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It’s late when Ventillas finally makes his way up to Cassia’s chambers. Later than he’d planned, later than he’d wanted. Master Jac had informed him hours past that his brother had been bathed, warmed, and well fed after his swim in the lake, but Ventillas had been anxious to see it for himself. He could scarcely believe it still—those precious few moments at the bridge where he’d looked upon the face of a boy grown to a man, a boy who he had thought lost, now seemed nothing more than a dream.
The shape in the bed is no dream. Ventillas kneels beside him, studying every line and angle of his face. It is Cassia—so tall and broad, but with the same black hair and same tanned skin, lit under a gentle glow of fireflies that Ventillas has brought into the chamber.
Then he shifts, face creased, and the fur blanket pulled up to his chest shifts downward, revealing a shoulder marred with scarring, thick and rope-like.
Ventillas can’t help the gasp that’s wrenched from his lips. He claps a hand to his mouth, hoping that he hasn’t woken his brother, so clearly exhausted—but Cassia only moans and shifts again, restless even in sleep. His eyes rove under their lids, fingers flexing against the bedding as if searching for purchase.
It’s an answer to the question of where his brother had been all this time, if only in part. Between the scars and the unpleasant dreams and the hunted, haunted look about his eyes, Ventillas could clearly tell Cassia had been nowhere good. The details would matter more when Cassia woke, and his story told—for now, Ventillas’ heart will hold the burden of grief and anger, keeping the embers tamped down and well tended until his fiery rage can be turned in the correct direction. He has only one true problem, now, in the late hours of the night—for Cassia has taken over near the entire bed, sprawled across it as if he owns the place.
They are his chambers, I’ll give him that, Ventillas thinks, a smile overtaking him. He rises and steps aside to dress in his sleep clothes, keeping himself as quiet as he can. Once he’s finished his nightly routine, he slips around to the other side of the bed, easing the blankets up with care and taking the spot at the very edge of the mattress.
The warmth from Cassia’s form, lying at his back, is like a memory from another time. From before his brother was lost, before the plague came and claimed and claimed and claimed. It makes a pressure build behind Ventillas’ eyes, makes the shadows of his soul, the secrets and the silent pain held within, just that much deeper and sharper in contrast to the light of his sweet baby brother.
He never thought Cassia would return. Now that he has, Ventillas finds his mind caught wondering.
The plague made desperation a close companion on the long journey to deliver Princess Jehan to her King. Has Cassia known that same desperation, vicious and terrible and grim? Ventillas hopes not. But if he hasn’t… if he knows nothing of the sort of things, terrible things, plague has forced Ventillas and the others to do…
…God. How could he ever find it in himself to forgive a brother destined for hell?
Our secret must never come to light, Ventillas thinks to himself. It is the last thought to cross his mind before he falls into a light, troubled sleep.
***
Ventillas’ sleep is not as troubled as the man’s beside him. He wakes several times through the night to vocalizations—moans and gasps and mumbled words he cannot make out. It isn’t until the sun is well into the morning that he decides he would rather wake Cassia from this mimicry of rest than allow him to suffer through a moment more.
Cassia has managed to kick half the bedclothes to the floor through the night. Ventillas huffs, hauling himself to his feet so he can pull off the rest, calling, “Rise and shine, my brother!” as he goes.
He’d only meant to wake him. Instead, Cassia lets out a strangled yell and twists onto his back, a fist flailing gracelessly upward. Ventillas is so startled that the damn thing finds its mark, striking him directly in the eye.
He swears, loudly, as he dodges another strike. “Cassia!” he calls, nearly tripping over the bedside table in his haste to back away. “Cassia, it’s only me! Stay your hands!”
There is no response, except a baring of teeth and a wordless snarl, more reminiscent of a feral lynx than a man. Cassia’s eyes, glazed and sleep-fogged still, skitter over Ventillas as if in search of a threat. His chest is heaving, strands of his hair sticking to the sweat breaking out across his skin—the blankets have fallen clear to his waist, revealing great swathes of scars in the morning light.
Ventillas watches him carefully, his hands raised, palms forward and as gentle as he can. “It’s alright,” he says. “You’re okay, Cassia. It’s only me. Only me.”
It takes a moment more for the tension to ease, Cassia’s exhausted eyes squinting in the light. “I’m so tired,” he says, slumping back against the pillows, all in a disarray.
The words are not pleading, as they might once have been, when Cassia was a little boy up far past his bedtime. Ventillas pushes aside memories of the time just after their father’s death, when his little brother had been hounded by nightmares long into the night and Ventillas, the only family left to him, couldn’t do more than lie beside him and attempt to soothe him. No… this Cassia isn’t one searching for his older brother for comfort. Rather, he is like a soldier, long into the siege and knowing it will be even longer before it ends, spirit heavy, resigned, but unable to truly stop.
It hurts to see. He has no cuts, no bruises or broken bones, his body long-since healed from whatever gave him his scars… but there are wounds, all the same. Under the surface, in his mind, becoming more and more apparent under Ventillas’ searching gaze.
Ventillas swallows. His eye is throbbing, a bruise surely forming from his brother’s knuckles. “I know, Cassia,” he says, as Cassia’s heavy eyelids begin to slide shut once more. He’s almost entirely sure that his brother has not truly woken yet. “I know. Go to sleep, my brother. I’ll be here when you wake.”
***
It’s been nearly twelve hours more, on top of the first night that Cassia slept away, before Cassia wakes.
Ventillas, true to his word, has settled into a chair, turned from the table to face his fitfully slumbering brother. He’s taken his meals in Cassia’s chambers. He was hardly hungry enough to pick at them, anxious to hear his brother’s story. Now preparation for dinner has begun in the dining hall—a page from King Rayan stopped by just moments ago to inform Ventillas that he and Cassia both are expected.
Ventillas does not begrudge his king the need to speak with his brother. Still, he cannot help the ache in his heart as his brother murmurs pleas into his pillow.
Swallowed by terrible thoughts, it takes Ventillas a second or two to realize when Cassia’s eyes open, murmurs falling silent. Ventillas waits a moment, studying him for signs of waking dreams.
He judges that Cassia must be properly awake when he rises to an elbow and asks after the prince, and then the archer. Ventillas offers short answers, reassuring him, feeling drained and short-tempered though he knows Cassia is not to blame. It’s been a long day, and a long night before it, to say nothing of the past year or three.
Finally, Cassia seems to notice the bruising on Ventillas’ face. He frowns and asks, “Who hit you?”
“You did.” The truthful answer displeases him, that much is clear. Ventillas could not care less. His brother is unsettled, his face flushing with shame when Ventillas’ eyes trace the scars on his chest for the millionth time. When he apologizes—perhaps for striking Ventillas in his sleep, or for wasting the day away, or for being lost to them these three long years—his shoulders hunch down and in, as if he’s making himself small.
It’s so much. Too much. Ventillas has not always been a brother, having been born nine long years before Cassia was conceived, and of the years after Cassia’s birth he hasn’t always watched over his brother as closely as he should. But for all his faults, for the times he’s slipped and the mistakes he’s made, he knows he’s never caused Cassia to be smaller than he was meant to be. He’s never seen his brother look so… lost.
“Don’t,” he says, forcing his voice to stay steady despite the veritable ocean of anger surging behind it. He makes a point to pour Cassia a cup of water, to give them both time to breathe, before he inhales and says, “It’s just the two of us here, Cassia. I want to know where you’ve been. Don’t leave anything out.”
The story is slow to come, Cassia’s eyes going distant over his cup as he casts his mind back. He speaks of Brisan soldiers, of capture, of slavery, of death. He speaks of whips and cells and a dozen, three dozen, five dozen bodies pressed together in utter filth. His voice stays level, distant, as he describes the work he did on the Brisan bridge. Once the words start they do not stop, meandering here and there and filling in gaps when Ventillas asks clarifying questions.
He speaks as if he’s held this story in for a very long time. And he must have, Ventillas knows—where would he have had freedom to speak it? To the Brisan guards whose whips flayed open his back? To the Brisan prisoners who curled their lips at the Oliveran in their midst? His men, Palmerin men, were killed early in their capture. That Cassia was not among them is a miracle or a mystery or both.
There is much to hear. Much to fan the flames building in Ventillas’ chest. And then Cassia reaches the final days of his capture, and his voice falters.
“You got out,” Ventillas says, almost a question, mostly a reassurance. Cassia’s face has gone pale, his hands fisted in the bedsheets. His chest, still bare, rises and falls a little too shallow, a little too quick. He swallows. Then…
“I thought I wouldn’t. That morning, the last morning I remember before I walked free… I awoke to a chill like I had never felt before. My skin felt too tight, and there were tender spots. Just below my collar, by my hip. I discovered, upon checking, that boils had grown there overnight.”
Ventillas gasps, sucking the air in between his teeth. “No,” he croaks, reaching as if to examine his brother, to turn him this way and that in search of an ailment long past.
Cassia winces, his fingers twitching. Ventillas forces his hands to halt at those broad shoulders, holding loosely. There is a small pucker in the skin just by his right thumb, under Cassia’s collarbone—a pocked mark that could have been a boil, once upon a time.
“You survived,” Ventillas breathes.
A smile ghosts Cassia’s face, gone just as fast as it arrived, before he shies away from Ventillas’ grip. “That’s debatable, I suppose. I think… Ven, there was a part of me that…”
He pauses, his eyes turning toward the windows, the deep brown of his irises swallowed near whole by the black of his pupils. Ventillas waits, swallowing back something bitter that rises at the back of his throat. When he continues, his voice is low, a depth to it that was not there before, the words choked with emotion.
“I think that was when I gave up,” he says, and Ventillas wants desperately to hug him, to make this all better in the way an elder brother should. “I knew time was short and I knew I would not last long. I knew that it did not matter what I did next, because I would never make it home. I…” His voice breaks, and he clears his throat, rubbing absently at his chest. “I—I had been in so many fights since my capture. I had my pride, and my honor, tattered though they were. And I never stopped fighting to break free of the cuffs. I would remember your lessons, every day, and I would fight so that one day I might return home. But that day, when I discovered my illness… it was so pointless, Ven. So I imagined what you would do in my situation. There was only one thing I could think of.”
“What was that, my brother?” Ventillas asks.
This time Cassia’s smile is grim, a twisted thing showing too many teeth. “I took as many of them down with me as I could.”
When Cassia was a child, he’d been inquisitive. He used to wander around on his own, poking and prodding at the soldiers and the grooms and the artisans as they commenced their duties. There had been a mischievousness about him that had been absent in Ventillas. More than once, Ventillas had been forced to herd his little brother back home, trying to stifle laughter at some playful misdemeanor that had one of the local laborers howling obscenities.
Cassia had never meant any harm by it. On the few occasions that his pranks were mean-spirited or had consequences he hadn’t intended, he’d become withdrawn, his young face creased with remorse. Ventillas had caught him crying once or twice, shamed and guilt-ridden.
He had done his duties as a man of arms, had never shied from violence, his stomach strong and his head held high. But there had always been a kindness, an understanding, behind his actions. He was shaping up to be a good Lord to their mountain city, fair and level-headed.
He does not cry now. Does not withdraw, does not express remorse. And he shouldn’t, Ventillas thinks—not after what those heartless bastards did to him and to his men. If Ventillas had been in that prison camp, had witnessed his brother’s suffering, the plague would have been the least of the worries those men would have.
And yet. Ventillas studies his brother, taking in his scars once more, visible and not. I gave up, he’d said. Knowing that he would not return home, knowing that he was dying, he had chosen to spread the pestilence through the men who had hurt him, every last one now long since dead and gone.
But not Cassia. No… Cassia is here, sitting before Ventillas, hale and healthy and strong, in body if not in mind. It is only between the words he speaks that Ventillas hears it—that he isn’t sure all of him has returned home after all.
The plague made desperation a close companion. This Ventillas is well aware. And now, looking upon his brother, it becomes clear that Cassia was not untouched by this year of death and pestilence and more. Ventillas doesn’t have to ask to know that Cassia is just as well-acquainted with that desperation as he.
…If it makes a difference, in the end, Ventillas doesn’t know. Either way, the one certainty he has is that he would take this pain from Cassia if only he had the chance.