Dragon's Maze

FROM THE ASHES

Jace stood in the building’s new skeleton, among the bare joists and timber rafters, looking out at the Tenth District. The traffic patterns in this formerly sleepy neighborhood would have to be redrawn, the streets widened. The unfinished embassy stood like the beginnings of a grand sculpture, not yet shaped into its final form but showing its majesty already. In order to build its foundation, the crews had had to clear out mountains of ash and charred wood. The sign outside read in official-looking, newly-painted letters: EMBASSY OF THE GUILDPACT.

Someone was climbing the makeshift stairs from below. Officer Lavinia made her way up to the floor where Jace stood.

Jace tipped his head to her. “Now’s your chance to arrest me, Officer.”

“You’re safe from me for now, Living Guildpact,” said Lavinia. She took in the panorama of the city around them. “Quite a view you have from up here, the site of your old sanctum.”

Jace shrugged. “They asked me where I wanted this place to be. Seemed fitting.”

“Makes sense. I suppose you’ll be making a lot of decisions now.”

“I intend to have a lot of help. That’s why I asked you here.” Lavinia inspected him. “To make a show of sharing the power?”

“No. Because I actually need your help. I’m not an emperor. I don’t lead the guilds. I just have the privilege of trying to keep them from devouring each other. Besides, I won’t be able to adjudicate all the time. I’ll need advice.”

“An advisory council.”

“Yes.”

“You thought of who’ll be on it?”

“Yes. Representatives from all the guilds, of course. People I can trust.”

“Sounds wise. So what do you need from me?”

Jace couldn’t tell if she was being coy, or if she really didn’t know what he was offering. “I think you actually want me to ask.”

Lavinia paced around the unfinished floor, not facing him, but Jace could see she wore a slim smile. She looked through the rafters, through the half-completed roof, to the sky, sheltering her eyes with her hand. “Looks like it will be a fitting edifice. So this will be the official embassy? The headquarters?”

“Well, this is where people will see the sign. This is where we’ll conduct official meetings that we want the public to know about.”

“This is the place that’ll go on maps.”

“Exactly.”

“Who gets to know where the real one is located?”

“Let me put it this way,” said Jace. “You’re not one of them. Not yet.”

Another set of footsteps came up the makeshift stairs. Emmara appeared without a word. Her gown indicated some new important station within the Selesnya Conclave.

“Can I talk to you later, Councilor?” Jace asked Lavinia.

Lavinia nodded, and smirked at the mention of the title. She tilted her head at Emmara, and made her way down the stairs.

Jace didn’t look at Emmara for a long time. He leaned his hands against one open windowsill, looking out onto Ravnica. He let her explore the nascent building, and gave her time to come up with the words she wanted to say. It was her place to speak, he knew.

“Have you heard any cases yet?” Emmara asked finally. Her tone was light, casual. That was good.

“A few,” Jace said. “A dispute over recruiting rights. A destruction of property claim. Nothing world-shattering.”

“And you’re able to mediate between the guilds? They abide by your judgment?”

“It seems they have to.”

Emmara wore a small smile, which brought rose to her cheeks. “You did it. You brought them together.”

Jace didn’t know where to look, so he inspected his palms. “We’ll see. There’s a lot to do yet, and you know I have to take care of some things … elsewhere.”

He saw Emmara’s smile falter, and he thought he saw her eyes unfocus for a moment. The talk of other worlds, of his planeswalker nature, had stripped away the lies between them. He didn’t know how she was taking it, but he had wanted to include her, to reveal the walls he put up around his life and let her inside. He wanted his secret to bind them together, as he had bound together the minds of the maze-runners.

“And then there’s you,” he went on. “I don’t know that I can ever express to you how sorry I am for the various ways I’ve hurt you. I think I have a list written down somewhere.”

Emmara fell against him abruptly, and her mouth found his, and she pressed against his lips like making an impression in clay. His eyes fell closed and his body froze, as if to contain the feeling of her skin this close to his, and to hold it inside him for as long as he could. But when she broke the connection and pulled away, and she smiled with her lips together like a courteous houseguest, he knew. He knew that it had been a gesture of gratitude, a one-way gift to show her appreciation, hardly more than a missive from her guild. He opened his eyes and composed himself, pulling his cloak around him. Her smile grew into her cheeks as she looked at him, but he saw a coiled-up pain in her eyes as they retreated from him and she looked anywhere else but his face. A politeness had frosted over them.

“Jace …” she began.

“Well, thanks for coming to see the place,” Jace said. His voice sounded too loud, too pedestrian. “I hope that we see each other again.” That was the wrong thing to say, too, as if he expected them to become total strangers. But he couldn’t unsay it, and it hung there in the air.

“We will,” she said, mending the awkwardness with two words. She was a healer in all ways. “But Jace, before I go, I need something from you.”

“Name it.”

Her lip trembled slightly. “In order for me to do my duty to my guild, I need to be able to share everything with them. I need to be able to commune with Trostani, with the woodshapers and guildmages, with every soul in the Conclave. That is my charge and my guild oath. Do you see?”

Jace’s heart thumped. “You want to tell them what I’ve told you. About my travel beyond Ravnica, about the other worlds. But you can’t tell them that—it’s not something they’d be able to understand. They can’t know.”

“That is not what I’m asking,” she said, pressing her hands together. “You are correct that I can’t tell them that, Jace. They can never know. It would kill them to know. Just as it’s been killing me.”

Jace flinched and glanced away. The meaning of what she said took its time working its way through the walls of his mind. She had kept his secret close, but it was causing her pain. Of course it was. She was not meant to brood on secrets and conceal them with lies. His revelation dug into her like a splinter, and he was the one who had imposed it on her. His attempt to bare himself to her had only been another cruelty.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“That’s why you have to help me,” she said.

When she said no more, he glanced back at her. Her face pleaded.

He realized what she wanted. “Absolutely not,” he said.

“You have to erase it from me, Jace. You don’t know what it’s like, keeping this from them. I can’t let them know it, and I don’t want to know it.”

“I’m not touching your memories.”

“You must. I can’t live this way. It’s too big to do nothing about. But I can’t do anything about it. It’s just there, in my mind.”

“But it’s the truth,” he said, the pleading tone creeping into his own voice. It was the truth, but it was more than that. It was his attempt to reach out to her. It was his gift to her that she had come to return, and in doing so she was showing him how unwelcome a gesture it had been.

“You have to put me back,” she said. “Back to where I didn’t know. As long as I know, I’ll never be able to be open with them. I’ll never be able to be Selesnya.”

Jace grabbed the hair on the back of his head, shielding his face with his elbows. He took a series of deliberate breaths, clenching his teeth against the urge to shout. He saw why she wanted this. He saw the good sense of preventing the spread of Multiverse knowledge among the planebound denizens of Ravnica, and he saw how the knowledge would eat away at her connection to her guild. But the thought of tearing into Emmara’s mind, excising the words he had told her—even if he only took a few minutes away from her, it would be a kind of goodbye. It would kill something that, right now, was a little bit alive.

“Please, Jace,” she said.

He nodded heavily. The spell wasn’t even that difficult to muster. He had such proficiency with it, like a rehearsed piece of music. He was present in her mind in the span of a few breaths, searching through flickering memories of Trostani and Exava and Calomir, brushing through her thoughts of him in his patterned blue cloak. Finally he narrowed the spell to focus on a moment in a storm when he showed her the truth of the man he really was.

He hovered there, with that memory cradled in his consciousness like a sip of water cupped in his hands.

She looked at him as he held the mind magic there, and her face was serene. “This is in case you need me,” she said, and she pressed a small wooden artifact into his hand. It was an intricate woodcarving in the shape of a leaf.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “You’re welcome here.”

He tightened his grasp, and the memory disintegrated. She embraced him as the spell ended, the polite end of a visit. She walked to the top of the stairs. He watched her descend out of sight, and then he turned to the window and looked out at the towers of Ravnica.