The noise was the worst part. They arrived with shouting and yelling, disrupting the stillness of the night with an effort to startle the entire coven to confused wakefulness. The wrenching and splitting of wood as they hacked down doors, the shriek of hinges as they finally collapsed inward. The high, uncertain screams of those just waking and fearing for their lives. The rush and crackle of flame as some unfortunate mages attempted to defend themselves. The gut-wrenching screams and groans of those wounded and left to die.
The first bang on their door woke Jace and Caleb at the same instant. Jace was the first one out of bed, tumbling sleepy and clumsy to the floor with his brother half a moment after. The house shook again as their front door crashed inward and they were fumbling with the latch on their window, pushing it out, wriggling over the sill, disappearing into the dark. They were one of many dark silhouettes fleeing towards the woods, their faces eerily flickering by the flames of their burning homes.
Jace doubled over, panting, pressing himself up against the thick trunk of a tree where no one from the ruined coven could see him. He dared peer around the trunk one last time; soldiers everywhere, swarming through their modest village, searching, destroying. Who knew how many they’d killed already, and how many others had gotten away? Their coven had not been large--twenty-seven members exactly--and while they had not all been mages, they had enough mages among them to have to hide themselves very well. Perhaps one of the villages nearby had betrayed them.
Our parents. The shock hit Jace sudden and hard. Not just their parents, but everyone they had known…they had been like one family, together, every single person looking out for everyone else. Everyone was scattered now, panic separating them all. However it had happened, they were lost…everyone and everything they had ever known was lost. They had no way to know the fate of anyone else. How could they ever find any of them again? How could they know who had died, and who was still alive?
No time now. Jace tightened his fingers on Caleb’s arm. “We have to go,� he whispered urgently, pulling back deeper into the forest. “We can’t stay here.�
---
The high walls of Reajh were imposing. Jace stumbled to a halt, gazing with parted lips and glazed eyes at the vastness of the city they had at last reached--traveling by night, voyaging alone, joining a caravan at one point, taking weeks to make their way on foot from the ruins of their home to the only place they thought they could start over. It was a risk; since birth, they had been instilled with the firm knowledge that the rest of Connlaoth held nothing but persecution for their kind, most of all Reajh. But they weren’t mages, and they had nowhere else to go.
The weeks of travel and hardship had taken their toll on the twins, and it showed in the thinness of their limbs, the hollowness of their faces. Food had been scarce, and cleanliness had barely existed. Jace could see the dirt permanently ingrained in the creases of his palms and beneath his fingernails. Their dark, coarse hair--so black that in strong sunlight it shone with tinctures of royal blue--was rough and unkempt, curling around their eyes and the napes of their necks, and the defined curves of their cheekbones stood out even more in their faces than usual. Even the soles of their shoes had begun to wear through. They had come here with the clothes they wore and nothing else.
Jace and Caleb joined the crowd constantly flowing in and out of the city’s main gate, slipping easily and sinuously between people, and ducking their heads from the impassive gaze of the guards. They were never more than a few inches apart, even when the ebb of the crowd tried to tug them away. When at last they were able to divert themselves onto the side of the street, away from the flow of traffic, Jace staggered to a halt, exhausted, hungry, and lost. He wanted a bath.
