Riel's Story - Mid-Fall

 When his parents informed him that his latest tutor, Quentin Makepeace, had abruptly left the Syndenton manor, Riel assumed that they had fired Mr. Makepeace for introducing their son to seditious and blasphemous propaganda.

The blood roared in his head, and his thoughts flew to the books tucked carefully under a floorboard in his room, obscured further by a heavy plush rug and part of his desk chair. What would be his punishment, exactly, for hoarding materials like The Faerie Reel and The Kingdom of Moonlight? His secrecy was clear proof that he knew possessing such things was forbidden, so he could not claim the ignorance of youth. Would they disown him? Lock him away in this blasted manor, more than he was already quarantined?

And what would happen to poor Mr. Makepeace? Surely, Riel thought, his heart beating fast despite himself, surely he had not actually been fired. It was all the more likely he had been arrested, condemned to the Inquisitors’ prison for corrupting the minds of the young… 

“Did he leave an address to send his last wages to?” he asked carefully, unemotionally. He gave no outward reaction to the news, nothing his parents could use against him. The firing and quitting of his numerous tutors over the years had become rather commonplace in their household: his mother and father knew well that their son could make an unsuitable teacher quit in less than a day, simply by aggressively—yet blandly, as if they were beneath his full attention—proving that he was far cleverer than they were or could ever hope to be, and by making his withering, fourteen-year-old contempt of them known through bored looks and near-silent breaths. 

But Mr. Makepeace was different. Had been different. He had stayed on for several months, and Riel had actually—tentatively—considered him a friend.

“‘Did he leave an address to which we might send his last wages?’” Riel’s mother corrected. She pushed a few peas around with her fork—something Riel knew his father hated—before adding, “No. He simply vanished without a trace, before the servants woke up. He didn’t even tender a letter of resignation. You must have done something horrible to him, for the man to forego his deucalions just to get away from you.”

That came as a terrible shock, even more so than the news of his actual absence. Mr. Makepeace had left of his own volition? He hadn’t been fired, but instead… had abandoned Riel to this madhouse, without even saying a word of goodbye?

No, Riel thought. He couldn’t believe it. Something must have happened; a threat had been made, or blackmail… His father must have had a hand in this. 

He glanced at the man now, surreptitiously, though his father was busy sipping his wine as he pored over business documents from an exchange he had made last night. Despite himself, Riel felt a surge of hatred, bile-like, roiling in his stomach; he waited out the rest of that torturous dinner before bowing and murmuring something about feeling indisposed for the rest of the evening.

His parents ignored that, too. As far as they were concerned, he was frail and sickly, too weak even to attend boarding school like most boys his age. Riel had believed for most of his life that this was due to an illness he’d contracted as a young child, something that had almost killed him—but now he understood their reluctance to let him outside had little to do with a sense of parental protectiveness. No, their motives were far more sinister.

Moving carefully, he climbed the spiraling staircase up to his rooms—of course, Riel thought, if they thought you were an invalid they would have never shut you up in the upper stories of the house, why didn’t you ever realize that?—and slipped into his bedroom. He locked the door behind him, taking care to move so methodically that the key barely clicked in the lock, and just to be certain, he barricaded the door by jamming his writing chair under the knob.

Everything in his room was perfectly symmetrical: the walls, the ceiling, the positioning of the furniture. He had made it that way, had measured everything out precisely and exactly, had ensured that things were just so. There were rectangular bars of ivory soap stacked in perfect towers within the cabinets of his bathroom. Surfaces around the apartment gleamed from their lack of fingerprints, lack of dust. The carpet was still fluffy, unmarked by the wear and tear of wandering idle feet, and the furniture sat neatly, sleek and pristine. 

It was because of this obsessive neatness that Riel always knew when someone had been in his room without his permission. He could sense the intrusion the way a bloodhound could pick out a scent; it was instinctual, immediate. He eyed the patch of carpet under which his stash of hidden books lay. So far it seemed no one had actually disturbed the cache… which supported his parents’ implication that they had not fired Mr. Makepeace. At least not for the reasons Riel had first thought. 

He knelt and carefully peeled up the heavy rug, lightly running his fingernails down the cracks of the loose floorboard until he could pry it silently up. In the hidden space beneath there sat The Faerie Reel and The Kingdom of Moonlight, along with three other similar books. Riel let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding and carefully picked up The Faerie Reel, running his fingers over the faded gold letters, flipping it open to a random page to ensure that no one else had thumbed through it.  

Really, he thought then, with just a hint of irritation. He was acting like he was stashing a gun in the house, or a bundle of illicit drugs. These were fairytales, books of pagan mythology, collections describing the magical—or Diminished—world as it once had been. Nothing to take seriously except in an academic sense—but the Autarchy cared little about differentiating between scholars and heretics. And if his parents had found out, they certainly would have thrown Mr. Makepeace to the wolves rather than their only son.

But if the books were undisturbed, how would they have found out?

Something on the page he’d turned to caught his eye. Riel looked closer; someone had written, using a horsehair paintbrush, in the finest, almost translucent ink:

Nothing is only itself.

He had his second great shock of that night. The phrase was written in Mr. Makepeace’s hand… but it had been written before he’d given the book to Riel.

That meant—if the phrase was indicative of anything—that his tutor had been planning his exit since before Riel’s fourteenth birthday. Weeks ago. 

Riel took a deep, steadying breath. Put the book back in its hidden spot and slowly walked over to the reading settee by the window, which looked out into a wintry grey courtyard. He had to think. That was what he was best at, and given enough time, he could think through anything, make sense of the most ludicrous turn of events. 

He just needed to go over everything again and see where it had all gone wrong.

#

Two things happened in the weeks leading up to Riel’s birthday.

The first was that an intellectual sensation was sweeping through the courts and universities and fashionable academic clubs of the land. This sensation was a book called On the Non-Existence of the Gift: a treatise by an up-and-coming scholar named Talua that claimed that all of the things that separated the Norms from the Diminished—formerly the Gifted—were mere psychological projections, delusions, and were not actually real. The book boldly claimed that magic, arma, grace, and all the other fantastical things in the world were mere conjurations of the mind, and that an enlightened people such as the Norms could finally let go of what he called “the superstitions of the past.” 

It had exploded throughout the Autarchy, in more ways than one. It became trendy, even exciting, to quote from the book, to discuss it over platters of sweetmeats and salted tea. Talua insisted that, in the same way that all children were made aware of whether they were poor or rich, almost from the moment they spoke, so too had the world made Norm children aware that they were different from Ket, Elves, Mages, and Hunters. But the superstitions and holdovers of the old world were so strong that the awareness of this difference manifested itself in a belief that the Diminished were not only different in their physical features—in their glowing eyes or symmetrical faces, which of course other beings would naturally envy—but also in their possession of some invisible, unknowable force, granted to them through the random whims of fate and denied to Norm children, who so desperately wanted to be like their counterparts that they perceived the difference between them in fantastical ways. Little Susie saw that Marie had beautiful eyes like flame—a mere genetic mutation, Talua called it—and her child’s fancy, latching onto her feelings of comparison and inadequacy, insisted that Marie must be better than her in other ways, that she must really be able to conjure flame like all the stories said. Or little Tim so envied little Mathias’ pointed ears—a mundane result of inbreeding, Talua argued—that it was very easy for him to believe the suggestion that Mathias would also live forever. And that belief was so strong, so reinforced by millennia of listening to the older races’ claims and stories, that they had all collectively deceived themselves into thinking that there really was such a thing as “the Gift,” something they lacked but that the Diminished had: though it was really a psychological projection of the idea of “Difference” between tribes, and not actual real magic, but shared mass delusion…

“That’s ridiculous,” Riel announced when his tutor Mr. Makepeace told him about it. Mr. Makepeace had been hired two months ago in order to teach him about history, Riel’s strongest subject, but he’d found that Riel had already read everything Mr. Makepeace had thought to bring him—so he kept him abreast of modern news instead, talking with him about things that couldn’t be found in the papers. So far the arrangement was suiting them very well. “And if it is true, the implications are horrific. That would mean the Autarchy is treating the Diminished poorly for no reason whatsoever; that the danger they say the Diminished cause is nothing more than imaginary.”

“Ah, but no one likes to think about that part,” Mr. Makepeace said. He was a short, solid man, about thirty, with an open and friendly face and a brown, pointed goatee. His hands, Riel had first noted, were thick and meaty, like a farmer’s hands—but he was the only teacher so far who had ever thought to treat Riel like an equal, like an adult, and so the boy had warily accepted him as a conversational partner. For now. “All anyone can focus on is that it yanks the idea of Diminished superiority right out from under them. The Diminished aren’t special, they aren’t loved by the gods like they always said! They’re just peddlers of lies, deceivers who press-ganged vulnerable young Norms into believing they were really superhuman. They took advantage of us, because we came after them; our race is younger than theirs, so they had the advantage in telling us how the world worked. So really, the way we treat them is all well and good, because they deserve it for lying and putting themselves up on a false pedestal.”

Riel was disgruntled by this train of logic in a way he couldn’t quite name. He asked Mr. Makepeace to get a hold of this book, and read it for himself in less than two hours—though it was well over nine-hundred pages—and found he was thoroughly annoyed by the author’s way of writing: Talua loved to make statements that boiled down to “this is nothing more than that,” so that the whole book said things like “reality is nothing more than a string of shared delusions that we all found it beneficial to believe in.” There was no actual proof for his statements, but it was all said with such confidence, such surety, that it was strangely compelling and hard to dispute. Talua concluded the whole monstrous thing with the profound and ringing statement: Nothing is more than what it is. 

“But why would other Diminished also believe in these ‘delusions’?” Riel asked afterwards, shoving the book away with dislike. “Would a Hunter feel inadequate because he lacked an Elf’s pointed ears, and therefore be incentivized to believe the Elf could really talk to animals? And how can these stupid ramblings dispute thousands and thousands of years of actual proof? There are ancient buildings that still hold the scorch marks of mage-flame… Records upon records of real historical figures…”

“Ah,” Mr. Makepeace said, “but how do we know those scorch marks were done by magic, and not, say, a sulphuric explosion from underground? Or that these historical figures were not simply charlatans taking advantage of the naïve?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Riel reiterated again. 

Despite this, however, he now felt strangely off-kilter and uncertain. This was unusual for him: for his entire life, he had relied on arguing with himself and thinking things through until it was all straightened out into a neat parcel of understanding. He’d had no choice, growing up with no friends, and with his parents utterly disinterested in anything he had to talk about. But now he was trying to get used to sharing his real thoughts with someone else—Mr. Makepeace—and somehow saying them out loud made them feel vulnerable, both thin and heavy-handed, and that made him feel uneasy. Clumsy. 

Mr. Makepeace seemed to recognize his frustration and dropped his devil’s advocate act. “I agree,” he said. “It’s all pedantry, nonsense. But many people are being taken in by it, partially because it’s so novel, and especially because so many of them—particularly the young ones—have never actually seen magic being done right in front of them, or a Ket leaping twenty feet into the air, or an Elf talking a rose into unfurling.”

“Of course they haven’t,” Riel said incredulously. “Because it’s forbidden. No Mage or Ket or Elf would dare.”

“And so that makes it all the easier to believe they really can’t do magic, after all,” Mr. Makepeace said. “And that none of it actually exists. Because few people ever get to see indisputable proof of it.”

Riel pursed his lips together. He, of course, had never seen any Diminished talent being performed in front of him either, but he had also never seen a million coins: and yet he knew that existed somewhere. Tiring of the debate, however, he only said: “There must be some proof that can convince people, even those who can’t trust their very senses.”

“Perhaps there is,” was all Mr. Makepeace said in reply. He studied Riel for a moment, leaning heavily on his hip against the far wall. Riel had noticed that his new tutor disliked sitting across from him at the long worktable his parents had installed in the library, where he did the majority of his schoolwork; the man preferred to pace as he talked, prowling almost like a patrolling lion. His eyes were almost catlike, brown and intelligent and turned at a gentle slant. Riel realized suddenly that he had no idea where Mr. Makepeace had come from. By his coloring he could have been from anywhere in the West; his accent placed him from somewhere beyond Kinley, but beyond that, Riel still didn’t know enough about the world to say.

“Have you ever heard about the moonlit world?” Mr. Makepeace asked then, before his pupil could think to inquire further. 

Riel frowned and shook his head. It was also rare that he did not know something, but because he wanted to learn—and learn everything—he resisted the urge to feel defensive about it. “No, I haven’t. What is it?”

“It comes from a famous poem,” Mr. Makepeace said. “About a faerie who falls in love with a mortal. She comes from the suntouched world, and I from the moonlit kingdom. It’s a way of describing—well, the mundane and the arcane, the everyday world and the supernatural. Math and physicks belong to the suntouched world; magic and ghosts and the secret commonwealth of all the things we can’t name belong to the moonlit.”

What about love? Riel wanted to ask, wondering about the fate of the faerie’s doomed romance—but the question was so sudden and ridiculous that he immediately hated himself for thinking it. “Where is the poem from?” he asked instead. 

“Forbidden materials,” Mr. Makepeace answered blithely.

“How did you read it, then?”

His tutor laughed and reached out a hand, as if to ruffle Riel’s hair; but then he remembered himself and put his hand in his back pocket, as if to put the gesture literally behind him. Riel didn’t know if he was annoyed or relieved. “Maybe you’ll find out someday,” Mr. Makepeace said.

The second thing that happened leading up to Riel’s birthday was that he began to suspect his father was having an affair.

Such things happened, Riel knew, and happened frequently, especially among their rung of powerful and wealthy businessmen. (His father hated the word merchant, finding it weak and ineffectual, and had once ranted in low, vicious tones for an entire night when an associate introduced him as an exotic imports merchant.) And yet he had never expected his father to participate in anything so tawdry, so unbecoming. The man seemed almost sexless, so preoccupied by numbers and gold that anything else—be it emotion or sexual impulse—seemed unthinkable in comparison.

And yet he could not shake the feeling, once it took root. He began to suspect it on a night when his parents forced him to attend an important dinner with their business associates. 

“The lines are all wrong,” Riel announced, an hour before the dinner. Though his new suit was crisp and tailored, there was something lopsided about it. Was it the sleeves? Was one longer than the other? Or was it the shoulders? Was the right one sharper, more squarely-cut, than the left? Or was his posture so poor that his body looked asymmetrical?

“It will have to do, young master. I gather your father is meeting with a very prominent businesswoman from the North tonight.”

Riel turned, still tugging irritably at his cufflinks. He shook his sleeves and said, “I suppose you’re trying to get me excited for it, Faron? Trying to emphasize what an opportunity this is for my young, impressionable mind to learn of the world?”

The aging servant of the chambers bowed, with just a hint of irony. “I would never presume to do so, sir. God knows no force on heaven or earth could ever excite you if you wished otherwise.”

The boy smiled faintly and gestured the man over to the mirror. “Does this suit seem lopsided to you? Uneven? I could swear there’s something wrong with it.”

Faron sighed lightly through his nose and adjusted his young master’s starched collar. “You look as noble as ever, sir—and just as symmetrical. If not for your dour expression, I would say that you look very dignified.”

“I have every right to be dour, Faron,” Riel said, allowing the servant to button his coat at the neck. “These dinners are pointless. I’m an ornament to these people, like a flower or a vase, there to be seen and not heard. Meanwhile, I sit there, bored nearly to tears, while they go on about coffee and khav and chocolate and all the other things my father strives to force his monopoly upon.” He examined himself critically in the mirror and added, “I can’t imagine why Mother even bothers having me there.”

“You have a very great imagination, sir,” Faron answered politely, picking up Riel’s discarded shirt and heading for the door. “I’m sure you’ll find the reason somewhere within.”

Riel rolled his eyes and made his way down to the dining room.

They sat, as always, in the same places at the same table, and were served the same food: roast goose with honeyed wine and wild rice. Riel’s father, Lauriet, was a man of routines, of patterns: he could not abide by many things, unpredictability and intimacy being chief among them. Once, a new maid had moved his silver comb from its usual place in his bathroom cabinet, and Riel’s father had fired her on the spot. And as for closeness—yes, Riel knew his father did not like to be close to anyone (which would make the later idea of an affair both boggling and intriguing). Riel’s mother had once sipped from his father’s glass by mistake, and his father had insisted that the servants take it away and bring him a new one. He did not even like to sit in the physicker’s chair, where other patients had sat, while the physicker stood close to him smelling of metal. He insisted that the doctor pay their house private visits, once every month; this was also the man who had said that Riel’s constitution was too weak for him to attend school, and who seemed to have the name of a new affliction every time he examined the boy even when Riel himself felt fine.

Tonight they were joined by a man named Yisai Achi, a merchant from the Sesz Isles, and a woman named Rosella Starik, a broad-shouldered, austere figure with platinum-blond hair slicked fashionably to her head like a shining helmet. She sat at his father’s right hand, Achi to his left, Riel and his mother on the other side of the table. Normally Riel paid little attention to his parents’ business associates, but there was something different about Rosella Starik. The plain way in which she spoke. The cool smile. The glimmer of watchfulness and hidden laughter behind her gaze. 

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” the woman said, inclining her head at Riel. Her voice was thick and husky with the Karzaki accent: she had to come from Karzai. A fur throw was buckled closely around her shoulders. “Your father talks about you often.”

I doubt it, Riel thought, but he returned the bow with an impeccable gesture of respect. “We’re honored to receive you as a guest this evening.”

The woman smiled slightly and turned away. As she did, Achi stirred in his seat, and Riel’s eyes flashed down. The man’s knuckles were scarred, in the way a warrior’s would be after years of training. Even as he looked, however, the merchant moved his hands under the table. 

Riel felt a sudden blanket of sweat cover the back of his neck. As the servants leapt to place down the usual dishes—bread, bowls of roasted vegetables, delicacies of grain and rare potatoes—Riel’s thoughts began to thunder, exploding through his brain like cloudbursts. What was going on? Who were these people, so different from who his parents normally associated with? Why was that man across the table moving like a fighter?

Calm down, he thought. Perhaps Achi was simply a retired mercenary, a sellsword who had swapped trades and gone into business; or perhaps he was a bodyguard hired to protect Miss Starik. There had been trouble among the trading houses lately, Riel knew that much; his own family’s prime competitor, the Whittens, were known to sabotage and ruin their rivals through underhanded methods. Perhaps this man was simply a precaution against that: the Whittens had even been said to deploy assassins.

But if Achi was a bodyguard, why lie about who he was? 

“Miss Starik, do tell us of your travels,” Riel’s mother simpered then. “We see so little of the Continent, especially since Riel was born.”

Rosella Starik turned her half-lidded gaze to Riel. “Do you dislike travel, young sir?” he asked, without the slightest hint of genuine interest.

Before Riel could answer, his father said gruffly, “The boy’s frail, Rosella, if you couldn’t tell already. Too sick to travel.”

The woman barely blinked; merely looked at the boy with the same cool, indifferent gaze. Then, strangely, she smiled a little. “Oh. I didn’t notice.” 

Riel sat still for the rest of dinner, aflame with humiliation. But even through the heat of that, he could not help but notice how his father and Rosella exchanged furtive looks every once in a while; how she gave him the same secret smile she had given Riel, and how nervous his father became then, no matter how much he tried to hide it. After the meal was over, both of them rose smoothly, silently, as if this were an expected thing, and left the table to go into the drawing room together, and Riel could not help but stare after them. His mother was acting as if she hadn’t noticed their departure at all. It was all profoundly strange, and stranger still was Achi’s sudden question to him: “How old are you, boy?”

“Thirteen,” Riel answered. “Fourteen in a few weeks.”

“Which is it? Thirteen or fourteen?”

Riel wanted to grind the man’s face into his food. “Thirteen,” he said through his teeth. 

Achi looked at Riel’s mother, whose face pinked. “I see,” was all he said.

Later that evening, Riel excused himself and padded silently to his father’s drawing room door, from where the two adults had never once emerged. He could hear nothing from beyond the door, and the indignity of lowering himself to the ground to peer through the crack underneath it was almost too much to bear; but his curiosity was overwhelming, and so he did it. 

But he could not penetrate anything through that crack between the door and floor, that separation that he could not see through; the line of light that marked the bottom of the locked door was too thin, so insubstantial that it made what lay on the other side seem, after all, like nothing.

#

“So you think they’re having an affair?” Mr. Makepeace said, a few days later. He came to the manor three times a week, and unlike most tutors did not live within the Syndenton grounds, but instead stayed at an inn in town. “Surely they could have simply been talking business.”

“Father always conducts those discussions in front of me,” Riel said tiredly. He had not slept well since the dinner, and he was starting to get throbbing headaches. “So that I might learn something useful, at least for when I’m supposed to take over the trading house. No, this was different. They were hiding something, the two of them. I’m sure he’s sleeping with her.”

Mr. Makepeace did not bat an eye at a thirteen—nearly fourteen—year-old boy saying such a thing about his own father. “You think he would be bold enough to do so in his own home? In the proximity of his wife and child?”

Riel would have shrugged, had he not detested such a gesture. “My father has always been… hard. Uncaring. Unscrupulous. I wouldn’t put it past him. And my mother would have no recourse. If she divorced him, she would lose everything. All the fineries that she’s used to.”

Now Mr. Makepeace whistled. “You are all rationality,” he said, in a half-admiring tone. “It almost makes me wonder if you’d recognize such a thing as an affair. True passion.”

“What else could it have been?” Riel demanded, annoyed by such a statement. 

Mr. Makepeace studied him for a thoughtful moment. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “But I think you’re clever enough to figure it out.”

From then on, it became a challenge. For the next several weeks Riel threw himself into learning the workings of the family business, primarily in a bid to study his father more closely than he had before. He sat with the man in his office, going over account books and foremen reports with him, feigning at a sudden interest in numbers, accounting. Grudgingly, his father said, “It’s about time,” and allowed him to observe the work—so long as he didn’t get underfoot.

He gained a hazy understanding of the shape of their family’s finances, their wealth, and how they conducted their business. The Syndenton Trading House primarily dealt in imports that had once begun as off-world transplants, or so the legends went: khav (which came from coffee) and chocolate, charch and smokeleaf, et cetera. Their main rival, the Whitten Trading Syndicate, dealt in something similar—foreign livestock such as horses and oben—and each house threatened to spill into the other’s territory at any given time. Their enmity had only been strengthened when Riel’s grandfather apparently shot and killed the Whitten patriarch fifty years ago. His father still kept the rifle over the mantle in the dining room. 

None of this, of course, told Riel anything at all about his father having an affair, but it did allow him to study a man he had only ever known to be harsh, exacting, and unforgiving. But there were glimmers of humanity, here and there, and a startling awareness on Riel’s part that his father very much looked like him. Or, he supposed, it was the other way around. There was that same sharp bone structure, the ice-blue eyes and jet-black hair. And, sometimes, a proud twitch of the lips when Riel handed him a perfect sheet of calculations; a wrapped toffee left innocuously on a desk and pointedly not acknowledged until Riel picked it up.

“He’s wracked by guilt,” he told Mr. Makepeace the week before his birthday party. The man had become his sole confidant during this period, and had listened with mild interest to all of Riel’s investigations, talking them over with him as if they were an intellectual exercise. “He sees the shadow of domesticity in me and feels guilty for betraying it.”

“But he hasn’t mentioned Rosella Starik once since her visit, has he?” Mr. Makepeace rebutted.

Riel snorted. “Of course he wouldn’t. Who willingly brings up their mistress to their son? And, in fact, the fact that I have never once seen her mentioned in our account books or bills of sale proves her connection to him is not one of business. It’s personal.”

“Hmmm,” Mr. Makepeace said, as if unconvinced.

Riel nearly spluttered. “She’s even attending the birthday celebration my mother insists on throwing for me,” he said. He supposed he was craving some validation for his efforts—but he was not willing to admit it. “You really don’t think something’s there?”

“I think your instincts are accurate,” Mr. Makepeace said, “but perhaps your senses need to be opened further. Perhaps you need to learn that nothing is only itself.”

“That’s not what the saying is,” Riel said waspishly. With perfect recall he repeated Talua’s famous phrase: “It’s ‘nothing is more than what it is.’”

Mr. Makepeace gave a little laugh. “It’s time you graduated from that level of thinking to a higher truth.” 

Sometimes Mr. Makepeace sounded more like a poet than a historian, Riel thought in dismay as his teacher turned away to draw something out of his bag. He felt a little cold jolt of shock when he saw what the man was holding: a book called The Faerie Reel. One look at it told Riel that this was a Diminished text; a forbidden thing. Suddenly the room felt close and narrow. He had never witnessed something unsafe in his home before. 

“Here,” Mr. Makepeace said, as casually as if he were handing Riel a handkerchief. “That poem I told you about, with the suntouched world and the moonlit world.” He blinked at the look on Riel’s face. “I thought it could help you. I noticed you have no fiction on your shelves: only texts on politics, and history, and grammar. But I think a little of the moonlit is needed to liven the soul, make it receptive to other currents in the world. To help you learn to look beyond the plain facts, what your eyes tell you. The opposite of On the Non-Existence of the Gift. I’ll have a few more to give you by the end of this week.”

He held it out again expectantly, and although Riel stared at it as if it were a snake poised to bite him, he felt his hands creeping forward almost against his will. He felt suddenly as if he were standing on the edge of a precipice; he knew that to take that book would be to jump. When his fingers closed around it, he felt as if he had been scalded; his hands burned, and cold white light seemed to shoot up his spine.

“Thank you,” he said, because that was what he had been taught to say. But inwardly his heart was lurching, in turmoil. Mr. Makepeace giving him this book seemed dangerous, almost lurid and taboo; why was his tutor risking the both of them so casually? 

But surely it  also meant that the man trusted him, trusted Riel not to tattle on him to the Vice Guard—trusted him, in fact, with his life?

Or perhaps he was simply a fool, as Riel had always suspected of his teachers. A bumpkin who didn’t know the consequences of his actions, who blithely assumed the world would not allow any misfortune to befall him. Perhaps Mr. Makepeace was simply arrogant.

He felt, perversely, a little disappointed by this thought, and hid the book under the floor of his room and did not read it. 

The next week was Riel’s birthday gala, an occasion that was populated solely by adults—for, again, he had no friends or even acquaintances beyond the servants of the manor. But his mother seemed to be having a good time, gliding through the manor and showing the guests the splendid stained glass she had commissioned, the fountain in the courtyard that had been swept of mid-autumn’s dead leaves. The only thing she did not show them was her own son: Riel was expected to stay in his rooms until the meal, and was expected to retire back to them once the last scrap had left his plate.

Rosella Starik was there, though this time she did not sit at his father’s right hand: this was occupied by a jovial man named Gareth Corell, an apple-cheeked merchant from Haven. When the drinks had been poured, he raised his glass to Riel and said, “To Riel! This day marks the day that you become a man.”

Riel returned the toast, but privately he found this sentiment odd. Thirteen was his Wreath Day, the day he had entered adolescence; and twenty was when he reached the age of majority. Perhaps Corell was simply confused and had forgotten his age; certainly his parents wouldn’t have talked much about him to their friends and guests.

The other oddity came when another woman happened to ask Riel: “Tell me, what do boys your age like to do?”

“I’m not sure,” Riel replied. He knew what he liked to do. Besides reading, which was his primary interest and one that he would not belittle by calling a hobby, he liked very specific things: he enjoyed building things from metal but not wood; he took pleasure in watching birds fly but could not be persuaded to pet the gardener’s cat; he kept lists of words he particularly liked or disliked the sounds of. At the moment he thought “protectorate” was especially beautiful but could not bear the word “torrid.” 

“Well,” the woman said. “You have keen acumen for one so young. I look forward to conducting further business with you.”

His mother turned hastily to the woman and said, “Of course, Riel returns the same sentiment. Don’t you, Riel?”

He looked from his mother, with her nervous smile, to the confusion of the other woman. Then at Rosella Starik, watching the whole thing unfold with an amused expression, and his father, who seemed to be ignoring the whole thing altogether. And then it began to occur to him: 

His parents were keeping something secret from him. But it was not an affair. 

It was something involving him.

That night, when the festivities were in full swing and the adults were preoccupied in the parlor on the far end of the mansion, Riel slipped down in silence to his father’s drawing room. He knew what key unlocked the door, now, and had memorized the combination to the safe in which his father kept the account books. He was not a particularly brave boy, but he was decisive and confident in his own ability to lie out of most situations. And the questions of the last few weeks gnawed and nipped out him. He wouldn’t be able to sleep until he learned once and for all what was going on.

The door to the safe glided open as if the hinges had been oiled just for him. Riel riffled carefully through the various tomes that he had become familiar with: there was nothing here that he hadn’t already seen from his work with his father.

But then, at the back of the safe, there was a little leather sheath that read: RIEL.

Riel took it without hesitation. He expected inheritance papers, a will, instructions on what to do should either or both of his parents pass away unexpectedly. 

But the first page he turned to was a contract—between himself and Rosella Starik.

Riel went cold.

He read on, hurriedly. There were a dozen more contracts, between himself and other parties, including the scarred man Yisai Achi. Most of the contracts referred to his purchase of something called devil’s tongue, or materials related to it. All were signed and dated by Riel—in his father’s hand. Sometimes his mother’s.

He wanted to sit. He wanted to run. Instead, Riel swallowed the thick saline gathering in his throat and flipped through the last pages, memorizing their contents, vowing to copy them down later. There was a letter from their physicker, the one who came to visit monthly; a letter of certification. It read: 

I assert my diagnosis. The boy Riel Syndenton is afflicted with a disease that keeps him looking younger than he really is. He was born on Coppersun 15, in Year 985 of the Mirror Era. I delivered him at the Syndenton home myself.

Riel felt struck, as if by a fist. That was the right birthday, but not his birthyear. By the letter’s false calculation, that would put Riel at age 20.

There was a sudden light step outside of the drawing room; Faron’s voice, the sliding golden light of a lantern under the door. “Is someone there?”

Swiftly Riel stuffed the papers back in their folder and shut the safe, crossing over to a bookshelf on the nearest wall and pulling a random volume off the case. “Just me, Faron,” he said, keeping his voice light and unconcerned. “I was just looking for a book to keep me occupied for the rest of this dreadful night.”

“Ah, young master,” Faron said, without coming in. Then he hesitated. “Your father does not like people to dwell in his study without his permission.”

“I know,” Riel said, opening the door briskly. “Which is precisely why I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell him.” He lifted the book and waggled it at Faron, proud that his fingers didn’t tremble. “I’ll finish the book and return it by morning. He’ll never know that I was here.”

#

The next morning, Riel told Mr. Makepeace everything he had discovered in his father’s study.

“What is devil’s tongue?” he asked the man.

Mr. Makepeace had listened to the whole thing with grave and silent concern. Now he said: “Do you really want to know, Riel?”

Of course I do, you idiot, Riel thought. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask. But of course he knew this was mean-spirited and unfair, so he only said: “Yes.”

Mr. Makepeace said soberly: “On the surface, it’s a plant, a kind of weed that makes animals go a bit loopy when they eat it. Manufactured in bulk, though, and processed a certain way, it’s a drug that the Mages of Karzai have been peddling in secret throughout the Autarchy. Illegal, of course, and destructive and addictive—and extremely profitable.”

Riel had been dreading that it was something like that. He felt the finality of it land in his gut, like a struck bell, a death toll, a gong that rang throughout this bones: he said, almost airlessly, “So my parents are not dealing in chocolate. They are involved in the drug trade.”

“I’m sure the chocolate is still a part of it,” Mr. Makepeace said soothingly, as if this were Riel’s true concern. “This seems to be a—side venture. Something to be done in secret, under the table. Doubtless Miss Rosella Starik is the one spearheading the negotiations. If she could get your parents to distribute devil’s tongue alongside their usual shipment routes… it would spread throughout the entire Continent. Make both parties a fortune.” He flexed his hands uneasily on his knees. “Of course… such a thing comes with its risks.”

“Such as discovery by the Autarchy?” Riel snapped then, standing up and pacing. “Such as arrest, trials, and a summary lopping off of the head?” He looked up then, realizing suddenly the significance of the doctor’s forged letter. “I’m their backup plan. Their scapegoat. If they’re caught, they can provide all the papers, all the evidence that says I was the one involved with the drugs, not them. It’s my signature on all of the contracts, of course.”

Mr. Makepeace shook his head. “But you are too young to sign such things on your own. Of course the fault would go to your parents.”

“Not if they have a physicker’s certified letter that I’m really twenty,” Riel pointed out bitterly. “Cursed with a disease that makes me look like a boy. Given a birthdate by a physicker bribed to swear he delivered me twenty years ago!” He cursed suddenly, for the very first time in his life; even Mr. Makepeace looked surprised. “That’s why they won’t let me go out,” Riel continued, feeling as if his blood had turned to acid. “That’s why I’m confined here, why I can’t go to school. My concealment supports their story; the less people who see me, the less people who can dispute this cockamamie lie that I’m afflicted—or that I’m old! They’ve been planning for this since I was born!”

He had the urge to hurl one of the books on the worktable at the door, but instead flung himself into a chair and seethed. His head pounded, and his eyes felt raw and gritty, though he hadn’t cried. A small part of him almost admired his parents’ ruthlessness, their clever cruelty. 

The other part vowed to exact vengeance on them.

Mr. Makepeace was silent for a moment, then said: “You have made copies of all these documents?”

“Only transcribed them from memory,” Riel answered, after a reluctant moment. 

Mr. Makepeace stood decisively and moved to the window overlooking the courtyard. It was an autumnal display out there, and normally Riel’s favorite time of the year: he loved the vibrant hues of the leaves, the ripening and progression of the year. Now everything simply looked dying or dead. There had been a tipping point, and somehow he had missed it. 

“You need to leave,” Mr. Makepeace said. “Their plans for you wouldn’t harm you if they were never caught—but they might be. And if they are, yours will be the neck the noose is waiting for.” He hesitated, as if surprised by his own morbidity, then looked at Riel. “Would you leave this house?”

“Where would I go?” Riel asked him, feeling tired and miserable. But even as he said it, another part whispered to him that he had thought out an escape plan for a long, long time. Haven, or beyond…

But those were boyish fantasies, he told himself. The same way other boys dreamed of slaying dragons or becoming great soldiers. He had plotted out the trajectory of his life after the manor—but only in the realm of dreams.

“You could come with me,” Mr. Makepeace said. “I could help you. We could take a caravan from Leore—” 

He cut himself off abruptly when there was a sudden creak outside of the library door. Riel stiffened, but it was only one of Faron’s maidservants knocking softly and asking if there was a want for tea. 

“No,” Riel told her through the door, more harshly than he intended, and they both listened to her scuttle away.

Mr. Makepeace lowered his voice. “Think on it, Riel,” he said in a half-murmur. “It isn’t safe here for you. Clearly your parents are using you as a ploy—their own child—” He broke off, shook his head. “You need to leave. I can make preparations. Tonight, even.” 

Riel couldn’t answer before there was another call at the door; the tinkling of a little bell. He heard his mother’s voice, a little raspy from entertaining last night: “Riel! I insist that you come down for tea!”

He stood and walked to the door, feeling like a man being sentenced to the gallows. Mr. Makepeace said, just a little sharply: “Riel.”

He turned and looked at his tutor. The man’s eyes were dark and intense, and suddenly, for the first time in his life, Riel felt a little afraid of him.

But Mr. Makepeace only said, “Read the books I gave you. Think it through. Nothing is only what it is.”

#

By the morning, his tutor had vanished, and Riel was left holding the contraband that he had left behind. After an hour of hard thought, he finally understood: the message in pale ink was written in all five books, and held over a candle flame and unscrambled, it revealed a series of coded messages that flashed across the page and vanished in a few seconds when brought away from the heat. 

Riel,

If you are reading this, then I’ll have gone. And if you are reading this, I will have found a way to save you.

I am not a tutor. I’m a little surprised that a person of your intelligence did not discern it sooner, but I suspect—and I’m sorry to say it—that you were so desperate for a friend that you wanted to be blind to it.

No, I am not a tutor.

I was hired by the Whitten Trading House to discover secrets that would ruin your family. Previous methods having failed, they surmised that a spy who could ingratiate himself to the Syndentons’ young scion would be able to extract information worthy of blackmail… or whatever it is the Whittens plan to do. 

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that you were held as distant from your own parents’ doings as a servant is; that you had nothing much to say about their business dealings, though you shone enough in other areas that even someone like me could recognize your potential.

Failing the information route, my secondary plan was to give you these books. A plant, damning evidence against your family. Had I proceeded, the Whittens would have reported you to the Inquisitors, your family manor would have been raided, and the Syndenton prospects would have been ruined. 

For what it’s worth, I am sorry.

But if you are reading this, I have decided not to embark on that course of action. Instead, I am offering you a way out. If you are reading this, you or someone else will have handed me other information I can use against your family—a last-minute rescue. Something that will still ruin your parents… but which will still give you the chance to escape their fate. 

Such a route, however, will come at a price. You will have to come with me and work with the Whittens. At least for now. Beg them for mercy, illuminate all the ways that you could be useful to them. Have them take you into their protection, even as they destroy your mother and father. Who will be left to judge you, after that? And what other course can you take?

Of course, you have every reason in the world not to trust me. Except this: this note, because I have grown fond of you as much as I have come to pity you. I hope you will consider this plan of action: the doom of your family gallops close. If you wish to join me, find a way to leave your family’s home one week from your birthday. Take the old road into Leore; wait at an inn called the Firedrake. I will be there.  

Or, if you wish to strike out on your own, do it quickly. Leave the city and change your name. Put all of this behind you and let yourself have a childhood—though it does seem as if  you were born already old. 

Either way, I wish you the best of luck. The world is too hard, too rational, so that it at times it seems insane. You have a good head on your shoulders, just a touch of the moonlit in you—just enough to have sense. You will grow into a good man, if you live to grow at all. 

Your friend,

Q

Riel burned the books, shortly after that. Afterwards, he sat at his bedroom window and watched the stars wheel overhead, the growing light and then fading of the moon. His head was still ringing; there was a kind of spangled aura growing behind his eyes. For the first time ever he found that he did not want to think things through, this split path that lay before him: this infinite splintering of possibilities, divided by lines so thin he could barely see them, as if they had all blurred into one. 

What could he do? Stay or leave? Become a Whitten or stay a Syndenton? Flee his old self or forge himself anew? Trust his first friend or punish his oldest enemies?

“The secret commonwealth of all the things we can’t name,” he said aloud, so quietly it was as if a ghost said it. The blood thumped in his head. The light behind his eyes grew and grew. “Everything is nothing but what I want it to be.”

The next day he was gone, leaving behind his white, silent room, the ashes of the moonlit books in his fireplace. When the Inquisitors came, they found no pictures on the walls, not even a tack; no papers with his name in his father’s safe. No toys or hoarded sweets squirreled away into the walls. In fact there was no proof that Riel Syndenton had ever lived in that place to begin with. There was no evidence that he had ever existed at all.