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After the gods fell, Lucanis went to talk to his cousin. Illario greeted him at the door with a mocking, “First Talon! What an unexpected pleasure, to what do I owe the honour?”, but stepped aside to let him in.
The mood in the room was strained, but not in the way Lucanis had expected it would be beforehand. They sat across from each other at the small table in Illario’s room, candles flickering restlessly in the breeze coming in from a window cracked open, curtains rustling like whispers — two people too familiar to ever be strangers, and nevertheless made strange to each other by the weight of words not spoken.
“For the longest time, I hoped you’d just been careless,” Lucanis said finally. “I sat in the dark and prayed to anything that might still listen that it had only been a slip-up, a mistake — a thoughtless comment you had made in the wrong place, at the wrong time. That maybe you’d been drunk, or angry, or wanted to impress someone. I entertained any hopeful hypothetical you could care to name.”
Illario sneered. “Always so eager to imagine my incompetence, cousin.”
“As opposed to what, Illario?” Lucanis said sharply. “What should I have imagined, instead? The truth? Do you figure that would have made for comforting company down there, in that wretched pit, the thought that you…”
Illario had the grace, or at least the instinct to recognize he had entered dangerous territory, to look away at that. “...I really didn’t know she was planning to keep you around, afterwards. The deal was a quick clean death. A fitting end for a Crow, and rather more than you afforded me, when the tables were turned,” he added sardonically. “Or, forgive me, does that come too close to trying to knock you off the high horse you’ll have to look down on me from in perpetuity, while my every living moment is at the gracious mercy of your hands?”
“Some might say that considering how intimately you were getting to know her, you could have extrapolated the likeliness of her actions from the nature of her character,” Lucanis said dryly. “Don’t try to tell me you trusted her. Clearly, you have never trusted anyone. Even me.”
“I didn’t know to distrust her in that particular way. If I had…” Illario paused, then exhaled a laugh, waved a jaunty hand in that way he had, as if to disavow all seriousness or merit of a matter. “Well. I suppose it probably wouldn’t have changed anything, even if I had, would it.”
Lucanis said: “No. I don’t suppose it would.”
“Being First Talon is going to kill you, anyway,” Illario said bitterly. “It was always going to kill you. It’s going to eat you, like it did everyone else, and then what do I have to show for — for anything? Caterina fed us all to the fire, only so I stand by and watch you die bravely and dutifully on a post you don’t even fucking want? I was supposed to sit back and blithely wait my turn and be happy in my irrelevance, until I was finally the last one left and our house brought to nothing, to less than ruins? Should I be grateful for my intended inheritance of a handful of ashes, when everything of value was gone? She has been letting it all burn down around us slowly and doesn’t even realize it.”
“So what, you had me murdered to… protect me from the prospective horrors of doing my job? Out of cousinly concern? Is that your angle here?”
Almost exasperated now, Illario said: “Lucanis, look at yourself. I stood against you, and you let me live. Fine, you show everyone that House Dellamorte stands strong and that we are untouchable even by each other, but how long until someone decides to test that? How are you ever going to keep the other Houses in line, buy their compliances, navigate the give and take of politics, except at the point of knife? There are a lot of Crows with a lot of ambitions, and you can only hold two daggers at once. All that training, all that attention, all her bets placed on her one shining poor little golden boy — and still Caterina taught you all the wrong things. You made her soft, and she let her weakness into you.”
“You can thank that soft heart for the fact that you’re still sitting here today.”
Illario threw his arms open with almost hysterical amusement and wild abandon. “And what a glorious existence it is to look forward to, a laughing stock before all of Antiva, put in my place and safely leashed in your shadow! One toe out of place, and every dagger in the country falls upon me until Queen Madrigal’s fate seems quaint and charitable. What freedom, what bliss, what dignity. You shouldn’t have.”
“You wouldn’t have had to stay in the shadows! If Caterina wanted me to be First Talon one day, even if she couldn’t be talked out of it, I would have brought you with — ”
With a dead sort of calm certainty, Illario said: “You’ll always choose her. In the end, you always choose her. Maker help us, you’ll find some way to choose her even when she’s dead.”
Lucanis faltered at that.
“Does he know that?” Illario asked, sensing weakness and pressing his advantage, and what did he need perfect duelist form for, when no dagger could strike as mercilessly as his words once he’d found the right opening and went for the heart. “Does your little Watcher boy know that you’d give up everything else, you’d die and leave him nothing but another grave to tend, if it meant you didn’t have to tell her ‘no’ just one time in your Blighted life?”
Spite, who had up until now stayed true to the deal he and Lucanis had struck before walking into this and only watched the proceedings, silently if sullenly, met Lucanis’s eyes over Illario’s shoulder and said: “Actually. We should kill him. After all.”
“No,” Lucanis said tiredly and rubbed a hand over his face.
Illario, who clearly had not expected an actual answer, raised his eyebrows and said: “...no, he doesn’t know, or no, you would tell her no? Because — ”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Lucanis said testily. Normally he might try to hide the inner dialogue better, but he was too annoyed to put in the effort and besides — what Illario helped break, Illario could very well deal with being broken.
Spite whined: “But —”
“No. I understand the temptation, believe me, but… no.”
He’s still ours, he added in the privacy of their own mind, gazing at Illario’s face — at the look of arrogance draped over his features to hide his uncertainty. .
Throwing his hands up, Spite groused: “FINE!” and stomped over into a corner to sulk.
“So you think Caterina made a poor choice,” Lucanis said, returning to the conversation at hand.
“You don’t?”
“Would you like to say that to her face? And what ‘choice’ did you leave her, after what you did?”
Illario gave such a sound of perfect disdain that the room seemed colder. “As if it was ever a choice. As if she would not always pick you no matter what. And for what? That is what I keep coming back to. You don’t even want what she’s given you, and she gave it to you badly. She made you a knife, not a Talon. When she’s no longer around to wield you, what are you going to do? What tools did she leave you to succeed with? It doesn’t matter how good you are at stabbing things, which I’ll admit you’ve got down to an art, best in the business, all you’re cracked up to be and more, bravo, well done. But you’ll have to convince people, explain yourself, put on a public face and a presence befitting of the title. You’re going to hate every fucking second of it and try to get out of it the only way you can. Which, because of her and all the promises you made, is courting death again like it’s your one true love while pretending that’s not what you’re doing, until hopefully it one day notices you and takes you up on your advances. Or am I wrong?”
“Yes, I could have used you,” Lucanis said, with some bitterness. “I could really, really have used you by my side for this, to do the talking while I handle the wetwork. But, alas for us all, you just had to go and — ”
“‘By your side’? You have never taken me seriously for a day in your fucking life!” Illario snarled. “Neither you nor Caterina have ever thought of me as anything but —”
“I thought of you as my brother,” Lucanis said. “I still do.”
That, finally, brought Illario up short.
— — —
Before his parents died, Lucanis had never hugged his grandmother before — had never really conceptualized her as something that might be hugged. The most contact she’d ever granted were kisses on the cheek in greeting and parting, and sometimes, when she felt exuberant, a hand brushed lightly over his hair, as if to tame down some imaginary out-of-place locks of it. (Mama would never have brought him to meet Caterina with his hair out of order.) Until that night Caterina had been a monumental but distant figure, the lighthouse around and through which every other member of the family navigated, spoken to with perfect courtesy and spoken of only in hushed voices.
But when she saw her two remaining grandchildren standing before her that night, she had moved with an almost vicious abruptness, a sort of desperate hunger in the way she’d clutched them to her, tightly enough to be as painful as it was comforting, her grip the only thing left that could make the world seem real. After a while she had lifted them and carried them over to an armchair.
They were both too old to be lifted and held like that — “Like we’re still babies,” Illario would have disdainfully protested, at any other time. But none of them had said anything as they sat there, two small bodies curled up in the shade and shelter of a bigger one. All of them silent, because what could be said? What words could have changed anything, after that?
She’d held them close to her, kissed them on the hair with an awkward and unstudied but urgent tenderness so unlike any of her normal poise, and it was the only time before or since Lucanis had ever known his grandmother’s hands to shake. Even now his mind could easily call back up the warmth of his face allowed to be tucked into the crook of her neck, the mingled smell of sharp fear sweat and perfume and blood that clung to her. The way the candlelight had looked shining through the teardrop-shaped earrings she’d been wearing before everything that happened, and hadn’t had time or presence of mind to remove. Somehow that detail had stood out to his child’s mind, and stayed with him ever since — that Caterina was still wearing her best earrings like it was a normal Sunday night, like everyone would be called in for dinner any minute now, they were just waiting outside while the staff finished setting the table. With his cheek resting on her shoulder and a great ocean of silence holding every other thought in place, he had watched the geometric fractal suns of the candlelight reflected through crystal. These days it reminded him of nothing so much as one of the drawings he still found in his journals some nights. Spite remained both unable and uninterested in finding mortal words to explain them, which Lucanis suspected was possibly for the best, overall.
“We three are all that is left of house Dellamorte,” Caterina had said eventually, clutching them to her tightly. “And we will not let it fall. We are never giving up anything else.”
Illario fumbled for Lucanis’ sleeve and held on with knuckle-whitening urgency. Lucanis had shifted his grip to hold Illario’s hand properly, just as tightly. The pain of his cousin’s grip almost grinding the bones of his hand together had seemed entirely immaterial.
The first night she sat with them until dawn while they slept, or tried to sleep. Not in the way you might normally to soothe children; no lullabies, no reassurances, no words at all after she’d pulled the covers up over them, but as a watchman keeping vigil, a sharp, drawn face carved out of stone — a deeper shadow in the room, to scare all other shadows away. From time to time, when Lucanis had feigned sleep well enough for a while, she would come over to the side of his bed and hold her hand close to his face, before moving away again, just as soundlessly, to do the same with Illario. To make sure they were still breathing, Lucanis had realized, as he watched her stand by Illario’s bed from beneath barely parted eyelids, studying her back as her proud shoulders drooped for a second, a nearly inaudible sound of relief. It was like watching a mountain shaken to its foundations, the world trembling along with her.
Many years later, when he’d been wearing both bruises and resentment in their newest bitter gloss, that had been one of the details clinging to his mind that eventually softened his heart. The opal ring clutched in her hand so tightly the edges cut into skin, blood leaking out between the fingers, and the way she hadn’t even noticed. That sound, that released breath of relief that he had not been meant to hear, which could have been mistaken for a sob, in anybody else.
Again and again he takes the anger and he swallows it down, down, down.
—
The first night they were alone, once Caterina had stopped watching over their beds in such a literal way, Lucanis had lain awake listening to the noises of the sleeping villa around them. He hadn’t been able to sleep — hadn’t really slept a whole night together since it happened, though he’d dutifully pretended to whenever Caterina was in the room.
Illario had stood at the side of his bed, suddenly. He said: “Lucanis?”, and nothing more, his eyes big and dark as wells in the moonlight. It was almost funny to consider now, but for the longest time as a child Illario had been small and slight, and Lucanis had been big and strong for his age. Only the mutually catastrophic onset of puberty had arrived to announce that this state of affairs would not be permanent. That night Illario had seemed smaller still to Lucanis’ eyes.
Lucanis pushed up on an elbow. “Yes?”
“Are you… do you want…” Illario glanced down at his bare feet against the polished floor tiles for a moment. “...I’m cold.”
“Alright.” Lucanis had lifted the corner of the duvet to allow his cousin to climb onto his bed and slip beneath the covers, then tucked it carefully around them both afterwards. Illario had been so cold against him — like a dead person, like touching Mama’s hand had felt, his child brain had thought, and did not know how to flinch away from yet. I shouldn’t have let him stand there so long, he could…
Illario stayed quiet as Lucanis wrapped himself around him and tried to figure out how to best use his own body warmth to bring his cousin back to life. He was so focused on that, he didn’t even flinch when Illario’s floor-icy foot brushed his bare shin where his sleeping clothes had ridden up.
“Sorry,” Illario said quietly.
Lucanis blinked. “What for?”
Illario sighed and pushed his face into Lucanis’ shoulder, so his voice came out half-muffled. “...nothing.”
It was strange, for Illario to be quiet for so long, and almost scarier than anything else that had happened.
“Are you still cold?” Lucanis asked after a while.
“No,” Illario said, his whole body stiff even as he strove to lie as close to Lucanis as possible, trembling all over.
“Oh.”
At Lucanis’ faltering slightly in uncertainty, Illario’s body went taut and desperate with panic, his hands clutching at Lucanis almost painfully anywhere he could reach. His eyes were so big, “No, no, don’t go!”
“I wasn’t going to,” Lucanis had promised, tightening his arms around him as if to make the truth even more real. “I won’t.” After another moment he added: “Also, it’s my bed. Where was I supposed to go, anyway?”
A small sound close enough to laughter escaped Illario’s throat, but he didn’t say anything more.
Illario didn’t cry, but his body kept trembling. Lucanis didn’t cry either — it hadn’t occurred to him to do so yet. The world had seemed strange and distant, like something happening in another room far enough away that he could just barely hear the voices talking in there, like everything was deep underwater. Time wouldn’t catch up until later, and by then the wound was numb.
Finally Illario said, in a strangled voice: “Where was she that night? Why didn’t she — if she’s so powerful and important, why couldn’t she —”
Freezing, his spine gone rigid, his mind gone blank, Lucanis said: “Illario, don’t…”
“It isn’t fair,” Illario maintained, fierce and heartbroken, and Lucanis had no idea how to plead for him to stop, before he broke everything, shattered everything that still held the world together.
“...Ilario, we’re all that’s left. Don’t… she’ll… we…”
Illario said: “I want Papa to come take me h-home,” and he cried then, while Lucanis held him tightly. He’d promised not to let him go. He wouldn’t.
— — —
In the wake of Lucanis’ words, the curtains sighed with a sharper gust of wind, the candles shuddered in response. A tremor ran through Illario’s whole body — so fine and contained that anyone who knew him less well might not have seen it. Lucanis knew him, though. He’d known Illario his whole life.
“I still love you,” Lucanis said eventually. “Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it would be easier and better for everyone if I didn’t. Maybe you’d prefer to be free of it. But I do. You’ll just have to deal with that.”
Illario stared at him for a long, long moment. Then, with an exhale of utter defeat and a helpless laugh, he let his face fall into his hands. “...perhaps it really is still you in there, after all. In my whole life I have never known anyone else who can be quite so pigheadedly —” words clearly failing him, he blindly waved a hand in Lucanis’ general direction, “like this. You have cornered the market, cousin.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucanis said.
Looking up at him through his fingers, Illario said: “...what?”
“I’m sorry. For… for whatever it was I couldn’t give you that drove you to this. I keep thinking about — that night, the Wigmaker job. You tried to tell me something, I think. Something you had tried to say for a long time. I didn’t listen. And for that, if nothing else, I am sorry.”
Illario’s face went completely blank. It was how Lucanis knew he had possibly said the right thing.
“I suppose this is where you could tell me you’re sorry too, but let us not get too crazy with it all in one go,” Lucanis said. “In fact if you do, I may have to escape through the window.”
The Lighthouse team were very dear to him, needless to say, but the civility and explanations he felt like they were owed… well. Sometimes there was nothing quite like home.
Illario shook his head, almost wonderingly, the mask of indifference cracking around the eyes as they crinkled, just a bit. “...I have known you all my life, and I still don’t understand how you can be like this.”
“That is fine. Not everything in this world is meant to be understood. Trust me. I’ve been seeing some things I would rather not, recently.”
“Well. What can I say, you’re the expert. You’ve killed a god, and claimed the contract,” Illario said, throwing his hands up helplessly. “If anyone has carved the name of our house into history and legend, you have. What more could I hope to add but footnotes now? But. Footnotes I shall revel in, if that is all is left for me. I bet I could make some good ones.”
“It’s where all the most interesting things end up, I hear.” Lucanis hesitated, then reluctantly said: “I… I have to go now. I’ll be back, though. If you don’t mind the company.”
Illario made a sweeping careless hand gesture. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll turn up unannounced through a window at some Maker-damned time in the night and scare me half to death to talk about some new coffee roast or fact about wyverns you came across. I know how this goes. I wouldn’t know how to stop you, and I’m not much inclined to try. Would spare someone else from having to listen to all the granular detail. If you are a ghost, this is exactly the haunting I deserve.”
Lucanis smiled and got up. “Good to know.”
He stopped at the threshold, one hand resting on the door frame as he looked back over his shoulder. “Just one thing. If you ever try to hurt Rook again, there is no ward of love or blood or magic that will save you. I think you knew that already, but… just in case.”
Illario, still seated, gave a game bark of laughter. “Your world-shaking pet Mortalitasi? Don’t worry. The man is even more insane than you are, I doubt he’d stay down even if I gave it a shot and somehow succeeded. You can have him all to yourself, for all I care.”
You only seemed to decide that when you realized he was extremely unswayable by any of your usual methods, Lucanis thought sardonically. (“Oh, I know the type,” Rook had said after meeting Illario for the first time. “Intimately, you might say. Consider me once bitten and more than appropriately shy in consequence. I get nervous when people talk to me like they want to sell me something now, it’s like a war wound or something.”)
“Maybe it’s just as well you have him,” Illario added. “A necromancer or two is going to come in handy. Because you haven’t changed my mind tonight — that soft heart of yours? It is going to get you killed one day.”
Lucanis looked at him steadily. “By you?”
Illario sighed.
“No,” he said, quietly. “No. Not by me, cousin, I don’t think.”
“Then that’s all I need to know. Goodnight, Illario. Talk to you later.”
“Goodnight, Lucanis,” Illario said, softened in the glow of candlelight until he looked like someone Lucanis once knew better than anyone.