Fray

by Rowenna Miller

  “I saw your work on the ship.” This was confirmation, not apology. The room seemed to constrict on me. The charm magic was too much, the light too brilliant, the realization too abrupt and biting that I knew nothing. The one thing that I thought I understood, no, that I thought I had mastery over—I knew nothing. Discovering charmed music in Serafe had been surprising, no doubt, but this shook me. “It was how I knew, for certain, that I had made the right choice in bringing you here. In moving ahead with our plans with Fen. You can do all that I had hoped.”

  Not now, I breathed. For now, only facts, no great plans for me and my skills. “And it’s still practiced here?”

  “You know that charm casting is not tolerated in Kvyset now. Once, it was permitted, behind the closed doors of the religious orders. It was never allowed outside the orders, and eventually the Church fathers grew… afraid of its potential. At the time of the schism, those who could practice were arrested. The Order of the Golden Sphere was, of course, hit particularly hard. Those who would give up the art were allowed to return, under an oath of silence.” She traced a gilded window frame. “Enforced by the removal of their tongues.”

  I shivered. “I’m not welcome here,” I whispered. “I should not have come.”

  “The schism was centuries ago. Yet even now, any daughter born with an aptitude for seeing the Creator’s light is sent here. Sons are sent to our brother house. The fathers of our order test them, traveling to the churches. There is a ceremony of serving at the altar at Midwinter—the Child’s Mass—and it is used to determine if the children see the Creator’s light. The Order of the Golden Sphere houses them and keeps them safe and stupid in service to a Creator who endowed them with gifts greater than the Church fathers would allow.”

  I touched the walls again, feeling as well as seeing the light infused in stone and mortar alike. The charm was not vague good fortune like I had manipulated on the ship; it was refined, for security, for safety, for endurance. “The charm has held fast since it was built?”

  “It has not aged in five hundred years,” Alba confirmed. “It has not crumbled or required repair since it was built. It has withstood hail and snow and direct strikes from lightning. When the door is barred, no one outside can open it.”

  “You didn’t bring me here only because you needed the resources of your house to contact the Fenians, did you?” I breathed in the beauty of the charm surrounding me one more time, acknowledging a masterful work of art that had long outlasted the hands that had made it.

  “If you can revive the art of casting among my sisters, you will have an army of light at your disposal.”

  And so will you, I agreed silently. Alba stood to gain much by allying herself with me—once the Order of the Golden Sphere unleashed charm casters for Galitha, the Kvys could not hold them back in their own country. And what of the darkness? Those questions would have to wait, I resolved. I had an ally who could help me deliver an army to my nation.

  “Sastra-set.” A young sister, eyes downcast and hair wrapped in layers of sheer white linen, held out a battered letter.

  Alba took it, then corrected the girl with a firm, “Va’rit-ma. Rit-na Sophie.” She handed the letter to me. “It is yours. Your correspondence will not be subject to inspection here.”

  The paper was stained and the seal smudged, but I knew Theodor’s handwriting as surely as I knew his face or his hands. I prized up the seal, unfolding the letter like the precious artifact, borne over time and distance, that it was.

  “They’re safe,” I breathed. Theodor and Kristos had reached the main Reformist army at Hazelwhite, and had been welcomed by the flagging forces. One of us would have been, I think, sufficient to raise their spirits, but together we represent much more—a leadership, along with Niko Otni in Galitha City, who will direct them to victory, he wrote. I could almost hear his voice—cautious optimism, steady vision. My father refuses to parlay, and even if he did, I fear the Royalists would bury him in their name and roll on without him. And so we must fight. Sianh has already begun working with the recruits, training them in field maneuvering and tactics, and will be well worth his pay. Already light troops harry and pick at the Royalist forces in the south; a pack of “foxes” as Sianh calls them even captured a supply wagon with, of all things, gunpowder and turnips.

  I inhaled, slowly, breathing in hope. It will not be long, and we will be ready to meet the Royalists in open battle. And then, my love, we will need your light and your influence more than ever. We will need supplies, powder, shot, cannon. A navy. My trust is in you to acquire what we cannot win a war without. My hands stopped shaking; the gold circlet on my wrist ceased trembling. Theodor’s words were charge and assurance at once, promising me purpose.

  My brother and the man I loved were holding on to their lives by a tenuous thread, waiting for me. Waiting for a war only I could wage.

  I love you, he wrote at last. No flourishes, no grand words. No more needed to be said. I folded the letter and put it in my pocket, wanting to keep it close to me. A good-luck charm, even if it lacked magic, then turned to Alba.

  “Let us begin now. We have very little time,” I said, voice steady and hands firm on the charmed stone my fellow casters had laid before me. This was the foundation on which I would build.

  Acknowledgments

  I have so much to be grateful for, and so many people to whom I’m so indebted for their knowledge, work, and support. I know I didn’t get here alone, and I know I’m not going anywhere without your help!

  Thanks to my agent, Jessica Sinsheimer, for your continued encouragement and professional insight and genius soup recipes. Thanks as well to the rest of the team at Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency.

  I’m exceptionally lucky and grateful for the vision and talent that’s behind this book at Orbit. Sarah Guan, editor extraordinaire, thank you for your perception and for the best hard questions. Two-hour phone calls feel like minutes! I have the most beautiful covers in the world thanks to Lauren Panepinto and Lisa Marie Pompilio. Thanks as well to Tim Paul for a map pretty enough to frame. Thanks on the publicity side to Alex Lencicki, Ellen Wright, Laura Fitzgerald, and Paola Crespo (who, seriously, never stops selling books!). To the whole Orbit team, thanks for this incredible opportunity and for letting me be part of a family of book-obsessed humans with you.

  Randy, thanks for your love and support. I didn’t mean to write a story “inspired by real life,” but I guess when it comes to love and dedication overcoming separation, I did… ooops? No regrets. Eleanor and Marjorie, thanks for letting me disappear into a writing cave and have long phone calls about words and generally be a very weird mother.

  Thanks to my parents for being my first and biggest fans and for not having Twitter so you can’t post my childhood scribblings for anyone else to see. To my family and friends, your support means so much—every time I awkwardly garble my thanks for reading my book, I hope you know how much it means to me.

  To my sewing and history nerd friends, I hope you see your work in these pages. To my writing friends, I hope you know how much your kind words, check-ins, and Twitter banter mean to me.

  And to all the readers who have come this far with me, thank you! I’m continually inspired by your support.

  Discover Your Next Great Read

  Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors.

  Tap here to learn more.

  The story continues in…

  RULE

  Book THREE of the Unraveled Kingdom

  Keep reading for a sneak peek!

  extras

  meet the author

  Photo Credit: Heidi Hauck

  Rowenna Miller grew up in a log cabin in Indiana and still lives in the Midwest with her husband and daughters, where she teaches English composition, trespasses while hiking, and spends too much time researching and re-creating historical textiles.

  if you enjoyed

  FRAY

  look out for

&n
bsp; RULE

  The Unraveled Kingdom: Book Three

  by

  Rowenna Miller

  The civil war that the charm caster Sophie and the Crown Prince Theodor tried so desperately to avert has come to Galitha. While Theodor joins Sophie’s brother and his Reformist comrades in battle, hoping to turn the tide against the better-supplied and better-trained Royalist army, Sophie leverages the only weapon she has: charm and curse casting. She weaves her signature magic into uniforms and supplies procured with the aid of unlikely foreign allies, but soon discovers that the challenges of a full-scale war are far greater than the entrepreneurial concerns of her small Galatine dress shop. The fractured leadership of the Reformist army must coalesce, the people of Galitha unite against enormous odds, and Sophie create more than a little magical luck in order to have a chance of victory.

  The autumn sun had ripened the berries in the hedgerows of the Order of the Golden Sphere, dyeing them a rich ruddy purple. The juices, a red more brilliant than even the best scarlet silk, stained my fingers as I plucked them from the deep brambles. Within several yards in any direction, novices of the order filled baskets of their own. A wheat-haired girl with pale-honey eyes had a smear of berry red across the front of her pale gray gown. She sighed and adjusted her starched white veil, leaving another red streak.

  I stifled a laugh, then sobered nearly immediately.

  A war waged some hundreds of miles south of us, the sisters of the Golden Sphere were deep in study at the art of casting charms under my tutelage, Sastra-set Alba was making final arrangements for an alliance-cementing voyage to Fen, and I was picking berries. The futility of filling my basket galled me. I snagged my thumb on a large curved thorn; nature made needles as effective as any I had used in my atelier, and the point produced a bead of blood almost instantly. I drew my hand carefully away and wrapped the tiny wound in my apron, letting the red stain sink into the linen.

  Picking berries. As though that were an acceptable way to spend my afternoon, now of all times. I flicked the corner of the apron away with a frustrated sigh. My basket was already nearly full, but the bushes were still thick with purple. I knew what Alba would say—winter cared little for our war, and all the members of the community fortified the larder against that enemy. I wanted to rebel against that pragmatic logic. The ordered calm of the convent mocked me, the pristine birchwood and the gardens, teeming with autumn harvest, all carrying on an unconcerned life and inviting me to join in.

  The quiet, the unassuming, pacific quiet—it infuriated me. Probably, I acknowledged as I resumed plucking fruit for the basket, because it was so inviting. Here I could almost forget—had forgotten, in horrifying, brief instants—that Theodor and Kristos were overseeing skirmishes and readying for greater battles, that Galitha City, under Niko Otni’s command, held out against the Royalists pressing in on them from both the sea and the land. That my friends in the city could be killed under bombardment, that my friends in the south could be overrun on the battlefield.

  I wanted, desperately, to do something, and I was, but teaching the “light-touched” sisters of the convent how to manipulate charm magic was plodding, redundant work, removed from the immediacy of the war for Galitha.

  The novice with the berry-stained veil motioned me over. Many of the novices took temporary vows of silence, and though it was not required, there were some sisters who maintained the vow for life, on the premise that silence made communion with the Creator’s ever-present spirit easier. Despite long hours of silence, on account of having no one to speak with here, I was no closer to any such communion.

  I dropped the last few berries from the hedge into my basket and joined her. I raised an eyebrow and pointed to her veil; she flushed pink as she noticed the stain, and pointed toward the narrow road that carved a furrow through the forest.

  Still too far away to see through the trees, travelers announced themselves with the rattle of wheels. She looked to me with baleful curiosity, as though I might know anything. As though I might be able to tell her in the stilted, limited Kvys I had picked up in the past months if I did. The other sisters along the hedgerow noted the sound and gave it little heed, turning back to their berries as though the outside world didn’t exist.

  To them, perhaps, it didn’t.

  Before I could decide if I had fulfilled my obligation to the order’s larder, Alba crested the little rise behind the convent and strode toward me. Her pale linen gown, a more traditional Kvys design than she had worn in West Serafe, more traditional even than most of the sisters, floated behind her on a light breeze. The yoke was decorated with symbols of the Order of the Golden Sphere, circles and crosshatches and thin dotted lines I now understood to be references to the charm magic I could see and cast.

  The berry-stained novice bowed her head, as did the other sisters, to a sastra-set, but Alba wasn’t looking for them. “The hyvtha is gathering,” she said, using the Kvys word that usually referred to a band of threshers at harvest or a troupe of musicians. “Let’s see if anyone has made any progress since yesterday, shall we?”

  “Don’t tell me we’re disappointing you,” I said, deadpan. Trying to teach adults who had been suppressing any inclination toward casting since they were children was nearly impossible. Of our hyvtha of eighteen women and two men from the order’s brother monastery, only ten reliably saw the light, three could maintain enough focus to hold on to it, and one had managed a shaky, crude clay tablet. Tantia was proud of her accomplishment, but had yet to repeat it.

  Alba expected a battalion of casters capable of the exquisitely fine work in the order’s basilica, and I had one caster who struggled with work a trained Pellian girl could churn out at eight.

  The travelers appeared on the road, a comfortable carriage drawn by a pair of gray Kvys draft horses. “And those are the Fenians.”

  “Which Fenians?” I asked, craning my neck as though I could see past the leaded glass windows in the carriage.

  “The foundry owner. Well, his son who handles his negotiations, at any rate.” Her smile sparkled. “Your cannons are forthcoming.”

  “So we’ll go to Fen—when?”

  “I’m still finalizing the deal with the shipyard, and I’ve two mill owners on the string each trying to underbid the other.” She grinned—she enjoyed this game of gold and ink. It made me feel slightly nauseated, betting with money that wasn’t mine. My business had been built carefully, brick by precisely planned brick, and these negotiations with Fen felt like a house of cards, ready to topple under the breath of a single wrong word.

  “So. I will not be joining the hyvtha this afternoon. See if Tantia can explain her methods to the others.”

  “I don’t think the problem is my Kvys,” I protested.

  Alba ignored my suggestion—that her plan for a small regiment of charm-casting sisters and brothers of the order was farfetched.

  I rinsed the berry juice from my hands at the hand pump in the courtyard of the monastery. Stains remained on my fingertips and palms.

  “Pra-set,” I said in poor Kvys, the words sticking like taffy, hoping that my meaning, “very good,” was clear to the struggling initiate. Immell’s hand shook as she drew her stylus across a damp clay tablet, dragging ragged charm magic into the inscription.

  Tantia, who had managed to craft another charmed tablet, laid her hand on Immell’s arm, reassuring her in a stream of quiet, almost poetic Kvys. I couldn’t follow more than a few words, so I nodded dumbly, what I hoped was a comforting smile plastered on my face. Immell’s hand steadied, and the pale glow around her stylus grew stronger, brighter. “Pra-set!” I repeated.

  Immell finished the inscription, one word in Kvys meaning Creator’s mercy, which stood in for luck. The charm magic receded from her hand as she lifted her stylus from the clay, but the charm remained embedded in the clay. “Pra-set,” I said again, examining her work. It was uneven and one letter was barely legible even to my unschooled eye, but it was done.

  We wer
e still a long way from what Alba hoped for: a phalanx of charm casters who had mastered what I could do. A complement to the Galatine army, she suggested. A safeguard for her house’s authority, I read between the lines. And a challenge, to the laws prohibiting magic in Kvyset.

  A few simple actions, a few stones tossed into a pond infinitely larger than myself, and the ripples were still reaching outward, trembling and new, but intent on fomenting change wherever they went.

  Tantia and Immell were speaking in rapid Kvys, gesturing at the tablet. Another novice, Adola, joined them, and the three linked hands. “Da nin?” I wondered aloud. What now?

  Tantia slapped some fresh clay from the bowl on the table, forming a sloppy disk with her free hand. I was about to chide her—orderliness was supposed to cultivate the mind for casting, especially in new learners—but she picked up her stylus and pressed her lips together, squinting into the blank space in front of her.

  Light blazed around the stylus and all but drove itself into the clay, sparkling clean and pure in the gray slab. “Da bravdin-set! Pra bravdin olosc-ni varsi!” she exclaimed.

  “How did you make such a strong charm?” I asked, correcting myself swiftly to Kvys. “Da olosc bravdin-set?”

  “Is hands holding,” Tantia replied, bypassing attempting to explain in Kvys. “Hands. I put hand on Immell. She cast.”

  “And the three of you—you joined hands and your charm was much stronger.”

  She nodded, smiling. “Easy cast, too. Than before.” She thought a moment, then added, “Easy than alone.”

  “How have I never come across this before?” I sighed through my nose. Pellian charm casters worked by themselves, except when an older woman was teaching a novice. “You would think,” I began, but stopped myself. My time in the Galatine and Serafan archives had taught me that precious little had been recorded on the subject of casting at all. One would think something important had been written down, but that didn’t mean it had. “I’ll look in the archives later,” I promised.