CHAPTER TWELVE: THE SWORD REMEMBERS
Gabe
Gabe sat outside the back door that led to the kitchen, quieting his breathing and listening to the sounds of Agnes leaving, having run downstairs before she could figure out he’d been listening outside the bedroom door. Physic. Seer. Mender. Gabe didn’t know what any of those words meant, but a picture was starting to form in his head of just how much had been kept from him, from all of them, for years.
And that lack of information, that deception, had allowed him to put Aaron in a coma. Possibly kill him, before Gabe had done whatever he did to keep his surrogate brother alive. He thought about the other boy, lying in some sort of stasis in his bed upstairs, and whatever guilt he felt over having done it quickly shifted to a fist-clenching anger at just how much the adults in his life had lied to him.
Conduit.
Birth-defect.
Don’t live this long.
He had no idea what it meant, but he knew the weight of significance when he heard it. And fear. Schwan. Was that his name? Gabe had been raised thinking his surname was White all these years. Was that a lie too? He ran a hand through his hair and let out an explosive breath as he sank downwards, an impossible weight crushing his shoulders, not just from talk of names or powers. Not from secret sword styles or the revelation that his uncle was keeping even more secrets from him than he had suspected, that he didn’t intend to tell him the truth for two more years. All of these fell away in place of something far more terrible.
“I’m dying, not dead.”
John was dying. That his death was going to lead to some something happening that Agnes sounded seriously scared of almost didn’t matter. Fuck. Gabe looked down at his hands. They shook slightly. How was he supposed to tell everyone else all of this? How was he supposed to just drop it on them without warning? He didn’t know how. Why this? Why now? His breath shook. Tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes and he whispered, “Why me?”
He folded his arms across his chest. Hugged himself as tight as he could, unsure if he was trying to suppress his crying or squeeze it out of himself. Uncle Michael had never been much of a hugger, and Agnes had a gruff sort of physical affection. Only John was truly free with it. This revelation suddenly made everything ten thousand times worse, and he nearly collapsed forward onto the dirt, trying to stay as quiet as he could. He didn’t want anyone to hear him, or see him, didn’t want to be perceived in any way.
“… Gabe?”
It was Cody. Gabe didn’t want to look up. His messy, dirt and tear-streaked face was the last thing he wanted anyone else to see in that moment.
Cody paused, and Gabe could see his face in his mind’s eye: kind and uncertain. “What happened, dude?”
He made himself look up, bit by bit. Lina stood just behind Cody, their clothes dirty from yard chores.
“He overheard Agnes,” Lina said. “Didn’t you?”
I said I was going to spy on her, he thought. I just… I had no idea it was going to be this bad.
Gabe slowly stood. Lina met his eyes for just a moment, then looked away, closing them. How much do you know? He wondered but did not say. “Yeah,” he answered. “It’s… it’s a lot. We need—” he trailed off for a moment, his thoughts still muddy and incoherent “—we need to get Roberta. There’s stuff you all,” his eyes flicked to Lina for a moment, “need to hear. ASAP. I just need to get some stuff from the barn first. Meet me by the pell in the woods.”
He started towards the barn before they could object, walking as if pounding the ground with his feet would let him outpace the fear, grief, and anger. The big barn’s door was open, and he walked past familiar sights, deliberately ignoring the motorcycle his uncle loved to work on and the orange tractor whose paint was flecking so bad that it was more rust than color. He climbed the ladder to the loft, motes of dust drifting past his face and his senses overwhelmed with the musty smell of damp wood and long ignored tarps. The duffel with the wooden swords was stashed behind a crate, and Gabe snatched it up and slung it over his shoulder before heading back down.
Just a few feet outside the barn door, he found himself looking up at Aaron’s window in the house proper. The Schwan’s ancestral sword-style.
Uncle Michael had always treated it like a secret that had to be preciously kept, expressly forbidding the other children from participating. Some part of Gabe wondered what he was betraying by breaking that faith, but if his uncle had, as he’d overheard Agnes say, taught him in order to channel and direct whatever potential and power he possessed, maybe it would work for the others, too.
And if there was even a chance that it would, then Gabe had to try. He started off towards the woods with its pell where he used to train alone with his uncle, avoiding looking up at Aaron’s window, which brought to mind a sharp, particularly painful memory, just then.
And when you wake up, he thought, which you will, I’ll teach you too. Uncle Michael be damned.
Winter, 2006
Gabe’s hands were cold even inside his mittens, the oversized coat doing little to keep out the chill. He held the wooden practice sword in both hands as he stood opposite his uncle, feeling the excitement of what they were doing thrum through his veins. At seven years old, nothing was cooler than practicing swords with Uncle Michael. It was the best part of his day, even when it was cold and rainy.
“Keep your point on the target,” Uncle Michael said. “From the center, it is easiest to move to any other defensive position that you need. Now—” he threw a slow cut at Gabe’s left side. Gabe’s seven-year-old parry was awkward, hindered by the puffy coat that rendered him more marshmallow than child. The wood clacked against wood, nonetheless, and Uncle Michael smiled, laughing a little. “Good,” he said. Then he sighed. “You know, that coat isn’t doing you any favors. Let’s see about—”
A loud thud echoed from the edge of the clearing and Uncle Michael spun with a speed that Gabe had never seen him move, bringing his sword up and down with a blinding flash that stopped just short of Aaron’s face. The other boy stood at the edge of the foliage-line, his eyes wide with shock and a fear that Gabe had never seen before. He instantly took two steps forward as Uncle Michael relaxed, but only slightly. The voice that came out of Gabe’s uncle was different from any the boy had heard him use before: It was… cold. “Do not,” he said, “ever sneak up on my nephew and I like that.” He swept his sword back to his side in a blindingly quick snap.
“I’m—I’m sorry,” the other seven-year-old said. He was holding a broom handle in his hand and his shoulders were shaking. “I-I-I didn’t m-mean to startle you sir, I—”
“What do you want,” Uncle Michael snapped. “We’re busy.”
“I, um,” Aaron was shaking now. “I just. I was wondering. I was hoping I could play with the two of y—”
“This isn’t play,” Uncle Michael’s temper was obviously short. “It’s family only. Leave.”
Gabe spoke up, stepping between the two of them, holding up his hands. “Uncle Michael,” he started, “It’s okay! Aaron is family—”
And then a look Gabe would never forget for the rest of his life crossed Uncle Michael’s face. It was like his whole face spasmed with a deep, ravening pain that rapidly shifted to anger, then cold, unfeeling contempt. He looked Gabe in the eyes and said, “No. He absolutely is not.”
A scrambling sounded in Gabe’s ears. He turned and looked over his shoulder. “Aaron, wait!”
But the other boy was already gone, running through the woods as fast as his legs could carry him. Gabe caught the sound of crying below the crunch of leaves and breaking branches. Gabe wheeled on his uncle. “You made Aaron cry!” he shouted.
Uncle Michael was still looking where the other boy had run, and his eyes were full of… something. Memory. Or maybe regret or maybe something else entirely. “Better he learn now,” he said. “Gabe, some things are not for everyone. They are not shared because they belong to specific people—”
“That’s stupid,” Gabe snapped. “What’s the point of learning something if I can’t share it?”
“Because it’s important!” Uncle Michael exploded. He pinched the bridge of his nose and growled low in frustration. “Gabe, you’re too young. You don’t understand the price that has been paid to allow you to learn any of this at all. People have fought to preserve this art. To safeguard it. People have died.”
“But…” Gabe struggled to understand, feeling like the man before him had suddenly become someone else entirely. “… But I just want to share with my friends. Why can’t I—”
“Because it belongs to us!” Uncle Michael abruptly snapped. “To family. We are its keepers and its caretakers, and to share it with others is to betray the work of generations! I will not do that,” he said coldly. “And—understand this—neither will you.”
Gabe dropped the practice sword, and following Aaron, ran into the woods, leaving his uncle looking baffled and angry and hurt behind in the cold and the rain.
Autumn, 2013
He dropped the duffel bag at the foot of the pell and waited. Gabe’s hands shook, but not because of the cold. This was what he had to do. Not just because it was right, but because so far as he knew, it might be the only way he could help the others. Even still, Uncle Michael’s warning about family, about belonging and secrecy, rebounded around inside his head. More than the words, though, it was the look on his uncle’s face, etched across his memory, that kept returning over and over. Pain and grief and guilt.
What happened to our family, Gabe thought, that made you so sad? Another thought occurred to him, sharp and abrupt: what did they do to you, that hurt you so much?
“Alright, we’re here,” Cody’s voice cut across his thoughts, and Gabe turned around to see the other three kids stepping into the clearing, along the same small path Aaron had used seven years ago. The thought was sharp and unkind. The adults were lying to him, had lied to him, his whole life. Fuck what they wanted.
“What’s this about, Gabe?” Roberta asked. Gabe hesitated, then he lifted up the duffel and dumped its contents onto the ground. Wooden swords clattered as they tumbled all over one another, along with a handful of battered fencing masks and hockey gloves. Roberta looked at the pile of equipment and her eyes widened. She looked back at Gabe. “… Your uncle never let the rest of us so much as touch any of this. Are you saying—”
“I overheard Agnes say that my uncle was teaching me this stuff so I’d have a way to manage my abilities when I finally came into them,” Gabe said. “I don’t know if it will apply to the rest of you as well… but it’s what I’ve got, so I’ll teach you everything I know.”
He explained the rest, telling them what Agnes had said about each of them in turn…. Everything except the name of Schwan, and the associated words that had sent his mind spinning in fear and fascination. Pride and Chivalry. A devotion to the dead that would destroy his uncle.
He also left John out, and why the Cerement was falling. He couldn’t bring himself to say it. Not yet. Thankfully the swords seemed to distract them for the moment.
Gabe took a deep breath to avoid spilling that he wasn’t saying everything, then shelved thoughts of identity and history, and said “okay, everyone pick up a sword. Uh. It’s time to start.”
Cody and Roberta hesitated for a moment. Gabe looked at them both and said “I know this is weird and awkward but please, this is all I’ve got. I promise my uncle isn’t gonna jump out of the shadows and bite you.”
Cody cracked a small smile. “You sure?”
He glanced left and noticed Lina hanging back, not picking up a wood blade. “… Lina?”
“I’m gonna pass right now,” she said quietly. “Not feeling well. Go ahead, I can learn a lot by watching.”
Something was off, but the other two didn’t seem to notice. Gabe shelved it for the moment and stood in front of Roberta and Cody. “Okay,” he started. “Um. Here we go.”
He took them through the parries and the stances. Basic stuff to start, and all the while the back of Gabe’s mind was insisting that it wasn’t enough. Every point conveyed, every ‘no-don’t-stand-like-that’ and ‘no-hold-it-this-way’ seemed to just make him more frustrated. After what was probably twenty minutes or so he stopped. Everyone was sweating and Roberta and Cody looked more nervous than happy.
“Hey,” the latter started. “Gabe, are you okay? You’ve been really tense since you spied on Agnes and—”
“I’m fine,” Gabe said, the words coming out just short of a snap. John is dying. “I just. I don’t know. You’re both doing… fine. You just started. It’s not a big deal but I don’t know how much time we have, and so far nobody’s produced so much as a spark of light! And maybe we’re not supposed to? I don’t know what this stuff is supposed to even look like! John said something about putting our will into it, and—”
John is going to die.
“Gabe,” Roberta started.
“—and it’s not like anyone who knows anything is gonna show up and teach us, so we gotta figure it out on our own and—”
“—Gabe—”
“—the last time I actually used whatever it is I had I almost killed Aaron and—”
“GABE. LOOK.”
Roberta held out her hand. A tongue of crimson fire shimmered with heat, suspended in the air above her palm. Her eyes were wide for a moment, then the broadest, goofiest expression Gabe had ever seen spread across her face. “THIS. IS. SO. COOL!”
Cody took a step back. “Holy shit!” He said, “how did, how, what, how!?”
Roberta took a breath, then closed her fist, the flames vanishing in a whirl. Then with another breath she said “something about what Gabe just said—putting your will into it… it just… it clicked, and I remembered that I used to be able to do this as a little kid. I just. I forgot and I thought it was a dream and—” she opened her fingers with a flourish and the fire appeared again, the reflection dancing in her dark eyes. “And it wasn’t! It was real!”
Gabe’s head started to hurt, and he felt a tingling at the ends of his fingers.
Roberta turned to Cody and Lina. “Both of you! Try it! Gabe said he heard John say we could all summon fire, right? Don’t think about it. Just… will it.”
Cody held out his hand. Lina did too—though Gabe noticed with a less hesitant, almost practiced movement—and both took deep breaths before two tongues of fire flared into being above their hands, orange for Cody, pale green for Lina. Gabe had just a moment to register it before his head started screaming in pain, and all of a sudden all he could think about was days confined to bed as a child. Before he turned six, when the headaches ravaged him every day.
… Don’t normally live this long…
“Gabe, shit, are you okay?” he heard Cody ask. Gabe’s free hand went to his head. He felt his friend take a step towards him and pain turned to panic as a vision of Aaron stepping closer flashed through his head. Not again not again not again.
They have lied to me my whole life.
Gabe held up his hand to ward the others off. “No, stay away, I don’t want to hurt y—”
There was a flash, and all three of the others gasped as the flames above their hands flickered and vanished in sparking bursts of purple light. Abruptly Gabe’s head cleared, and he caught a glimpse of a ball of purple light dissipating above his outstretched hand.
But it didn’t stay there. It vanished, flowing into him, through him. Gabe reflexively flexed the fingers of his sword-hand. His whole body felt like it was vibrating, the same tingle from before flowing under his skin like he’d grabbed a live wire.
“You haven’t been practicing,” Uncle Michael’s remembered voice echoed in his mind.
“Gabe?” Lina sounded frightened.
“The most important thing.”
“Dude what happened?” Cody took another step forward. “Are you okay? Are—”
Gabe turned on his heel. The energy was flooding through him. Needed to go somewhere. He needed to do something with it before it ripped its way out of his skin. Purple light ringed the edge of his vision. Somewhere. Something. Anything.
“Our family—”
“The one you won’t tell me anything about?”
“Gabe what’s wrong!?” Roberta’s voice was an octave higher than usual. He barely heard her.
The Pell. The moment the thought entered his head his feet were moving. Gabe put his free hand on the wood sword, yelled “Everyone get away!” and cut with the blade at the standing wood post as hard as he could. It connected with a blinding flash. Every ounce of the energy flowed out of him at once, shattering wood, charring the splinters to ash in a blink.
“The most important.”
The ripping echo of the deafening boom faded from his ears.
Gabe stood in the clearing, holding the hilt of a wooden sword, its blade blasted to charcoal half a foot down from the cross, the pell his uncle had built to train him a smoking, two-foot crater in the center of the drizzly, open space. He dropped the hilt. Turned. Oh God, what had he done? Oh shit oh damn oh fuck—
—Cody, Roberta, and Lina stood roughly ten feet back, staring in shock and fear… but none of them were hurt.
“I…” he gasped. Gulped. “I’m sorry I… I didn’t know what else to do. It felt like it was going to burn its way out of me, and I didn’t want to hurt anyone else.”
Roberta stared at him, her eyes wide and afraid. “Was… was that what happened when you and Aaron…” she trailed off.
Gabe’s hands shook. He looked at Cody, Lina, and Roberta. The nearest things to family he had, even as his uncle insisted that they weren’t. Even as he’d felt pulled between dead people he’d never met, and the living he wasn’t allowed to connect with. His eyes stung and his mouth quivered. He could barely muster a whisper. “… Not exactly, but…” He gulped and the first sob slipped out. “I’m sorry I… guys I’m j-just so sorry—”
Roberta stepped forward and hugged him. Then came Cody, and last of all Lina. This time there wasn’t anything staunching the tears. Gabe cried until it hurt, and then he cried some more, holding onto his friends in the shade of the tall trees surrounding them.
And that was how John found them.
“What—” John stared at the state of the clearing, his eyes wide “—what on earth—”
The teenagers separated, and one by one, met John’s eyes. He might have yelled at them, might have demanded an explanation or condemned the risk they were taking. Instead, he looked down, an expression as close to shame as Gabe had ever seen crossing his face.
“So, you know, then.” He said.
“Some of it,” Roberta said.
“More than you told us,” Cody was quiet, an unusual strength in his voice. “Less than we should’ve been.”
Lina looked away, closing her eyes. Finally, Gabe simply asked “What’s a Conduit?”
John’s brows drew together. Instantly Gabe felt a flash of guilt. Yes, Agnes, Michael, and John had kept secrets from him. Yes, they’d lied—God how they’d lied—but was John’s position any fairer? That he was feeling guilt and anger at the same time just made him angrier. Gabe’s hands balled into fists.
“You were listening,” John said. It wasn’t a question.
Gabe took a deep breath, and met John’s eyes, barely keeping his voice controlled. “Yes.”
John sighed. His breathing appeared to be coming with difficulty. “I’ve wanted to tell you the truth for a long time,” the old man said quietly. Drops of rain began to fall, pattering on the ground as the sky darkened into evening. “But there are promises I made, that Agnes made, that prevented it.”
“Stop dancing around it!” Gabe snapped. “You lied to us, and we deserve the truth.”
John held up a hand. Started to speak. “Look around you,” he said. “Look at what you’ve done. You want to know why the truth was kept from you? We didn’t want you to grow up having to worry about accidentally killing each other.”
“But I did,” Gabe’s teeth set. His voice was barely controlled now. He watched the pain grow in John’s eyes as he spoke. He didn’t care. “None of your good reasons change the fact that I didn’t know what I could do until I put my brother in a coma. Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you bury it?”
He didn’t even touch on the subject of identity, which frightened him even more. Not yet. He wasn’t ready for the others to know. The guilt at hiding it made his anger spike again, and all at once he shouted “WHY!?”
John leaned against a tree. His face was painted with grief. “Kid,” he said, “you think it’s bad now, at fourteen, caused by an accident? Imagine how much worse it would’ve been as a child. When you were a baby, you couldn’t control whatever magic you have at all. Magic—the life-force of those around you—used in your presence was disrupted by your powers. Now take that risk and multiply it by a house full of children your own age, all grappling with their own magic, and adults who—for all our ability to control their own gifts—still do not understand what you can do or how dangerous it is.”
John’s breathing was labored now. “It wasn’t a mistake,” he said. “It was the least awful option available to us, and it at least let you grow up without hurting one another. For three days, we didn’t even know if you would wake up.”
“What about Aaron?” Gabe’s voice broke. “Is he gonna wake up?”
“He’s…” John blinked. His fingers clenched against the tree. “… He’s…”
His eyes rolled back in his head. Cody rushed forward, reacting faster than the others as John pitched over, his legs giving out and his body collapsing into the sandy-haired boy, who stopped the old man from crashing into the hard ground. “Shit, damn, fuck!” Cody yelled. “He’s so heavy, help me!”
Gabe was at his side in a flash. Between the two of them they managed to lower John to the ground. Gabe’s heart hammered in his ears. All he could see in his mind’s eye was Aaron collapsing to the earth. The other boy lying in his bed. Gabe’s mouth dried up and he couldn’t think. It was like his mind was moving through sludge. Sweat froze the back of his neck. “He’s not breathing,” he heard Roberta say, as she knelt by John’s other side.
“Shit, what do we do?” Cody asked. He was looking at Gabe as if Gabe had any idea. He didn’t. Could only stutter and choke on his words as he tried desperately to fuel coherent thought. Could he try pouring his power into him like he had with Aaron? Would that work, or would John end up in a coma as well, vegetating in stasis, unable to say or do anything at all?
He’s already dying. Would that kill him?
“Cody,” Lina said, and there was a flint in her voice that none of them had heard before. She stepped forward, looking down at the three of them. “Put your hands on him.”
Cody looked up at her. “What?”
“You heard what Gabe said earlier,” Lina answered. “You’re a Mender. That means you can fix things, and not just things, but people. Put your hands on him and pour your will into it.”
“But I don’t know what’s actually wrong with him.”
“Yes, you do. He’s not breathing. Start there.”
“—but—”
Lina’s face hardened and she snapped “DO IT.”
Cody pressed his hands to John’s chest and Gabe watched his uncertainty turn to determination. “I’m not ready to lose you,” his voice shook. “So, listen to me and start breathing!”
A soft shimmer of orange light surrounded Cody’s hands, then John gasped, his eyes open and shimmering with the same light for just a moment, then it faded, and he closed them before murmuring “… Guides, boy… you… really need… t’learn some… finesse.”
He slumped back, barely awake, but this time he was breathing. Gabe checked his pulse. It was steady. He looked over his shoulder at Lina but found her now looking at him. There was a sternness in her gaze, like she was pushing him into saying something. “We should get him inside,” Roberta said. “This rain’s gonna make him catch a chill.”
“Okay,” Gabe nodded, watching Lina nod barely perceptibly as he spoke. “Lina, hold the door. The three of us should be able to get him inside.”
It was getting dark by the time they got him onto the living room couch. He must’ve left Merlin in the house when he came to find them, because the dog was right inside the door. He barked, then whimpered as they laid him down, then stuck his head under John’s hand. He stirred as they put a pillow under his head and managed to murmur “Heat up water… tea,” before quieting again. As Roberta and Cody went to see to it, Gabe noticed Lina slipping out of the room. He could’ve let her go, but in that moment all Gabe could think about was the certainty on her face when she’d given Cody orders. The iron in her voice and the way she’d avoided looking at them before. Always dancing around the edge of something she wouldn’t quite say.
Seer.
He caught up with her on the back stoop. She was standing in the rain, staring off into the woods, her eyes closed.
Gabe stood there for a long time. He and Lina had always been close—as much like brother and sister as they could’ve been, with how Michael was—but for just a second he wasn’t sure how to even try to broach the subject. After a few seconds of standing there awkwardly he took a deep breath and asked, “What else do you know?”
Lina turned her eyes up towards the rain, letting it fall directly on her face. Her shortish hair was soaking through, strands sticking to her neck. “Not everything,” she sighed. “But… enough.” She turned and looked at him. “I know some of the truth about you, and about the others. I know lots of things that make sense to me and even more things that don’t. But more than anything, I know that I have to be very careful about what I say, and when I say it.” She took a deep, shaking breath. “And I know that I’ve seen this conversation coming for years, and I’ve been terrified of how it would resolve. Because right now, more than anything, I need you to trust me, and I know how suspicious that’s going to sound.”
Gabe stared at her, taking all of that in. He paused. “Did Agnes tell you not to tell the rest of us what you knew?”
Lina closed her eyes. That alone was all the confirmation he needed, but she went further and admitted it. “Yes.”
“How long?”
“The Cerement—the failing enchantment that used to suppress our powers, can’t blind a Seer.” She sighed. “The dreams started when I was four. Agnes helped me make sense of them.”
Gabe’s eyes widened. Holy crap.
“Why did you do it?”
She watched him. Then she said, “Because based on what I saw, it was the right thing to do.”
“You mean your dreams?”
“Waking and sleeping.”
He took a deep breath. On the one hand, his sister, or might-as-well-have-been sister, had lied to him. Lied to him and hidden things from him, about himself, in collaboration with his caregiver, and possibly his uncle.
On the other hand… she was the only one who had been honest with him when he actually asked. “And you don’t think it’s a good idea for me to know everything now?”
Lina nodded. “You know enough to do what you need to do. The rest… it won’t make sense coming from me. But I… Gabe I need you to trust me. More than anyone else, I need your trust. Because I care about our futures, and the truth is when it comes down to it, the others will listen to you more than me.”
“Why?”
She rolled her green eyes. “Because you’re charismatic. Because you’re a boy. Because you’re white. Pick one.”
That hit harder than he was prepared for. Accepting it felt like trying to swallow an uncracked egg. Gabe looked down at his hands, pale in the winter, prone to tanning only a little more than his uncle’s in the summer. The choice was before him: trust or suspicion, leap of faith or make demands. He didn’t totally like any of the options in front of him… but of all the people he’d dealt with so far, who knew what was happening, and who knew enough to give him more information, Lina was the only one who had been honest, and who had told him why.
“Okay,” he said, and extended his hand. “Whatever happens next, whatever needs doing… I trust you. I just have one question.”
“I’ll do my best.”
His guts were in his throat. It was hard to form the words. “Agnes said I have some sort of birth defect. Am I… is there something wrong with me?”
Lina watched him carefully, then she said “the better question is: when everyone thinks something is, does that make it true? You are who you are. I don’t think anybody should be able to tell you that whatever that is, is broken.”
She took his hand. Their palms clasped.
“It’s going to get bad before it gets better,” she said. “It’s going to get really bad.”
Gabe believed her.
And that made it so much worse.