The night ended with far too much drinking and singing in languages I didn’t understand. They were religious hymns, clearly, and all religion felt a bit alien and strange to me at this point. I refused the alcohol I was offered.

  I knew I was still a captive, carefully never left alone, though the cultists pretended otherwise. Several people came over to congratulate Adaline on finding her long lost brother. Many asked in hushed tones about me being kidnapped by the Division and stared, with varying degrees of subtlety, at the piercing hole in my left ear from my Division Mage tag.

  “Do you worry that he’s not powerful enough to handle life as a true Heir?” One man asked Adaline. “If he was captured by the Mage Division, could he really keep up?”

  “I was nine years old and untrained at the time,” I said coldly. “But if you’re curious, maybe you could go ask Maggie to take this seal off of me and find out for yourself.”

  The man finally gave me an actual look-over, and smiled. “Maybe you do have the fire to be an Heir of Raxolas. Let's give it a try sometime if His Excellency Drianthenes ever decides to unbind your magic. I’m sure you could use the practice.”

  He cuffed my shoulder, but I just shook it off and glared at him, which made him chuckle more. In some ways he wasn’t that different from my peers like Milo at the Division. Condescending and only respectful of people like me if we could prove ourselves.

  Friedrich, after socializing most of the night with his father and other men by the fire, came over to sit with us. Adaline transformed when he approached, her eyes widening into a more innocent look and her body language flowing into something at once both flirty and demure.

  “Oh, you came by to see me,” she said, eyelashes fluttering somewhat. “It really means the world.”

  Friedrich laughed. “Of course, love! I always have time to see you. I’m sorry my father took up so much of my evening.” He grinned at Adaline.

  Behind him, Calanthe stared sharply at them, especially Adaline. She didn’t quite push her pretty face into an ugly glare, but managed a frigid look that didn’t threaten the inhuman effects of her make-up. This seemed typical of this cult, and how the terrifyingly deadly Mages around me were also immature and ridiculous.

  “What were you talking about with your father?” I asked. Partially to gather information, partially to distract Friedrich from the lovey-dovey eyes he was sharing with my sister.

  “Oh, you know,” Friedrich said, “our big plans. Or, well, I suppose you don’t! I can’t say much, father would be so angry, but you’ll see it all in the end. We’ll harness the same power that once fueled our great ancestor Raxolas, father of all the Great Mage families and the Empire itself. Then all of Westrion will be united in peace under our banner.”

  He said it airily, as if it was no big deal, but still puffed up his chest as he spoke. I had some professors who spouted propaganda for the Commonwealth and the Mage Division, but they had rarely been this sanctimonious.

  “And your father will pass the Empire on to you, to make you the Great Emperor set to conquer first Westrion and then the world, letting them all live peacefully under your magnanimous rule as you get an ever increasing number of beautiful wives?” I asked, not quite letting my tone push into outright sarcasm. Friedrich didn’t seem to notice.

  “Oh, it’ll not be trouble for us wives!” Adaline said brightly. Her tone was lighthearted and consoling, trying to lead the conversation away. I frowned at her. I felt angry at her and sad for her all at once, and I hated how much it reminded me of myself.

  The different personalities for talking to different people, the unthinking moves between charm and intimidation, the carefully constructed faces. It was a mirror to my own constructed Biralei identity, a painful thought I quickly pushed away. That part of my life was gone, anyway, it had died with Adain when I couldn’t put my mask on anymore.

  Except, a treacherous thought whispered in my ear, that you thought you could still get back to it, or something like it, if you had done well on this mission… I dismissed it. My old mission to investigate a dead goat had been a lifetime ago. I wasn’t that person anymore.

  So who was I?

  “Of course,” Friedrich said, completely sincere as he pushed bullishly through my sarcasm and Adaline’s attempts at conciliation. “You may not fully understand or believe it yet, but if you let the truth into your heart then you’ll see that this is the best path for all. Strength in leadership is necessary for all to thrive, and I was bred to be the greatest leader-”

  There were limits to what I could take, even in the name of information gathering. I stood up, happy to risk being paralyzed by Drianthenes Senior if it meant I didn’t have to hear any more of this guy.

  Henri immediately teleported in front of me. I was beginning to regret not accepting that alcohol.

  “Where are you going?” he demanded.

  “Back to my tent,” I said, “unless you want to force me to hear this guy flirt with my sister all night.”

  Glancing down behind me, I saw that Friedrich actually looked stunned and outraged. Adaline looked over at him in concern, then narrowed her eyes up at me for a moment. She was even crazier than Theo if she thought I’d care enough to sit through all of that.

  “I’ll send Maggie back with you,” Henri said decisively.

  And so I sat in a dark, empty tent at the end of the day. Maggie sat on the floor across from me, knitting by lamplight. I could still hear people drinking and yelling outside. I wondered if I could do a bit more spying, maybe scout out the camp. I eyed Maggie cautiously, then started trying to subtly inch my way toward the tent flap.

  “If you do that then I’m going to knock you out,” she said. “I have the spell on hand for my patients. Don’t test me, boy.”

  She flicked her gaze up to me, staying on me for just long enough to see that she was serious. I could see the magic moving within her, sharp and precise, and I sat back down. I was frustrated and restless, though, so I adjusted to sit back with my hand between her and her lamplight. Wearily, she set aside her knitting.

  “Do you really believe all that bullshit Drianethenes was supporting?” I asked. “Enough to make you keep me here against my will? You think you’ll be the heir to a new world or whatever?”

  It was a shot in the dark and maybe I was about to get another lecture. But Maggie had sat quietly throughout Drianthenes’s speech, rather than standing up and cheering like the others. She seemed knowledgeable and, more than that, she reminded me of Shamora. I couldn’t imagine Shamora ever believing a big empty speech like Drianthenes made. I didn’t quite think that Maggie could, either.

  “I’m too old to be the heir to anything,” she grumbled, not looking at me, “but this is my home. Adaline is sticking her neck out to make sure you’re kept alive. I’m going to make sure it’s not going to blow up in her face.”

  “Adaline’s out there sucking up to some daddy’s boy with more chest hair than wit,” I said. “Changing her entire personality to giggle at him. You’re not going to talk to her about that?”

  Maggie looked up at me now. She was frowning at me like I was an annoying dog or a stuck bit of thread.

  “Adaline knows what she’s doing,” Maggie said. “She’s smarter than people think, except when it comes to that old friend of hers, Sarai. She doesn’t want the boy, she wants to be queen, and she’s better than any other option we have. The world is a terrible place, but she’ll be a smart and capable queen. It will be better with her ruling.”

  “Is that actually going to make her happy, to be queen?” I asked. I remembered my earlier conversation with Adaline today, and I decided to make a guess: “Is that what mom wanted for her?”

  Maybe it was. My mother had apparently come here and listened to countless epic speeches from Drianthenes, complete with howls of approval from the cult. She had brought and raised children here. She and my father had lived and died here, which made them seem like strangers. I knew nothing of what they wanted.

  Maggie bristled at my question and pushed it aside.

  “Oh yes, your mother was as star-crossed as young Adaline there at the thought of being able to do something, something other than cower and hide for being a Mage,” she said. “Have you never thought of what it was like for her when you were taken away?”

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  I flinched. “What good would that have done? It’s not like I could have changed anything. That part of my life was over and I wasn’t about to wallow in it.”

  That, of course, was a lie. I had wallowed quite a bit in it. The important thing, though, was that I had eventually gotten up and faced the world. That’s the thing that shaped me into who I was now: a man, not a bullied boy curled up in a bedroom missing his mother. I had more strength than that.

  Maggie simply eyed me silently for a few long moments.

  “What?” I asked. “What would you have done, torn down the Biralei palace? I was well-treated and cared for there. Better food and education than I could have ever gotten at home, anyway. I got a chance to learn and prove myself as a Mage, without being pulled into this circus.”

  I gestured around us. I thought ‘circus’ was a generous description of this place. My childhood here would have been far worse, parents or not. I shuddered slightly, trying not to think of what they would have done with a trans child.

  “And I suppose that’s all you need in the world,” Maggie said. She sighed. “I know it’s easy to judge the people here. I’ve been here for long enough to see that half this camp is propped up on lies, cruel lies at that. But I’ve seen no one’s life who isn’t. Yours certainly isn’t, Mr. I-Never-Wallow. And I’m willing to bet that little brother of yours lies to himself every single day.”

  I felt my face twist and crunch. The utter truth of those words were hard to dispute. But I still felt, I still knew, that her words twisted the truth as well. I struggled to put the logic together coherently, but I pushed myself to say something.

  “The lies here don’t exactly seem cruel on everyone,” I said. “The leader of your little band seems to be doing pretty well for himself. He’s got everyone kissing his feet. Friedrich doesn’t seem to be suffering cruelly from a future kingship and lovely wife being given to him on a silver platter.”

  “And the lies that the Brialeis told you were fair?” she asked sharply.

  “Fairer than this.” Sometimes when I said things about the Mage Division even I didn’t know if I meant them, but I could feel honest saying that one. “What was life like for my father here? Was he a Mage?”

  The question was half unearthed curiosity, half disguised argument. If I’d wanted Maggie to back down, it worked even better than I’d hoped. Her entire face sagged, growing new wrinkles in the lantern light.

  “He might have been the most honest man I’d ever met, your father,” she said. “Foolhardy and slow on the uptake, but honest. I’m sorry he died.”

  We were silent for a moment. I wanted to ask how he died. I wanted to ask how he lived. But to do either would acknowledge how much I cared in a way that didn’t feel possible for me. I shook my head, trying to clear out all the things I shouldn’t be feeling.

  “I don’t live my life based off of lies,” I said. “I know the truth, all of it. I remember what it was like, being taken from my parents. I don’t lie to myself, I just focus on things I can actually change and work with. What’s the point, otherwise?”

  “So you don’t lie to yourself, you just focus on useful truths?” Maggie asked. “I see. What happens to truths that aren’t useful? What happens when they become impossible to work past, young Mage? What do you do then, just break down around them?”

  My memory flashed to hot tears in Shamora’s office, things too painful to think about spilling out of my mouth as I’d admitted how much I hated puberty. I took a deep breath in and banished the memory.

  “Then I see what I can do about them,” I said. “Simple.” My traitorous voice cracked on the last word.

  “Heh, of course,” Maggie said, shaking her head and turning back to her knitting. “You know, you remind me a bit of myself when I was your age.”

  This was another opportunity for information gathering. An insider’s perspective on the cult. Maybe I’d learn a better way to push for my rescue mission. Or, failing that, a way to escape to the Division.

  And if I also got to hear the story of the only woman in this camp who didn’t seem totally insane as we sat in the lamplight and ignored the howling outside, a woman who reminded me of Shamora and carried herself like she’d seen the entire world, then that wasn’t so bad either.

  “Were you part of the cul- the Heirs, back then?” I asked.

  She gave me a wry smile to show me that she knew exactly what I had been going to say. “Yes, I’d been part of it since I was quite young. My mother brought me here when I was seven or eight. I hated it, felt above it, and it was the only world I’d ever known. I threw myself into my studies, telling myself I didn’t mind if the young men didn’t want a woman quite so homely as myself no matter how powerful a Mage I was.”

  “So it’s not only about how magical and powerful you are as a rightful Mage heir around here?” I asked, a calculated bit of sharp humor, which also helped me let out some steam. “I’m shocked.”

  “Like I said, everyone lies to themselves,” she said. “I could see that even when I was young. But I pushed and studied, becoming more and more powerful while the other ladies focused on their husbands and babies, and I grew in rank by necessity. It seemed to me like you could always make someone respect you eventually.”

  “Of course. Always.” Now this was something I could understand deep into my bones. I could make them respect me, and I would.

  “I didn’t realize until too late that it was a waste of time,” she explained. I froze in surprise. “Not the magic training, those skills are useful. But pushing for their respect. I’d always be a healer-woman to them. Struggling for scraps of respect from people who’ve already decided who you are, especially if they judge based on something so useless as sex, is foolish. Any respect will be grudging and shed as soon as it means anything. The respect of people like that is worthless.”

  “But…” I trailed off. “You’re a Great Mage. You are the Healer of the Heirs, aren’t you? Can’t you do something, now you’ve fought for that respect? Your position?”

  “I have done something!” she said. “You have no idea how much I push here to make people’s lives better, to make this place a decent place to live. I do what I can, but everything could be gone in an instant if I get on the wrong side of Drianthenes’s ego. Make no mistake, child.”

  I continued to stare at her. “But- I-”

  My mouth snapped shut. She looked at me with intensity to her gaze, as if she could read all my thoughts and ambitions. It was impossible, of course. I’d never given her any indication that I was in my own battle for the respect of the institution of Biralei, and she couldn’t read minds.

  The Biraleis were different, though. They weren’t driven by the ego of a single old man as they piled high sexist stereotypes in the woods. Sure, there’d been some resistance to my transition and my place as an adopted Biralei, but there were plenty of others who supported me. I didn’t have Maggie’s problems.

  I could relate to them, though.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s unfair. But… why do you stay, then?”

  “I’m the most competent Healer here,” Maggie said. “There are people who would die here if it weren’t for me. And I teach the girls magic. They’ve already learned too much wrong by the time they get to me, but I wouldn’t trust anyone else to teach them. I don’t hobble their learning, you see. You think Adaline would have been successful with her werebeast project under any other teacher here?”

  There was pride in her voice as she talked about Adaline and her girls. It reminded me painfully of Shamora and how she’d look after all the younger Mages, keeping ties with her favorites and the ones who needed her help most as we grew older.

  “You really love Adaline and the others,” I said.

  “Yes. I do.”

  I smiled at her, and there was a moment of silence between us. As the warm feelings inside me settled down I kept my smile on my face, though the thoughts within me churned. The Hands of Humanity never let us prisoners learn so much about them for a reason. There had to be a way I could use this, this information and connection, I just hadn’t found it yet.

  “Where will Adaline sleep?” I asked. Who, exactly, will watch me when I’m sleeping? Is what I didn’t ask, because there was no sense in reminding them. This captivity was much more kind than the dark cells of the Hands of Humanity; I didn’t want to give them a reason to change that.

  “She’ll sleep in here with me, as she has ever since the death of her mother, and both of us will watch you,” Maggie said. “Don’t think you’ll have an opportunity to run like a rabbit, boy. This isn’t a place that anyone walks out of.”

  Her words were hard, bitter, and I didn’t doubt that she meant them. For all her seeming clearsightedness about the reality of what this cult was, she didn’t seem much sympathetic to me.

  When she talked about no one being able to leave this place, her tone held sadness and suffering. But it was not the tone of suffering together. It held the resentful edge of if I can’t leave, what makes you think you get to?

  It was, still, a tone that meant she might say more if I played my own words right.

  “Theo did,” I said. “He’s only nineteen now, he must have been, what, seventeen? He seemed pretty established at the Hands. A teenager could just walk out of here.”

  When the resentment softened into sorrow in Maggie’s eyes, it didn’t reassure me.

  “Theo more than paid the price for his escape,” Maggie said, “and he wasn’t the only one who paid.”

  We fell silent.

  “Is the Convergence real?” I asked suddenly. “The source of Raxolus’s power.”

  Maggie sighed. “It’s real, but I can’t tell you any more than that. Why don’t you stop interrogating me and do your meditations? After that you should get some sleep. Give your magic a chance to heal.”

  I did as she suggested, though it was a challenge to clear my mind. Things kept overboiling in my thoughts. I wished I had never come here. I wished I had never gone on that mission. Yet I had, I’d made the choice both times. I only seemed capable of choosing things I would regret, which didn’t bode well for the future.

  After meditation I closed my eyes and sunk deep into a dreamless sleep. The world weighed so heavily on me after these weeks of frustration and loss.