Aneirin

Aneirin stood in front of the cold hearth of Ganlin Hall, experiencing the silence. It was all around him, so loud it was a hum in his ears, the roar of emptiness, of loss. The laughter he remembered was gone, the screaming-matches between lovers, the cards games, the children playing, the old women gossiping in a corner—all gone. All that was left was just cold, empty stone.

Aneirin could barely feel his hand as he reached up and wiped tears from his cheeks. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been crying, but he couldn’t seem to bring himself to stop. He’d had to come back. Had to see the empty halls for himself. Had to prove to himself that they were really gone. And they were. Like they had vanished from the mountainside entirely. Aside from scorch marks, some dried blood spatters, and Aegel’s youngest daughter Trytha’s bloated body rotting in the hot springs, there was no evidence of the massacre that had taken place here less than two months before. To a casual observer, it looked like its occupants had simply moved out.

But Aneirin had been there. He knew. Laelia and Taebin Vethyle had killed his family.

He remembered Agathe going down first, mid-swallow of wine, her head exploding from the forehead back, her illusion of corpulence dropped so that she could enjoy a good time with her family. Then it had been Icel. Then Nerys and Maddoc. The Vethyles had targeted the strongest first, the ones that could make the smart enchantments they couldn’t unmake, and they’d waited until everyone had been drunk to do it.

And Aneirin, nauseous and trembling from being drained of every ounce of his veoh, had been forced to watch them die. Laelia had ensured that. They had tied him to a chair—with rope, because they knew that would break him even more—as they killed everyone in the hall, then had left him there as they started dragging out the corpses.

Aneirin had wanted to die, then. He’d watched everyone he’d ever known murdered, their bodies butchered, their faces blank and staring, heads lolling as their bodies were tugged to some unknown destination. He’d cried, he’d struggled, he’d screamed. His own blood had helped him slip his bonds, and he crawled out after the crimson drag marks, desperate to find them, to stop them…

And Wynfor Ganlin had been there, stepping out of nothingness to wrap him in an illusion, had cradled him and dragged him back into the gardens like a man who had lost everything, whispering that Aneirin would be okay, that he would make sure he’d be okay. And Wynfor had then put his hand to the earth and Aneirin had felt a brief knowing that everything would be okay, because his grandfather was about to kill them all—but then an animated conglomerate of garden dirt had emerged from the ground and taken Aneirin’s place. A golem, which continued to crawl along the bloody path Aneirin had been following. A transformation of Form and Function that, now that the rest of their family was dead, only Wynfor would ever be able to do, ever again.

No, kill them, Aneirin had whimpered, shivering in the arms of one of the most powerful Ganlins to have lived in the last thousand years. Please, Grandfather…

I can’t, he had whispered back, tears streaking his ancient face. There are too many of them. I can only save the two of us. For, as Aneirin had learned since he was old enough to hold a book, while the most powerful Aulds could create enchantments to last millennia, the least powerful Aulds could kill with a thought.

Power, Rees had always told him, is complicated.

But, at that moment, listening to the sounds of Vethyle laughter and the hiss of dragging bodies all around them, Aneirin hadn’t cared.

Kill them, Grandfather, he had begged. Please just kill them. He hadn’t cared what the cost. He didn’t care whether they lived. He wanted their enemies dead.

But despite his protests, Wynfor had thrown him atop a horse and hurried him up the Slopes.

When Aneirin realized that Wynfor had meant to save him, to escape, he’d fought. He’d kicked and punched and screamed and finally, with a look of anguish, Wynfor had put him to sleep.

And in that moment, as he felt Wynfor’s spell wrap around him, Aneirin had felt betrayal all over again.

Aneirin found a seat across from the hearth and sat down, surrounded by empty tables and chairs. The Vethyles hadn’t moved in after executing his family, as Aneirin had hoped. He had wanted to see Vethyles enjoying meals in their stolen hall, drinking stolen wine, reveling in their victory. He’d wanted to see that, so he could pull the walls down on top of them.

Instead, they had just…left…it. The whole Slopes, empty and dead.

Aneirin wondered if the Norfeld negotiations to buy the Ganlin spark mines had just been an excuse to get a delegation up the weigh-line. The more he thought about it, the more his gut twisted at the signs he had missed.

“Probably more alive than you’re going to be tomorrow evening…”

He had talked to Laelia Vethyle. She had told him she planned on killing the Ganlins. And, rather than telling Rees or Agathe, he’d gone to find the Rockfarmer, instead.

I could have stopped this, Aneirin thought, feeling the emptiness all around him like cold rot in his guts. Instead, they had died at his ranking ceremony, their minds befuddled with drink that he had bought.

Aneirin closed his eyes and filled himself with the silence once more. He had come here intending to find Vethyles.

Intending to die.

Instead, he had found emptiness.

Somewhere out there, Wynfor was hiding. The only Ganlin that could help him, and he had run like a coward. He supposed he could have asked the peasant girl which hole his grandfather had hidden under, but at this point, Aneirin wasn’t sure he could face Wynfor without trying to hurt him.

One of the greatest Ganlins to have ever lived, and he’d simply let the Vethyles kill their entire family. He’d run.

It was inexcusable.

And yet, there was no one here to fight. Wherever the Vethyles and the Norfelds had gone, it wasn’t the Slopes.

Aneirin got up and went to his old bedroom in the back, in the kids’ section. He hadn’t yet been upgraded to Auld Walk with Rees, Icel, Wynfor, and the others. He opened the door and looked inside.

He had thought, coming here, that he could rest within the halls of his home, clean the stone of blood, dig graves and do justice to the memories of his family.

But now, standing in the doorway, looking at his empty room, the covers still unkempt and untouched from where he had left them two months ago, Aneirin knew he couldn’t stay here. All he could think, looking at it, was that his family would still be alive if they had been blankets. Blankets or beds or anything that didn’t represent a threat to the power-hungry monsters running the Spyre. All the objects of Ganlin Hall had been left untouched. It was the people who had been destroyed.

Aneirin closed the door without entering and went back to the great hall. It was just as silent as it had been a few minutes ago, the huge hearth cold for the first time in centuries.

He stood there for longer than he really meant to, staring at the empty hearth, just soaking in the loneliness.

Then, through the massive windows overlooking the Slopes, Aneirin saw the weigh-line move.

At first, he thought he had been imagining things, but when he went to the window and watched, the trees seemed to be swaying to a breeze that wasn’t there, their leaves a deeper, more vibrant green than he had ever seen before. Frowning, he went out into the courtyard to get a better look.

Though he knew it was fancy, he could have sworn the aspens looked like they were breathing. Moving and swaying to an invisible breeze, they all but glowed with health.

Aneirin’s first impulse was to go look at them up close, but his second was more guarded. He quickly ducked out of sight, circled out the back of Ganlin Hall, and watched from a new vantage under a guise of invisibility, changing the Function of the air around him to create the illusion of nothingness. It was one of the few spells Rees had managed to teach him in between his busy days helping Agathe keep the peace at the Spyre, and he’d been sworn not to use it until he was ranked.

The irony of that left Aneirin hunched over Ganlin Hall, watching the aspens bitterly. He supposed it would help him in the end—not only did the Vethyles have no idea he escaped, but they also had no idea he was one of the few Aulds who had both the power and training to make themselves unseen. Aneirin intended to see the entire Spyre fall for their oversight.

The aspen weigh-line continued to wave and pulse, almost like a single undersea creature. Aneirin had seen them once, inside Rees’s office aquarium. It had been one of the first things the great Auld had shown him once he had brought him to the Spyre—the water so salty it made Aneirin gag, the fish so strange and colorful he had to wonder if they were fish at all. It had been a gift from a distant ruler from the far south, where the Idorion met the ocean, a token of thanks for a charm Rees had made for one of the ruler’s sickly children while passing through many decades ago.

It was the flowing plantlike things that clung to the rocks, however, that he remembered now. Like they were surrounded by that moving, salty water inside Rees’s aquarium, the aspens moved and flowed, their limbs twisting in the morning light almost as if they were reaching for the sky.

Whatever it was, it was too big to have come from the Vethyles. Not even Rhydderch could have created an illusion to span the entire mountainside. Wynfor might have been able to do it, given enough time, but Wynfor had been hundreds of miles away, in the Idorion. After observing for an hour, Aneirin cautiously opened himself up to the trees themselves, expecting a Vethyle tang to the magic.

He recoiled at how strongly Ganlin it was. So strong, in fact, that instead of sapping Aneirin of power, veoh tried to leach back into him upon contact. Aneirin again suspected a trick. Perhaps Laelia had invented a way to trick the ethereal senses, as well as the physical?

Yet, the longer Aneirin watched the aspens gently move in the nonexistent breeze, he knew he had to get closer.

I saw these burn, Aneirin thought, as he came to a stop at their base, looking up. His entire life, he had been told of the hazards of allowing the weigh-line to be cut. It took decades of work to repair a single breakage.

And, now that he was looking, there were dead trees… But it was almost as if new ones had grown around them, creating a line that had little to do with the original. It was thicker, stronger, and had Aneirin not seen it two months ago, he would have said older than the first.

He couldn’t feel a Vethyle illusion, but Aneirin supposed there were a couple Vethyles capable of creating an illusion he couldn’t feel, namely Cyriaca Vethyle or her uncle Rhydderch. Possibly even her son Josue, who was ranked three points higher than Aneirin.

But to enchant an entire mountainside? Only a Ganlin could have done that.

For the first time, Aneirin wondered if maybe Rees or Agathe or Nerys had somehow survived.