BRUNNHOLD | WELL PAST THE LAST HOUSE
Only a few days had passed and Tristaan had already been here too long. Hours had stretched into a houses which had crawled into a day which had somehow become another and then another. There was so much that was terrible and strange but so much more that was horrible and familiar about laying in some narrow, uncomfortable bed in a room full of other bodies after a long shift of work and a lackluster meal. He'd traded away a handful of Old Rose cigars he'd smuggled in his clothes and two silver earrings for very specific information, ignoring his meal in favor of attempting to make friends. It was a mix of wariness and welcome and, honestly, Tristaan felt the same about it all, struggling to keep Tek from his Estuan and careful to ignore the stares.
He'd asked about various professors. He'd asked about their offices. He'd asked too many questions, perhaps, but no one had begrudged him. Not too much.
But he'd run out of time.
Now? Now, he couldn't sleep—how could he? alone without the warmth of his witch and her glamour, without the soft breaths of Linora's tiny body tucked close to his? when was the last time he'd slept alone for so long, anyway?
The darkness of the room was heavy on his scarred chest as he counted cracks in the ceiling, as he counted every spring in his spine. The sleeping sounds of his roommates might as well have been the distant whir of textile machines and the way air filled his lungs scratched and burned like so much soot. There in the last ember glow of the small hearth, memories crawled from the flickering shadows cast in dull black shapes on the walls.
Tristaan had spent years trying to forget them all:
The frightening loneliness of the streets. The confusion of waking up far from home. The offers of food and shelter to a starving, lonely boy who no longer knew what he was meant to be in the world. The exhaustion of long hours without breaks. The beatings for even the smallest of infractions and the beatings he took for others he knew wouldn't have survived another. The fierce rebelliousness of those friendships, of family made in desperation.
He had been nothing then, too. No one. Nobody's son, magicless and abandoned. Just a scrap. Unwanted junk to be used until it broke, only he'd already been broken. He'd been born broken, right? Had he ever really escaped any of it? Or had the Red Crow been a lie?
He'd run from them, too. He'd fled too quickly from that first soothing taste of family to a tongue parched by abuse and suffering, leaving Guaril and the tribe behind in favor of finally finding an outlet for all that unspoken pain—all that rage. If he was broken, he had nothing to lose breaking the bodies of others, after all. It wasn't as though he mattered to anyone, it wasn't as though he had a name to keep or a family to make proud, no matter who those loving Red Crow had wanted him to be. He might have called Guaril Da, but the old wick didn't have to bear the shame of the passive's birth.
Then again, neither had his parents. They'd not allowed him the life of a gated passive, clearly terrified to have the truth of their son so close, too close, to their perfect lives.
Gods, what had they told Navinia?
What had they told anyone?
That he'd run away?
That he was dead?
The fire sputtered, logs crackling, sparks dancing in the hearth and in the narrow cavity of Tristaan's chest while he sputtered a tearful breath in response.
No. It didn't matter. It didn't have to matter.
Closing his eyes, he tried to quiet the thoughts that writhed within, the flames that seared against his heart so bright and hot. He thought of his daughter, of the child he shouldn't have had with a witch he wasn't allowed to love. Her round cheeks and bright eyes. Her tiny hands wanting his worn, calloused ones. No matter the wrongs that had brought her to life, no matter the guilt and shame he'd bear for daring to love at all, for sharing his curse with someone who didn't deserve it, she was everything right with the world—light and hope.
Fami.
Hama.
Now that he had these treasures, he could never—how could anyone ever—
The dark-haired passive's eyes fluttered open and he felt his body moving almost of its own accord, mind made up before his heart could even catch up with the decision. Slipping from stiff sheets and crossing the room on quiet, bare feet, he tugged on his coat and shoes in silence. It was with well-practiced stealth that he opened the door, and with uncanny skill that he stepped out into the hall of the gated population's male dormitories, having already memorized every staircase and every exit he'd laid an eye on since his arrival and quite confident there were more he'd not yet seen.
Something fierce and needy roared in his chest; something long held quiet, awakened and clawing past his heart.
Here on Brunnhold's campus, Tristaan had already realized it was not about moving unseen—no one saw his blue uniform, no one saw him as a person, no one saw him at all—but it was about appearing to have a purpose, about appearing to be doing the work. Any work, apparently. Look busy seemed to be the galdorkind's motto for those passives they deemed worthy of living among them. As if doing the work somehow redeemed them, as if service saved their cursed souls from destruction. It didn't. He'd already lived that life—the dangerous, dingy textile factory on the Arova hadn't saved him from anything, barely even death.
What happened to the rest? What happened to the unwanted?
He knew. He knew. And he had a purpose, all right.
He was just enough a stranger to be unfamiliar. He was just familiar enough to be assumed a part of something. He'd learned how to be unassuming and he'd learned how to use his own magicless existence to his advantage, but that was out in the world like some wild animal. Tristaan was hardly tamed. It took him several panic-filled moments to pick a direction, to make his way through the kitchens, to insert himself into the duty of carting away garbage like he belonged there without even saying a word.
Took trash to know more trash, after all, and as the dark-haired passive shoved kitchen waste down some quiet hallway with only a few eyes lingering in his direction, he chose not to search for metaphors for his whole wasted life in the refuse that soured in his nostrils and turned his empty stomach.
It wasn't as if it even mattered if he got caught breaking rules he didn't care about—would they beat him here? Would it matter? Brunnhold rules were surely more gentle than some Soot District factory and were surely gentle compared to fighting in the Rose Arena. There was hardly anything he could imagine fearing about discipline in this place—save being trapped here forever, anyway. He'd already been beaten, broken, crushed, and violated as a magicless son of a galdor among textile machines and indentured workers long ago, after all.
He just needed to make it outside. He just needed to get his bearings. He knew where he was going, roughly, barely. He'd guessed it on a map, anyway, but his time with the layout of campus on paper had been too brief to completely store away all the information he needed to find his mother's office in the Static—well, maybe it had been Quantitative?—or perhaps Physical—Conversation Wing of a sprawling educational institution he wasn't even supposed to set foot onto.
It was more chance than skill that got Tristaan outside the dormitory building of the passive wing, out into the phosphor-lit campus and to the furnaces without even a second glance in his direction. Once he'd actually done the job of handing over so much garbage for burning, he took off in a different direction, sticking to shadows, aware of the late house. If Brunnhold's campus was beautiful, he couldn't see it. If the prestigious university was a sight to behold, he didn't have the breath to waste on it.
Instead, he sifted through memories as he slipped from one hiding place to the next in the pouring rain—his childhood in Muffey, his sister who'd been a student here, and their promises of joining the Seventen together. Had she kept that promise? Or had she forgotten him, too? He might have gotten lost—in his mind and on the sprawling stretch of sidewalk and manicured lawns—but eventually, finally, the dripping passive found some dark, unlocked side door for servants (the sign said so) just as the bells of the Church of the Moon struck a new pre-dawn hour.
He'd never heard them before, not ever in his life, and he couldn't help but stand there, door open, dripping, to listen. Abandoned by galdorkind, cursed by the gods, betrayed by criminals he'd turned around and stabbed in the back for his own freedom, there was no comfort in the sounds. Stubbornly, he offered the Circle his prayers anyway lest someone was wrong and they wanted to hear from him anyway, just in case, and then he stepped into a narrow stairwell, shutting the door behind him.
It only took him half an hour to realize he had no idea where he was going. He knew the risk he was taking, wandering aimlessly, but he took it anyway, resisting the urge to smash every door he passed that was wrong, attempting to maintain a composure that made it look like he knew what he was doing, like he was on some late-house errand for a professor.
Tristaan only knew half a name, anyway—his family name—the name of his mother forgotten to trauma and time, but surely it was enough. He wasn't about to give up looking.
Had he been in this hall already? Or that one? Where in Alioe's name was he going? Why'd he even come this far in the first place? Tek dribbled—unbidden and angry—from his lips as he carefully glanced down a row of doors,
"Havakda."
to doors we were not meant to open."
— Passive Proverb