army. It wasn’t right for his knees to go

weak at the idea of standing up to his father. Sometimes, he wished he had a

little more of the flippancy and irreverence his brother had been known for.

Vastiun had never cared if Father was angry or disappointed with him. It

hadn’t bothered him at all, especially as they’d gotten older. Jev wasn’t sure

why he’d always cared so much, tried so hard to do what was honorable and

expected of him, to be the appropriate eldest son. To please a man who’d

never been pleased by anything, or so it seemed. During Father’s tirades,

Vastiun had simply rattled his luck charms and run off into town to do as he

pleased. He’d—

Jev straightened and gripped the edges of the bench. “By all four dragon

founders, could that be it?” he whispered.

Only Lornysh, with his fine elven hearing, looked at him.

Jev didn’t explain. He was already lost in the past, remembering the night

his brother had died, the spearhead lodged in his guts, his cries of pain and

Jev’s shouts for someone to find a healer. But the healer had come too late.

Vastiun had died in his arms, having never fully explained why he’d joined

the army so many years into the war and requested to be sent to Taziira. He’d

mentioned something about a girl back home, but he’d been oddly elusive

when Jev had asked him for details.

“What is it?” Lornysh asked.

“You never knew my brother,” Jev murmured, almost wishing Lornysh or

Cutter had been there that night, so he would have someone else with him

who could verify the memories of his death. Or rather, his memories of the

next morning when they had burned Vastiun’s body in a pyre, refusing to bury

it in enemy territory. Before that, Jev had removed his brother’s weapons and

also the rings and luck charms he’d always worn on his wrists. Vastiun had

started collecting them as a boy, and his wrists had been so loaded with them

by the time of his death that he’d rattled when he walked.

Had there been an ivory one? Jev thought he remembered something like

that. Not eye-shaped, as he had been imagining from Zenia’s description, but

the shape of a tree trunk with an eye looking out from a hole in the side.

Could it be what the Water Order was looking for? One of Vastiun's luck charms?

It seemed a stretch, but Jev couldn’t think of anything else he’d come

across that might fit the description. But why would Vastiun have stolen some

artifact from one of the Orders? It was true that Vastiun had worried less

about upholding the Code and obeying their father than Jev, but he had still

been a good man. A moral man. Sometimes, he’d mouthed off to Father and

anyone else who told him what to do, but he’d never broken the law in any

serious way.

“He died the year before I joined your company, as I recall,” Lornysh

said, a prompt perhaps.

Jev sat back against the frame of the wagon, the wood hard against his

spine. Should he explain here? No, not with the watchmen within earshot.

“Yes. I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about later.” Jev made a point of not

looking at the watchmen. They had turned away, but they had also stopped

talking. He didn’t need magic to know they were listening. “After I talk to my

father.”

A conversation he had been dreading but that might solve this problem.

After removing Vastiun’s valuable and precious belongings from his body and

his pack, Jev had mailed them home with his latest intelligence reports. He’d

addressed the package to his father, certain the army would send it along to

Dharrow Castle. Those charms might be hanging from a peg in his brother’s

room right now.

The wagon came to a stop, the pond just visible beside the road. The

nervous sensation returned to Jev’s stomach. They had arrived.

The watchmen hopped out, not stopping Jev when he followed. He was

aware of Cutter and Lornysh climbing down behind him and their escorts

fingering their weapons uneasily, but Jev didn’t wait for permission to leave

the wagon. He strode toward the massive stone structure that had housed

Dharrows for almost a thousand years.

The drawbridge was down, as it always was, water from the pond

siphoned away to create a moat around the castle. A few trees swayed in the

breeze wafting up from the sea a couple of miles below, but as Jev had told

Lornysh, the land was mostly cleared around the castle and the pond. Cows

munched grass on a slope on the far side.

Not only had little changed since Jev walked away ten years earlier, but he

was fairly certain the cows had been in the same spot. He might have found

comfort in returning to the home he remembered, if not for the tense

relationship he’d always had with his father. He distinctly remembered being

relieved when his father had informed him he would be going off to war.

Even if Jev had never believed in the war, it had been an excuse—an order—

to leave, and he’d been ready for that.

As he crossed the drawbridge, Jev thought of his mother for the first time