home

search

Chapter 28: Control Before Truth

  Rowan deposited Kess onto the couch in his rooms, though in hindsight he wished he’d put her in her own rooms. Still, his were closer, and closer to the kitchens still. He leaned against the door to his rooms and sighed, rubbing his eyes. I was too hard on her, he thought, standing there. I shouldn’t have called her a coward—especially without knowing her well enough to gauge her reaction.

  He’d been shocked—and yet pleased—to find Kess working on her powers, but he had a feeling his vicious treatment the night before had spurred her into action. Perhaps Kess had needed a nudge, but Rowan supposed he shouldn’t have been cruel about it. The last few days have taken too much of a toll on me.

  He’d signed a deal with Grandbow, though with the stipulation that his prototypes would be released at a slow rate—enough to buy him some time to get to the bottom of the problem, or so he hoped. Cashin had grumbled, but agreed once Rowan promised him cheaper yet brighter lights that he could turn more of a profit on.

  So now Rowan was expected to provide brighter, cheaper lights that didn’t explode, while making sure that Kess didn’t do the same.

  At least she hadn’t blown the manor sky high.

  Unfortunately, Kess seemed to have a knack for getting her way, and Rowan couldn’t watch her all the time, not while returning to his research on Fulminant insulators. Guards had seemed excessive, as Kess wasn’t a prisoner, but he’d expected petty thievery from the girl at worst—not this. Well, at least she’s willing to try using her Fulminancy, he thought as he pushed off the door to make his way towards the kitchens. He didn’t know what had changed, but he wouldn’t question it either. Life was simpler that way, and Rowan needed something to go his way for once.

  Rowan returned from the kitchens with a pile of food in his hands. He’d had to scrounge for it himself, but the cooks were good about leaving out food well past when sensible people would want to eat. He had a feeling a few of them were secretly night owls, though their occupation demanded such an early start.

  Rowan expected to find Kess out cold, though he had hoped to get some food into her first. Instead, he found her turning one of his wood carvings in her hands, a look of awe on her face.

  The woman looked like death itself. How she hadn’t done worse damage to herself, he didn’t know. He wasn’t foolish enough to call Claire in, though—neither woman tolerated the other; Kess spent as much time avoiding Claire as possible, and Claire, for her part, glared daggers at Kess each time she spotted her in the hallways.

  Kess looked up as the door snapped shut, and moved to put the carving down.

  “You can look at it,” he said, setting the food down on the table in front of her. “It’s fine.”

  Kess turned the carving in her hands as Rowan unpacked the food. She looked, to Rowan, like she might topple over at any moment, but her eyes were discerning as she held the tiny owl in her hands. It was a carving Rowan had done in his spare time—a simple one to keep his hands busy—but Kess seemed enamored with it.

  “Did you make this?” she finally asked, eying the tools on the table.

  “I—“ Rowan hesitated with the box he was unwrapping. It wasn’t that his woodworking was exactly a secret, but to share it with her, well, it didn’t sit quite right in his stomach. But he wouldn’t lie to her, either. “Yes,” he finally said.

  Kess blinked between him and the owl, something odd in her gaze. “Rowan, you…” she trailed off, running delicate fingers along the owl. Rowan was particularly proud of how smooth he’d gotten the wood on that one. “This is incredible,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

  Rowan felt a reluctant smile spread across his face. “You really think so?”

  “Absolutely. Where did you learn to do this?”

  “Eamon taught me a little,” Rowan said as he dumped some vegetables onto a plate. “But he mostly does tables and practical stuff like that. The art is kind of my thing.”

  Rowan considered himself a fundamentally practical person, but while there was beauty in a well-crafted table, Rowan found more beauty in depicting the trees and birds he noticed on walks through the city. Several of his best carvings were displayed on the mantle—a mixture of delicately carved, tiny trees, and birds of flight, though many of those had to be propped up with their own carving. Kess’s eyes wandered to the mantle, and though she didn’t stand, the awe was clear in her expression.

  “You could make a fortune with that kind of craftsmanship,” she said quietly. Rowan just grimaced.

  “Actually, I usually just give them away.”

  “Give them away?” Kess repeated, dumbfounded. “Rowan, you could have a career doing this.” She shook her head, setting the owl down gently on the table, though she seemed reluctant to do so. “You have more money than sense.”

  “Not everything has to be about money, Kess,” he said, handing her a plate.

  “Spoken like a true rich boy.” Rowan said nothing to that, given the sack of gold in Kess’s room and the highborn family she likely came from long ago. She picked at the food for a few moments, eating with less verve than she usually did, but at least she was eating. Rowan, for his part, had a few bites, but he’d eaten earlier with Eamon—it was mostly to make Kess feel like it was fine for her to eat.

  Her plate half finished, Kess admired his work on the mantle for a little longer, something distant in her gaze. “Does it help?” She set her plate down and picked up the owl again, turning it in her hands gently. “I mean, does it help you forget?”

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  Rowan watched her for a moment, small and quiet, nothing like the woman she’d been for the past month. Looking into her haunted eyes, Rowan wondered if perhaps he hadn’t given her enough credit—maybe there were some things too terrible to speak of. Maybe her problems went deeper than his own. Even so, Rowan wasn’t a man trying to forget—he was a man trying to remember, so he asked her a question instead.

  “Do the fights do it for you?” She looked up at him, thoughtful.

  “Sometimes,” she said quietly. “Sometimes they do the opposite.” She cradled the owl like a small child might hold a favorite toy, and oddly, Rowan saw something in the woman that he hadn’t before—vulnerability. “It’s by design I think,” she said. “Are we really supposed to forget who we are?”

  “Forgetting who you are is one of the most common forms of despair, I think.”

  “Sometimes—“ she bit her lip, watching the owl in her hands. “Sometimes I’d like to. It’s easier that way.”

  “Maybe you feel that way now,” he said. “But who do we become when we fight to be no one at all? And how do we face the future, knowing that we’ve betrayed the past?”

  His words hung in the air, and a quiet stillness settled over the room, punctuated only by the crackling hearth and the snap of lightning outside. When Kess spoke, her voice was quiet and broken.

  “Sometimes our past selves aren’t worth facing,” she said, handing him the owl and meeting his eyes. “Nor are our future ones.”

  Rowan shook his head and pushed the owl back into her hands, closing her fingers around it. “Keep it,” he said. She looked at him, confused, but something in Rowan was starting to believe that maybe simple kindness would get him further with Kess than his most recent attitude. Whatever her story, it wasn’t a happy one.

  “Thank you,” she said, and her shoulders slumped unhappily. It felt odd to Rowan to want to fight against that unhappiness. You hardly know her. And yet, he found himself searching for an encouraging word to say to her.

  “Kess,” he said. She looked up at him, eyes beautiful but sad. “I don’t think you should be ashamed of the past. Whatever happened, it made you who you are.” He hesitated, thinking of what he’d said just last night. You’re a coward. “I know I called you a coward, but I was wrong,” he said quietly. “I know few people with the bravery to face something they fear that much.”

  She nodded mutely, and stared into the fireplace, owl in hands, her thoughts clearly elsewhere. Feeling a bit guilty and chastised for his earlier treatment of her, Rowan awkwardly left the room. If Kess wanted to stay the night on his couch, it wouldn’t affect his plans—he intended to spend most of the night in the library anyway, which he’d mostly taken over for the purposes of his research.

  With papers, notebooks, and various lights spread throughout the library, Rowan spent a quiet but frantic evening trying to gauge just how unstable his prototypes were. The results weren’t good; last week just one of his twenty prototypes had blown. This week, though it was replicated on a smaller scale, two out of twenty had blown.

  He’d recreated his prototypes on a tiny scale, with each light set into a recessed section of a board that would hopefully contain the smaller explosion of lights the size of his thumbnail. Two of the little bulbs were blackened and burned, the metal around them, charred.

  Rowan ran a hand through his hair, sighed, and wrote down the results, his notebook illuminated by an eerie green glow. He would spend the rest of the night expanding the board to include a hundred bulbs activated by Fulminancy in the hopes that scale would help him get to the bottom of the mystery.

  Having Kess’s Fulminancy would be a nice control, if she agreed to use her powers more regularly. Perhaps Claire’s Fulminancy was unstable, though the lights in his workshop had blown even with Kess’s Fulminancy coursing through them.

  Regardless, Rowan needed solutions—and fast. Emulating his prototypes on a smaller scale might help him find out just how widespread the problem was while the lights were still used mostly in commercial areas. An expansion to the residential area before he solved the stability problem would be disastrous. He buried himself in his research and tried to forget that he’d betrayed his principles along the way.

  Rowan settled into the quiet work that would ultimately destroy his career if anyone found out about it, but his thoughts wandered further than his own subterfuge. Fitting each bulb with the required materials and the little puff of gas was quiet work, and most of the manor had gone to bed by this hour. He found his thoughts—oddly—on Kess.

  Her hatred of the Fulminant was puzzling, for one. Rowan understood some of that frustration, at least. He’d spent most of his youth ignored or, in some cases, abused for his lack of powers. His family was a special case, however—his father was downright obsessed with Fulminancy and viewed it as a political tool. It couldn’t be that bad for the rest of the city, could it? And Kess had obviously been born into a prominent family—at least red sash, Rowan figured. She obviously worked very hard to disguise her accent and mannerisms, but it was hard to be rid of them entirely. Why would a woman born Uphill with incredible power hate the very thing that she was?

  Something thumped overhead, and Rowan paused. A puff of gas filled a bulb, and he set his tools down, blinking at the dwindling fireplace blearily. What time is it? He thought. Perhaps much later than he’d intended to stay up. Judging from the sound overhead, he wasn’t the only one.

  With one last look at his setup, Rowan left the library behind and made his way to the roof. At the top of the stairs, the door was cracked, and the acrid smell of an early Lightstorm met his nose, blown in on the Drystorm winds.

  Rowan peered through the ajar door at the roof’s single occupant—Kess, her knees pulled up to her chest, lightning dancing around her body, flashing against her dark hair as it whipped in the wind. Kess almost seemed…relaxed in its embrace.

  The lightning was a living, breathing thing, and Rowan stared, transfixed, for several moments. He had never seen a Lightstorm…play with someone. And yet that was what it did. The energy frolicked around the woman, twisting in a supernatural dance that Kess paid no mind to as she stared out over the city.

  Briefly, Rowan wondered what it would be like to join in that dance. This was power he’d spent an entire lifetime wishing for—craving, even. It was power that could change the world in the right hands.

  But it wasn’t his to have. Kess’s powers, swirling around her, wild, untamed and uncontrolled—those were her gift and her curse. And, though Rowan recognized the inherent strength of that gift, he slowly realized the depth of her curse. He’d been eaten up inside by the secret of his prototypes for nearly a month now, but what if he’d spent a lifetime hiding something like that? And what if there was nothing he could do to fully stop it?

  What if it eats her up inside, day after day? He wondered. What if it really is as she says, and she doesn’t feel in control of it even when things go well?

  Kess feared her lack of control. But didn’t Rowan fear the same? Hadn’t he chosen control over truth not even a month ago?

  As a final peal of thunder rolled overhead, Rowan finally turned his back on the girl who had everything he had ever wanted, but threw it aside as refuse, and wondered how in Mariel’s name he could teach the woman without confronting a part of himself he wasn’t sure he wanted to face.

  NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s and publisher’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Recommended Popular Novels