This would not have seemed so extraordinary if Tennice and Tanager and Julia had not lifted their glasses at exactly the same moment in exactly the same motion, all of us stopping in a single movement as if time itself had halted. Suddenly, my knees felt like water.
“So you see,” he went on in audible speech once more, “how it might be possible to change many things with such abilities.”
Tanager, Tennice, Julia, and I… we looked at each other with astonishment, disbelief, and a hundred other emotions that were written on our faces. Tanager downed his brandy all in one gulp and jumped up from the floor to pour himself another. Julia’s slender hand seemed paralyzed, and she stared first at Karon and then Martin. Tennice slammed down his glass, sloshing the amber liquid on a small table and jerking his hand away. I forced myself to exhale, hearing the tremulous sound of my own breath as implications and possibilities ran riot in my head… terrifying possibilities… humiliating… violating…
Oh, Seri, don’t be afraid. No, I’ve never —not ever —done this to you before. You’ve had no thought that was not your own. You’ve felt no desire, performed no act that was not of your own will. And until this moment, I’ve never let myself hear anything but what has come from your lips.
The words carried so much more than their meaning—a plea for understanding that exposed a part of his most private self—that I found myself thinking, It’s all right; it’s all right. I’m not afraid. Not of you. And I knew it all was real when he glanced up quickly and gave me a tenuous smile.
“You can see how it might be easy to abuse such a gift,” he went on, “and why people might come to fear it. That was what happened. For thirty or forty years the Open Hand ruled the Four Realms and corrected all that seemed wrong. But the J’Ettanne were no wiser than other men and no more immune to self-importance, and more and more they liked to order things according to their whims. Those who disputed their rule were punished with nightmares and terrors until the poor souls thought they were going mad. The poor and ignorant were controlled with superstitions—rumors of vile monsters, spirits, and demons. By the time of the Rebellion, the J’Ettanne had enslaved the people they thought to save, and, in their arrogance, had written their—our—doom.”
“But what chance had ordinary people against such power?” Tennice sat stiffly in one corner of the couch with his third glass of brandy, his voice tight, verging on anger.
Karon stood up, folding his arms, a slender silhouette against the fire. “There were so few of us. That was the key. We had been scattered for so long that our numbers had not increased like those of other races. And it doesn’t matter if I can listen to what you’re thinking, for if all five of you are thinking at once, as loud and discordantly as possible, I can sort it out no better than if you’re all babbling at once.”
Tanager had stretched his long legs over the rest of Tennice’s couch, and with a wry grin poked one of his outsized feet at his older brother. “That’s exactly what Evan and I always did when we were boys. We’d bully Tennice into taking on Father over our last scrape, while we went off and got into another. We’d yell at him until he was so confused, he couldn’t think how hard Father was going to come down on him.”
Tennice glared sourly at Tanager… and then slowly, reluctantly, his stormy countenance relaxed and he broke into a rueful chuckle. “I had to take up the law as self-defense.”
Karon nodded, laughter dancing across his face like the wisps of summer fire above a midnight meadow. “Quite the same. In our case, it was only the matter of a single year until the Open Hand was overthrown. Those who came to power decreed that no one would be safe as long as any J’Ettanne walked upon the earth. No work of the J’Ettanne could stand and no memory of the J’Ettanne could survive. Thus began the extermination and the law that you know. The priests called us heretics and destroyed everything we had touched, as well as many things that had nothing to do with us. They closed down every temple and shrine, broke every statue, burned every writing, ruined every artifact that was not devoted to Arot and Mana or one of the Twins—”
“That’s why the temple rules are so strict about heresy, and priests are so quick to stamp out any talk of lesser deities like harvest gods or shopkeepers’ daemons or water spirits,” said Julia.
“Exactly so,” said Karon. “They couldn’t untangle politics and belief and superstition and sorcery. And so they had to destroy it all. Over the past four hundred and fifty years most of the J’Ettanne have been hunted down and killed, though I doubt three people in the world outside this room remember exactly why it’s done.”
“But where have you come from, then?” I said. “How have you managed to survive without being found out? There have been no… no sorcerer burnings… since I was a child.” The very words were as acid on my tongue.
“I’m getting to that.” With a grateful smile, Karon drained a glass of wine Julia had given him. Setting the empty glass on the mantelpiece, he continued. “Though most of the followers of the Open Hand were slaughtered right away, those of the Closed Hand held out for a few years in their stronghold. But they knew their days were numbered. With the hunt so virulent, they were sure to be discovered. So they decided to abandon the stronghold, building secret ways through the mountains and sending out a few families at a time to settle in remote places where they would not be known. These refugees carried with them two tenets: that the gifts of the J’Ettanne were for life and not destruction, and that no mind could be invaded without consent. At least a few survived and managed to escape detection for several centuries. Some prospered, particularly in one Vallorean city called Avonar. My ancestors were among them. As late as five years ago the Lord of Avonar, the Baron Mandille, was a J’Ettanne. He was my father…” His voice faded.
I caught my breath. “Avonar! Evard’s triumph. Did Evard know?”
Karon hesitated, glancing at me and then at Martin, who was perched on the back of Tennice’s and Tanager’s couch.
“He knew,” said my cousin in disgust. “I don’t know how, but somehow in the last days of the Vallorean War, King Gevron learned that sorcerers lived in Avonar and that they were the last. Gevron promised amnesty to every citizen of Avonar who returned to the city before midsummer’s day, proclaiming that he had decided to leave the place a free city because the lord of Avonar had tried to broker the peace between the Leirans and the Vallorean king. The war was over. They all went home. But instead of amnesty Gevron sent the Duke of Doncastre. When Evard sacked Avonar and slaughtered all who lived there, Karon was studying at the University, bound by his father’s command to keep his connection with Avonar secret.”
Martin paused for breath, and the four of us pelted him with questions, the most particular being how Martin had come to learn the truth about Karon before the rest of us.
“When I was in Yurevan two years ago,” Martin said, “I took a few days to visit a professor from the University whom I’ve known since my own student days. He introduced me to a young colleague who was collaborating with him on a cultural history of northern Valleor. Karon, of course. We enjoyed each other’s company immensely and went riding together several times over the course of the week.
“One day we came upon a young family with a newborn babe, the man and woman scarcely more than children themselves. They were starving, riddled with wasting fever, and had taken refuge in an abandoned charcoal-burner’s hut in the forest just beyond Ferrante’s land. The boy warned us off and, in his last despair, begged us to toss him a knife so he could put an end to his family’s misery.