Rees

“It’ll only hurt a little.”

Where he was leaning against the wall, Rees rolled his eyes. “Just tell him the truth. It’s gonna hurt like hell.”

Rees’s sister cast him a look that could have scorched timber. Still glaring at Rees, Siana turned to her son and opened her mouth to lie. Then she deflated. “Your uncle’s right. It’s gonna hurt. A lot.”

To the boy’s credit, he only became a little pale. Pale was good. If they didn’t get pale, they were stupid. On the other hand, if they got too pale, it meant they wouldn’t be able to stand up to the Vethyles when they met in the street.

Rees gave a grunt of approval. He liked his nephew. Aneirin was smart and able. He suspected his veoh wasn’t as strong as his or Agathe’s, but what Nirin lacked in capacity, he made up for in wits. Even now, after learning the full extent of what went on during a ranking, the little bastard was trying to think of a way to get out of the testing planned for him tonight. Rees grinned, watching him argue his sister in circles as he tried to convince her it wasn’t necessary.

Finally, Rees tired of listening to his sister struggle to counter his nephew’s reasoning. “They’re waiting for us,” he said, interrupting the verbal dance. He stepped forward, grabbed the skinny boy by the ear, and tugged him away from his mother. “Let’s go, Nirin. Time to leave your mother’s teat and become an Auld.”

Aneirin, to Rees’s surprise, didn’t go meek under his grip. He punched him in the jaw and sprinted for the door.

“Nirin!” his mother cried, at the same time Rees touched his bleeding lip and shouted, “You’re a dead one, boy!” Rees lunged after him. Behind him, Siana called after them, but they were out of range before she could finish her sentence.

Aneirin had a youth’s energy, but Rees knew the Slope’s complex passageways like the back of his hand. He veered right, took a shortcut through the kitchens, and caught up with Nirin just as he was reaching the outer doorway to the upper Slope.

As the boy was fiddling with the latch, looking relatively smug, Rees snuck up from the side and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. As Nirin let out a yelp, Rees dragged him away from the exit. Spinning him around, he socked him in the face.

At fourteen, the boy was roughly the same height as Rees, but the blow laid out his skinny form flat. Nirin groaned, sat up, and cried out as blood started draining from his nose. When he looked up at him angrily, though, Rees demanded, “Now are you going to continue to be a little rock-jumping varmint or are you ready to be a man?”

“You punched me,” Aneirin muttered.

“I’ll do it again, too,” Rees promised. “We’re already ten minutes past due. Sooner or later, the Auldheim’s gonna come figure out which rock you’re hiding under, and you can be sure she’ll make anything I do look like a damn love tap. You’re a Ganlin, not a shadow-fearing Vethyle. We all do it, sooner or later. Get over it.”

Aneirin glared at him, but he got to his feet.

Rees took off his cloak and tossed it to him. “Clean yourself up. You don’t wanna get ranked looking like your grandfather just punched you in the face.”

“You’re not my grandfather,” he said petulantly.

“I’m old enough to be.”

“You’re not. You’re my uncle.” As if being his uncle somehow gave him less authority in the situation. Recognizing where this verbal sparring was about to take him, Rees grabbed Aneirin by his bleeding nose and dragged him back through the corridors to the feasting hall, ignoring his protests.

He stopped outside the huge double doors and forced Nirin to look at him. “Now, I want you to think about this really hard, boy. Do you want to go face this on your own, or do you want every Ganlin on the Slope to see me drag you to your ranking ceremony like a recalcitrant child?” He released him. “I like you, Nirin, but by the gods, you will not make a fool out of me today. You chose me as your monitor, and I intend to see you finish this like a man, not like a babe. If you wanted someone to beg and plead with you to attend your own rating, you should have picked your mother.”

The anger fled Aneirin’s eyes. “Sorry,” he muttered. He wiped a few more drops of blood from his face and handed Rees the cloak. Rees nodded, pulling open the door for him.

When Rees entered the enormous main hall, he saw that the tables had been moved out of the way and chairs and benches had been scattered throughout, all facing the dais in one end. Ganlins of every age and occupation sat or stood in the great hall, packing the place to bursting.

Aneirin hesitated in the doorway as a cheer went up, vibrating the air in their lungs with almost a thousand jubilant Ganlin voices. Rees gave him a gentle shove.

Suddenly red-faced and sweating, Aneirin stumbled down the pathway to the dais. Every step of the way, relatives congratulated him with slaps on the back, out-of-season flowers, hugs, and necklaces of leaves and tiny gnarled, wind-sculpted twigs. Rees hung back, acknowledging his own honors with smiles and warm embraces.

It took over half an hour for them to reach the dais, but that was common. Sometimes, when a child was especially well-liked by the clan, it could take up to an hour to get through them all. Still, half an hour was respectable, and Rees was pleased.

The Auldheim met them at the top of the dais with the enchanted belt in her hands. She noted Aneirin’s bloody nose and frowned slightly at Rees, who shrugged. Agathe cleared her throat and the entire hall fell into silence. When she spoke, her voice cut through the place with painful clarity. “Aneirin Ganlin, you are here today to be rated amongst your peers, to take your final step toward becoming a Ganlin Auld.”

A cheer immediately rocked the place, but Agathe silenced it with a commanding wave of her hand. “Have you chosen a monitor?”

Aneirin stood straight, his head high. He nodded. “I have,” he said, without any trace of the childish fear he had shown before. “I choose Auld Rees Ganlin.”

Hearing those words, Rees couldn’t have been more proud. He felt his chest swell as the crowd rose into another frenzy.

Once the cheers had calmed, the Auldheim turned toward Rees. “Auld Rees, do you accept the responsibilities of testing this boy?”

“I do,” Rees said.

“Do you think you can provide fair and impartial judgment in moderating the flow of Aneirin’s veoh in this ceremony, without allowing pity or compassion to skew the result?”

“I do,” Rees repeated. He winked at Nirin, who looked uncomfortable.

Agathe handed Rees the veoh belt. “Then I leave him in your hands.”

Several Ganlins in the crowd whooped, and one shouted, “Make it hurt!” Immediately, the rest of the hall broke out in a clamor of similar statements, and hearing the things they said, Aneirin went pale.

After Agathe stepped away, Rees hefted the belt and took a deep breath. Meeting Aneirin’s eyes, he said, “Well, boy, let’s see what you’re made of.” He motioned at the decorations Nirin had gathered on the way to the dais, finding his throat tighter than usual. “Take that stuff off. We don’t want it to strangle you.”

Rees saw that Aneirin’s fingers were shaking as he removed the garlands of leaves and twigs and flowers, but then noticed that his own hands weren’t that steady, either. He fumbled twice when he unbuttoned Nirin’s shirt, exposing his torso.

Carefully, he set the shirt aside and put the belt in its place. At its center, a black metal ring made a wide circle around his veoh-son’s belly-button. As he moved behind Nirin and cinched it into place, the boy’s fingers clenched and the skin on his arms broke out in goosebumps.

Rees didn’t blame him. Even for the brief moments that he had held the thing, its residual veoh had seeped into him like a cold heat, remnants of the hundreds of others who had preceded Aneirin. Rees, included.

When the belt was securely fastened at his back, he gently took one of the boy’s clenched fists and strapped it into place at his hip. Aneirin was shaking, now, but he continued to stand tall as Rees walked to his other side and strapped down his other fist.

Rees returned to his front and took a deep breath, looking into his wide green eyes. “You ready for this, Nirin?”

Nirin nodded firmly, though his face was as pale as an albino snowgoose.

Rees took a deep breath, steadying himself, and touched the dial resting over his stomach.

Instantly, Nirin grunted and the black metal ring burst into a shiny silver light. Watching him, Rees remembered what his first experience with the belt had been like. His monitor had jumped to the fourth notch from the first moment, knowing Rees held more veoh than most. The sensation felt hot and unpleasant, a forcible draining of the victim’s veoh. Rees, not wanting to torture the boy, had done the same as his own monitor and skipped the first three degrees. It was beyond doubt he was at least a Fourth.

When, after a moment, Nirin endured the setting with seemingly no ill effects, Rees tipped the dial another full notch to the right. Nirin suddenly went stiff. Sweat beaded on his forehead and his breath began to come in ragged pants. All around Rees, the feel of magic began to tingle his skin as it was released into the room with them.

Watching him, Rees debated turning the dial another full notch or beginning to work up the grades. Knowing he didn’t have a lot of time to complete the test, he compromised and twisted the dial halfway to the sixth notch.

Nirin screamed.

Veoh was overwhelming Rees’s senses, now, blasting from the boy like a great rush of wind through a mountain pass. As he watched him, trying to decide how much further he needed to go, Nirin began to struggle to get his wrists free of the belt. Unfortunately, as Rees well knew, the belt had been designed for just such an attempt, and it held tight.

Still, Rees wasn’t sure if the boy had reached his limit. Five and a half was a little on the weak side. He was sure he was at least a six. He cursed himself for not switching the dial to six originally and getting it over with.

Now he did.

Nirin’s eyes went wide and he doubled over, screaming out all the air in his lungs. He began to fight the belt in earnest, now, and he saw blood begin to form where the enchanted straps held his wrists in place. Nirin sucked in another breath and kept screaming, an unearthly sound that reminded him of a dying thing.

Rees almost ended the test there, but he checked himself.

I’m his monitor, he thought. This was the single biggest moment of Nirin’s life. It would decide where he could go in life, which researches he could pursue. He ground his teeth and twisted the dial another half-notch.

At six and a half, Nirin started to bawl. He sank to the floor, his legs collapsing under him in a heap, and just cried.

Still, though, as Rees watched the belt, he did not see the telltale blackening of the silver circlet surrounding Nirin’s belly-button that indicated the boy had reached his limit. He knelt beside him. If Rees could get him to seven, Nirin would be cleared to work on plants.

Seeing that Rees meant to turn the dial again, Nirin let out an animal scream and tried to kick him.

Rees easily wrapped a weave of veoh around Nirin’s chest and legs, holding him in place as he touched the belt.

“Please Uncle Rees,” Nirin begged, his voice a tattered, mindless sob. “Please, stop it, please please please...”

Rees tightened his jaw and twisted the dial another two degrees.

Nirin arched his back and thrashed, and something white was building in the corner of his mouth. Rees held back, waiting the required six seconds. Then he considered shutting it off.

He’s depending on me, he thought. Only three more and he can work with plants.

He turned the dial another degree, allowing the belt to drain the boy’s veoh at an even faster pace.

Immediately, the silver circlet framing his stomach turned black, signaling an ebb in veoh. At the same time, Nirin stopped breathing.

Rees switched the dial back to zero.

For two seconds, his nephew lay on the floor, unmoving.

Then Nirin’s chest rose with a gasp that shattered the silence of the hall.

Rees stood up and faced the room. “Six and seven,” he said, loud enough for even those in the back to hear.

The breathless observers burst into life, shouting and clapping and catcalling. Ignoring the ruckus, Rees knelt beside his nephew and began removing his wrists from the belt. “You all right down there?”

Nirin looked drained, and rightly so. Rees wouldn’t have been a worthwhile monitor if he had made it easy on him.

Once Nirin could move his arms again, he weakly pushed himself to a sitting position, deaf to the commotion in the hall below him. He simply stared at Rees. “You made me stop breathing.”

Rees winked. “Only for a minute or two.”

“What’d I get?” He had obviously been so bent on struggling to breathe that he hadn’t heard Rees’s declaration to the crowd.

When Rees told him, a new respect and gratitude filled the boy’s eyes. “Six-seven is strong enough for smart enchantments.”

Rees nodded. He had been hoping for more, but Nirin seemed pleased enough, which was what mattered. He moved behind him and finished removing the belt, then helped him to stand.

As he got to his feet, the cheers of his relatives in the great hall rose to an ear-bursting roar. Rees handed his nephew his shirt. Behind him, Agathe collected the belt and examined it. Nodding at the result that Nirin’s veoh had burned into the meter, she confirmed Rees’s assessment.

Even though there were normally a few more formalities to the ceremony, Nirin’s relatives in the closest rows took that as a sign of completion and they rushed the dais, crushing their trembling new Auld with jubilant arms and tears of joy.

Six-seven’s not bad, Rees thought, reluctantly. The boy could match the strongest Vethyle, hands-down. Still, as his monitor, it was Rees’s job to wonder if he could have gone higher.

“You did good,” his uncle Icel said, slapping him on the back. “Gods, boy, you almost killed him. Excellent job.”

“Thanks, Ice,” Rees said, relaxing a little and turning to him, smiling.

Icel was an anomaly in the Ganlin clan—his eyes were the white-blue of deep glacial crevasse, resembling that of a Vethyle more than a Ganlin, which was why many of the children of the Slopes called him ‘Uncle Ice.’ Rees, who had had the misfortune of being ranked by him over two hundred years before, still clung to the nickname he had used while begging Icel to shut off the belt.

Icel, unperturbed, had dragged the notches all the way up to the Eight-Three mark, making Rees one of the highest-ranked Aulds in the country, second only to Agathe and her brother Wynfor.

Rees watched the crowd now crushing Nirin with their congratulations and he frowned. “Where’s Wynfor?”

Ice snorted, his blue-white eyes glittering. “Stargazing on the Slope, I’d guess.”

Rees felt a rush of anger. “Nirin is his grandson.”

Icel’s normally cheerful face darkened. “The suspicious old coot hasn’t attended a rating ceremony in his entire life, other than his own.”

Rees was furious. “Why not? Because it’s the courteous thing to do?”

Her uncle Icel shrugged. “Who knows? Wynfor’s reasons are his own. We poor peons cannot hope to understand the workings of genius.”

Rees grimaced. “Genius.” He snorted. Wynfor was the second-ranked Auld in the Ganlin family, directly under his sister, the Auldheim herself. As such, Wynfor spent most of his time deep in trance in the highest levels of the Spyre, modifying this enchantment or that. Even when ordered by the Auldheim to attend his grandson’s ranking ceremony, he hadn’t even bothered to step inside the hall.

“I’m going to go find him,” Rees said, watching Nirin. In the crush, the boy hadn’t yet noticed that his grandfather wasn’t with the rest, but it wouldn’t be long now.

His uncle sighed. “Rees, you can’t reason with my brother—he’s like a very large brick with a beard. Might as well get the boy so utterly drunk he won’t remember a thing, then convince him Wynfor was here. You’d have better results.” He peered into his tumbler of whiskey, gave a sad grin, and tossed it back.

“No,” Rees said, his anger building. “The Auldheim told him to attend.”

Uncle Ice laughed. “Both of those old farts spend as much time as possible ignoring each other. I’m actually surprised he even came along.”

“If Nirin asks where I went, tell him I’m going to get that Rockfarmer girl for him.”

Icel tipped his empty glass to her in a companionable gesture. “Good luck.”

Rees nodded and turned to go.

A worried young voice called, “Uncle Rees, you’re leaving?”

He paused, forcing a smile. “Something on the Slopes needs my attention.”

“Damn right it does,” Icel muttered, already working on another glass of whiskey—probably conjured. “A downhill shove would do it.”

“You’ll be back soon, then?” Nirin asked. His curly black hair was still plastered to his face with sweat, though his pallor had faded somewhat. Someone had handed him a celebratory mug of ale and he had already drained half of it, a line of foam marring the adolescent fuzz of his upper lip.

“I’ll be back,” Rees assured him. “I’m going to go get that Rockfarmer.” Then he turned and went to find Wynfor.

Rees scried and found the man doing exactly as Icel had suggested—stargazing.

Irritated, he let himself into the steamy, artificial warmth of the outdoor mountain sanctuary. Wynfor had chosen to be as far from the celebrations as possible, which meant out on the breezy, snow-spotted ridges. Feeling resentment building in his chest, Rees wove his way through the thick foliage that provided a windbreak for the civilized part of the Slope and went searching for the old Auld in the windswept peaks along the ridge.

He found Wynfor bundled against the cold, seated on a rock formation high above Ganlin Hall. He wasn’t watching the stars, though. He was watching the weigh-line.

“What are you doing out here?” Rees demanded, too cold and too perturbed for formalities. “Your grandson just got ranked.”

“By you, no less. You must be proud.” Wynfor continued to stare down into the valley at the single line of aspens that wove its way up the mountainside, its encroaching neighbors neatly trimmed back to give it room to grow.

Rees narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you want to know what he received?”

“Six-six, six-seven, depending on how good the tester was.” Wynfor glanced at him. “Am I right?”

Rees felt a sudden rush of anger so strong he felt like shoving the old man down the hill as Ice had suggested. “He’s your grandson.”

“Yes.” Wynfor lifted his hand to point at the aspen line. “And that is our only way out of these mountains.”

Rees turned, glanced down the jagged Slope, and frowned. “Your first grandson just became an Auld and all you can think about is going back to the Spyre? Why did you even bother to show up?”

Wynfor made an amused snort. “Because. I think about how more than four-fifths of the Ganlins are all gathered in one place, with no way out except a single weigh-line of aspens or a hundred mile trek through the mountains. I consider how every one of these celebrations ends with every Ganlin Auld in attendance getting so plastered on wine and spirits that he can’t see straight for days. I wonder if anyone else has ever thought of this, too.”

Rees stared at him. “What is wrong with you?”

Wynfor laughed. “Probably a lot. Too much life, I suppose. Give Nirin my congratulations.”

“Give them to him yourself,” Rees snapped. Then, tugging his bloodstained cloak around his shoulders, he stormed back down the mountain trail to the warmth of the vale.

Seated by the hot springs, Rees scried for the girl.

He found her stumbling along a mountain path by moonlight, shivering, her teeth chattering, her lips blue. Just as he expected.

Sighing, he wandered amidst the hot springs for some time, seething, not wanting to return to the festivities and ruin Nirin’s special day with his foul mood. He paced, cursing Wynfor for the eccentric, selfish bastard he was. Then, once he felt a little better, he turned back toward Ganlin Hall.

A sound made him turn.

A man stepped from the steamy foliage, dressed in black. Rees frowned. He didn’t recognize him. Too late, Rees realized the man’s eyes were following someone behind him.

Something hard slammed into the back of his head and Rees’s world went black.