Water House

by Shelly Jarvis

  It was more a cottage than a manor, and certainly not a castle, covered in flowering vines. There was a wisp of smoke coming from the chimney, curling lazily into the sky. They passed through the small wooden gate that squeaked as Cassian opened it and walked up the stone flagstones to the rounded door.

  Cassian didn’t bother knocking. He pushed through the door and called, “Mother, I’m home.”

  Ros smiled, unable to hold back. There was such joy in his tone, such honest delight in being back at his home, that she felt it pulsing from him in waves.

  She heard a woman calling his name from somewhere farther in the house and a moment later, a tall woman with thick black curls came bolting into the room. She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him fiercely, saying, “I’m so happy you’re home. Tell me everything that happened.”

  It wasn’t until she released him that she seemed to notice Rosalinde. Like her son, she was tall, with black hair and dark eyes, high cheekbones, and startling good looks. Also like her son, she wore her emotions on her face, and right now she was wearing a look of surprise.

  “Good day,” Ros said, dipping into a curtsy.

  “Forgive me,” she breathed, bowing low just as Cassian always did. “You took me by surprise. I didn’t expect the future queen in my home today.”

  “I apologize for any inconvenience it causes,” Ros said.

  Cassian rolled his eyes. “Can we please stop with the formalities? There’s a lot we need to talk about and we don’t really have the time for you two to feel each other out.”

  His mother smirked. “Bold of you to speak that way.”

  “She’s not stuffy like the other nobles, Mother. She can handle it.”

  “I wasn’t talking about her,” Ombretta said. “That’s no way to speak to your mother.”

  Cassian broke into a wide grin that his mother quickly mirrored. “You’re right and I’m terribly sorry. Dearest Mother, high ruler of Night house, Lady of Darkness, I’d like you to meet Ros.”

  Ombretta flipped her hair over her shoulder and said, “That’s so much better, darling.”

  When they laughed together, Ros felt like she was missing out on the joke. Still, she was glad to see that after all that had happened only minutes ago, Cassian was still able to feel something other than heartache.

  “Lady of Darkness,” Ros repeated. “Very intimidating.”

  “Thank you,” Ombretta said.

  “It would probably be more effective if you didn’t smile so much,” Cassian said.

  “What fun would that be?” she asked.

  Ombretta turned and walked through the open doorway behind her. Cassian grabbed Rosalinde’s hand and pulled her into the next room and out a side door that led into a walled garden. There were vines growing above and all around them, flowers and bushes, and beautiful blossoming trees at the corners of the garden. Ros was entranced by the place, knowing the amount of work that must’ve gone into it.

  “Your garden is lovely,” Ros said.

  Ombretta waved a hand towards some seats. As they sat, she said, “Oh, it’s nothing. Certainly not when compared with a Botanist like yourself.”

  “Oh, no,” Ros said, shaking her head, “I don’t have my mother’s gift. My sister does, but I ended up between houses with Tsunami power.”

  “Right, that’s your primary. But you must have an ability with plants, don’t you? I would imagine it would be easy for you, with your mother’s substantial powers.”

  Ros furrowed her brows. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

  Ombretta turned to Cassian and clucked her tongue. “I thought you were going to show her how to access her full range. How do you expect to woo her without...”

  She trailed off when she looked down and saw their joined hands. Cassian said, “I planned to teach her, yes, but things haven’t gone how I expected. That’s why we’re here.”

  Chapter 32

  “Spill it,” she said.

  Cassian squeezed Rosalinde’s hand and said, “First, Ros, I want you to understand what we’re talking about. I’ll explain everything in more detail when I can, but the basics are this: as an Elementalist, you can access more than one gift. I know it isn’t taught that way and everyone focuses on their one big thing, but that’s just a failure in our system. You have Tsunami, as you know, but there’s more that you haven’t tapped into yet.”

  His words clicked into place in her mind, filling in the blanks about him. “At the opening ceremonies when I made you mad, you said you could teach me true power. You teleport, but you also covered the stadium in darkness, and you absorbed the darkness in the hall. Then you awakened the blood but you didn’t want anyone to know it was you. You were using multiple gifts this whole time.”

  Cassian nodded. “No one realizes it because no one understands what a Night mage can do.”

  “Even us, at times,” Ombretta said. “We have no one to guide us, so we work to figure out our powers as best we can.”

  Ros asked, “Is that what happened to Gaius? Did he push his gift too far?”

  Ombretta’s expression was enough to tell Ros what she needed to know. The woman recovered quickly, but her face had already given her away. She knew.

  “Ros, please,” Cassian said, shocked at Rosalinde’s indiscretion. “I know we’re in a hurry, but have some tact.”

  “She already knows,” Ros said, nodding towards Ombretta.

  Cassian looked between the two women, his brows furrowed. After a few seconds, he stopped looking at Ros and focused on his mother. He shook his head in denial, his heart breaking for the second time that day.

  “Let me explain,” Ombretta said.

  Cassian jumped up. “Explain? You told me he was dead!”

  “He was, in every way that mattered.”

  “But I talked to him. I felt him.”

  “That thing is not your brother,” Ombretta said. “It’s all that’s left of him. Anger, bitterness, a desire for vengeance.”

  “Maybe you didn’t know Gaius as well as you think, because that sounds like him even before this happened.”

  “I have no delusions about your brother. He was born with a darkness in him that has nothing to do with the elements. That’s why I worked with him and gave him so much of my time—I wanted to spare him from the misery he was building for himself.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Ombretta shook her head. “I don’t want you to know this pain.”

  “Damn it, Mother, I’m not a child anymore. You can’t protect me, just like you couldn’t protect Gaius.”

  “I wasn’t trying to protect Gaius,” she whispered. “I was trying to protect everyone else from him.”

  There was a long moment of silence while her words hung in the air between them before Cassian finally sat down at her feet and took her hand. It was such an intimate gesture that Ros wasn’t sure she should still be there. But she had to stay. She needed to know everything she could about Gaius if they were going to defeat him. Whatever he was, whatever his motive, he had something to do with her missing father and she was going to save him.

  “You know how he was,” Ombretta said, swallowing hard. “Callous. Easy to anger. But he was clever and cunning, too. He was driven. Gaius was so desperate to bring prominence to Night house that he was blinded by that ambition.”

  “Which is why he was entering the Great Match. To make alliances with the other houses.”

  Ros pressed her lips together. She already knew that Gaius hadn’t participated in the Great Match four years ago, but Cassian had been fed the story by his mother, and she had to be the one to take it away.

  Ombretta shook her head. “I told you that because I thought it would keep you safe. If you thought the other houses were against us, you wouldn’t want anything to do with them.”

  “He never went to the castle,” Cassian breathed.

  He glanced at Ros. She tried to give him a meaningful look, but there was just
so much hurt on his face. Finding out that his brother was still alive—at least somewhat—and now learning that his mother had lied to him? Ros couldn’t imagine how broken he must feel right now.

  “No. He went on a quest, trying to find the place where our power is strongest.”

  “That’s insane,” Cassian said.

  “Not really,” Ros said, wincing at the way her voice cut into this moment. But she needed to share the things she knew, if they were all going to be on the same page. “The old scrolls at the palace library mention places in this world, Cradles, they call them, where our powers are born. They say an Elementalist’s powers will grow stronger there, but that’s about all they say. The scrolls aren’t specific, at least not in a way today’s scholars can understand. But the Cradles are definitely out there.”

  “I’ve found two of them,” Ombretta said.

  “Two of them?” Ros asked, brows raising.

  She nodded. “One for Fire, one for Night.”

  “How did you find Fire?” Ros asked.

  Ombretta said, “With help from a Fire mage.”

  Cassian shot his mother a look that Ros couldn’t read. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When he spoke, his tone was one of defeat. “When I tell you this, you become one of three people in this world who know the truth. The other two are sitting in this garden with you. Can I trust you with this secret?”

  “Yes,” Ros breathed.

  Ombretta said, “Cassian, please don’t—”

  “We’ve kept enough secrets, Mother. It’s time to let someone in.”

  “I tried,” Ombretta said, her voice cracking. “I told her father and he betrayed me.”

  Both Ros and Cassian’s gazes darted to Ombretta. She looked back at Ros, defiant. But it was Cassian who said, “She’s not her father. She has his blood, but she is her own person and I trust her. If you can’t, at least trust me.”

  Ombretta nodded. “Always.”

  Cassian turned to Ros and said, “Night mages are made from two opposing gifts: a Fire house Light mage and a Water house Blood Healer.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” Ros said.

  “It does, if you understand the combinations,” Ombretta said.

  “I was obsessed with them growing up,” Cassian said. “I spent hours figuring up different combinations. There are so many things we leave untapped with our magic, Ros. We could do so much more if people would be open to exploring more than the basic constructs.”

  Ombretta shook her head. “You were both so interested in what could be. Neither of you were willing to consider that it had already been done, that things are this way now because it’s the only way magic survives.”

  “Maybe it shouldn’t survive,” Cassian said.

  Part of Ros thought he was right. Magic caused trouble. It was dangerous, separated the classes, and turned people into power-hungry monsters like Gaius. But then she thought of how Teague had healed those people in the arena, the way her mother’s flowers bloomed in the royal garden, how she was able to call forth water for the thirsty.

  “Magic can be helpful and beautiful, if it’s used the right way. We just need to figure out how to keep it from misuse.”

  “Starting with Gaius,” Cassian growled.

  Ros looked down at the drop of blood on her palm. Defeating Gaius was important to Cassian, but she still needed to find her father. As if reading her thoughts, Cassian said, “It’s all connected. Your father’s disappearance and my brother’s return from the dead.”

  “Your father is missing?” Ombretta asked.

  Ros wasn’t positive, but it sounded like true concern in her voice. “Since the opening ceremony. We think someone is making a play for the throne.”

  Ombretta ran a hand over her eyes. With a sigh, she said, “I have no love for your father, but he is a good king and I swore an oath to him a long, long time ago. So, tell me how I can help.”

  Chapter 33

  After a much-needed rest, they filed out of the Night house the next morning with a tentative plan in mind. They’d spent the evening before getting their bearings, working through what they knew about the abduction, the darkness, and conspiracies about who could be after the throne. The one thing they knew for sure was if they were going to rescue King Tancred, they would need to stop the darkness, or whoever was controlling it.

  Ros wasn’t convinced anyone was controlling Gaius. From what she’d felt of him, he was hungry for power and control. King-napping seemed like an easy way to get the things he desired. Then again, she couldn’t figure out why he would wait until now to do it. If he’d been gone four years, what had kept him from seeking out the king before now?

  She didn’t bother asking Cassian or Ombretta their opinion about it. They’d made it clear they thought Gaius was being controlled, manipulated from outside sources, and despite the dark desires they’d seen in him in the years at his side, they thought he could be rescued and rehabilitated. Though she disagreed, she refused to be the one to take that hope from Cassian. If that was what he needed to believe, she’d let him hold onto it as long as possible and do her best to keep her thoughts from showing.

  Ombretta wanted to go to the Night Cradle, where she thought Gaius would have found his new powers, and where he might return if he needed to recharge his strength. Though she wasn’t entirely sure, Ombretta believed Gaius would need to seek the Cradle regularly while he was incorporeal.

  She instructed Cassian where she wanted him to teleport them, giving him a location he remembered that was near the Cradle. Ros wondered why she didn’t transfer them to the site herself, until Cassian explained that his mother had never quite mastered the ability. She could move about in smoke form, as they’d seen Gaius do and as the old stories claimed she did the night her Great Match ended, but she couldn’t move from place to place like her youngest son.

  Cassian teleported them to the top of a hill where stone ruins lay around them. There was an archway above them—the only thing still standing—and everything was covered in purple moss and dark mushrooms speckled with silver.

  “What is this place?” Ros asked, her breath catching in her throat as she stared out at the abandoned beauty around her.

  “It’s the Night castle,” Ombretta said. She walked through the broken stones as if it were an elaborately decorated hallway. “This place housed the original Night Elementalists, before they were eradicated.”

  “What are you talking about? Prior to your family, there was only one other Night Elementalist in recorded history.”

  Ombretta shook her head. “In the history you’re taught, maybe. We’re rare, certainly, but that’s only because most prefer to hide out as non-magicals to avoid being hunted by the other houses.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Ros whispered.

  “The truth isn’t always pleasant, Princess,” Cassian said.

  Ombretta led them out of the ruins and down the hill towards the woods. “I thought I could change things if I were queen. That’s why I went, you know. It was a longshot, but when I met your father…I had hope.”

  Ros opened her mouth to ask a question, but something entirely different came out before she could stop herself: “Did you love him?”

  In the following silence, Ros was glad she was behind Ombretta and couldn’t see her face. The quiet stretched on for several minutes before Ombretta said, “I don’t know. You could’ve asked me the same question a hundred times over the last twenty-five years and received a different answer each time. Sometimes I thought I did, but sometimes I hated him. Mostly, I don’t think I knew him well enough to feel either of those things.”

  Ros felt her words digging their way into her bones. It hadn’t been a week yet, but she’d already felt the same things towards Cassian. Just days ago, she was promising herself she would get rid of him as soon as possible, but now she didn’t want to consider what her life would be like without him. Maybe it was the intensity of what they were dealing with, or the inevi
tability of choosing a husband at the end of this, but Rosalinde’s heart had settled on love sometime during this.

  She didn’t ask another question, didn’t say another word. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear anything else about how Ombretta did or didn’t feel about her father. It was strange thinking of him as a man with desires and feelings she couldn’t understand, instead of just as her father. Part of her also felt guilty for talking to Ombretta about this, as if she was somehow betraying her mother, the woman King Tancred chose.

  Ros was so caught up in her thoughts, she bumped into Ombretta when they stopped. “Sorry,” she whispered, but Ombretta lifted her hand for silence. She pointed ahead of them and Rosalinde’s eyes followed the path of her hand until they landed on a dark part of the forest that Ros would’ve overlooked if she hadn’t been with them.

  “Can you see it?” Ombretta asked.

  “The shadowed place?” Ros asked.

  Cassian said, “That’s an illusion. Someone has made the area blend into the forest.”

  “What do you see?” she asked.

  “I can see the illusion,” Cassian said, “but I can see beyond it, too. It’s hard to explain.”

  Ombretta asked, “Have you ever traced a picture? It’s like that. You can see the picture you’re drawing on top, but there’s something underneath it that you can make out but it isn’t as clear as the top layer.”

  “So the illusion is the top picture,” Ros said. “Can we walk through it?”

  Ombretta shook her head. “Not without being seen. Instead, we’re going to walk between the layers.”

  Chapter 34

  Rosalinde felt a chill roll down her spine as she looked between the illusion and the area she could now see. Every part of this felt unnatural. The illusion was to her left, shimmering with bright colors from this side of it. She felt heat rolling off it in waves.