by B. T. Narro
“Out with it!” Reuben demanded.
“It’s very difficult to speak about,” she said quietly.
I suddenly had the feeling that Remi might’ve had a more traumatic past than any of us. I mean, she had clearly fled from her husband. There was probably a good reason for it.
I could see others looking at Remi more apologetically now. They must’ve felt the same way as me.
“We have to know the truth,” Kataleya said calmly. “Even if it’s difficult to speak about. We have to know we can trust you because all of our lives are at stake. You do understand that, right?”
I was beginning to like more and more that Kataleya had stopped us for this discussion. All of this needed to get out, and better sooner than later.
I was almost entirely convinced by now that Kataleya was not the one working against us. Time and time again, she had proven how smart she was. She would never leave a callring in her room if she was the traitor. Never.
Looking at Kataleya more closely, I started to wonder if she might be older than some of us. She seemed more sure of herself as she spoke, and there seemed to be something in her eyes that tipped me off, though I didn’t know what it was. Sometimes I caught her looking at me across the dining hall during mealtimes as if she knew a secret about me. She never seemed shy about our gazes meeting, even offering me a smile here and there. It was a kind of confidence I wasn’t used to, though I certainly didn’t mind it coming from someone so easy on the eyes.
She dressed differently than the other girls as well, and I didn’t think it only had to do with the wealth she possessed. She wasn’t like Reuben—she almost never donned expensive robes. She often worked up a sweat while training with water and therefore tended to favor more close-fitting shirts open at the collar. She didn’t seem to mind that these same shirts accentuated her curves.
Remi, in contrast, looked younger than Kataleya. She had dark green eyes, almost brown. They were small but hard, her face taking on a look of grit as she glanced at the ground. She had light brown hair that was always curly and messy, not in the same wild manner that Charlie’s dense mop of blond hair sat on his head, but lighter, a silky texture to it as the wind played with it.
Her clothes were always loose and baggy as if she meant to hide behind them. Even though she spent most of the day working with fire and sweating profusely, she still seemed to be more comfortable with the extra fabric.
She was short, like Eden, but there was more tone and strength to her shoulders from what I could see. I had witnessed Remi improve greatly with the sword. She was naturally agile and a quick learner, but even Michael, who wasn’t learning as fast, could still defeat her easily in duels. She still had a ways to go to stand up against any decent opponent, her size being her worst enemy, if she did continue with sword training as I hoped she would.
Sometimes I wondered if a smaller weapon might be better for the talented fire mage, but I had enough to worry about without getting involved. I skipped Leon’s sword lessons, opting to practice my sorcery instead. I was sure after checking on a few lessons that Leon couldn’t teach me anything my father hadn’t already, and I was too experienced with the sword to get anything from practicing with my peers.
I had always admired Remi’s determination. And yet, there was something about her personality that made it hard for me to completely trust her, especially watching her train by creating balls of fire that hovered in front of her and then exploded upward into the sky. It was an unnerving sight.
“I understand,” Remi said. “What do you want to know?”
“Let’s start with who’s your husband?” Michael asked.
“No lies,” Eden added. “If we find out later that any of us lied about anything, that’s as much an admission of guilt as a running away from this conversation.”
Remi’s gaze wouldn’t lift off the ground as she breathed quickly.
“Just talk,” Reuben told her angrily.
She still wouldn’t.
“Speak!” he yelled. “Only liars take time to think. Tell us who you are married to!”
“Gerald Ryler, like Charlie said!” she shouted back. “My family promised me to him when I was ten.”
“Oh god,” Charlie said in disgust.
“No, we didn’t marry when I was ten. I was fourteen when we did.”
“Oh god,” Michael echoed. “That’s not much better.”
“There was nothing I could do about it!” she shot back. “I tried to talk my parents out of it, but they wouldn’t listen. I never liked Gerald.”
“Then why did your parents make you marry him?” Michael asked.
“Because his family offered, and they were worried no one else would marry me. I was…an odd child, and there weren’t many boys around my age.”
She stopped at that.
“Keep going,” Reuben said without sympathy.
She told the ground, “Gerald turned out to be much worse than I thought. So I…ran away soon after we were married.”
“From where?” Reuben asked.
“From where I grew up. Granlo.”
“Never heard of it,” Reuben said skeptically.
“It exists,” Kataleya told him. “It’s a small village about five miles northwest of Newhaven. Keep going, Remi.”
“I had to get away, but I didn’t know where to go.” She paused. “I ended up running to Newhaven.”
“How old were you?” Reuben asked.
“Fourteen.”
“And how old are you now?” he asked.
“Seventeen.”
So she was one year younger than me. I didn’t know how much older Kataleya was, but I highly doubted she was seventeen like Remi.
Reuben continued his questioning. “Where did you spend the last three years?”
“In Newhaven.”
“What did you do to stay alive?”
“I’m…getting to that.”
“No. What did you do? Answer!”
“I did many things!”
“Say them!”
“I begged! I performed jobs, any job I could. I had no home. It was horrible!”
“What jobs?” Reuben pushed.
“I washed clothes. I swept floors. I moved goods.”
“You’d rather do that, with no home, than live in a house with your husband?” Reuben shouted. “You really expect me to believe this?”
“I don’t care what you believe, Reuben. You don’t know what it’s like to be a fourteen-year-old girl who is forced to marry someone much bigger and stronger, who thinks he has the right to do whatever he wants to you.” She broke out in tears as she collapsed and put her hands over her face.
“He was big,” Charlie added, in monotone. “And definitely not fourteen.”
Kataleya bent down beside Remi and put her hand on Remi’s back. “I’m sorry for Reuben. You’re right that he doesn’t understand, but we do.”
“We do,” Aliana agreed.
“I’ll give Gerald a swift kick between his legs if we ever meet him,” Eden said. “That’s a promise.”
Remi stopped crying and slowly rose to her feet. She wiped her tears. It was hard to believe this was an act.
“It gets worse,” Remi said coldly. “But…I really don’t want to continue.”
“You have to,” Reuben said.
“My life is finally good now!” she replied with sudden anger. “I would never do anything to jeopardize what I have. Every day I think about how lucky I am that I’ve come to the castle. I don’t care that we have to fight. The kind of danger we face is not anything compared to what I’ve faced already. Now I’m strong. I can stand up for myself. Why would I throw all of this away and work with Cason? There’s nothing for me to gain out of it.”
“Unless all of that is a lie,” Reuben muttered.
“It’s not a lie!” Remi shouted, her face red.
“How did you end up in the castle then?” Reuben asked. “You have to at least tell us that. How did you learn magi
c if you were homeless?”
I added, “And how much does the king know about this?”
She answered me first. “He knows everything I’ve told you and more. He knows my birth name. He knows my past. He allowed me to divorce Gerald without seeing him again. I’m not legally married anymore, but my legal name is still Veronica Ryler. No one can change their surname outside a marriage. He said it would cause too many problems with the record keepers, and he wasn’t going to create a lie just for me to have a new name.”
“Couldn’t you go back to your old name?” I asked, not knowing the rules of divorce here. Where I came from, only adultery or death could dissolve a marriage legally, but then the name of the woman was changed back.
Remi looked down as if embarrassed. “My name was Ryler before I married.”
“Oh god!” Michael repeated again.
“Are you saying what I think you are?” I asked.
She shook her head. “The only way we’re related is because Gerald’s grandfather is my great-grandfather,” she said. “We don’t share anyone else in our family tree.”
“So what does that make you?” Michael asked.
“It doesn’t matter. I won’t see him again. He came to Newhaven eventually to look for me, but he didn’t try very hard. I’m sure he’s given up by now.”
“So the king let you go by Remi?” I figured.
“Yes. I never planned on telling anyone any of this, but I had to tell the king and Barrett because my identification papers have my birth name. I prefer the name Remi now, and I would appreciate if you all continued to call me that.”
I didn’t want to think of her as Veronica anyway. The name didn’t seem to suit her.
“You still haven’t explained how you learned magic,” Reuben said. “You already knew you would specialize in fire before you were tested. I remember.”
“I remember that as well,” Charlie echoed.
Remi looked down again.
“Stop delaying and answer,” Reuben demanded. “You’ve always been too reticent, just like someone who is trying to hide their traitorous ways from us. Explain yourself already! How did you learn how to make fire with sorcery if you were homeless and couldn’t afford lessons?”
“I got lucky.” She glanced at Reuben from the tops of her eyes. “I met a fire mage who needed a servant.”
“Which fire mage?”
“Josef Webb.”
“Him?” Reuben asked incredulously. “You can’t be telling the truth.”
“I’m getting tired of you doubting me,” she warned him in a cold tone. “Everything I’m saying is true. At least wait until I’m done to spew your nonsense. Yes, Josef Webb. I happened to run into him when he needed someone to wash and clean up after him when his last servant unexpectedly quit.”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“A well-known fire mage,” Michael answered for me. “Well-known for his attitude, at least.”
“Yes, it didn’t take long for me to realize that he didn’t care about anyone or anything but money and fame,” Remi said. “But he let me stay with him, and he paid me. It was a better life than I’d had for a long while.”
“I did hear that Josef had hired a young servant girl,” Kataleya said. “Everyone was talking about it for a while. It didn’t look good for him, but soon we’d all forgotten.”
“Oh that’s right,” Reuben said. “They said she was fifteen.”
“I was sixteen,” Remi corrected him. “That’s when I started to feel mana for the first time. I immediately knew what it was, because I had learned a few things watching Josef go about town and provide fire for money. He spoke about mana and sorcery frequently to his clients, but only to make himself seem like a more powerful sorcerer than he was. I tried to learn what I could from him. I requested lessons when he had time, but…”
She started to chew on her thumbnail as her gaze drifted. “He wasn’t going to teach me anything, so I taught myself,” she told the ground. “I learned from him and then taught myself,” she repeated, looking up again. “It wasn’t hard. Like Eden said about enchanting, I found that I had a knack for fire.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” Reuben said.
“I’m not!”
“You are!” he countered.
I actually agreed with Reuben. Remi had not taught herself, that part was a lie.
“Who taught you?” I asked.
“You too, Jon?” Aliana asked me. “She’s being honest.”
“I am!” Remi said, looking like she wanted to cry but couldn’t.
“I don’t believe her,” I admitted.
“Yeah, I agree with Jon and Reuben,” Michael said.
“You don’t have to tell us, Remi,” I said, then lifted my hand as Reuben started to interrupt me, “But,” I continued, “we will consider you a suspect unless we can trust you.”
She held my gaze for a long while before she swung her head around in a quick rotation. “All right, I lied about one thing because I really don’t want to talk about it. I offered a trade to Josef, for his instruction. Can we just leave it at that?”
“What did you trade?” Charlie asked.
“Oh, Remi,” Kataleya said pitifully.
“I was desperate to learn more,” she told the ground again.
“What did she trade?” Charlie asked again.
Michael whispered something in his ear.
“Why is that so bad?” Charlie asked when Michael was done.
“It’s bad that Josef would put a girl in that position,” Michael said, then told Remi, “He should’ve taught you without that. I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “It didn’t take me long to realize that he didn’t have much to teach me anyway, but I did learn the basics of mana and spell casting. I left and found other work as I practiced. I was working at an inn a year later when Barrett showed up one day asking the innkeeper if he knew of any young sorcerers who were looking for an opportunity. I was lucky I overheard, because the innkeeper lied about me. He said he didn’t know of any even though he was aware I could make fire, but he didn’t realize I was listening. So that’s it.”
It was more than I’d heard Remi speak in all the time I’d known her. But from the breath of relief she blew out, it seemed like she might go a long while before sharing that much again.
I still felt like she was keeping something in. It might’ve been a small piece of her story that didn’t matter, that only made her feel bad to remember, or it could’ve been something more dangerous to the rest of us. But could she really have a connection to Kataleya’s father or the Priggs? I believed her story to be accurate, even if she might’ve left out a detail or two. From what I knew about Newhaven, commoners—especially those with nothing, like Remi—never found themselves in the company of nobles.
But I trusted that the king knew everything he needed to about this girl who was one year younger than me, who seemed to have lived through more trauma than all of us combined. Michael and I had both lost our fathers. Charlie never had real parents who cared about him. Aliana’s father was absent through her whole life, and it sounded like Eden had her own problems with her father. But the things that Remi went through sounded worse than I could even imagine.
It made me want to trust her. She really did have the most to lose. There was nothing for her to go back to. And yet, I just couldn’t bring myself to trust her completely, but I also couldn’t bring myself to trust anyone here completely except for Charlie. Though I was beginning to feel closer to Kataleya after all of this.
I wanted to believe Michael was innocent because he was my good friend, but I had to admit to myself that even he could be playing us. Somebody was an incredibly talented liar. That was almost a fact.
“So is Remi the traitor?” Charlie asked.
“All we know is that she could be,” Reuben said. “I’m sure I don’t need to share my history. Like Kataleya, most of the affairs of our families are public. We were recruited by the king.”
“Which is why you, more than anyone, should believe that I’m innocent,” Kataleya said.
“But a callring wasn’t found in my room, and my father couldn’t have anything to do with stealing from tax collectors. My family only owns property in the city. If a crisis tax was imposed, the king would expect my father, like other property owners in Newhaven, to collect and deliver the coin to the castle safely and securely. If it didn’t arrive, it would be my father’s head on a pike. He couldn’t blame it on anyone else.”
I didn’t understand something. “Why wouldn’t Kataleya’s father be responsible in the same way for tax on his land?”
“The relationship of the Yorns with the king is different. They work closely together to tax and keep the peace across a vast area of Lycast,” Reuben explained. “And we Langstons make the most of our wealth from endeavors in the capital alone.”
“By taxing the poor and keeping them from ever having enough coin to purchase their own property,” Kataleya said.
“By making smart investments,” Reuben retorted.
I was starting to realize the details were not important so long as Reuben was telling the truth, which did seem to be the case, even if his phrasing made his family sound better than they really were.
“So that just leaves me,” Michael said. “Well, I can say that I don’t know any nobles except for you two.” He pointed at Reuben and Kataleya. “I learned a thing or two about sorcery because my father was a carpenter and was hired to do a big job for a sorcerer. Unlike Josef, this sorcerer was kind. Hemphry Flax. I’ve kept in touch. We met when I was thirteen, and I’m nineteen now. He’s no wind mage. Water, like Kat, but I still learned from him.” Michael scratched his nose as he made a sour face. “Hemphry helped me a bit after my father was murdered by a thief during the night. I still never found out who did it.”
“What about your mother?” Eden asked.
“She left when I was a baby. She never wanted a child. At least I had my father until a year ago.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” Eden said.
“I don’t think any of us did,” Kataleya said.
