Incendiary (Hollow Crown)

by Zoraida Cordova

  Sayida and Tomás haven’t returned from their task to trade the rubies for passage on a ship. I shut the door to a washroom and clean my face. Everything hurts in a way I didn’t think possible. I strip off my clothes and clean myself, re-dress my wounds. Lady Nuria’s lovely gift is ruined, but I salvage as much of the platinum wire and stars as I can. I braid a few strands into two bracelets, then spool the rest and tuck it into a small leather pouch I strap to my belt. When that’s done, I braid my hair in a plain plait down my back. What would Leo say if he saw me putting on riding trousers and a rough-spun tunic with holes in it? At least it’s clean?

  I’m scooping more water in my hands, trying to get the muck out from under my nails, when my ears ring, making way for a memory to barrel into me. Méndez’s voice is clear as a bell. The slippery memory of him staring at the sea solidifies, ready to be seen.

  Justice Méndez reaches the top of the tower, breathing in the salty air as he waits for the guards to open the door. He rushes inside, anxious to test out his new toy.

  A frail man, skin the color of ash, rocks back and forth in the corner of the cell. Dull glowing veins stretch down his face, his torso.

  “Cebrián, come here,” Justice Méndez orders.

  The man won’t respond. Justice Méndez expected as much. “Bring her in.”

  Lucia is dragged in, gagged and fighting tooth and nail as they shove her into the cell.

  Justice Méndez tries again. “Cebrián, I brought you a gift. She is the first to heal.”

  Cebrián stops rocking, but doesn’t acknowledge the people in the room. Justice Méndez closes the distance to the girl, removing the gag from her mouth.

  She shakes in the cold room and asks, “What did you do to me?”

  “Use your magics. Look into my mind. If you can tell me what I plan, then I’ll let you go.”

  Lucia eyes the room between each sharp breath. Justice Méndez extends his hand, his thin fingers like a fallen autumn branch. “If you choose not to, you’ll remain a prisoner of Soledad until the day you die.”

  He watches Lucia weigh her options, clearly knowing this is a trick. He keeps his expression neutral, not wanting to scare her off yet.

  She grabs his hand and closes her eyes. He feels the probing of her foul magics.

  Cebrián’s head pops up. Silver eyes and a terrifying smile spreading across his face.

  Lucia gasps, jumping back, and drops Méndez’s hand. “You can’t! You have to let me go!”

  He steps back, as do the guards. “A promise is a promise.”

  Lucia runs to the door, but Cebrián beats her there, his speed and agility inhuman. Before she can utter a scream he is upon her, hands tight around her neck. Her body convulses, color draining by the second. Her skin turns nearly translucent. New veins, pulsing with a faint glow, begin to appear, tracing a path up her arms, her legs. . . .

  Justice Méndez is thrilled at the progress.

  The door to the cell bursts open. “Stop this.”

  Justice Méndez turns to face the intruder. Spoiled, wretched prince.

  Prince Castian. His eyes are wild. He points a finger at Méndez. “I am ordering you to stop this immediately.”

  Justice Méndez burns with irritation at the prince, who remains a constant thorn in his side. Turning slowly, unhurried, he waves a hand at his creation.

  “That’s enough, Cebrián, you’ll drain her dry. Remember, you can’t control magic that isn’t there. I won’t have repeats of the others.”

  Castian crosses the room to Méndez. Cebrián pulls out a crude weapon hidden in his tunic. He jams the sharp point into the prince’s shoulder.

  I can’t move. Lucia was still alive? How did she recover? Then it hits me. The new Ventári was Lucia, and I saw right past her.

  “No,” I say. I say it over and over again because it can’t be.

  I step out of the washroom and grab a cloak. Rush through the crowded house and out back to the patio. Here in the port everything smells of the sea and I breathe deep as if I could scrub myself clean from the inside.

  A troubling thought digs at the story I’ve built for myself. Castian stopped the experiment. Castian had a shoulder injury at the ball. The man had stabbed him. That was why Castian had circled Soledad on his map. Why Méndez and Castian had been gone from the palace at the same time. They’d been together. But what is the prince playing at?

  The weapon was never in the wooden box Prince Castian had in his secret study and it isn’t the alman stone in the vault.

  You don’t want to see what’s right in front of you.

  Right in front of me. I look down at my hands. The memory of Méndez healing scarred hands wasn’t about me. It was that man—that Cebrián.

  Because it is not an object at all.

  The weapon is a person.

  A Robári like me. It’s like a living, breathing alman stone. I think of what he did to Lucia. He drained her power, like a memory, twice. The light that emitted from him was brilliant, a ray of light, a beam of alman stone. Somehow, the justice used alman stone to alter the Robári’s magics.

  I’m going to be sick.

  I take several steps to the fence and cough up my meal and when all that’s left is acid and bile, I heave. I go to the well and fumble in the dark to bring up a bucket of water. I drink until my mouth stops feeling so dry. I have to tell Margo and Elder Filipa.

  When I take a step back into the house, I know that I can’t. If they know that the justice can turn memory thieves into magic thieves, that will only prove that I am as dangerous as they think I am.

  You were born to be a weapon, Méndez told me.

  I didn’t want to hear those words because he was right. That’s all I’ll ever be to anyone. My parents. Friends and neighbors. Dez.

  I look up at the house and the people who are eagerly awaiting a new life. A ship that will help them regroup. I can’t take that hope away from them. There is one thing I am good at, better at than stealing memories, better at than hurting the people I love—and that’s being alone.

  I lift the hood of my cloak and sidestep the house, making my way down the narrow alley that leads back to the boardwalk.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Sayida asks, appearing from nowhere like a figure out of the Gray. Her eyes are dark as coal, and the smile leaves her face when she realizes what I’m doing.

  “How long have you been there?” I ask.

  “Not long. Despite my injuries, I could feel your anguish, Ren. This metal Nuria gave us is strong.” Sayida holds out her forearms wrapped in fresh gauze and linen.

  “Good. How are you?”

  “Better after Filipa’s tonic for the pain,” she says. “You should know we got the ship. It leaves in two days’ time.”

  I turn to the house. The lights dim enough that they won’t cause attention. “Go inside. Tell them.”

  “Why do you do this, Ren?” She tries to grab my hand, but I don’t let her.

  “Don’t use your power on me.”

  She winces and rests her hands at her sides. “I’m not! I’m worried about you.”

  “You don’t understand what’s happening.”

  “Then tell me! Ren, I’ve trusted you with my life. You’re the closest thing I have to a sister, and no matter how much I try to be there for you, you push me away.”

  My eyes sting with salt and anger. “This isn’t something that you can understand.”

  “Let me try.”

  I shake my head and pull the cloak tighter over my head. “Your powers allow you to feel what others do and to give them comfort. Or push them to action. They don’t erase people’s lives. They don’t take and destroy.”

  “You’re wrong. I could also give them pain,” she says. “Don’t forget that. We choose what we do with these gifts. That’s what we’ve always been taught. The same way the magicless can kill with their swords and poisons, with their bare hands if they choose to. I have seen you take away trauma from people so
they can sleep better at night. Don’t you see? You decide who you’re going to be. You take someone else’s pain into yourself. Even when you’re taking, you’re leaving something good behind.”

  “The Hollows outweigh any good I’ve done. You don’t know what I’ve seen—I tried to put everything in the darkest corners of my mind. But there is no escaping what is in here. I can’t dream. I can’t conjure Dez’s face without dragging another memory along for the ride. There are so many pasts in here that I don’t get to have my own. I shouldn’t get to have my own!”

  She walks up to me, and this time I can’t fight against her sympathy, her warmth, which I hate and love all at once. She pushes back my cloak, and the sea breeze is cool against the wetness on my face.

  “You were a child, Ren. You didn’t do anything wrong. I blame the damned Whispers. We should have treated you better. We should have been kinder to you.” She takes a deep breath to settle her anger. “What are you now?”

  “A soldier.” The answer is instinctive. Something I feel like I should say.

  “Yes, but you’re more than that. You’re not a child anymore. It’s time to stop letting the world define who or what you are. You are the girl who has always wanted to prove herself. To best everyone else. To show that she could carry her weight. You are the girl who saved me from a man who would have tortured me for days. You were willing to trade places with me. Why can’t you see that girl?”

  “Because—” The words are on the tip of my tongue. I see it now. More clearly than I ever have before. I don’t know if it’s the fresh air, or the magics that Sayida weaves with just her presence. But I see myself. Not as a single person but as hundreds, thousands of fractures, like a mirror with so many cracks spreading from the center that it can’t reflect a whole image. “Because I have more stolen memories than ones of my own making. Because I have lived hundreds of stolen lives, and I’m afraid to live my own.”

  Who is Renata Convida?

  “I don’t know who I am, Sayida. Not truly. It’s like who I am is trapped beneath the tragedies that belong to everyone else. There’s only one way I’ll be free of this.”

  She rests her hand on my face and in this moment, I am thankful I didn’t get far from this house. “Then maybe, before you can do anything else, you have to let her out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can help you try again.” She holds her hand out for me to take.

  When I take it, the warmth of her magics trail along my skin, and my own memories begin to flood in, bright and colorful, but the suffocation I usually feel is gone. The fear, the guilt, the darkness, at last, are cracking open, making space for me to breathe. I want to weep with the relief of it.

  And so, tentatively, delicately, I wade forward, and the first memory that comes to mind is falling asleep in my father’s arms in front of the fireplace.

  That’s quickly overpowered by the heat of a fire. All burning villages smell the same. Leonesse scream as the king’s men set fire to houses, trying to smoke out the Moria from their homes and into the streets to be captured. My lungs tighten.

  “Focus,” Sayida whispers, and sends another push of magics through me.

  I close my eyes, but my thoughts are jumbled. I see thousands of strangers. I walk hundreds of paths across the country, across the sea.

  “Ren.” Her voice is a susurration, a kiss on my temples.

  My head aches, as if I’m carving deeply into it, prying open bone to delve into the core of my mind. I remember being six years old, new to the palace. Justice Méndez handing out stellitas like they were gold pesos every time I told him a “story.” The stories always came after I stole the memory of captured Moria, prisoners who scared me with their tear-reddened eyes. But I knew, I knew that every memory came with a reward. The memory changes, and then I’m in my favorite place in the palace, in that library. There was a couch in front of the tallest window I’d ever seen. Deep in the distance, where I knew my home village was, there was a great fire that consumed every part of it.

  Those memories are the things that define me. They made me into who I am.

  You were born serious. Dez’s face comes to mind. His honey eyes linger on my lips, always. But no, I was not born serious. I was made that way.

  The memories unfold faster now. Within the palace there was a long blue hallway. When the justice was too busy and my attendant fell asleep, I wandered around. Large statues decorated halls vaster than any home I’d ever been in. There was a study with a boy in clothes dirty from chores. He was always alone, playing with dice. He’d roll them onto the floor, and then they’d vanish. Then he’d cup his hands over them and make them reappear. It was the simplest magic. It was the first time I was around other Moria children who were not my family. I didn’t even know how many kinds of magics we possessed.

  After a while, the boy disappeared, like so many of the others. Then one day, the Whispers came and I was gone.

  Even now, I can hear the rattle of the dice, like great echoes in my thoughts. A trick of the mind. All of it was a trick, wasn’t it? Simple. Easy. Unfair.

  I see that girl unwrapping sweets in the library, staring at the fire that killed her parents. I see that girl, and I wish I could hold her and tell her that she couldn’t have known. That no one taught her better, that no one was there to protect her.

  When I open my eyes, Sayida and I are bathed in a white light. White like that Robári’s eyes—the one they made into a weapon to use against us. And I know that no matter what they think I might be capable of, I have to tell everyone what I know about this weapon, about what they’ve done to Cebrián.

  “Thank you,” I tell Sayida, looking deeply into her warm dark eyes. “There’s something I have to do.”

  Hand in hand, we go back into the house and call a meeting in the main room. The Whispers gather around me again. Margo and Elder Filipa watch me carefully.

  I tell them everything I know. How they experimented on Moria like Lucia and she is likely lost. About the weapon, the Robári, and what the justice has done to him.

  “We have to get Cebrián back. I don’t know if we can reverse what’s been done to him, but at least we can get him away from the new justice, whoever that might be. Take away their precious weapon before they learn how to make more of them. Before he was killed, Illan said there were volunteers for the mission. I’m asking you now to trust me.”

  Elder Filipa holds a hand up to silence me, and all of my hope that they’d listen evaporates. “You’ve done well, Renata.”

  I lean in, because I don’t think I’ve heard her correctly. Filipa never smiles, but her mouth quirks. “Thank you.”

  “You’re the reason why we can keep the Whispers alive. Are you ready to do what comes next?”

  Ever since I understood my past and what I was responsible for, I’ve wanted to figure out a way to fix it. Dez told me that I did belong, and that no one thought of me differently. But he was wrong. This is how I get a clean slate.

  “I am,” I say.

  Filipa looks to Margo, then to me. “Tonight you will lead a group of three to retrieve this poor soul before the king can do any more damage. We have to save him. Amina, Tomás, you will accompany Renata.”

  “I won’t fail you,” I say, taking Filipa’s hand. Even though she flinches, she does not let go.

  Her eyes are cold, and I tell myself that this is because of everything that has happened. Everything we’ve lost. She narrows her gaze. “Make sure that you don’t.”

  Chapter 30

  The others rummage through the house until we find clothes that make us appear like nobles. I wear a simple tunic dress over trousers and leather boots. Once ready, the four of us take the Tresoros carriage along the rocky path that lines the eastern coast of Sól y Perla.

  Margo and I sit on one side of the carriage, Amina and Tomás opposite us. It is strange to be part of a unit again, albeit a group of Whispers I’m not as used to. I draw back the curtain to watch Soledad
loom in the distance. It is built in the old Moria style, all pointed arches with large winged beasts perched along the rooftops. It’s high up on a hill where a cliff cuts cleanly down to a roiling, restless sea.

  “Did you know that the first documented references to angels were in the Song of Our Lady of Shadows?” Amina remarks. As Elder Octavio’s apprentice, she read as many texts as she could on the history of the Moria and Puerto Leones. Whatever hadn’t been burned by the king, at least. “About a hundred years ago, King Fernando’s grandfather changed them into demons, and turned angels into those fat childlike creatures the justices like to paint on their ceilings.”

  Margo reaches over me and closes the curtain. “Enough. This is our first mission as a unit. We have to remain calm.”

  “We are calm,” Amina says, tying and retying the knot of her hair. “As calm as we can be rushing into a prison no one has ever escaped.”

  I tug on my tunic, restless. “Go over the plan once more.”

  “Tomás will stay with the carriage,” Amina says. “While Margo and I clear a path to the south entrance.”

  “I’ll take the north side,” I say.

  “We meet in the center courtyard. From there, Gabriel said there’s a stairwell with a metal sun that marks the door to the high tower where the justices keep maximum-security prisoners.”

  “Simple enough,” Amina says.

  Margo shoots her a glare that could petrify. I know Margo, and I can tell she wants to remind the young Illusionári that she hasn’t seen the number of hours in the field that we have, hasn’t seen firsthand the way even the most straightforward of plans can go terribly awry, but now is not the time, and despite Margo’s courage, she’s sweating as much as the rest of us.

  I won’t fail you.

  Make sure that you don’t.

  It’s taken a full day’s ride to reach Soledad.

  I peek out the window. For a prison, there aren’t as many guards as I thought there’d be. We are still outnumbered, but we are not ordinary soldiers. We are Moria.