“He wasn’t strong like you,” his father said sadly. “His little body couldn’t handle the malicious arcana.”

“Did anyone else die?” Aelric had asked. His mother and father shared a look then.

“The rest of the village was lucky,” his mother replied.

That was the last time they spoke about his brother. He knew it brought them great pain, and so he did not bring up the subject again.

Aelric didn’t know why these memories repeated themselves in his mind. When he looked around to see where his feet had carried him, he felt an odd melancholy in his heart as he found himself standing before the old treehouse. It had been built out over the years since the wolf. They added supposed defensive structures and even a pully system that would drop a weight and launch a visitor upward. Then Feyna and Aelric had begun going together, and his friendship with Brint broken. None of them went to the tree house anymore. Over time, wind and rain withered their little structure, and now only half the roof remained.

“Oh, Aelred,” Aelric said now as he wandered aimlessly through the darkening woods. “How I wish you were here now, big brother. Perhaps together, we could have come up with some way to save our family…”

He fell to his knees then and began to cry just as he did when he was a little boy. His chest heaved with sobs as he covered his face in his hands.

“What happened to Aelred?”

Aelric startled, snapping his head upward toward the feminine voice. He blinked through his tears trying to see into the shadows of the tree branches. He saw her eyes first, bright and piercing before the shape of her body formed as she stepped past the open wall of the treehouse and onto the thick branch that supported its weight. She slid down into a seated position in a movement so graceful that it reminded Aelric of a panther he'd seen on a hunting trip with Brint and his father when he was a boy. With a leg perched and the other dangling off the side, she tilted her head and said, “Well?”

“The Drakh took him,” Aelric said, and he didn’t know why he answered her question.

“The Drakh?” the woman repeated as if testing the word on her tongue. “Mmm… I’d heard they’d done it here. Mild, well-controlled by Fenlein. Why didn’t your parents take him to a healer, if he responded adversely?”

Aelric felt as if he had been clubbed over the head. Twice. “Who is Fenlein?” he managed.

The woman made a scoffing sound, though Aelric still couldn’t see her face well in the shadows. Somehow it made her sound younger than he had first supposed. “Despot Castavir's high arcanist. Don’t you even know that? He used to arcane for your prefecture's magistrate.”

“What do you mean he controlled the Drakh?” Aelric pressed on.

“He fed it his arcana and spread it thin. Too thin to let the Drakh rage, but enough to let it circulate. A success I’d heard. Otherwise there’d have been a lot more dead little Aelred's when the plague passed through here two years ago.”

Something hot flashed in his chest when she said his brother’s name. He hadn’t liked the way she said it. But the questions came just as rapidly. Nothing she was saying made any sense. The Drakh hadn't passed through the plains again. It was impossible.

“There hasn’t been a plague in this village since I’ve been alive.”

The woman laughed, but it didn’t sound like she was happy. “This is why I hate assignments like this. You shadebloods really do have toads for brains.”

Aelric’s eyes widened. Shadeblood. A derogatory term for the lower castes. He’d heard the term before but never used toward him. Once he'd heard Elder Keen call a Mirebound such a name. The man had an unkempt appearance and was out of food and arcana. He had come through the village looking for work. Elder Keen had chased the man away, calling him curses all the way. His father had frowned deeply when Aelric asked him what the term meant.

"Elder Keen shouldn't have used that word. No one should, but especially not him. It is used by the higher castes when they wish to bring shame to the lower castes. And last I checked, Elder Keen was Earthborn himself."

The highest caste Aelric had ever met was only a Sealed, and he seemed like any other trader at the town market. He wasn’t sure how he felt about being called shadeblood now, it was true he was only an Earthborn, and only half of one at that given his father's lineage. But it made him afraid. This woman was definitely someone higher than an Earthborn or even a Sealed. He was certain now. It was in her voice. Not just her accent. It was the way she spoke. Calm, commanding, and a hint of something he still didn't understand. It was almost playful. Darkly so.

“Say,” she said, leaning down at him now as if for a closer look. “How long have you been alive?”

“I-I turn seventeen in a few days, High One.”

“Your parents taught you some manners. That’s very good.”

The women dropped from the tree and landed lightly on her feet in what appeared to be an easy fluid motion. But having climbed and fallen from that exact tree a number of times over the years, Aelric knew there was nothing easy about it.

"So… you're almost an adult…"

He could see her face now as she stepped toward him. She was a head shorter than him and she was beautiful, strikingly so. Almost as if her beauty was too much, as if it were something sharp and dangerous to be wary of. Feyna flashed through his mind, and he suddenly felt a pang of guilt that he didn’t understand.

“You’re a big lad, aren’t you?” she said, looking him over as she drew close. “Which village are you from?”

“I am from Village Aldin of the Five Villages, High One.” There was a shimmering quality to her cloak and yet it appeared extremely smooth at the same time. He had never seen fabric so fine.

She nodded. “Aldin of the Five Villages. Seventeen. Are you the one I’m looking for?”

“No,” Aelric replied immediately. He dared not move. His heart was pounding in his chest.

“Say,” she said again in that casual, dangerous voice. She leaned close to him, so close that when she asked her next question, he could feel her lips brushing against his ear. “You wouldn’t be dampening your arcana right now, would you?”