I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1451: I Came Here For Both Of You

The stairs down from the war room ran two hundred steps and Northern took them at a walk, because running would have told the men on the balcony above him that there was something worth running from.

There was. He simply did not intend to say so.

The guards in the corridor were still on one knee. One of them, a boy no older than Iren, had his palm flat on the stone and was breathing in short measured pulls like a man keeping down a meal. He tried to get up as Northern passed and could not manage it, and the shame on his face was worse than the fear had been.

Northern stopped and put a hand on his shoulder.

"It isn’t you. Stay down until it passes."

Then he went out into the courtyard, where his eldest sister was waiting with her hands folded, and the pressure came down over him like a hand closing over a lamp.

For a moment he could not make his lungs finish.

He had been in the presence of a Luminary three times in his life. Rughsbourgh had felt like a landslide that had learned his name. Reis had felt like being read. This was neither. This was the sensation of standing very close to something enormously heavy that had not moved and was not going to, and knowing with perfect clarity that the ground under both of you had an opinion about it.

’Stop it.’

"I’m not doing anything," Rehema said.

She had answered the thought before he had finished having it, which he chose to believe was a coincidence.

"I know you’re not. That’s the part I object to."

Northern let the breath out and made his shoulders come down out of his ears.

"Every guard in this palace is on the floor and there are four hundred and twelve fresh graves on this mountain. Whatever you are, be less of it, or be it somewhere else."

Rehema considered that.

Then she turned and walked forty paces back through the ring of kneeling men, out through the gate arch, and stood in the road beyond the wall with the wind pulling at her cloak, and waited.

Behind him, one after another, the guards began getting up.

Northern stood in the empty courtyard and discovered that he was furious.

’Graceful stars. She’s good at this.’

He walked out to the road.

Up close she was not what a Reimgard was supposed to look like, and he understood at once why he had disliked her the first time. The white hair was there, loose and unbrushed, and the height was there. Everything else was wrong. There was no jewellery on her. Her boots had been resoled by somebody who was not a cobbler. There was a burn scar across the back of one hand, badly healed, the kind you get from grabbing something you should have let fall.

She looked like a woman who had spent a year on the Dark Continent.

’It’s barely even two months.’

"You’ve gotten taller," Rehema said.

"People keep telling me that."

"It’s the only thing anyone can safely say to you." She glanced past his shoulder at the balcony crowded with faces. "They know now."

"They know now."

"How did it go?"

Northern looked at her.

"Roughly the way I said it would go, back when I was still telling myself I didn’t care."

Rehema nodded slowly, and did not say she was sorry, which he noticed, and which he was grateful for in a way that irritated him further.

He took her up the Spire because there was nowhere in Ryugan that a Luminary could stand where a Ryuganese man would be able to sleep afterwards, and because the alternative was letting Eryx watch his own prophecy walk around the palace grounds for an afternoon.

She looked at the shadow furniture as they passed through. She looked at the black couches, at the walls Elliot had spent three days arguing were impossible, at the corridor of solid dark that had no business holding a lamp bracket.

"You made all of this."

"A version of me made all of this. He complains constantly. You’d like him."

"Is he you?"

"That’s the question, isn’t it."

Northern dropped into a chair that had been a shadow eleven hours ago and gestured at the one across from it.

"Sit. Say what you came to say. If it takes longer than an hour, I’m going to start forging while you do it."

Rehema sat.

And then, for a while, she did not say anything, and it went on long enough that Northern realised she was not gathering herself. She was letting him decide how much of the room he wanted to fill.

’Oh, I hate this.’

"Reis came to you," she said at last.

"He did."

"He offered to help you kill Father."

"He did."

"And you said yes."

Northern spread his hands.

"I said yes to the shape of it. I made him rebuild a General’s house first, which he did, in front of witnesses, which cost him more than the house."

"That was clever."

"I have my moments."

"It was clever and it was the wrong thing to be clever about." Rehema leaned forward slightly, elbows on her knees, a posture nobody had ever taught a princess. "You checked whether he would pay. You never once asked what he was paying for. Reis has wanted Father dead since before you were born. He has never once needed help. He is the second-strongest thing in that Empire and he has had thirty years and a talent that unmakes what it has already made, and Father is still on the throne."

She let that sit.

"So ask yourself the only question that matters. Not why a man like that would want help." She held his eyes. "Why he would want yours."

Northern did not answer.

He had, in fact, asked himself a version of that. He had asked it in the tower with Reis smiling at him and had put it down again because there had been a more urgent question in front of him, and because putting things down and coming back for them later was a habit that had worked out for him roughly half of the time.

’She was right about him the first time. That’s the annoying part. She was right and I still had to go and find out for myself.’

"You knew he was up to something before I did," he said.

"I did."

"How."

"Because I am his sister" Rehema tipped her head. "You have been a Reimgard for eleven months, Rian. I have been one my whole life."

The name went through him like a nail through a board.

He kept his face exactly where it was. He was very good at that. But she had already looked away, politely, the way you look away from a man adjusting his collar, and that was somehow worse than being watched.

"Don’t call me that."

She smiled softly.

"You are a Prince."

Northern stopped himself, and heard the sentence he had been about to finish, and disliked it very much.

"Say the rest of it," he said instead. "You didn’t cross a continent and jump the Sword King’s watch to give me advice about Reis and tell me what I am."

Rehema’s mouth moved. This time, it wasn’t a smile. The thing that comes before one and then decides against it.

She straightened.

"No. I came because of both of you. My brothers."

Northern went still.

"You have Rigel."

"I have Rigel."

"Alive."

"Sulking. There’s a difference, but not a large one."

And for the first time since she had walked into that courtyard, something crossed his sister’s face that she had not chosen to put there.

"Then take me to him," Rehema said. "Please. Before Father comes back for a second look."