All families are a mess of complicated dynamics. Why would we think the gods would be any different?

  -“Ruminations” Emperor Garifax

  I am stunned by a moment, both by finding this man here, leaning back and playing up a coy smile as he sips on his glass of whiskey, and by what he said to me. My eye tries to identify him, but like with the other powerful magicians I have come across, it discovers nothing. The lack of any identity is as much an assurance that this is my long-lost brother in front of me, reclining against Jan’s bar like he hasn’t disappeared for almost twelve years.

  “Mom wants me to come get you for supper,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest.

  Corinth snorts up his drink, spraying the glass as he looks on the verge of gagging.

  “Is that little Charlie?” David Cal, a fieldhand my father hires on some rare occasions says, turning and looking at me. He steps forward, hesitating for a moment, and I throw my arms around the man, squeezing him hard. “Oh! Not little Charlie anymore.” He taps my back, begging to be released.

  “Not so little anymore,” I repeat, smacking the man on the back.

  “Well, that makes two of the three lost children,” Jan says, leaning over his bar, patting Corinth's back. “Just need the big one to come around to get the whole clan back together.”

  “It could happen,” I say. “Best be getting back. Daela hates leaving hot food sitting out.”

  “Wouldn’t want to make that woman roth,” Jan agrees.

  The men part from around me as I take my stroll to the door. I reach the handle, already sliding it open, when I hear the footsteps rushing behind me.

  “Charlene!” Corinth calls, getting a door slapped closed in his face.

  My smirk is short-lived. By the time I turn away from the door, I find him standing there behind me in the dirt outside the storehouse. Outside, with only the light of a hung lantern and the pale moonlight to illuminate him, I get my first good look at my eldest brother. He is a big man, not in the same way Halford is, but looking like someone kept growing a human a little too long. Corinth stands easily seven and a half feet tall, his frame not bulky with muscle, but athletic and narrow. My eyes cannot help but linger on the rolled-up sleeve of his missing arm.

  “I thought that you were supposed to be some powerful magician,” I say, my gaze flicking from his missing arm to his missing eye.

  Corinth quirks a brow. “Those are some choice first words for the brother you haven’t seen in a decade.”

  “Better than the ones you had for me,” I shoot back.

  “Ah, well…” Corinth looks to the side, finding the armored woman standing in the lantern light. “I don’t have much of an excuse.”

  “You were drunk,” I say, shrugging. “Makes your mind slow.”

  “With the benefit of hindsight, a random red-headed rank two magician woman walking in should have been enough of a clue. Again, sorry.”

  “You allowed yourself to get drunk?” The armored woman, Janna, asks, moving out of the light. “You said that you would not let your guard down.”

  “And I haven’t,” he says to her. “Janna, might I introduce you to my sister, Charlene. Charlene, this is Janna. She is, my assistant.”

  Janna looks me over again. “We met briefly. I warned her not to enter.”

  “I wish I had listened.”

  The woman nods in approval. “I can see the resemblance, hopefully, it is only skin-deep.”

  “This doesn’t feel fair,” Corinth says, looking between us. He snaps his fingers. “You know what we should do, leave: leave, go eat, enjoy a smoke on the porch after–much better than standing about and criticizing me.”

  “If this woman is your assistant, does that mean you rule this Grise place?” I ask. Even before I ask the question I know it is in poor taste.

  Corinth’s face hardens in an instant. He turns his eye on the armored woman. “What did you let slip?”

  “Nothing.” Janna falls to a knee, bowing her head before Corinth.

  He hurriedly kicks her leg. “Get up before someone sees.”

  Corinth holds out his hand and lines of fire burn to life above the palm of his hand. In under a second, an arrangement of runes more complex than I could hope to create in a month of strenuous runework springs to life. Corinth snaps his hand closed around the lines of fire and power floods out into the air around us, snuffing out the light of the lantern with the shock of its birth. I feel as if someone just boxed my ears and need to stretch my jaw before sound pops back into the world. Corinth opens his palm again, a map of fire burning the air above his hand.

  “The observers are still too distant to have perceived the conversation. Just in case, I have made it so that the sound will have changed before it can have reached them. It will be as if you asked some other question.” He looks up at me, and for the first time, I feel the true might that he carries within him. “How did you hear that name?”

  My jaw clicks closed as I stare back at him. “I…I saw it. My eye sees the names of people.” I point at Janna who is still dusting off her leg. “It says that she is the High Secretary of Grise. You are a rank five magician, you said she was your assistant; it made sense to me.”

  Corinth lets out a long breath, the sternness in his features leaving, replaced with the faux arrogance of a young man. I know it now for the disguise that it is. “Well, that is quite an interesting thing. I will need to investigate. This may cause a momentary discomfort.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He answers by holding up his hand, a sigil of fire appearing in front of him. Blinding light strikes me in the eye. I stumble away, barely keeping my feet, clutching a hand to my right eye. “Tits and Fucking Honey!” I swear, feeling a trickle of a tear wet my hand. Only, when I try to blink away the flash of pain, do I find my hand stained red. “Hit on me and then try to burn my eye out!”

  “You propositioned your sister, lord?” Janna asks. “I was given that was not a common practice in Gale.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Never an easy day,” Corinth groans, pinching the bridge of his nose like it was his eye that was almost seared out of his head. “What I wouldn’t give just to relax for once.”

  A lash of dragonfire splashes over a round shield of air in front of his face. Corinth looks up, his eyes tracking the dregs of the fire as it disappears into dying motes in the air. “Interesting.”

  “I was assuming you could take it. You’re a big boy.”

  “You can punch me if you want,” he says. “It will probably hurt you more than it does me.”

  My bloody knuckles crack him in the jaw before he can take a breath for his next sentence. The snap as the bones in my hand shatter in the blow echoes down my arm, but the pain is nothing compared to the satisfaction of seeing him stumble back and fall into the dirt. I shake out my hand, feeling my body already diverting its attention to mending the delicate bones. Closing my right eye, I gently probe the skin of my eyelid, feeling the fleshy orb beneath. It still feels mostly intact.

  I catch Janna looking at me again like she is once more taking my measure. “Is decking your brother in the face not proper?”

  “It is when he has been an ass,” she says. “Not that I would ever call my lord as such.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t.” Corinth climbs back to his feet. “Is your hand alright?”

  “It’s fine.” I flex my fingers for him.

  “Remarkable healing,” he notes. “Now that you have gotten your aggression out, can we speak with civility?”

  “If you will tell me why you felt the need to try and burn my eye out.”

  “I didn’t try to burn your eye out.” Corinth rolls his eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic. I merely needed to conduct a survey of that artifact and make certain that it did not have any tethers that would allow others to see through it.”

  I blink at him. I never even considered that a possibility. “And?”

  “It is fine as far as I can tell. What I am curious about is, how you managed to attain a providence reading device before you fully integrated essentia. Did you meet a friendly djinn or something?”

  “Djinn are real?”

  “Unfortunately.” Before I can ask anything else, he holds his hand up. “Yes, a great many things are real and some others aren’t. I will be happy to help you sift them at some other time. Explain the eye, please.”

  “Arabella Willian gave it to me, along with helping me to complete my essentia. You know her, right?”

  He nods, scratching his chest. “Ah, that makes a certain amount of sense. I’m sure that the gifts weren’t free.”

  “I have to make the third rank in the next two and a half years and compete in some kind of trial for the Willian Guild,” I say.

  “Shouldn’t be too difficult,” he says, shrugging his one arm.

  “How did you manage to get through the third rank so quickly?” I ask.

  “That, sister, is a long story, and if you were being truthful about our mother, we do not have time for it now. Later, I promise that I will share with you whatever you want to know, but I believe there was some mention of roast pork before we headed out to the service.”

  “Correct,” Janna affirms. “Your mother is quite the cook.”

  “She isn’t Banbo,” Corinth says. “But hers is better than you are likely to find anywhere else around.”

  “We should get going then,” I say. It is so difficult to shove down all the questions bubbling up in my mind, but he is right. I don’t want to face my mother if we miss her dinner.

  “Going?” Corinth says, holding up his palm again. Fire spirals into the air, crisscrossing in a pattern that floats vertically, expanding above us into an intricate net of interconnected runes. In a flash, the fire slams down around me, and when the sear of its light leaves my eyes, I find that we are standing in the yard in front of my house, a stray dog barking at us from down the drive. “We are already here.”

  The struggle is like a tangible thing, wanting to ask how he brought us here so suddenly, wanting to ask about the runes of fire he makes freeform in the air, wanting to ask why he had such a harsh reaction to me mentioning the name Grise, but I hold my tongue. Corinth is already walking away, hopping up the steps on the new front porch and ducking into the house. Only when I start moving after him do I notice Janna not following.

  “Are you coming?”

  “No,” she says simply, refusing to elaborate.

  I hesitate a moment longer but eventually realize that it might be best to leave the woman be. The smell of roasted pork greets me as I push inside.

  The dinner table in the narrow room on the east side of the house is the same as I remember it, a scratched piece of light-brown wood covered with a blue and white checkered sheet, frayed at the edges. The dinnerware set atop it is different, three porcelain plates still shiny with their newness, sterling silverware that we could never afford growing up, and a steel tray in the middle of the table with an actual cloche to trap heat and flavor. My father’s plate is the only exception to the newness. Stalks of steamed broccoli stand out against the chipped wood of his plate, little red flowers painted by his mother dulled to near invisibility by the passage of time.

  He looks up at me as I come inside, hard eyes showing a momentary softness before looking back down to his plate. The blonde beard he keeps has grown longer in my absence, and his already huge frame has seemed to bulk even more. He might be a match in stature for Halford now. His eyes stay down as Corinth takes the seat on the opposite end of the table from him.

  “I’m home,” I say, coming into the room.

  “Good to have you back,” Father says, pushing a stalk of green around with his fork. “Daela, we’re all here already!” he calls out into the house.

  “I’m coming!” my mother yells from the other room. She comes around the corner a moment later, carrying a pie tin in a gloved hand and slipping it onto a cloth already set out on the table. Daela pulls off her apron, hanging it on a peg on the wall before she takes her seat.

  The last to do so, I sit opposite her at the table. My mother offers me a smile, ignoring the two men at the table who seem content to just stare down at their plates. “Help me serve,” she says. She doesn’t need to tell me twice. We move in practiced ease, ladling out food onto the plates, stuffing them full, knowing the appetites of the men in the family. My mother hums as she catches me taking a big portion for myself as well.

  “I’ve missed your cooking,” I say, spooning gravy onto the tender pork. “I keep running out of spices out on the road. There are so many I’ve never heard of before, don’t really know how to use them, but nothing beats my mother’s gravy.”

  “True,” Corinth spoons some onto his plate as well. “Nothing really can beat it. I have some cookbooks that I can give you, if you’d like, Charlene. Might help, especially if you’ve already transitioned your diet over.”

  It doesn’t take a genius to understand he is talking about eating monster meat. “I’d like that.”

  “Well isn’t this nice,” Daela says. “If we could just drag Halford back from the capital we might get ourselves a proper reunion. I’d like that.”

  At the head of the table, my father grunts, spearing a piece of meat with his fork and chewing it. The sound is like the closing of a book, and silence falls over the table. By the light of candles burning on the middle of the table, the meal proceeds in silence, the scrapping of utensils on plates the only real noise. I find myself keeping my gaze down, focusing on the food, avoiding looking up at my father.

  I don’t know what I had expected. After Corinth left, the man barely spoke about his firstborn for years. The thought of him giving me the same treatment is like a stab through the heart. How must I have hurt him to make him behave this way?

  “Better serve the pie before it cools off too much,” Daela says, taking the knife set beside the pie and hefting it.

  Father pushes up from his seat, his big chair scratching against the wooden floors. “Got an early day tomorrow,” he says, scooping up his plate in his hand, and stacking his utensils on top. “Best get to bed. Good meal, Daela, always is.”

  The man’s big feet set the boards to creak as he walks down the side of the room. He pauses for a moment behind me, and as I stare at the floor I see his boots. A huge hand falls gently on my shoulder, squeezing it for a moment, before the footfalls continue past, stopping by the kitchen before clomping up the stairs.

  I let got a breath I didn’t know I was holding. A piece of sweatpear pie is on my plate a few moments later, but I don’t pay it much mind. My attention is too far removed, my relief too palpable. My dad doesn’t hate me after all.

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