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Chapter Four

With the new ax and a packet of freshly wrapped honeycakes in hand, brother and sister left Hammerwall behind, hurrying against the coming dark. Rae kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead until they were out of sight of the Bastion’s gate. He took a quick look around. Other than a handful of last-minute travelers trying to get inside before nightfall, the road was abandoned.

“Did you learn anything interesting in the Bastion?” La asked casually. Rae glanced in her direction.

“Plenty of stuff. I checked out the prices on the windship cabins,” Rae said.

“Did you? Have they dropped any since you last checked?”

“They have not!” he said emphatically. “It costs as much to ship a crate of oranges out of this place as it does to buy a tract of dry land along the orderwall. We’re going to have to start putting our pennies together, sis.”

“Oh, well, our rich uncle will cover us,” La said. This was an old game from their childhood, a hopeless wish fulfillment that their parents chastised them for. “The young Lady Kelthannis does not travel among orange crates.”

“Then you’ll be wanting the captain’s suite, my lady,” Rae said with a mocking bow. La returned it with a curtsy. “Windows on three sides of the cabin, and a personal chef to see to your every need. Unless you want oranges. We couldn’t afford to put those on the ’ship, my lady.”

“Well, then I will simply have to make due with these cakes. More cakes!”

“Oh, hey, did you get the honeycakes?” Rae asked, licking his lips.

La produced a package of wrapped butcher paper and handed it over. Rae tore into the package, nearly spilling the honeycake onto the road. The loaf was warm and smelled of sticky syrup and sweet bread. Rae and La split a square, walking close together and scrambling whenever one of them spilled a precious crumb onto the ground, laughing for miles. When they were done, La folded the rest of the cakes away and tucked them into her bag. They walked in contented silence for a while.

“We’re never going to Fulcrum,” La said quietly, breaking the mood. “That’s a dream you should just lock away and drop the key into that bottomless pit you call a brain.”

“Maybe,” Rae said. “Maybe not. Give it time.” He cleared his throat and pulled away from his sister, hands thrust into his pockets. “So, how’d it go for you?” he asked.

“With Harlen?” La wrapped her arms tight around her belly. “He’s kind of an asshole. I had to pay half, which is half more than he should have charged. He made some kind of excuse about living on the edge of Order, and how all guarantees are null and void in cases of misuse.” She sniffed and gave Rae the side-eye. “Very heavily implied that any ax you picked up wouldn’t survive more than a year.”

“I resent the implication,” Rae said. He was carrying the newly bound ax over his shoulder, and spun it forward in his hands to inspect it. “He’s probably passing bad merchandise off on us to capitalize on my reputation as a . . . um . . .”

“As a walking disaster,” La finished. “Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. But it would help a country mile if you didn’t have the reputation in the first place.”

“Can’t help the stories people tell, La,” Rae said. He shouldered the ax again. “And Claudette?”

“The baker’s daughter was dusted in flour and glowing with sweat. I’ll spare you the details.”

“Oh, please don’t!” Rae said, clutching his free hand to his chest. “Was her hair a cloud of gold, glittering in the light of the ovens? Did her nose wrinkle in concentration as she measured out—”

Lalette groaned and punched her brother in the shoulder. Rae stumbled to the side, skipping to cover the stagger.

“You’re a terrible person, Raelle Kelthannis,” she said.

“Yes, yes. That I am. So. Nothing else in the market?” Rae asked. La hesitated for a moment. “What happened?”

“I saw the justicar who came to the house. I mean, I think I saw him.” La held up her hand to keep Rae from interrupting. “It was out of the corner of my eye, just a glimpse, but when I looked around there was no one there. First in the bakery while I was waiting for the cakes, and again while I was waiting for you.”

“Wraithbinder, perhaps. They can disappear pretty quickly.”

“Or maybe I’m just nervous because my brother is meeting with criminals, and we’ve spent our entire lives trying to avoid the justicars’ attention.” She grabbed his arm and dragged him to a stop. “Rae, what are you getting involved with?”

“Nothing that would bring a justicar all the way from Fulcrum to Hammerwall,” he said. “Morgan is a petty criminal. I do small tricks for him. Sometimes I open a spiritlock. Nothing dangerous.”

“And this new job? The one that’s going to get us a ticket out of Hammerwall?”

“I don’t know the details.” Rae pulled free from his sister and continued down the road. La caught up after a while, peering at her brother suspiciously. “Well, I don’t! He’s always said that there were opportunities for a full spiritbinder in his crew. Good money. Nothing dangerous.”

“What’s he going to do when he finds out you don’t have even a whiff of an elemental in your soul?” La asked. “Unless you’ve magically figured out how to make that sword work? It’s someone else’s spiritblade, Rae. What makes you think you can use it?”

“Force of will,” Rae said with a smile. “I just need you to trust me, La. I’m going to bind that air elemental. Tonight.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then I’ll think of something else. I just need you to keep Mom and Dad distracted while I try. Can you do that?”

She grimaced at him, then crossed her arms and nodded.

“Make me one promise,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Do it in the barn. We can’t have you wrecking more of the provisions.”

Good enough, Rae thought. He stayed a pace or two behind her. They walked the rest of the way home in silence. Dusk was already thick in the air when they turned the corner onto their property. All the lights in the house were on, and a lantern was burning bright on the front porch. Their mother, still in her formal dress and holding a flintlock across her lap, waited on the steps, smoking her pipe.


That night, their parents drank a little more for dinner, a rehearsal for Hallowsphere, and went to bed early. Rae pretended to follow their lead, shutting himself into his room after reading for half an hour in Dad’s chair. He locked his door and waited until La retreated to her room. Half an hour of quiet patience, and he was pretty sure he could hear the rest of the family snoring. His window slid open easily, and he was across the yard and into the cellar as quickly as possible. The spiritblade was where he had left it, locked away beneath the blankets. Part of him had been afraid Father might have moved it following the justicar’s visit. He closed and locked the box, then made his way to the barn.

The thresher lay in pieces on the far side of the barn. Rae cleared a spot in the middle of the floor and unwrapped the sword, folding the burlap with unnecessary formality before laying it to one side. He worked the lantern out of his pocket and spun it to life, cold fingers stinging against the metal as the flint hummed and finally caught. Dialing the lantern down as low as he could and still see what he was doing, Rae unfolded the parchment from Indrit and placed it on the ground. Then he took up the sword and balanced it tip-down in the middle of the scrying and fed his soul through the blade. The fractured interior of the spiritblade flared to life, projecting the trapped pattern of the soul onto the parchment. Rae shifted the sword back and forth, trying to get the soul tapestries to line up.

They weren’t very similar. Rae wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but the two patterns were quite different. But of course Rassek’s soul included the woven tapestry of the air elemental, as well as the lesser aspects that the man had used to align his soul to the plane of Air. But Rae expected the core of the pattern to at least be similar. He turned the parchment square of his own scrying around and around, bumping the two designs together to try to find overlap. There simply wasn’t any.

“Well, what do I know?” Rae muttered. Souls were strange things, and despite the stolen moments in his father’s library, Rae had a lot more assumptions than facts at his disposal. He should still be able to use the aspects as a guide to align his soul.

Rae cleared his mind and tried to remember his studies. He had had a proper manor education when he was younger, before the Hadroy Heresy changed the direction of Rae’s life so drastically. As the son of a mage, the fundamentals of spiritbinding had been layered into his schooling from the very beginning, alongside counting and the peerage. It was a good foundation, and over the years he had added to it through practice and stolen moments in his father’s hidden library.

According to Eldre Bene’s Explication on the Aspects of the Soul, the mortal soul was the one place in the material realm that all the planes touched equally. Bene wrote it before the discovery of the higher realms (life, death, order, and chaos), but the revelation of those higher planes only reinforced his principles. Because of this, a thorough understanding of an individual soul would allow the spiritbinder to, essentially, fray the edge of the spirit and weave it into an aspect of one of the other planes, giving the mage access to certain powers. The spiritblade was the manifestation of this binding, a focus for the esoteric interweaving of soul and planar elemental.

These early experiments with spiritbinding led to the discovery of the elemental spirits that occupied the planes. By binding their soul directly to an elemental, the spiritbinder became an anchor for that spirit in the material plane. This connection would allow the ’binder to draw the elemental into the real world, commanding it as though it were an extension of their body. Later, the Iron College learned to reverse the process, using the elemental as a dive stone, allowing the spiritbinder to delve into the depths of the planes, learning greater and more powerful aspects.

That’s how Rae understood it, at least. He might have been hazy on a few of the finer details, but the fundamentals were sound. He just needed to align to one of those aspects. Binding a mote was the first step in the process.

Rae folded his legs under him and rested the sword across his knees. This part of the trick he felt he could do; he had practiced often enough at night, eyes closed beneath the sheets, trying to unwind the knot of his soul. There had been nervous moments during those early attempts, nightmares of unraveling his spirit and not being able to reel it back in, of losing himself in a fog and never getting back to his body.

Deep breath and exhale. Focus inward, and his soul loosened in his chest. Outside the barn, the air was full of night sounds, the chorus of chirping and screeching and howling drowning out his heartbeat. Rae pushed those things out of his mind. He sank deeper into himself with each breath. Finally, he was still. The sword hummed under his hands. He became sharply aware of the fractures that marred its interior. He felt his way through the cracked sword, reaching out to the elemental plane of Air, and the spirits that lurked there.

The night disappeared. Not just inside his head. A hush fell across the farmyard, gripping the barn in icy silence. It felt like the whole world turned into a tomb, and Rae was buried at its center. He opened his eyes and saw the sigil of a mote hovering in the air before him, projected there by the sword. Rae reached out with one trembling finger and traced the sigil’s glowing lines with one hand, echoing the motion on the parchment scrying of his soul with the other. A chill ran up his arm, into his heart, deeper. He shivered in his bones. But he kept tracing.

Sparks of light floated up from the pattern, and the sword in his lap grew warm. They filled the aspect’s sigil, crawling up his hand to flash against his skin. It burned, hot as a poker fresh from the fire. Rae yelped and snatched his hand back, but a web of burning light trailed from his fingers, tangling with the scrying. The trailing lines grew thinner and thinner until they snapped, falling back to the pattern on the paper.

A flash of light filled the room. Rae fell backward, his head spinning as his awareness dropped back into his flesh. The frayed edges of his soul knit themselves back together, closing over the wound like a scar. Something lodged in the wound, a splinter of burning light that pulsed against Rae’s soul. The aspect, Rae thought. He had done it.

The night returned, slowly, tentatively. An owl hooted, and the chorus of crickets ratchetted back to life, filling the air with their droning song. Rae took a deep breath, then stood up and faced the far wall of the barn. A pile of hay lay scattered on the floor. He held the sword loosely in one hand.

Reaching into his soul, Rae slashed with the fractured spiritblade and gestured toward the hay. The pulsing shard embedded in his soul, still hot from the binding, flared to life. A fragment of it ran down his arm, through his fingers, manifesting into the material plane. In the dim glow of the lantern, it looked like liquid air, a squirming tendril of refracted light that spread out quickly. A gust of wind rolled across the floor, sending the pile of hay flying into the air. The wall creaked under the impact of the column of air, shaking dust from the rafters. Rae closed his fist and reeled the mote back into his soul, socketing it back into the shard.

Rae’s face split into a smile as wide as his heart, and twice as deep. He started laughing, and couldn’t stop until he remembered he was supposed to be hiding. Even then, it took several minutes before he could calm himself.

He had done it. Rae Kelthannis was a spiritbinder.


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