Page 72 of What Is Dark Within Me

You have to be, returned the voice.

When reddish sunlight glowed through the slits in her curtains, she dressed and went to the training fields. Taddeas was already there, setting up dented metal targets.

“You’re distracted,” he said after an hour of watching her release torrent after torrent of fire, engulfing both the targets and the unhappy trees behind them.

She sighed, trying to soften her face enough to let him know that yes, he was right, and she deserved whatever chiding he wanted to give her.

“I know. Sorry. It has nothing to do with you, I promise.”

“Need to talk about it?” he asked.

“It’s fine, really,” she told him. “Let’s do more drills.” When she could clear the smoke from her eyes, all five of the targets that Taddeas had set up were smoldering, half-melted distortions of themselves.

“By the Second, I think you’d do just fine on a battlefield,” Taddeas said. He was mostly able to look her in the eye now, but she saw the way his fingers twitched when he delivered the compliment.

“Can I ask what might be an invasive question?” Aleja asked, at the end of practice.

“Of course,” he said, gathering the cooled targets as they prepared to leave the field.

“How did you end up High General, at the right hand of the Knowing One?”

Taddeas chuckled. “Would you believe I used to be a college professor? I know I’m not exactly charismatic, but there was something about being at the head of a classroom…”

She made a show of glancing at the battle axes strapped to his back. “I’m guessing you didn’t take those to campus with you.”

“Fortunately, there was no need. I studied Nubian military history.” He smiled at the look of awe on Aleja’s face. “That sounds a lot cooler than it actually is.”

“No way!” Aleja exclaimed, her mood brightening. “You, sir, are exactly my type of nerd. One day, we’ll talk about how I spent eight months reading about nothing but Florentine tempera murals painted during the Black Death.”

“I knew there was a reason we were going to be friends. It was me who called to the Knowing One. It was during the eighties when the AIDs epidemic was rampant. My partner was living with hemophilia, and this was before it was standard to test the blood supply before transfusions…”

“Shit,” Aleja breathed. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. It was a dark time. We lost many close friends in those years. I’d found manuscripts about the Knowing One when my research took a tangent, and I uncovered correspondences between Roman and Nubian scholars. I’d never tried a lick of magic before then, so you can imagine my surprise when it worked.”

“What did you ask of him?”

“One full life, for Jack and myself. We were in our mid-fifties, but I wanted another thirty years. I wasn’t aware I was shooting low,” he said with another deep laugh. “What he asked in return seemed so unbelievable that I spent the first decade wondering if I’d been tricked.”

“And what was that?”

“Advice.” He paused for a moment before continuing. “Every five years, on April 26th, the day I’d made the bargain, I was to meet him at Jackson Square Park, rain or shine. He’d show me what looked like old military records—battle plans and their outcomes—and ask my opinion about what could have been done differently or what might have turned the tides in one side’s favor. That sort of thing.”

That this had been the bargain no longer surprised her, but that Taddeas was here, and Jack wasn’t, made it feel like there was a knot in her heart that wouldn’t let the blood through. Roland hadn’t been able to bring his brother with him, and it seemed to have broken them both.

“You’re afraid to ask what happened then,” Taddeas said, voice sly, as they made their way out of the woods and into the shadows of the palace.

“Kind of.”

“We got our life. When I had my last visit with Nicolas, it was in the spring of my eighty-fifth year. I was on my way to New York from the village in southern Spain where Jack and I retired. He was a savvy investor, and thankfully, we weren’t surviving off the earnings of a college professor. That day—a beautiful day, actually—the Knowing One asked if I’d like to join his council.”

Bonnie waved at them from the vegetable garden, her sunhat askew atop her head. Aleja waved back, feeling a strange sense of déjàvu. It was as if this scene had played out before.

“You said yes?”

“Nope. I wasnotinterested in an eternity without Jack. Greed, remember?”

“But you—”

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