Like Wesley was just a pawn, an object, passed from their hands to Ashwood’s.

“It’s lies,” Wesley said. “I would remember.”

“We took your memories with your magic,” Saxony’s amja said. “Look at your scars, my dear one.”

Wesley touched the skin under his cuff links. The burns he carried with him, hidden partly by the tattoos of his city and, now, his staves.

“They’re from my father,” he said.

“They’re from your magic,” Saxony said. “The fire you used to burn the tornado was the same fire I saw when our mother died.”

“Our mother?” Wesley said, like the thought was a curse.

And it was, wasn’t it?

What they were telling him was trying to erase all that he was. All he had worked to become.

“We could only quell your powers,” Saxony’s amja said. “Vea sacrificed her life to try and get rid of it, but your magic fought so hard to stay that in the end we could only hide it and pray that you’d never find it again.”

“Why would you do that?”

“There was a prophecy,” Saxony said. “A prediction that you’d bring about a war if you had magic. They got scared and they got stupid.”

“I’m trying to stop a war,” Wesley said. “I’m trying to help people.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m telling you this. I trust you.”

Wesley shook his head and stumbled back, right into Tavia. Her hands touched his shoulder, but for the first time ever the feel of her didn’t calm him. It didn’t erase the awful feeling in his heart.

“The Thornton Walcotts tried to keep you safe from magic,” Saxony’s amja said. “They feared your destiny just as we did.”

The Thornton Walcotts had done a lot of things to Wesley, but keeping him safe wasn’t one of them. He didn’t remember much and what he did remember he always pretended to forget, living his life as though it had only started when he became a busker.

It wasn’t a lie. The time before that hadn’t been a life at all.

His father had seen to it that the only things Wesley had or knew were the ones he had turned rotten before handing over.

Wesley never felt safe in that house. Feeling safe was dangerous, his father had always said, and he’d branded those lessons into Wesley’s mind and onto his body so that he’d never forget them. Saxony said his scars were from a fire and even if that were true, even if some of them weren’t from his father, he remembered all the ones that were.