Ignite the Sun

by Hanna Howard

  We must have stopped and made camp, but I had no memory of doing so, or of lying down to sleep. When Yarrow shook me awake the next morning, I felt like I was reviving from a period of long death. My whole body was stiff and screamed at me when I moved, as though my muscles had been subjected to terrible punishments while I slept. My legs and feet were the worst. I had never walked or run as much in one day as I had since leaving the Black Castle, and at first I was afraid I would not be able to stand at all. But Linden showed me how to stretch the muscles that hurt most, and after some work I could walk without agonizing pain.

  We started off again, following Yarrow in dour silence. The morning was as inky black as the previous midnight had been, and while darkness was nothing new to any of us, we were at least used to days that paled enough to give depth and variation to the shadows. This darkness was complete, and it was only by risking help from Yarrow’s Runepiece that we made any progress at all. A faint white light shimmered from the disc as we passed among the dying trees, some enchantment of Yarrow’s glowing and spreading around us like a mist as it wove into the fabric of the air. I didn’t know what exactly he was doing, but I hoped it was making us hard to find.

  Our pace was slower the next day, and I knew Yarrow was trying to make things easier for me. We kept as silent as we could, wrapped in the thick traveling cloaks that doubled as our bedding—all except Merrall, who apparently only needed her magic to keep warm; she slept curled inside a swirling orb of water at night and wore no cloak during the day. All the while, Yarrow wove his protection around us with the faint white light.

  It was easier to walk without tripping when I could see, but it was also easier to think, which I was loath to do. Instead of letting my mind dwell on my monstrous powers, my treacherous parents, Yarrow and Linden’s deception, or my death sentence, however, I deliberately reexamined things I already knew. Things that had gained new meaning since I’d left Umbraz.

  It now made sense why the Darkness inspired more dread in me than it did anyone else. I tried to remember what Yarrow had told me during those countless times I had wheedled stories out of him—stories I had tried to forget once I reached Gildenbrook. He had told me plenty about the old days—about the way sunshine looked on the trees, and the glitter of the sea at sunset, and even about sunchildren and the way they used light to make magic—but he always left off long before Iyzabel’s ascension and the arrival of the Darkness. I had learned all of that at Gildenbrook.

  Had there been clues in those early stories as to what and who I was, and I was simply too dense to see them? Yarrow had said he’d kept the knowledge from me to keep me safe, but I wondered now if all the sunchild stories had been his own small—even subconscious—way of trying to show me the truth.

  I frowned at the back of Yarrow’s bald head, haloed in white light from his raised Runepiece. In the carriage, he said he, Linden, and Merrall had only come to me in the first place because they believed me to be the sunchild daughter of the king and queen of Luminor. Bitterly, I wondered who had sent them, and how they had known where to find me. And—I wasn’t sure if I would ever have the courage to ask this question—did they want to stay with me, or had they been given no choice?

  What I knew about Yarrow and Linden now seemed pitifully incomplete. But was that because they had been so good at maintaining their charade, or because I had never bothered to think about the lives they led apart from me? Merrall had called me a selfish brat and a spoiled princess.

  Perhaps she was right.

  18

  CHAPTER

  Let’s stop here.” Yarrow’s raspy voice was startling after so many hours of silence. “I’ve disguised us as well as I’m able, and only time will tell if it’s enough. We need to rest in any case.”

  The light from his Runepiece had changed from a whitish shimmer to a more substantial gold that illuminated the clearing we had stopped in. He bent to place the stone on the ground, where it grew into a pale lamppost that threw light over us all in a wide circle. The forest here was much like everything else we had seen so far: sparse trunks rising into darkness, and the ground blanketed in dead twigs, fallen branches, rotting logs, and the occasional hardy shrub or pale stalk. Above us the sky was a deep, smoky color, bare branches drawing charcoal lines across it like bars.

  Merrall announced she was going to find a stream to soak in to refill her magic supply. As Yarrow explained to her how to detect the edges of his enchantment so she wouldn’t wander past them, I picked out a broad, flattish boulder and dropped my rucksack beside it. Then I lowered myself gingerly onto it, stretching out my swollen and sore legs.

  Linden had found a stump to sit on and was unpacking cooking gear from his rucksack. I caught myself staring at the long, muscular lines of his arms as he rifled through the bag. His woven sleeve strained a little, highlighting the curve of his shoulder, the lean cords of his forearm . . .

  I turned away, blushing, even as a sly, unbidden voice piped up in the back of my mind. But you don’t have to worry about Milla Nightingale’s approval anymore. You and Linden are both nymphs. You could even marry him now—

  For a moment the idea bloomed in my mind like one of Yarrow’s flowers opening its petals in spring. And then I remembered the truth: I couldn’t marry anyone. I couldn’t even touch another person’s skin without risking deadly harm to them. Miserable and disgusted with myself, I dug my fingernails into my palms and yanked my thoughts in a different direction. They landed on the subject that had been foremost in my mind all day, and before I could stop myself, I heard words tumbling out of my mouth.

  “So what now?” My voice sounded bitter and caustic.

  Yarrow looked a bit confused—perhaps he thought I was asking about food or sleep—but I could tell Linden knew exactly what I meant. I wondered if he had been thinking something similar.

  “You mean, how can you trust us, now that you know we’ve been keeping the truth from you for ten years?” Linden had been digging out a small firepit in the dirt with a rock but sat back on his heels to look at me as he spoke.

  I nodded, oddly relieved to hear him state it so baldly.

  Yarrow was pushing several logs into a circle around Linden’s work, and he lowered himself onto one before looking at me. A small crease formed between his wooly brows. “We told you the knowledge was cursed, Siria.”

  “But that was just one piece of it all,” I argued. “You still could have told me the truth about other things, surely.”

  “Could we?”

  Despite my bitterness, I gave this fair consideration. Each scenario I could imagine, in which they told me one of the wild secrets I now knew to be truths, I saw at least a half dozen ways for it to end in disaster. But I also saw one or two ways for it to end well. Would honesty have been worth the risk?

  “Even if I understand why you lied,” I said slowly, “it still doesn’t change the fact I don’t know how to trust you now.” I thought of my parents, who had never bothered to tell me I was their adopted child, and felt, if possible, even flatter. I wasn’t sure I knew how to trust anyone now.

  Yarrow nodded. “That’s fair.” He paused a moment, forehead furrowed. “Well then. Do you mind if I tell you a few things? Not massive revelations. Small things.”

  Apprehension coiled in my stomach, but I shrugged.

  “Okay. Here we go.” He fixed me with a very serious gaze and said, “From the time he was nine to the day after he turned fourteen, Linden asked me every day—every single day—if he could tell you what he was. And every day I wanted to say yes, because the more we grew to love you, the worse it felt to keep such huge secrets. But do you know why I said no? It’s the same reason he eventually stopped asking.”

  I shook my head, chest tight.

  “Because I knew—and Linden grew to realize—that we, the only two people in your life who knew the truth, would be taken away if anyone ever found out what we were. And you would eventually be murdered by the queen.”

  I swal
lowed.

  “A few more things,” said Yarrow, leaning onto his knees. “But let’s go a shade lighter. To begin with, my favorite food is barley stew. And Linden hates the taste of it more than anything.”

  The surprised laugh that burst from my mouth startled even me. “I know that.”

  Yarrow’s gray eyes twinkled. “I know you do. I just want you to know that it’s true. Here’s another one: I think that sun you painted when you were eight is the best work of art that’s been done since the overthrow. Other people might disagree, but other people are wrong.”

  I laughed again, but only briefly; a constriction was growing in my throat.

  “Here’s another one,” said Linden, the dimple creasing his right cheek as he tried to force a grave expression. “Yarrow only plays the fiddle so well because he can’t carry a tune in a tin bucket.”

  Yarrow gave a bark of laughter and tossed a stick at Linden, who grinned at me. I smiled back, but their reassurance was already being crowded out by more doubts and questions. They both seemed to guess it, because Yarrow’s smile faded, and Linden cast me a shrewd look before he said, “I know that can’t fix it. But we want you to see that our relationship with you was always built far more on the things we did tell you than the things we didn’t.”

  I nodded, trying to believe him. From the shadows behind Yarrow, Merrall reappeared, soaking wet and looking better tempered than she had all day. She sat down on one of the logs and raised a sarcastic eyebrow at me.

  “I expected you to be crying by now,” she said. “Well done. You are already braver than yesterday.”

  From Merrall, this was probably a genuine compliment, but it still rankled me back into speech. Even as Yarrow turned a look of exasperation on the naiad and Linden opened his mouth to retort, I said loudly, “There’s something else I need to know.”

  There was a rather startled silence. All three turned to look at me.

  “Who sent you to me?”

  Blank looks.

  “At Nightingale Manor,” I said. “When I was six. Who sent you? Was it these rebels in the north?”

  Both Yarrow’s and Linden’s faces showed understanding and a flash of guilt. I braced myself to hear they had never wanted to come at all and, like Phipps and Milla, had been motivated by an agenda rather than love.

  For a long time there was silence. “Yes,” Yarrow said finally, his gravelly voice weary. “It was the rebels in the north.”

  I nodded, trying to seem stoic.

  “They sent a pair to each of the girls who were with you at the ball yesterday, each of the children we, like Iyzabel, thought might be the missing sunchild. The hope was that we would have someone watching over each of you, who you trusted, ready to help you escape when the time came.”

  I felt slightly lightheaded again. Even braced for it, the truth was like a slap in the face. “Who we trusted . . .” I repeated faintly. “Would you have let me die on that platform if I wasn’t who you thought I—?”

  “No, Siria,” said Linden, dragging a hand through his hair.

  “What happened to all those other girls? Would you have helped one of them instead of me if someone else had transformed? Did their trustworthy mages just leave them to die?”

  “Siria.” Yarrow’s voice was a deep rumble.

  I stopped talking. Merrall was smirking at me from behind her curtain of wet hair, and I had a sudden urge to strangle her with it.

  “I don’t know what happened to all of the others,” Yarrow said. “I heard several years ago that a mage in Heraldstone had been executed, but whether one of the other girls was his charge, I don’t know. It’s entirely possible there were others at the ball beside Linden, but what became of them, we may never find out. But think, Siria. What did Linden and I ask you to do the night before the ball?”

  The terrible knot in my chest loosened minutely. “You . . . you asked me to come see you.”

  “To tell you the truth and ask you to leave with us. Before you transformed.”

  I stared at him, looking for hints of deception, though it was clear enough by now that I was terrible at detecting them.

  “It’s true we came to Nightingale Manor because we were sent there. But we didn’t spend time with you because of rebel orders. Linden didn’t play with you every day for six years because of rebel orders. I didn’t tell you stories or feed you dinners or teach you how to garden because that was some kind of edict from higher up. And we’d have rescued you yesterday whatever you turned out to be.”

  There was logic in what he said. “How can I believe you, though? You still need me because you think I’m going to defeat the Darkness or Iyzabel. How can I believe you actually care about me? Me, separate from anything my supposed powers can do, anything you hope I might accomplish?”

  I could hear the desperation in my voice, but not even Merrall seemed willing to mock me for it. I didn’t think I had ever cared more about the answer to a question in my life.

  Yarrow was watching me so closely he appeared unaware his glasses were slipping down the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, Siria. I think only you can answer that. What will it take? What do you need?”

  “I—” I broke off on a weary sigh, the answer coming plain and obvious. “Time,” I said dully. “It will take time.”

  Linden looked as if this answer was as unwelcome to him as it was to me. But Yarrow nodded. “Fortunately, time is not something we’re lacking. And for my part, I’d like to prove myself trustworthy by continuing to tell you the truth about your life, insofar as I know it. So if you feel up to it, there’s one more rather large piece of the puzzle I’d like to give you.”

  I could tell by the instant flare of resentment and mistrust at these words—there was more?—that time was absolutely the only remedy to the deep fracture in my trust.

  “Your teachers at Gildenbrook discussed the overthrow, I think?”

  I nodded warily.

  “Do you remember any of what they said about the royal family of Luminor?”

  My family. I shivered. “I . . . I remember they ruled Terra-Volat for a long time. Many centuries.”

  “But King Auben and Queen Elysia—your parents—do you remember learning anything about them?”

  Chills rolled down my arms and legs as I shifted my memories of Gildenbrook history lessons into this new context. I could practically hear the papery voice of our history mistress, crackling like turning pages as she told us about the corrupt, Light-loving family Queen Iyzabel had deposed. Along with King Auben and Queen Elysia, a crown prince and two princesses had died in the overthrow.

  But one of the two princesses had not died.

  I had not died.

  I stared into Yarrow’s face while the dark forest appeared to wheel behind him. “I had . . . a brother and a sister,” I whispered faintly. “W-what happened to them?”

  Yarrow’s face was taut. “It was chaos the night Iyzabel raided the palace. No one knows how your mother smuggled you out, or to whom, but by the time Iyzabel followed Elysia out of the city, your father and your older sister Kysia were already dead. We know that Iyzabel killed Elysia on the banks of the Elderwind and then went back to find you and your brother. You were already gone by that time, but the seven-year-old crown prince was nowhere to be found. Iyzabel didn’t learn until later that he’d been away on a trip with your uncle at the time.”

  I clutched at the rock beneath me, trying to keep the world from spinning. Six years older than me. A brother.

  “Iyzabel started her search of the kingdom after that, to purge the magical species, which she saw as a threat. But her other purpose was to find your brother, Prince Eamon.”

  My throat was dry, and my voice came out a croak. “And . . . did she?”

  Yarrow shook his head, his expression gentle in the light of the fire. “No. No, she did not.” He smiled. “Siria, your brother is alive.”

  19

  CHAPTER

  My brother—my older brother—was alive
.

  I have an older brother.”

  The rebel camp formed to protect him,” Yarrow continued. “And Iyzabel never found them. Eamon is twenty-two now. He’s still there, in the Northern Wilds. From what I’ve heard since we left, he wants nothing more than to see you safely among the rebels.”

  Yarrow was still smiling at me. But I didn’t smile back. Instead, I looked down into my lap at my freckled hands.

  “What is it, Weedy?” Linden’s voice.

  I raised my eyes, first to him, then to Yarrow.

  “I . . . I just don’t feel like I fit.”

  “Fit what?” said Yarrow.

  I swallowed. “This wild story, this history. A brother is . . . wonderful. But I don’t know how to be sister to a prince any more than I know how to be a sunchild. It feels like we’re talking about a stranger. I’m not those things.”

  I didn’t say the rest of what I felt, that despite their hopes for my new powers, I positively dreaded using them. Linden’s face was beginning to heal, but he would always have a scar where I had burned him. He would always wear a reminder of the horror I could inflict. And while a flesh and blood brother was more than I had ever dreamed of, he came parceled up with a list of roles I had no desire to inhabit: Long-awaited sun-bringer? Lost princess? Secret weapon of the resistance? It was like a bad dream, in which I only wanted to wake up someplace safe and comfortable while everyone else insisted on charging ever forward into new and more haunted territory.

  Yarrow looked sympathetic, but there was a familiar glint of iron spreading through his gray eyes. It was like watching clouds harden into stone. “Maybe not,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean you aren’t those things. You’re just going to have to learn, because no one else can be who you are. And we need you to be who you are, Siria. Terra-Volat needs you to be who you are.”