Chapter Thirty: End to Mistrust

“Osmund, won’t you tell me what’s happened?!” Cemil demanded, chasing behind as Osmund wordlessly led the way.

Sakina trailed at a distance. Her face wore a look of equal concern, splashed in orange by the fading sun. Osmund only looked long enough to make sure they were keeping up.

They reached the ruined house quickly enough. Osmund checked to see that they were watching, then took a deep breath and hopped through the threshold.

Nothing. He blinked his eyes deliberately. Then repeated both steps a couple more times to be sure. Still nothing happened.

“It was right here,” he insisted wildly. “I was—transported somewhere else. The whole thing was an illusion. There was a strange person there and I felt them inside. They were—they were trying to change my thoughts! And they wanted to hurt you!”

Cemil and Sakina shared a worried look, but not the kind he’d been going for. “I’m not drunk!” he protested hotly. “A-and I’m not crazy! You need to believe me!”

Sakina ran her palms up and down one of the wooden beams. Her expression sharpened. “I definitely sense the traces of powerful magic,” she deduced after a tense silence, “but without a dark mage here with us, it’s difficult to say much else.”

“Osmund,” Cemil began slowly, preparing the inevitable question, “what business did you have here?”

And so, Osmund dropped to his knees and told him everything. Well, not everything—he left out the part about being a Tolmish prince who was going to be stuffed in a sack and smuggled back into his home country to act as a royal puppet if he didn’t play along. And he also, you see, altered the truth a bit. Okay, it was quite a lot, and quite brazenly too! But they didn’t have to know the full story.

“I never planned to go along with whatever it was they wanted!” Osmund heroically lied. “The dark mage I met told me he needed me to get close to you, and I pretended to agree so that I could see what they were up to! That’s why I went!”

This did not have the intended effect. Cemil looked incredulous as he stared down at him. “Why would you not tell me?! Do you realize how foolish that was?!”

“Cemil,” Sakina said quietly. But the Meskato prince was only beginning.

“And you went completely alone,” he went on, livid, as Osmund angled his face down and winced. “They could have hurt you to get at me. They could have killed you. You went there based on one stranger’s word?!”

“He said he was your brother!” Osmund appealed, eyes squeezed shut.

This did the trick. Cemil’s mouth stopped moving. Sakina looked at him in alarm.

When the man finally broke his stunned silence, he sounded different than Osmund had expected. Unlike someone who quarreled with his brother, in other words. “You really saw Emre?” His voice was almost hopeful. “He’s well?”

Osmund startled as Sakina kneeled down to help him off the ground. “He seemed, um, alright? And he was definitely a real person, those times I saw him. He wasn’t an illusion.” He knew well enough now what those looked like. Well—what they felt like to look at.

Cemil grew distant again. “I haven’t seen him in ages. Last I heard, he’d gotten mixed in with some…” He cursed rather than continue.

Sakina finished for him, frowning. “Some insurgent types.”

Osmund’s gaze trailed back down to the dirt and the imprint he’d left with his knees as his mind worked. “The first time we met was, um, at the bathhouse in Şebyan. It wasn’t far from the governor’s mansion.”

Thankfully, no one asked for more details about this clandestine bathhouse encounter. “Perhaps you’ve guessed,” Cemil began dourly, “but dark mages have a talent for not being noticed unless they choose it. I shouldn’t be surprised to learn he’s been lurking in my backyard. Damn that Emre! That idealist knows nothing of the people he’s working for!”

Sakina turned to Osmund, a look of contemplation etched onto her features. “Osmund, who did you see in there? What did they look like?”

He shut his eyes again, conjuring up that long-nosed, short-haired face, and tried to describe the person from the terrifying encounter. The others didn’t interrupt until he was finished.

“Except for the eyes, that sounds almost like…” Sakina seemed afraid to say it.

“She’s dead,” Cemil interrupted. “It’s someone else.”

Osmund felt helpless again. “Who?”

“Never mind.” Cemil waved a dismissive hand. “The corpses of imperial mages do not get up and walk around.”

Sakina had mercy on him. “An ███████ who worked for the emperor,” she explained. “She was called Örümcek. Executed for taking outside assignments, but before her death she was an illusionist of immense power. A jewel in the emperor’s crown, meant for his exclusive use.”

Örümcek—spider, if he wasn’t mistaken. A chilling codename if Osmund had ever heard one. There was a word in Sakina’s explanation he didn’t recognize, and he repeated it tentatively in a question. Cemil snorted a humorless laugh.

“A torturer,” he said. “Someone who asks questions in cruel ways.”

Ah. An interrogator.

“Whoever they were, I felt their magic digging into me,” he muttered. “It went into my brain and kept…showing me things. I-I think she was trying to convince me to hurt you.”

Sakina touched his arm in a gesture so featherlight Osmund didn’t instinctively draw back from it. “How did you ever resist?” she asked, sounding mystified.

“I…” Osmund blanked. And then the dreadful memory came back to him in full.

He almost hadn’t. Not really. During a few moments of terrifying calm, it would have been nice to surrender. If not for the danger he’d seen lying in wait for Cemil, he could not say for certain what he might have done.

“I don’t know. I-I must have somehow fought it off.” The rest, he could not say. “I knew it was trying to take control of me, and that I…couldn’t let it do what it wanted.”

“You might be naturally resistant to those kinds of spells, considering how powerful a dark mage would have to be in the first place to bring you to another realm like that,” Sakina said, sounding impressed. “That’s a useful talent. Most people just see what they want to see when caught in the web of such strong illusions, and don’t think to question it.”

Osmund smiled and gave a nervous laugh. “Well, that makes sense then,” he realized. “I don’t usually believe good things even when they are real!”

He was aware of how abundantly pathetic this sounded as soon as it left his mouth. She was looking at him like he was a shivering wet puppy she’d discovered huddling under a cart for shelter. With three legs. He attempted to salvage things. “Oh, um, it was a joke. People used to pretend to give me the things I wanted. Haha.” By the looks of things, he was down another leg or two.

Cemil had been quiet awhile. At last he spoke.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” he said. There wasn’t any anger left in his voice. But, there wasn’t warmth either. “Let’s return to the village. Whoever cast the spell, they’re long gone.”

Back at the house, they stretched out their bodies and rested their feet in uneasy silence. Sakina got out some ink and started making absent marks on pages as they waited for the smiling old woman to take her evening stroll.

Osmund, lost in thought, jumped at Cemil’s approach. The Meskato prince, his face unreadable, offered him a cup of water, which he accepted with hands he hadn’t realized were trembling. “Thank you,” he mumbled.

Cemil hovered. “You aren’t injured?” he asked after a pause.

“N-no. I’m fine.”

The old widow appeared from within, a basket under her arm. She spoke some words to Sakina and the two kissed each other on the cheek. Cemil said something too. Ignorant of the Anshan language, Osmund only gave their host a weak smile.

When she was gone, he asked, “Tell me about the gryphons?” He’d accosted them about his experience almost as soon as they’d returned from the day’s excursion—there hadn’t been time for them to decompress. “How did it go today? Are you any closer to figuring out how to help them?”

The others barely noticed the question. “We’re looking for something in common among the infected creatures, such as a lair or preferred hunting spot, to help track the source of the spread,” Sakina finally said, with the air of a distracted adult satisfying a child’s curiosity, and Osmund shut his mouth. “If there are developments, we’ll share them.”

They were both very troubled by this business with Emre. That much was certain. “I-is there anything else you’d like to know about what happened?” Osmund threw out, nervous about opening himself up to questions he might not want to answer, but desperate to be back in their circle again. “I want to help. Really.”

Silence. “Cemil…were you listening? We should talk about Emre,” Sakina said, casting her eyes up from her work.

“What’s left to discuss?” Cemil’s bitterness ran over. He was seated heavily on a cushion on the floor, but Osmund could see how he itched to be in motion. “He’s thrown himself in with those who seek to bring ruin to our homeland. I can’t stop whatever comes to him as a result of that. That’s how an inexperienced hawk flies.”

“The two of you want the same thing, don’t you? An end to the mistrust. A better future.”

“Wanting the same thing is meaningless when his method involves fragmenting the empire, so that my family can be of no service to our subjects at all,” Cemil snapped. “My older brother sees things in such simple terms. All that schooling, and for what!”

Sakina wasn’t ready with one of her instant rejoinders, and Osmund could tell (even before seeing her pursed lip) that she was holding back. “You know his life hasn’t been easy,” she settled for saying.

“Hasn’t it?” Cemil glared. “He pretends being brought with our mother to the imperial palace was the beginning of all his troubles. As if he didn’t make eager use of every opportunity available to him, superior to anything he could have had in Anshan territory, even if he won’t admit it.”

Sakina was paying an almost conspicuous amount of attention to her brushstrokes, or maybe it was just that the quiet movements of her reed pen seemed deafeningly loud in the space between words. “Everyone wants to have a choice,” she said.

“Choice? Who in this world chooses their fate?” Cemil countered. His fervor had re-ignited. “I don’t understand. He enjoyed the life of a prince, if not the title, and yet he self-righteously throws it away.”

Neither of them was paying the least attention to him, yet Osmund shuddered; it felt as though if they only looked, they’d be able to read his secrets right off of him. He felt surer than ever that he could never tell Cemil about his true origins. Who knew what he’d say when he learned his feeble horseman—his sweet, silly distraction—was himself a prince, and fighting his own destiny tooth, nail, and claw?

“I wasn’t supposed to have a choice,” muttered Sakina.

“That’s different,” said Cemil stubbornly.

“Is it?” She wasn’t ready to give in. “Can you really argue that life in the Empire suits everyone, even those born into fortune like us? What life would you be leading, if not for that prophecy? It would certainly be very different…”

Cemil stood at last. His eyes were animated. “If our Empire is imperfect, it is because it waits for us to perfect it,” he said fiercely, not addressing the rest. “I will not be my father.”

Sakina and Osmund watched him as he made for the door. “Enough of this for now,” the Meskato prince resolved. “Let’s go out.”

“Out?” Osmund echoed. “Again? To do what?”

To this, Cemil gave a vague gesture of impatience. “To enjoy being somewhere else,” he said, apparently feeling it a redundant statement. “The mind works best when the senses are engaged.”

Osmund turned helplessly to Sakina, who only said, “You boys go. I’ll stay here.”

“A-are you sure?”

Osmund must have been a sad sight still, because she looked up just long enough to give him a wry smile. “I haven’t had a moment alone since the Meskato army showed up,” she said, though her voice was kind. “Go. See the village properly.”

Cemil opened the door, and Osmund followed. Side by side, they stepped out into the night.