The Desert Prince

by Brett, Peter V.

  I pull back to look at her. “You’ve seen my da?”

  “Darin and I skate down there some winters,” Mrs. Bales says. “Still warm in Krasia during the cold months. Been a while, but your da asks about you every time.”

  The words hit me harder than the compliment.

  Mother clears her throat. She is holding a pair of polished goldwood boxes. One she hands to Selen, and the other to me. I open it to find a midnight-blue hooded cloak, much like the one Mother wears. A cloak worthy of royalty, embroidered along the seams and back with hundreds of silver wards, stitched in Mother’s flawless hand. I throw it around my shoulders and it drifts about like a breeze, then settles to cover me almost completely.

  Selen finds a similar cloak in her box, green and brown with wards embroidered in thread of gold. “Night, this must have taken forever to make.”

  “I’ve had time,” Mother says. “I knew this day was coming. I just thought it was a bit further off.”

  “Din’t make one for Darin?” I ask.

  “Darin has one, already,” Mother says. “The one I made for his father.”

  “Been to the Core and back,” Mrs. Bales says. “Kept me safe in the dark below.”

  “Keep them close, as night falls,” Mother says.

  “Even in places you think safe,” Mrs. Bales adds.

  I am out of patience for meaningless platitudes that tell us nothing. “Safe from what, precisely?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Mrs. Bales says.

  I look to Mother, reminding her with my eyes of her promise. Mother purses her lips. “The crown prince of the demon hive. The Krasians call him Alagai Ka.”

  “Hah!” Selen says. “Now I know you’re spinning ale stories.”

  “Anyone with half a brain knows not to take Tender’s tales on their face,” Mrs. Bales agrees. “But Alagai Ka is real. I helped your das capture him to lead us down into the demon hive.”

  My chest tightens, and it’s hard to breathe. I know the story as well as any, but every version I’ve read ends the same way. “Wasn’t he destroyed in the Deliverer’s purge?”

  Mrs. Bales shrugs. “Probably.”

  “Probably?!” I can barely form the word. Is everything I think I know about the war a lie?

  “Things got sticky when we reached the hive,” Mrs. Bales says. “Demon broke his chains and found a chance to cut and run.”

  “Darin’s father killed every demon for more than a hundred miles in every direction,” Mother says. “We hoped he was caught in the purge along with the others.”

  “And might be he was,” Mrs. Bales says. “Or run off for good, hiding at the edge of the world with his little stump tail between his legs.”

  “The dice are unclear on this,” Mother says. “To them all mind demons are Alagai Ka. But something has taken control of the remaining corelings, and it knows who you are.” She looks to me and Darin and Selen. “All of you. It lacks only opportunity to strike, and we must keep it that way until it can be found and eliminated.”

  My anger is doused by cold fear. Can I never leave the greatward again?

  Mrs. Bales puts her hands on her hips. “It’s a mistake, not bringin’ Olive’s da into this.”

  Mother shakes her head. “If we use magic to communicate over the miles, there’s a chance the mind might intercept it.”

  Mrs. Bales rolls her eyes but doesn’t argue. “Then I’ll just skate down there and tell him to come. He can travel almost as fast as me.”

  Again, Mother shakes her head. “Inevera will never allow it. She…doesn’t trust us together.”

  “Ay, hear that can happen when you stick a woman’s husband behind her back,” Mrs. Bales says. “Want them both in any event.”

  Unbelievably, Mother accepts the barb. “I don’t trust her any more than she does me.” She removes the dice from the pouch at her waist and moves to her casting table, goldwood coated with pristine white felt, edges raised to prevent dice from rolling off. “I can cast as well as Inevera.”

  Mrs. Bales snorts. “Ay, well. Let’s be on with it, then.”

  Mother’s dice look nothing like Favah’s. The art of foretelling requires seven alagai hora, dice carved out of demonbones, each with a different shape and number of sides. Wards carved onto every face focus their power and tell a tale of what might be, for those trained to see it. I’ve never had the gift—much to Favah’s sorrow—but Mother is famed for hers.

  Dama’ting Favah’s dice are black demonbone, smooth as polished obsidian, while the duchess has coated hers in priceless electrum, the only metal that can hold and conduct Core magic without loss. They glitter like silver in one of her hands. Instead of a hanzhar, she holds a surgical lance in the other.

  “Olive, let’s start with you.”

  I sigh, holding out my arm. Mother has the process down to a ritual. She disinfects the pad of my left index finger, then uses the lance to pierce a tiny scar, the precise place she’s taken blood from countless times over the years.

  “Five…six…seven.” She squeezes a single drop of blood onto each of the dice, then puts pressure on the wound until it closes. It heals in moments, but the scar is always itchy. The duchess says it’s my imagination.

  She puts her hands together, dice clattering as she gently shakes them to distribute the blood.

  I’ve never seen the duchess pray. Even at cathedral services, she does no more than bow her head respectfully. A ruler must act in the interest of her people, she taught, not in what she imagines is the interest of the divine. But in the ritual of the dice, even Mother acknowledges a higher power.

  “Creator, giver of light and life, I seek knowledge of my child, Olive Paper of Hollow, whose father is Ahmann Jardir of Krasia. What is the source of the attack on Olive’s life last new moon?”

  As she speaks, the dice begin to glow, brighter and brighter until they shine through her fingers. She casts them down and there is a flash as the tumbling bones are pulled out of their natural trajectories by the wards of prophecy. They roll to a stop, throbbing softly with dim light, and everyone holds their breath.

  At least at first.

  Darin, Selen, and Mrs. Bales lean in, but I can tell the collection of symbols means little to them. After Mother studies the throw in silence for long moments, the tension wanes and they withdraw.

  Darin flits across the room, scampering like a squirrel to perch atop a high shelf of books. He seems far away, but I know he can see, hear, and smell better from that distance than most folks can up close.

  Selen drifts away next, helping herself to a cup of tea and a biscuit before sitting on a divan and putting her feet on the table. Normally, Mother would snap at her for that, but the duchess is so focused on the dice, she doesn’t even notice.

  Mrs. Bales stares at the dice long and hard, trying to pierce their mysteries. At last she huffs and moves away. She walks along a bookcase, running a finger along the spines before selecting a volume. She sits right there on the floor, curling her legs under as she begins to read in wardlight.

  “What do you see, Olive?” Mother asks quietly.

  My stomach clenches as I look at the dice. I recognize all the symbols, but I feel just as lost as I did trying to predict the weather with Favah. Every symbol has multiple meanings, interpreted from context, direction, and proximity to the others. Even after years of training, I’ve never understood how anyone makes sense of it.

  Mother points to where a die with a rock ward and a die with a wind ward have fallen beside each other. “This grouping was one of the first I ever threw, when Favah began instructing me. I was so sure I knew what it meant, and Favah called me an arrogant, idiot girl.”

  “Were you right?” I ask.

  Mother shrugs. “I was lucky. The future is a story, and there are many ways to tell the same story. It might not mean now what it me
ant then.”

  “What was that?” I’m unused to the sound of humility in the duchess’ voice, and I’m not sure I care for it. If she’s not sure, then what chance have I?

  “Rock and wind wards intersecting can mean a mountain.” Mother traces invisible lines where the ward edges of the dice would meet, then gestures back to the die showing the rock ward. “But the rock ward is upside down. What do you think that means?”

  “Inversion often means opposition,” I recite from the text.

  “And what is the opposite of mountain?” Mother asks.

  I hesitate. The duchess loves to ask questions like this one, treating my answer like some invisible exam. I hate it even as my stomach burns with the need to win her approval.

  But what is the opposite of mountain? A lake? The sea? The sky?

  I look at Mother’s face, silently testing each against her serene façade. If I think out loud, she will critique each guess, but however patient she appears, every question required to circle to the right answer will be held against me in the duchess’ esteem.

  I close my eyes, imagining a mountain. I’d never seen one until the borough tour, but I remember them now, standing proudly along the horizon. I think of their shape, how they displace the air around them. I try to imagine the opposite of that, but there is only air, filling the space that was once occupied by the mountain.

  Could that be it? An upside-down rock ward and a wind ward cancel each other?

  Again I look at Mother, testing the answer against her. The duchess loves trick questions that require a bold answer, but she also loves questions that are deceptively simple, masked in complexity. Creator help me, if I guess something bold and wrong. I think back to her exact words.

  The rock ward is upside down. Invert a mountain, and you don’t get empty air, you get displaced soil.

  “Valley,” I blurt, before I can overthink it.

  Mother turns back to the dice, but there is a faint hint of upward curl at the very edge of her lips. Mother is stingy with praise. When I was younger, these little successes would ease the burning in my stomach, at least for a while, but now I know better. This was only the beginning.

  Mother grills me for hours, as Darin and Mrs. Bales silently eavesdrop. Selen, at least, has given me a bit of privacy by falling asleep on the divan. The questions are endless, some simple, some difficult, and some deceptive. This is how Mother teaches. Not with lectures or books, just a slow interrogation with bits of knowledge dropped like breadcrumbs along the way.

  Mother leads me about the bookcases, pulling tomes of foretelling off the shelves and piling them in my arms. I consult passages as she directs, reading silently even as Mother recites them from memory. Then back to the dice for more questions, altering the meanings we first divined based on the passages I’ve read.

  Next she takes me to the stand on the great rug in the center of the library, woven into a perfect map of the known world, a globe cut and flattened like an orange peel. We stand between the mountains of Miln and the shores of the Krasian Sea, but there are whole continents beyond, marked only with their names from the old world—before the corelings returned. That was hundreds of years ago. Who can say what’s there, now?

  Such places could have been destroyed in the Return, or turned into something entirely other than what they were in the old world, much like Hollow and the Krasian empire. Or they could be exactly the same, unthreatened by a demon hive even as our lands descended into chaos.

  Mother paces the rug carefully, counting out calculations I deduced after ninety minutes of hard questioning. There was no hint of smile on Mother’s face then.

  I’ve grown increasingly nauseous as it has dragged on, and I fear I will sick up if things continue much longer without a break.

  “A mimic demon hungers beneath a city in an eastern mountain valley.” Mother speaks the words with finality. “Here.” She waves a foot vaguely over a valley in the eastern mountains, covering an area that might be hundreds of square miles. It was the country of Rusk, once upon a time, and there was more than one city—and Creator knew how many villages—in the area indicated.

  The book she was reading thumps to the floor as Mrs. Bales dissipates into smoke, flowing across the room to rematerialize right between us on the floor. I hop back with a gasp.

  “Mimics are like sheepdogs.” Mrs. Bales sounds skeptical. “They keep the other corelings in line, but they ent exactly known as great thinkers.”

  “Prince Iraven said the demons in the desert have evolved,” Mother says. “Mimics follow victims, learning their names, then taking the form of someone trusted to call out and lure them from the wards. They may not be master tacticians, but they are cunning.”

  Mrs. Bales nods. “Ay, and maybe the minds kept them dumb. Don’t want the sheepdogs startin’ to think for themselves.”

  “But if this one’s been on its own for fifteen years…” Mother says.

  “Then maybe it ent him,” Mrs. Bales says. “Just a wasp nest we need to smoke out of the barn.”

  I should be relieved to have the focus off me, but I feel even sicker. “Then why would it be after me?”

  Mrs. Bales shrugs. “Any mimic demon that survived the purge would remember your mam and me. If they smelled our blood on you—”

  “At the same time?” I hate to pick holes in an answer I like, but the puzzle doesn’t fit. “The tour was hundreds of miles from this valley. Tibbet’s Brook is hundreds beyond that.”

  “Mimics can dissipate, same as me,” Mrs. Bales says. “They can cross a thousand miles like skippin’ over a puddle.”

  Mrs. Bales looks at me a long moment, then turns back to Mother. “Girl’s got a point, though. Need a big rippin’ evolution to go from learning to say someone’s name to coordinating attacks all over Thesa.”

  A little bit of my tension eases. The need to impress Mrs. Bales is almost as strong as the need to impress Mother.

  “Agreed.” The duchess turns to eye Darin, still perched atop the bookshelf, watching and listening to every word. “We need to know more.”

  15

  THE FATHER

  Aunt Leesha is confident in her wards, and she ought to be. What Olive calls wardsight is just…sight for me. Always has been. I can see the way Aunt Leesha’s wardnet wraps around her library like a blanket, a glowing web impenetrable to corelings.

  Her sound wards, too, form a bubble around the rooms. Normally I could listen in on the servants in the pantry two floors below without cocking my head. Now there’s absolute silence beyond the wardnet. I might find it peaceful, but the unnatural nature of the quiet is disconcerting. Less like silence than a kind of deafness. There could be demons at the doors and I’d never hear them coming.

  The windows have no bars. The warded glass in the panes is stronger than steel. Even a crank bow bolt wouldn’t cause so much as a scratch. Secure in her keep, Leesha has left one of them open two inches to allow in the fresh air.

  I’m thinking about that window as Aunt Leesha suddenly turns to meet my gaze. Two inches is big as a wagon track when I’ve gone slippery. I could cross the room before she realizes I’ve moved and be out that window without slowing. The guards on the grounds might as well be hip-deep in water, for all their chance of running me down.

  I don’t want to know what the dice have to say about me. I just want to play my pipes by the swimming hole.

  Mam looks at me, and I know she sees the fear in my aura. “Gonna be all right, Darin. Won’t hurt.”

  Ent worried about hurt. I let out a breath, going slippery as I hop down from the shelf. Aunt Leesha’s library has a two-story ceiling. It’s a fifteen-foot drop from my perch, but I’m lighter when I go slippery, falling slower and with less force. Olive gives me a sympathetic look as I touch down and approach the casting table. Selen, thank the Creator, is still fast asleep. The steady rhythm of h
er breathing calms me as I hold out my arm.

  Aunt Leesha is nothing like the Herb Gatherer back in the Brook. Coline Trigg never stops talking—asking after folk, sending regards, and spreading gossip. Go to her with anything short of a broken bone and half your treatment will be a lecture on how you’re not taking good care, and the other half will be drinking some awful-smelling tea. Coline’s scent fluctuates with her mood as the conversation wanders.

  Aunt Leesha’s scent seldom changes. She always smells…focused. She looks at a problem, plans a solution, and then acts with quick precision to carry it out. Her normally gentle hands are firm as she lances my finger and guides it over the pyramid die, squeezing out the first drop.

  Looking close, I see my aura well and stretch with the droplet. Even outside my body, the blood is a part of me.

  But then the droplet falls, and a tiny piece of my aura snaps off with it. The glowing droplet strikes the electrum die and the wards pulse as they drink the light of my aura, absorbing everything there is to know about me. Maybe things I don’t even know, myself.

  The square die next, and on five more times, until all seven dice have attuned to me. Before the eighth drop begins to well, Aunt Leesha presses her thumb hard against the spot, closing the wound. “Keep pressure on that.” The words are precise. Economical. Inviting no discussion. Her mind is already on the dice.

  I like that about her. Why talk when there’s music to make?

  Olive steps close. She doesn’t say anything or take her eyes off the dice, but she slips her hand into mine, and I suddenly realize how scared I am. I’ve learned to tune out the sound of my own heart, but it is beating so fast it’s like a drumming in my head.

  I feel like I’m falling, and I hold on to what I can. I squeeze Olive’s hand and focus again on Selen’s steady, peaceful breath. I force myself to match her, chest expanding and contracting in sync with hers. Slowly, I begin to calm, heart slowing back to its normal rhythm.