21. Florian

Chapter 21

Florian

I only owned one gray suit, and I chose to wear it the next morning. Bright and interesting color was always in fashion in Dawnchaser lands, so gray wasn’t common. But considering I’d just sentenced a man to the next best thing to death, it felt appropriate to be somber.

As though they had all read my mind and decided similarly, everyone I cared about did the same thing. Aunt Ivy arrived in the dining room with Fawn, both of them wearing dark blue. Cove arrived in a darker gray than me, almost black, and with his pale skin and white hair, it made him look severe. Even Frost wore black.

Just as we were getting seated, the servants showed in a handful of other people. Family, yes, but people I didn’t recognize other than by their Dawnchaser coloring.

Cousins Aeryn and Poppy, it turned out, and their respective partners, and Poppy’s two teenaged children. Six entire family members I didn’t remember having met. Stranger yet, they were all respectful and somber, as the situation demanded.

I offered Aeryn my hand to shake, and they started to take it, then rolled their eyes and grabbed me for a hug. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here, kiddo. I slugged your dad after Fenella died and he said I was no longer welcome on the family estate.”

I blinked in shock, staring at them for a second, before Fawn burst into giggles behind me. That brought me back to myself. “Then you probably don’t know Fawn at all,” I said, motioning to my sister. A moment later Fawn, too, was enveloped in a hug from a cousin I hadn’t seen in twenty years.

Because they had hit Father after Mother’s death.

We all sat down to breakfast, and it started out awkward, but not in a terrible way. No glaring or sneering was involved, just polite distance as people started to learn about each other. It was...surreal.

“You should be prepared for this,” Cousin Poppy said to me as we were eating. She had a tendency to talk with her hands, and since we were eating, that translated into waving her silverware around while eating. Fawn was entranced, staring at her every motion. “I don’t know if you’ve been to a severing before, but the family is...”

“Morbid?” her husband offered.

“Disturbingly gleeful,” Aeryn’s wife said. “It’s like something straight out of the Middle Ages when they burned people for bonding stones.”

I shivered at the thought but nodded. “I remember one. Cousin Camilla got caught trying to poison Father. Sort of.”

She’d been giving him an emetic, trying to embarrass or inconvenience him more than kill him, because he’d embarrassed her in front of the family. I had been ten, not long bonded to my own stone, and horrified by the very idea. Cousin Poppy was right. The people attending had treated it as though it was a social occasion, and the severing was their entertainment. They had taken joy in it. Cousin Camilla had cried and begged for leniency, insisting that it had been an ill-taken joke not an attempt on Father’s life.

He’d been entirely indifferent to her suffering. Told the crowd that they would do well to remember the day and what happened when a person crossed him. It hadn’t been about her crime at all. It had been Father’s way of controlling the family.

And now I was doing the same, wasn’t I?

I was trying to get the family under my thumb and...but no. Adger had tried to murder Cove. I’d watched the video with my own two eyes, Adger planting his palms on Cove’s chest and trying to shove him down the stairs. I didn’t doubt that he’d started by trying to use his stone, both because Cove said he had and because he’d done it to me more than once when we were children, if not in such dire circumstances.

Half the family had assembled in the square to see Adger severed, which...I suspected had been built for this very purpose. The thought made me want to tear it apart with my bare hands. Why was so much of our family built around taking joy in cruelty?

The square was near the enormous driveway of the manor, built for large family gatherings. It wasn’t so much an actual square as an empty area built a little like a shell, with a slow gradation of stairs down to a small central platform, risers on all the levels heading down so that people could sit.

We all had to be comfortable while watching someone’s life end, after all.

It was already half full of people by the time we’d arrived after eating, and the mood was high, the crowd buzzing with interest. They wanted the bloodbath. Adger’s parents were there on a riser at the bottom platform, looking serious and miserable but resigned. I wasn’t sure if it was a good sign or a heartbreaking one that the family as a whole seemed to be reacting much as they had at Camilla’s severing. They seemed to be accepting that I was doing this and had a right to make that choice, but also...why were we, as a group, so enamored with the pain of others?

Fawn grabbed my arm, leaning most of her weight on me, and it was reassuring, even if I didn’t want her present for this. She certainly hadn’t been at Camilla’s severing. Father had never allowed her at public events.

We reached the center of the group quickly, because like my father before me, everyone got out of my way when they saw me coming.

Courtney was at the front of the crowd, smiling as he sat on a riser with another cousin. Bernard, maybe? Barry? I just stared at him for a moment, until he noticed me and gave me an unimpressed expression. “What?”

“Isn’t Adger your friend?” I asked.

He gave a casual shrug. “His chance at being the Dawnchaser is over. What’s the point of him now?”

My face must have reflected my disgust at him, because Fawn had to bury a giggle in my shoulder, her whole body trembling with the attempt to try to hold it back. She was always entertained when I made “funny faces,” after all.

Then it was Courtney’s turn to be disgusted. “Why would you bring her out in public? Your father always had the good sense to hide his shame.”

Fawn stiffened next to me, and for a second, I froze. The world around me stopped moving, and I couldn’t respond. Couldn’t react. Couldn’t fucking breathe.

But then Cove’s hand landed on the opposite shoulder from the one Fawn was buried in, and the world came into being again.

And I was fucking livid.

“Fawn is here because she’s my sister and she belongs at my side as long as she wants to be there. If my father was too much of a coward to spend time with her, that was just one of his many problems.” Chatter among the crowd died down as people listened to me, and for some reason, it didn’t terrify me for once, the fact that my family was listening to what I said. If they thought less of me because I loved my sister, that was a fault in them, not me. “This whole family has spent too much time forgetting what’s important. Fawn is important. Not your imaginary shot at being the Dawnchaser. You’re never going to be the Dawnchaser, Courtney. If you were the last living member of the family, you still wouldn’t be a leader.”

His pale cheeks pinked, eyes firing with rage. “How dare you?—”

“Easily. I dare easily. Because most members of this family would react just like you have here, if you were in trouble. They wouldn’t give a damn. They’d let me sever you with the same lack of concern, thinking it was another day’s entertainment. We should be supporting each other, not”—I motioned to him as a whole, from top to bottom—“this. This is why the other ruling families look down on us. This is what makes them right. We can be better, and we damned well should.”

Behind me, someone started clapping loudly. I turned to see who it was—Cousin Aeryn. They were glaring at Courtney, jaw set. Next to them, Poppy was nodding, eyes narrowed at Courtney.

Aunt Ivy slid an arm around Fawn’s waist, glaring at Courtney down her nose. “Besides, I can’t imagine why anyone would be more ashamed to be with Fawn than you. Fawn is a delight. You most definitely are not.”

“Just as insufferable as his mother,” Aeryn muttered somewhere behind me.

His mother. Afton. Also Kit’s mother and the woman who had hurt Cove. As I turned back to the front of the square, I shook my head. “No. Courtney is awful, but I don’t think anyone alive, bar my father, is remotely as abhorrent as Cousin Afton.”

Behind me Courtney scoffed, but I didn’t give him a single bit more of my attention. There were more important things to deal with this morning.

Adger’s father looked at me as I came to the front, where he was now standing with his wife, both of them trying to look stoic. “You’re not going to kill him.”

Oddly, it sounded more like an observation than a question. There was some surprise in his tone as well.

Still, I wanted to be clear. “No. I’m not. His punishment is the severing. I hope it’s serious enough to make him stop and think before he tries to do anything like it again.”

I wondered if he thought it was a sign of weakness, my not murdering his son. But then his wife burst into tears, and he tugged her against him. He didn’t meet my eye but muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “thank you” as he turned to comfort her.

Odd to think that something so awful and permanent was being seen as a mercy.

It wasn’t.

Cousin Camilla had chosen to end her own life a year after her severing. I’d only seen her twice more, but each time she’d been thinner, her gold hair lank and greasy, enormous black circles under her eyes. I didn’t think Adger was especially stronger than she’d been, and I didn’t think it was going to be a walk in the park for him. He could start over and make something of himself. He still had a ridiculous amount of money. He just wasn’t going to have power over others anymore, and if his stone had been his friend, he would never speak to them again.

I suspected that if separated from Navia, I would react as Cousin Camilla had.

Pfft , Navia said, bright and cheery as always. No one could tear us apart, Lucky. You’re mine .

Technically, I knew that wasn’t true. But it still made me feel better to hear her say it.

The guards brought Adger out, wearing anti-resonance cuffs, and a sad looking man in a black suit followed.

The severer.

He was one of the few people in the Summerlands who had resonated with an amethyst that allowed him to manipulate the bonds between human and stone. Some could repair them if they were damaged. Most could only destroy them.

The folks around him treated him like an executioner, keeping their distance, many of them looking on him with fear. A few thought the power he wielded attractive, but I couldn’t imagine that was a comfort for him. I wouldn’t want to spend my days with the kind of person who thought ruining lives was exciting.

When they arrived at the center of the square, he bowed to me. “Lord Dawnchaser. I am here at your request.”

My request. Because the Dawnchaser authorities paid him a yearly salary, of course. He wasn’t paid based on the amount of work he did, but because he was available to do the job whenever we needed him.

I wondered, for a moment, whether Father could be severed from Soz. Whether Soz would want that.

But it was too late for that. Father wasn’t going to have the chance Adger did, to continue on with his life as before. The severing tended to leave people unable to ever resonate with another stone again. There were rumors of healed severings, but no one knew a person who had healed, we had all simply heard the stories and I suspected them to be fiction.

At Camilla’s severing, Father had made a speech. A long, self-important thing about how trying to murder him was trying to murder the whole of Dawnchaser, and how everyone should be relieved that they were going to be free of the threat of a murderer. Funnily enough, no one had seemed relieved. Only viciously smug at the pain of another, or nervous about the threat it represented that Father had this power.

So it wasn’t a surprise that they were all looking at me with expectation. They thought I intended to make a self-aggrandizing speech about how I was Dawnchaser, and they were mere ants crawling through the grass I owned.

I wondered if I was about to surprise them or disappoint them. Maybe both.

“Most of you are aware that my father has been declared persona non grata by the other families who rule the Summerlands,” I said aloud. Every person in the square, most of whom had been whispering to each other, went silent. “Cove Moonstriker has been dispatched to end this. What he, and the rest of the Summerlands, didn’t realize before now, is that Father started destroying this family long before he drew the Gloombringer’s blood.”

The crowd remained silent, their eyes avid on me.

“Or perhaps I shouldn’t say started. Perhaps I should say that he continued a tradition his own father started. Beating down everything that was good and hopeful and decent in the Dawnchaser family. Favoring people who stabbed others in the back. Who betrayed their brothers and sisters for more power and money. Adger was following that tradition when he showed up here and thought that murdering the Moonstriker was a good way to take control of the family. But murdering Cove Moonstriker would have simply confirmed what the other families are starting to think of us: That we’re a lost cause. Unredeemable. That maybe the best thing for the Summerlands would be to wipe us off its map.”

That got a few people whispering again and clearly stunned a few others. I didn’t know how it was a surprise. It was obvious to me. Sometimes, I’d even thought it correct—that the only way to protect the Summerlands from us was to end our entire line.

I waited for them to quiet before I spoke again. “I plan to prove them wrong. I’m going to give Dawnchaser a chance to become what we always should have been. To help each other and the people who live in our lands. To make something decent, instead of just the biggest pile of cash that we can sit atop, pretending to be kings of the world. If you have a problem with that, then I suggest you hide yourself from my sight and try to keep the family’s attention off you from now on. The only people welcome here, on this estate, in this family, are people who give a damn about the whole of Dawnchaser. Not only themselves.”

Turning to Adger, I set my jaw. “You made this necessary, Adger. I am sorry this is happening, but this is on your head. You tried to kill a man. If the Moonstriker were anything like my father, you’d be about to lose your head as well as your stone. I hope you take that to heart and use what you have left to become a better person, even if I’m not sure you have that ability.”

He didn’t meet my eye, just stared at the ground in front of him as I took a step back to stand next to Fawn and Aunt Ivy and the others.

The actual severing was anticlimactic, over in moments.

The severer stepped forward and laid a hand on Adger’s shoulder. He flinched away, but didn’t step back. A moment later, he stumbled to one knee, gasping and reaching for his neck where his stone hung. One of the guards removed the chain he kept it on, handing it to me. I took the chain gingerly, refusing to touch the stone. I didn’t even want to have done this, let alone deal with the emotional fallout from a stone that hadn’t been at fault for Adger’s actions. Rare was the malicious stone that wanted to hurt anyone, so it was almost certainly an innocent victim in this disaster.

A moment later, Adger’s parents were leading him away, him shuffling more than walking, barely lifting his feet enough to move. He stared into space, leaning hard on his father and looking empty.

Not for the first time, I wondered if having him executed would have been a kindness.

My father had kept Camilla’s emerald, I knew. Like a trophy. He might as well have mounted her head on the wall in the dining room. I turned and looked at the people around me, wanting to get rid of the fucking thing but not able to—to?—

It was a bad thing, wasn’t it? Trying to make the big man fall down the stairs? I told him it was a bad thing and we shouldn’t do it. A tiny unfamiliar voice asked me. I almost dropped the chain. Adger’s fucking stone was talking to me. How was that even possible? I hadn’t resonated with it. After a moment of silence, it spoke again. Am I not allowed to talk to people anymore?

No! I mean yes. Yes you can. Just no more Adger. We’ll see if you can resonate with someone else .

That was the best I could do. I couldn’t make a stone resonate with a person. Couldn’t force a bond. No offense to them, but I didn’t particularly want another stone in my head all the time either.

The stone didn’t answer, but there was an odd sound in my head almost like a relieved sigh.

Olivier came up beside me, looking sad and serious, and I turned to him. “Can you take his stone to the jewel room? They deserve a chance to resonate with someone else.”

The jewel room was where we kept all the unbonded emeralds on the estate, theoretically to let young children in the Dawnchaser family have the first chance at bonding an emerald.

Olivier nodded, taking the stone in his hand and leaving. Odd, he didn’t even hesitate to touch it, when it felt somehow wrong to me. Only after he was out of sight could I breathe again.

“It spoke to you?” the severer asked.

I turned to him, wide-eyed, and nodded. Was that common, stones speaking to people they hadn’t resonated with after a severing?

His smile was small, but seemed genuine, as he inclined his head to me. “My grandfather’s journal said your great-grandmother could speak to all the emeralds. That she was horrified by severing because of it, and almost never ordered it done except in situations like this. You know. Where it was the kind thing to do, for the stone’s sake.”

For the stone’s sake.

It was a surprising way of looking at it, and I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. What stone would be happy resonating with someone who wanted to push people down flights of stairs? Stones could take delight in mischief and pranks, but I’d never heard of one being quite so cruel or bloodthirsty.

Not like humans.

That emerald was better off without Adger, and the family was better off without the danger of him resonating with Soz.

My family.

I looked up to find most of them still there watching me. There was some disgust from the ones like Courtney, some predatory interest. Likely they were thinking that because I cared, I was weak and a target. But mostly, what I saw looking back at me was sheer curiosity.

I just had to figure out whether they wanted to be part of my peaceful, hopeful vision of the future of the Dawnchaser family, or whether they were expecting someone to stab me and wanted to be there to see it.