Chapter 7 — The Whole World Knows
The Gatewardens had a network.
Kael learned this the hard way. He had assumed, naively, that what happened in the woodland binding chamber stayed in the woodland binding chamber. He was wrong. The Gatewardens ran a broadcast system — an old, strange network that linked every circle on Aethra, and through the circles, every government, order, and news office on the planet.
It was designed, Lucas explained, to announce exactly one kind of event.
A survival.
"So when you say 'the whole world knows,'" Kael said, sitting on the edge of the platform with his head in his hands, "you mean... the whole world."
"Every circle," Kyle said proudly. "Every order. Every government. The Conclave will have had it within the minute."
"Within the minute."
"It's a very fast network."
'I have been alive as a Curse-brand contractor for forty minutes,' Kael thought, 'and every powerful person on the planet already knows my name. Cool. Cool cool cool. No notes.'
Inside his skull, two voices were ignoring him.
"—and another thing," Spark was saying, "your throne is ugly. I just want that on record. Fused bone? Really? What are you, a chair with a grudge?"
"It is a statement of dominion," Void replied, with infinite patience. "You wouldn't understand. You live in a shoebox made of lightning."
"It's called AMBIENCE—"
"HEY," Kael said out loud, to the air, and both Gatewardens jumped. "Sorry. Not you. The voices."
"The voices," Lucas repeated.
"I have two demons in my head and they are arguing about furniture."
The Gatewardens exchanged one of their slow, damp looks.
"Two," said Kyle.
"Two."
"You contracted two familiars?"
"One contracted," Kael said. "One moved in without asking. Apparently there's a difference. Apparently my soul is a hallway now. I don't want to talk about it."
Lucas slowly raised a hand, like a student in class. "Can we... put that in the broadcast?"
"NO," said Kael, Spark, and Void, in unison — the first thing the three of them had ever agreed on.
---
The walk back through the settlement was the strangest walk of Kael's life, and he had once walked home wearing a stolen scarecrow's coat.
Forty settlers had watched him kneel on the platform. Forty settlers had watched him get back up. The news had travelled through the crowd faster than the Gatewardens' network — white hair, red eyes, alive — and now they lined the path, and nobody chanted.
Nobody said anything at all.
It was the silence that got him. A week ago these same people had screamed STREAKING SUMMONER at his window. Now they stood in rows with their hats off, looking at him the way people look at lightning-struck trees — awed, and a little afraid, and quietly glad it wasn't them.
'This is worse,' Kael realised. 'The jokes were better. The jokes were so much better.'
His mother broke the silence by hitting him.
She ran out of the crowd and slapped his chest with both hands, once, twice — and then grabbed his face and looked at his red eyes and started crying, and hit him again, and hugged him, and hit him again.
"You — stupid — stubborn —"
"You said I get it from your side," Kael wheezed.
"YOU DO. YOU DO. THAT'S WHY IT'S STUPID."
His father arrived a second later, at a dead sprint that was mostly belly, and wrapped both of them up, and for a while the three of them stood in the road being a family while the whole settlement politely pretended to look at the trees.
"Your hair," his father said into the top of his head.
"I know, Dad."
"Your eyes."
"I know, Dad."
"You look," his father said, pulling back and squinting at him, "extremely cool. Devastating. The girls of this settlement will riot."
"THAT'S your takeaway?"
"I'm a simple man with simple joys."
From the back of the dispersing crowd, a dry voice said, "Well. It seems I'll have to revise my published assessment."
Dr. Krell stood there with his arms folded, spectacles catching the light, looking at Kael the way a man looks at a maths problem that has personally insulted him.
"Three years of F's," Krell said. "And you come back from the black plain alive. Do you know what this does to my reputation, boy? I called you hopeless in the regional journal. In PRINT."
"You could publish a correction," Mira suggested, from beside him.
"I will DIE first."
Mira's eyes found Kael's. She looked at the white hair, the red eyes, the new stillness in his face.
"Zero point five," she said quietly.
"Apparently I'm a decimal," Kael said.
"I told you." The smallest smile. "Why not you."
---
That night, the household sat around the kitchen table, and for the first time in a week, nobody was crying.
His mother made too much food. His father ate too much of it. The candle burned. It was almost — almost — like before.
Almost, because of the voices.
"So when do I get to come out?" Spark asked.
'Out?' Kael thought. 'Out where?'
"Out THERE. The physical world. Aethra. You summon me, I pop out, I bite things, everyone applauds. That's the whole arrangement."
'You can do that?'
"I can do that. We probably shouldn't do that."
'Why not?'
"Because," Void said silkily, from his throne, "a Curse-brand familiar physically manifested on Aethra destabilises the resonance-energy balance of the surrounding region. Summon the rabbit, little host, and you may tear a hole in your world."
Silence in the soul-room.
'You're lying,' Kael thought.
"I never lie. Lying is for people with something to prove." Void's voice was a patient, endless dark. "Ask the vermin. He knows the rule."
Kael pushed the thought at Spark. 'Is it true?'
Spark was quiet for three full seconds, which for Spark was a geological era.
"...It's a little true," the rabbit admitted. "It's a resonance-balance thing. It's theoretical. It's fine. We just — we shouldn't test it indoors. Or near people. Or near anything, really. Or ever, unless it's important."
'Define important.'
"Life or death," Spark said. "Give or take."
Kael looked at his mother, laughing at something his father had said. At the candle. At the crooked table of his whole entire life.
'Right,' he thought. 'So I survived the Rite, and my prize is that my power is a bomb I can never set off.'
"Welcome," said Void, "to being chosen."