Page 13 of A Whisper in the Walls

Dahvid shielded his eyes as he walked into the room. The door closed behind him with a muted click. Everything around him dripped with cleansing magic. A pearl-white layer that looked like false snow. The room was furnished with a single table, set at the very center. Dahvid quietly stripped out of his clothes. He covered himself with a towel, then lay down on the table. Everything around him—the cushions and cabinets and walls—looked eerie for their lack of color, almost dreamlike. Once he was settled and his eyes were closed, the spell began.

He could feel layers of dirt peeling off his skin. It always felt nice. At first. But then the magic would dig deeper. He gritted his teeth against that sharpness. He knew the pain was necessary. He’d visited cleansing rooms since he was five years old. Any time a new tattoo had been chosen for him. The part of his body that would house the magic needed to be a perfectly blank canvas. There was dirt, of course, that might make his skin less receptive, but there was also dormant magic. Residual traces that the naked eye could not detect. Removing that layer always felt like having hairs ripped from his body with hot wax.

Pain, his father’s voice reminded him, is a road to power.

Dahvid tried to keep his breathing steady. Eventually the claws of the magic retracted. The cleansing spell faded. His chest rose and fell. When he opened his eyes, the room had lost its dreamlike color. The table beneath him was normal, gray stone. The cabinets and the door were a matching bronze. Cath didn’t bother knocking as she entered.

“Ready?”

“For you? Always.”

He loved how easily she blushed. How she came to his side without hesitation. Even as a boy, he’d grown accustomed to startling others. Living life as a spectacle. Image-bearers were, by their very nature, eye-catching. Most people had treated him as something to be enjoyed at a distance, like a painting on a museum wall. In truth, his magic wasn’t all that different from other branches. More powerful, perhaps. Not sourced from government warehouses like most. But that didn’t stop the majority of people from thinking of him as something dangerous or exotic.

Cath had spotted him across the room at a tavern in Peska. Before he and his sister had decided to come to Ravinia. All of the tattoos had lured her over. She’d joined them for a drink, and then a second. Sometimes it felt like she’d sat down that night and simply decided to stay for good. He thought he loved her, but there was no one left to tell him what love was supposed to feel like.

Now Cath leaned over him, carefully repositioning his arms and legs for the morning’s work. She let her nails trail playfully along one thigh before turning to unpack her equipment. He tried not to shiver, but goose bumps spread from the place she’d grazed. It felt so boyish, this lack of control. The two of them had been together for nearly a year now. He’d assumed that he would grow accustomed to her and all the impulses she drew out of him. The opposite had occurred. All this time, and he felt more in her power than ever.

“Calm down, dear,” Cath said, arranging her supplies. “We only have the room for an hour, and it’s not going to be that kind of hour.…”

Dahvid scowled at her, adjusting his towel. He fixed his eyes on the ceiling. A mirror hung there. He saw his entire body reflected back like a painting. All the tattoos he’d gathered over the years stood out, bright on his pale, muscled frame. His body existed as a living, historical record. Three different artists had made their marks on him over a little less than two decades.

His eyes drifted to the first tattoo. On his right wrist, a sword that shimmered with light. Martha had drawn it. His father had hired the artist when Dahvid was just five years old. He still found it remarkable that he’d been permitted to summon a weapon at that age.

Martha’s second drawing sat on his right shoulder. Three golden circles, overlapping in such a way that the eye could not tell where one began and the other ended. She’d etched that just before Dahvid learned to hate her. Before he was old enough to understand that the way she treated him was not tough love but a pattern of abuse. It was particularly ironic, because the golden circles she’d drawn remained one of his best protective spells.

Her third tattoo was the smallest one. A reflection of their shrinking relationship. The slender glass vial stood out on his right thigh, frothing with golden elixir. Designed as a protection against poisons. Smart, he supposed, for one of the heirs to a major house. He’d learned how to use the spell’s power for quick healing in recent years. Far more useful to him. No one cared enough about nameless gladiators to actually poison them.

That was where Martha’s drawings ended. He remembered finally feeling brave enough to walk into his father’s study. How smoke had drifted in the air between them like a haze. Ware had stood a few steps behind Dahvid. His older brother’s presence was the only reason he managed to speak in a steady voice. He told his father how Martha used pain to demonstrate her control over him. How easily she’d blurred the lines between discipline and abuse. His father had watched him with an unreadable expression. When Dahvid finished, the man crossed the room and cupped his son’s chin in one hand.

“Why didn’t you tell me? Did you think I would not protect you?”

In the years since, Dahvid had forgotten so much of his father. All the little details that made a person more than just a memory. He would never forget the fierceness in his expression that day.

“You are my son. I would fight the tides for you. I would rip the moon from the sky. Mark my words, boys.” He had looked back and forth between them. “The two of you—and your sisters—there is nothing I would not do to keep the four of you safe.”

Dahvid never saw Martha again. As a boy, he’d assumed she’d been dismissed. Thinking back on his father’s words—the fury buried in each syllable—he was less certain of her fate now.

As Martha’s work ended, Ware’s began. His brother had always been a fine artist, but he’d secretly been training to replace her. The proposal was accepted by their father, who liked the idea of his boys working so closely together. Ware was born a dreamer. Bringing strange spells to life through Dahvid suited the creative in him. Their first successful tattoo was the scarlet traveler—the one piece of art that caught everyone’s eye.

The flower stretched from chin to lower chest, petals unfolding in the imagined sunlight. It was a credit to Ware that it still housed Dahvid’s most devastating spell. Their second tattoo together was less useful. It ran down one bicep: a flock of birds taking flight. They looked like silhouettes against the pale sky of his arm. A natural choice for two boys who’d always pretended that they could fly as children. Even after years of training, the spell hurt more often than it helped.

Ware’s final tattoo remained a mystery. Dahvid saw the edges of the image, beginning on his right hip, circling before vanishing onto his back. He never looked at it for long. He had never activated its magic, no matter how tempted or desperate. Ware had finished the tattoo and promised to explain how to use it. He never got the chance, because that same night the Broods killed him.

Dahvid closed his eyes. He heard swords scraping overhead. He smelled smoke as it started to filter down into their hiding place. He felt fear. Followed by cowardice. Then a sharp tug on his arm.

“Don’t go there,” Cath whispered. Her voice echoed in the small room. “You’re thinking about your sister again. Stay with me, dear. There’s nothing you could have done.”

He stared back at her until his heart stopped thrashing in his chest. His hands had balled into fists. Slowly, he let his fingers uncurl. He hadn’t been thinking of Ava, and he felt guilty for not thinking about her enough. His youngest sister. As lost to them now as the others.

Before his mind could stumble down those darker trails, his eyes sought out the newest tattoos. They always comforted him, because they were not drawn by a ghost. Each one had been created by Cath.

Martha’s work had produced efficient, useful spells. Nothing that a wand couldn’t summon. Ware possessed a rare ability to create images of great depth, which produced magic to match. Cath was more of a trickster god. Her artistic power rested in creativity and wickedness. All three of her spells had quietly become favorites.

On his left bicep, there were the twins. Two imps expelling mirrored blasts of frosty wind from their puffy cheeks. She’d also drawn the delicate rope that circled his left wrist. The pattern almost looked like it was weaving in and out—writhing over his skin—if he stared at it for too long. Finally, there was a perfectly drawn circle centered on his upper abdomen. A simple design that resulted in an equally simple but clever magic. Today, Cath would try for her fourth tattoo.

Again.

“What attempt is this?” she asked.

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