He’d never met strangers on the property.
It wasn’t like he’d entered the room on purpose—the last time he’d done that, he’d gotten ten lashes for intruding on the masters’ ‘private talk’ and ‘being disrespectful’ despite having gone on his knees to apologize like his mother used to do.
Not that it had saved her from getting beaten to death, not so long ago.
But he could swear on his mother’s unburied remains that he hadn’t meant to go in this time. He had just come back from a particularly difficult picking session—frostbane was useful, but a pain to find in the winter—and had wanted to inform the house master that his only findings were feeble roots. He would get a lashing for that, too; he just hoped it would happen while the cold was still numbing his hands.
Now, however, caught between the backdoor and the eyes of six people staring at him from the dinner table, his limbs froze even further. The master and his family were sitting with a stranger, and the child had been so busy pulling his bucket of pickings and hardening himself for punishment that he hadn’t made out the new, different voice in their conversation, and now the stranger was seeing him and oh Saints he would not be feeling his skin tonight—
“And the young man?” the stranger asked.
His voice was…soft. Deep, with an undertone of undisputed authority, but undeniably soft. Not something the child usually heard in this house.
“My son,” the master hastily replied, punctuating it with a laugh too loud to be genuine.
“Whatever was he doing outside in the cold?”
“Probably trying to find some flowers he’s read about,” the master’s wife replied with a smile. “Saints know he loves to get his hands dirty.”
The child’s spine stiffened. Their son? His mother was dead serving these people. Flowers? Those were the poison plants they’d made him find with his magic! He didn’t even know how to read!
Why were they lying? If this man was only another one of their visitors, wouldn’t they be proud to show him off as their possession? The powerful little mage turned slave?
The stranger’s eyes were still on him, waiting for him to move, to speak. He couldn’t, though. Not when he knew what this intrusion would cost him, not when the masters were eyeing him like they wanted him struck by lightning behind their civil smiles.
“Come in, child, you’ll freeze. Come sit with us and tell me about those flowers.” The stranger was smiling at him.
“He’ll freshen up first if you don’t mind, Your Serenity,” the master said, voice dripping with exaggerated politeness. “Evalie, why don’t you get your brother downstairs to wash up?”
He felt his back tense again. Insults about his filthiness had never stung him like this before. But it was too late to react; the master’s youngest daughter had stood up, her eyes flashing in brief fury. He knew this sixteen-year-old’s fists better than he knew how many leaves were on a frostbane branch.
But the stranger had also stood up, making everyone freeze. He didn’t look at them; he only had eyes for the child as he extended a welcoming hand toward him.
“Come sit with us,” he repeated, as though the master had never spoken. “What is your name?”
“De’rion,” the master replied instead. “Come say hello before you go change, De’rion!”
De’rion—nothing, in his forgotten mother tongue. A mocking of his heritage. His name in this house, before and after his mother bled to death two storeys below.
“Rowan,” he spoke for the first time since he’d entered. “My name is Rowan.”
The family gaped at him like fish thrown out of the water. The magic stone on his earlobe—that they had carved into his skin since he was old enough to walk—tingled with heat at his act of defiance. He bit back a wince. He could already feel twenty other lashes coming for him later, but he would take that before he let them deform the last thing he had left of his mother.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the master’s wife said, eyes wild with something he’d never seen on her before. “Naming yourself after plants again? Silly boy. Excuse him, Your Serenity, the child has quite the imagination!”
They all mimicked her laughter, eyeing him as if to dare him to speak up again. It would have worked, on any other day; he would have ducked his head and disappeared downstairs until one of them came to beat him back into his place.
But not today, because he finally saw it. In the way they were nudging each other, the way their voices were sickly sweet, the way they were looking at the stranger as though one wrong move would make him breathe fire at them.
He’d seen that wild, frantic look on his mother so many times.
These people were afraid.
It didn’t help that the stranger was still looking at him, his eyes full with a gentleness he had never gotten before—not from the people who knew what he was, at least. The stranger pushed his chair away, and the laughter stopped immediately.
“Sir?”
He walked over to Rowan, his steps deliberately slow. The child kept his eyes on the floorboard, bracing himself in case something, anything, struck him by surprise.
Instead, the man kneeled in front of him and slowly took his hands. They hadn’t warmed from the frost yet, and were still dirty from mud and blood crusts in places where thorns and sharp leaves had pricked him.
“Will you look at me, Rowan?”
He did. The man’s gaze was…knowing.
“How old are you?”
“De’rion,” the master warned.
“Eleven,” Rowan replied.
The stranger began rubbing soft circles on the skin of his hands. His fingers were warming up, like the blood was flowing back into them.
“And what were you doing outside?”
Rowan swallowed, resisting the urge to look back at his owners. The stone on his ear was burning stronger now. “I pick plants for the masters,” he said. “He sells them as poisons and remedies on the forbidden market.”
Someone gasped, and a fist slammed down on the dinner table.
“Half-witted child!” the master yelled. “What are you on about? Evalie, take him downstairs or—”
The stranger’s eyes never left Rowan, but his gaze hardened. “Where is your mother?”
Always clean your hands after picking, Rowan.
It wasn’t him—it was me! I forgot to cut out the poison berries!
Mother will always love you, my sunflower.
Rowan’s breath hitched as tears pricked his eyes.
“They killed her,” he whispered.
He choked on a sob, his hand flying to his ear to ease the piercing pain of the magic stone. The stranger’s hand followed his, and for a moment Rowan’s ear went numb; when he opened his eyes, he felt no pain, the stone was sitting in the stranger’s palm.
It was then that Rowan noticed the emblem of the twin suns embroidered on the man’s collar. Your Serenity.
A cleric of the Saints.
“Pack your things,” the stranger said simply.
Rowan obeyed, still sniffling, and headed downstairs. He only had one sack—a few layers of fabric that his mother had stitched together for him, in case they ever gathered enough goods to run from this cursed house. He grabbed it and threw in it his only change of clothes along with his mother’s old notes.
That’s when the screaming started.
It quickly died out, followed by the rough sound of heaving objects hitting the ground. For a moment, Rowan remained frozen, remembering his mother’s tales about the blessed the clerics of the Saints. People empowered by the holy pillars themselves; people who could make light out of darkness and hear truth from lies.
People who turned sinners into dust, and the stranger was one of them.
He climbed back up the stairs slowly. Would he die too, for having served these people with his magic? Would he pay for the poisons they had sold and the lives they had taken? Would the Saints at least let him join his mother?
The stranger was quietly waiting for him by the backdoor, his stance straight, his clothes immaculate.
There was blood on the ceiling and the walls behind him.
When Rowan reached the top of the stairs, the strangers was standing as if to shield him from the view. He wrapped Rowan in his large black cloak and hoisted him up into his arms.
“It’s alright,” he said with a gentle smile. “You have nothing to fear anymore.”
Rowan stared at him. “Why were you in the master’s house?”
“I was looking for you. One of our priests bought an extract of marigold heavily tainted with magic a few days ago, and we tracked down the seller to make sure he wasn’t hiding a mage somewhere.” Then, in a lower tone, “I’d heard about mage slaves in this region. The audacity, knowing the High Temple protects them.”
“You are a cleric,” Rowan said with a hint of awe.
The stranger’s eyes twinkled with delighted surprise. “I am,” he replied. “My name is Adriel, and I serve Saint Valhenya. Do you know about the Saints, Rowan?”
“My mother used to tell me stories, before—” Rowan bit his lip. “The masters hated when I tried asking them about it.”
“They are not your masters. They never should have been.” The man shook his head. “Will you come with me to the Temple? There are many people like you who would love to meet you.”
Rowan hesitated. He had already been left once; he barely knew the cleric, but he was the first person in a long time to look at Rowan with sympathy rather than contempt.
“Will you not stay with me?” he asked in a small voice.
The stranger—Adriel—smiled. “Only if you want me to.”
