Atsuki Nightwhisper's Arc

Chapter 9 of 17

The pendant named two houses. It named no people. Atsuki knew he was the child of a broken oath, but no oath would stop Matthias. A house-mark proved a line existed. It could not prove his parents left him, or that they still lived. He needed names of persons, not walls. Stellara had given him one last direction before he ran: find the half-merfolk scholar who kept the deep records. Only that scholar traced individuals through Eldergrove's oldest blood. He found the scholar in a ruined marriage chapel. Vines had swallowed the walls. Broken glass lay under the empty windows. Caspian Tidewell sat on a low stone, legs stretched useless before him, a scroll unrolled across his knees. He did not look up. "You knocked over my quiet," Caspian said. "Stellara sent me." Atsuki set the pendant beside the scroll. "These two houses. I need the people inside them." Caspian glanced at the gold. His dry mouth tightened. "Nightwhisper. And the other." He tapped the second half once. "I buried that name years ago. Asking twice about the buried is against the rules." "Someone wants me dead for this," Atsuki said. "A priest. He hunts the family I hid." Caspian studied him a long moment. Then he pulled a second scroll from a wet leather case. Faded ink. Delicate lines branching down. "I keep half my work underwater. This half I kept dry." He rolled it flat. "Because I knew someone would come for it." Atsuki leaned close. The lineage forked down the page. Two names sat at the bottom, joined by a single line. "Your mother." Caspian's finger stopped on the left. "Nightwhisper's daughter. She married against both houses." His finger crossed to the right. "Your father. The son they sent into hiding." He looked up. "They did not abandon you. They gave you away to keep you alive. The oath's enforcers kill the child of a broken bond first." Atsuki's hands went cold on the stone. Twenty years he had matched no face. Now two names sat under his own, written by a stranger's pen. Not lost. Not careless. Afraid. "Where are they?" he asked. "Dead." Caspian said it flat. "Both. The priest's order saw to that before you could walk." He rolled the scroll and pressed it into Atsuki's hands. "The family you hid in the monastery. That is your father's blood. His brother. The old woman is your grandmother." Atsuki stared at the scroll. The people sheltering on the cliffs were not strangers he had rescued. They were the last of his living kin. And Matthias knew where they slept. "Take it," Caspian said. "I am done keeping secrets that get people killed." He turned his face to the broken window. "Go. Before the priest reads what you just read." Atsuki gripped the scroll and ran for the cliffs. He had names now. He also had one night to keep the last of them breathing.