by Kova, Elise
“Yes, Martis. I am sorry. While it is no excuse, this past week merely has my mind preoccupied.” She made an effort to enunciate her words properly, draw them out even though she was so tired from days of double lessons. “I shall endeavor to be a better student.”
“You had four days off from your tutelage. You have six months—at most, likely less—until the parade arrives for you, and you are expected to return South with full and proper knowledge of your station. Now is not the time to add delays by daydreaming, however tempting it is to preoccupy your mind with all that has yet to pass.”
“I understand.” Vi folded her fingers, avoiding doing anything that could land her in further trouble.
“And you are by no stretch a bad student,” he mumbled softly. “In any case, perhaps a change of topic would refresh your energy for what remaining time we have.”
Martis crossed over to the desk opposite Vi’s. He shuffled through his papers, selecting a letter.
“Ah, yes, let us discuss the War in the North.”
“Did we not cover that last year?” Vi hoped she came off as curious rather than obstinate.
“Every year you can learn something more, because you are older, wiser, and more mature.”
“Right, of course.” Vi picked up her quill and promptly put it down. If she was holding any kind of writing utensil, she’d be at risk of scribbling cartography lines or magic circles on her page, either of which Martis certainly wouldn’t appreciate. “So what are we going to begin covering this year about the War in the North?”
“How the War in the North was a precursor to the rise of the Mad King Victor. So we are, in effect, drawing new connections between the two topics we have previously discussed.”
Vi tilted her head to the side. “The connection is plain, is it not? The War in the North directly preceded the uprising. It was the last war of Emperor Tiberius Solaris.”
“More than that. For it was an article collected by your mother during the War of the North that enabled Mad King Victor’s rise to power.”
“What?” He had her attention now. “But, the Mad King… he tried to slay my mother and father. My mother would not have helped him.”
Vi had seen the raised and angry scar that ran from her mother’s shoulder to the center of her breast. Vhalla had let her run her fingers over it as a curious child, and said a wicked man had given it to her, but never elaborated further. When Vi finally had a name for the “wicked man,” she never asked again.
The scar was not unlike the one on Taavin’s face, Vi realized. Then instantly shook it from her thoughts. She had to remain focused or Martis’s limited patience for her would run out.
“He did. But how he did it is of great import, for it was the start of the end of the Crystal Caverns.”
“So, how did he do it?”
“Do you remember the lore of the crystal weapons?”
Vi nodded. Long ago there were said to be four crystal weapons, one in possession of each of the unique geographical regions of the Main Continent. They seemed to be things relegated only to tall tales… yet two of those crystal weapons surfaced, marking the rise of the Mad King. But that was all Vi knew. As she conveyed the fact to Martis, it suddenly seemed a glaring deficit in her education.
“Just so,” he affirmed. “One of those weapons the Mad King Victor used was a crown that had been in your family’s possession for centuries.” Vi wasn’t sure how a crown could be a weapon, but she did know that crystals were strange, powerful, and extremely dangerous. “The other was an axe that was retrieved from the North.”
“An axe?” Vi repeated, her mind spinning, trying to recall every fireside story she’d been privy to and every mention of lore from Ellene. “Like the axe Dia, the fallen star, used to carve civilization from the boughs of the Mother Tree?”
“If you believe these Northern stories.” Martis’s sniff clearly conveyed that he didn’t.
Vi bit back a retort asking why it was so unreasonable to believe Southern histories of crystal weapons and a power that could turn men into monsters… but similar Northern oral histories were mere “stories” to be dismissed. Even if she felt in the right, arguing with Martis would get her nowhere. Vi had long since learned that some minds, once made up, could not be changed.
“I think, perhaps, it is more than just coincidence that an axe shows up in their stories and our history.”
“Yes, well, I am not here to speak about that. I am here to speak about what your mother has passed on to me in her letters.” Martis tapped a series of papers on the desk. What Vi wouldn’t give to leaf through it. But her parents’ correspondence with her tutors was as private as their correspondence with her. “She would have me tell you of when she retrieved this weapon with the intent to benefit the South, and protect it from falling into the wrong hands. But all she did was foolishly—her words, and I think them far too harsh—think that she could make the axe safer than its own people had by placing it in a Northern tomb.
Tomb. Vi sat a little straighter. She’d heard the word before, and recently. Perhaps too recently to be a mere coincidence.
“She was here during the encampment, and on the edge of the city…”
* * *
Ellene and Jayme were waiting when Vi finished with Martis. Seeing people occupying her sitting room was truly a welcome anomaly.
Jayme had made the long table in Vi’s sitting area her weapon smithy. She currently had a whetstone atop layers of rags; the sound of the metal sliding over stone made a soft yet sharp shhing noise that had the hair on Vi’s arms standing near immediately.
The young heir to the Northern throne was lounging on a sofa, clearly much less bothered by the noise as she hummed to herself a tune that was scribbled out on a sheet of paper. Vi vaguely recognized it as something she’d heard being sung recently among the city commoners. But she didn’t recognize the words.
Both perked up immediately on seeing her.
“You’re done for the day now, right?” Ellene asked eagerly.
“Not quite.” Vi hated to see her friend deflate, but there was nothing she could do. “I promised your mother I would work with her on something.”
“On what?”
What, indeed… Vi had been half hoping Sehra would’ve told her daughter something to explain their new tutoring arrangement, and spare Vi the lie she’d now be forced to think up on the spot. “Going over details for when my family comes to collect me.”
“That sounds tiring.” Ellene flopped back onto the cushions.
“But necessary,” Martis interjected from the doorway, pausing briefly to give Vi a bow. “Thank you for your work today, princess.”
“Yours as well.”
“I look forward to continuing our discussions. Hopefully, next time, they will not be so one-sided.” He gave a thin smile, and left.
“Rude,” Ellene muttered. “Is he allowed to talk to you like that?”
“Given all that I’ve put Martis through over the years, I’m going to say yes.” Vi ran a hand through her hair, sorting the carefully plaited braids.
“Careful, you give that kind of leeway to the Southern court and they’ll walk all over you,” Jayme said without looking up from her work. It sounded like something Romulin would say.
“I’ll deal with the Southern Court when I have to.” Romulin’s letters had painted the court as a garden of roses—fresh smelling, beautiful at a glance, but with thorns attached and filled with vipers at the root.
“An apt advisement, I’m certain Prince Romulin would say much the same,” Andru interjected, as though he could read her mind. Vi nearly jumped out of her skin. The man had an innate and unnerving quality to go unnoticed—which was unusual for a man as equal parts handsome and awkward as he was. “They can be quite brutal.”
“More or less brutal than the Senate?” The question left Vi’s lips before she had time to even think.
“That depends on who you ask.” Andru did not look at her when he spok
e. He was so transfixed on the other corner of the room that it drew Vi’s attention as well. But there was nothing there, and when her eyes swung back, his attention was solely on her.
“Senates and courts, boring and far away.” Ellene shifted to the edge of her seat. “Can you go over things with my mother later, Vi? The Winter Solstice market is beginning to set up and we’re going to see this year’s layout.”
“Given our incident in the jungle, I’m not going to push my luck.” Plus, the sooner she got these lessons out of the way, the better. Vi needed to master her magic and be done with all of this Yargen business.
“I could go with you,” Andru said suddenly. All three sets of eyes were on him. “I would be happy to see the market.”
Vi stared at him. Just what was he trying to do? She didn’t think for a moment he was genuinely interested in the market.
“It’s a girls-only trip.” Ellene spared Jayme and Vi having to turn him down.
“Any particular reason?” Andru was back to looking in the other corner of the room. But he quickly brought his eyes back to Ellene.
“You don’t ask girls what they’re doing during girls-only time.” Ellene laughed.
“Is there anything else we can do for you?” Vi asked, trying to give Andru a graceful out.
Luckily, he took it. “No, I shall be off.”
With that, he all but bolted for the door, head held high. The momentary discomfort Vi had observed was gone entirely.
“Goodness, he’s strange…” Ellene murmured. “Did they send him to try to make you so uncomfortable you’ll heed the Senate’s every word just to get rid of him?”
“You could be nicer,” Jayme chided.
“You said yourself he was unbearable on the road,” Vi pointed out. Jayme merely shrugged.
“Anyway! Back to the market.” Ellene was like a dog with a bone. It was times like this that Vi recognized she was just toeing the line between girl and woman, not decidedly one or the other. “Jayme is going to meet Darrus for the first time.”
“I met Darrus in the spring.” Jayme stole the words from Vi’s mouth.
“Briefly. And he’s changed so much since then. He’s grown,” Ellene said with a somewhat dreamy look, clutching the sheet music to her chest. That motion alone made Vi suspect that the song had something to do with the young man.
He hasn’t, Vi mouthed to Jayme while Ellene wasn’t looking.
Jayme hid a snort of laughter with a particularly swift movement of her blade over the stone. “It’s hardly been seven months.”
“Practically a year.”
“Seven months is more like half a year.” Jayme rolled her eyes and began to pack up her things. She paused, looking to Vi. “Should I go with you?”
“Go with me? Why?”
“I am your sworn guard.” Jayme had a small smile, one Vi hoped was from pride at the fact.
“I’m staying in the fortress. You go make sure this one’s feet stay on the ground so she doesn’t fly away with that boy.” Vi pointed to Ellene.
“Hey!”
“Understood.” Jayme gave a mock-serious salute.
“I’ll catch up with you two later.”
“Don’t be too long!” Ellene was off the couch, pulling Vi in for a quick squeeze. “If you’re quick, you can join us. But we’ll be happy to go again later, too.”
They were out the door in a blink. Vi wasn’t long behind them. One more set of lessons with Sehra… and then the real work would begin when she summoned Taavin.
Chapter Sixteen
Vi tapped her fingers along her drafting table, debating with herself. Martis’s words about the tomb still lingered in her mind from the morning. Compounding with that was some genuine progress made with Sehra, assuring her that another night of Taavin’s tutelage wasn’t essential for her at this moment.
She had promised him she’d hold up her end of the deal.
“Oh, fine, let’s get this over with then.” Vi threw up her arms and uttered, “Narro hath.”
She felt the connection thrum between them. It came to life with vivid sensations that culminated in an awareness of Taavin’s existence somewhere across the world. But, for this brief moment, that distance didn’t seem so impossibly large.
“You again?”
“Hello to you too.” Vi huffed at the curt introduction.
“Back for more elementary explanations on Lightspinning?”
“No,” she said firmly to the disembodied voice. “I think I know where this tomb of yours is located.”
Silence. Stillness. And then, with a nearly quivering eagerness, “You do?”
“Yes. I think so, at least… How will I know?”
“When you arrive, merely repeat the process of the last apex and receive the vision. If it truly is a place where fate was malleable, that should be all you need.”
“That’s a bit vague, don’t you think?” Vi mumbled.
“I think it’s perfectly clear.”
He would. He wasn’t the one having to conceive a way to get to these apexes. “After I do this for you, we need to discuss how to stabilize these glyphs. I keep losing them too quickly.”
“The fate of our world hangs in the balance and you’re focused on Lightspinning technique?” His voice went low, almost growl-like.
“The fate of my world counts on me learning this,” Vi insisted. She’d keep up her end of the deal, but she needed him to know that she wasn’t going to be distracted from his in the process.
“I think you need to—” Taavin never got the chance to finish.
A knock on the door startled Vi to the point of nearly jumping out of her seat.
“Vi, may I come in?” Ellene called through the door.
Vi looked at her skin. It was back to normal. The startle must’ve jostled whatever connection had been there. Given how he’d begun his final statement, the productive part of the conversation had ended anyway.
“Yes, come in,” Vi called back, lifting her quill in an attempt to look as though she’d been pouring over her maps.
The door of her library cracked open, and Ellene peeked her head in before emerging the rest of the way. “Maps? Is that seriously what’s kept you this whole time?” Vi couldn’t tell if she was frustrated or pleasantly amused.
“Yeah, I realized I hadn’t had a chance to incorporate my sketches from the hunt onto my main maps.” Vi felt bad for lying to Ellene. But she was in so far over her head when it came to this mysterious power that she didn’t even know where to begin.
Ellene crossed over to her desk, looking down. She dragged her fingertip along the winding lines that Vi had sketched weeks ago, the dry ink staying securely in place. “You really do have a knack for this.”
Vi glanced up, her pen stilling from the three strokes it’d made on the page. There was a softness to Ellene’s voice that Vi was unaccustomed to hearing. If she had to attach a label, she’d call it sadness, and that fact wrenched a corner of her, twisting to the point of pain. But the reason for Ellene’s sorrow or her own was unclear until her friend gave it words.
“Soon, you’ll finally see some of these places with your own two eyes.” Ellene’s finger tapped on the Crossroads in the Western Waste before trailing down to the southern capital. “It isn’t long now, until you leave.”
“We have a whole winter.” Vi caught her hand, giving it a squeeze.
“Don’t spend it here cooped in your room alone with your maps,” Ellene whispered. “Don’t let the idea of places you want to see, that you’ll see soon enough, take you from me in these final weeks that I have you.”
“I won’t.” It sounded like a promise, but Vi didn’t know if such a promise was fair to make. She could never control what consumed her attentions. And it seemed, now, that learning the magic of the world beyond was going to quickly absorb all free thought if she wasn’t careful. Could she go that quickly from merely wanting control of her powers to wanting to excel in them?
“Promise?�
� Ellene must’ve heard the reservation, too.
“I promise.”
Ellene was right; soon enough she would be taken away. Then, she would have a whole lifetime to spend in the South, years as an Empress going on tours across her territories to attach visuals of locations to the names on her map. She could find tutors for the magic that was already intriguing her, bring them from the Crescent Continent, if she must. She would have far more clout as Empress than Sehra had as Chieftain; she might have better luck as a result.
“Good. I’m going to hold you to it.” Her voice was much brighter, a smile sneaking on her lips.
“You already have something in mind.” Why was she not surprised?
“Well, you missed the market today with Jayme, Darrus, and I, and dinner. You owe us.”
Vi gave a snort of laughter and decided to play along. She owed everyone something right now it would seem. “Okay, I owe you… how can I repay my debt?”
“Tomorrow, after your lessons, come out with Jayme and me. We can walk through the market—show you what you missed—on the way to the outer ring.” The outer ring was the burnt stretch that still remained like a scar on the earth from the Empire’s occupation during the War in the North.
“And what are we doing in the outer ring?”
“Noru races!”
She suppressed a shiver at the mere mention of noru. After the incident in the jungle, Vi was quite content not interacting with the beasts again for a while. But she already promised Ellene…
“They’re the preliminary races for the winter solstice festivals,” Ellene continued. “Darrus asked me today to join the first heat with him. But, of course, I played coy and told him that I’d have to see if you were planning on joining. Since you’re the Crown Princess, I had to be deferent to you and all.” Vi snorted at the idea of Ellene showing her proper etiquette. Ellene clearly had the same idea as she giggled with laughter. “I was thinking we could take Gormon out—he’s faster than mine. Mother still insists I ride the old slow Stanos for safety or some such.”
