by Cora Carmack
The men never seemed to notice. If they looked at the women at all, it was to stare or flirt or in a few instances reach out and touch. That was when Aurora saw the second male employee of the night. Zephyr’s lieutenant—the man called Raquim—was tall with dark skin and eyes that said what his lips did not. He had an uncanny way of appearing whenever a man tried to do anything more than talk to one of the women on staff.
Aurora was not sure how long she had been watching the ecosystem below her, studying the way it worked and thrived, before a tall form cut off her view. “What are you doing?” Kiran muttered, crowding her under his arm and shuffling them both back toward Zephyr’s office door. Before Aurora could argue, he had her through the door and shut away again. “You know you cannot be out there. If you are seen, you could be in tremendous danger. I told you that the patrols have been dramatically increased since the palace breach. All it takes is one person to recognize you.”
Aurora sighed, trudging through the office and into the bedroom next door. “I cannot stay in here forever. I need to do something.”
“Try resting.”
She snapped her head around to glare at him. “I am rested.”
Kiran held his hands up.
“What about a book?”
“I am tired of reading.”
Kiran raised an eyebrow. “You? Tired of reading? Are you ill?”
“No, but it does not help my mood when the only book in my possession is about a royal from a city that fell to vicious storms, especially when he at least got to do something. Finneus Wolfram braved an ocean looking for safety. I am braving a bedroom, while those women out there, complete strangers, mind you, risk themselves to gain information for us. I could be doing that just as easily.”
Kiran balked. “That’s ludicrous. There are some high-level people out there, from both the Locke and Pavan command hierarchy. They have most certainly seen you before.”
“I can wear a disguise. Those men are clueless. I watched them. They do not really see those women. They see what they want to see. And unlike the women working down there, I know what to listen for, and I will know whose conversations are worth my time.”
Kiran opened his mouth, his brows already set in a familiar straight line, and Aurora continued, “And don’t you dare forbid it. As if you have any right to rule over me because you are male, and I am not. If I am to rule a kingdom, surely that begins with the right to rule myself at the very least.”
Aurora stared at him, her chin tilted up slightly, and for a few long moments he said nothing. He just looked at her with the most confusing mix of anguish and frustration and something that might have been pride. Then he inclined his chin slightly and said, “You will have to convince Zephyr, but I am sure you will. You are remarkable in that way.”
A raspy voice broke in from the other side of the room. “She really is, isn’t she?”
Aurora gasped and spun around, the scarf on her head toppling to the side with the quick movement. Her mother was awake and struggling to push herself up onto her pillows, but her arms kept folding weakly under her own weight. Rora pushed past Kiran, rushing to her mother’s side to press her back, urging her to be careful.
“You are awake,” Aurora whispered, her throat choked with tears. “Oh goddess, I am so glad you are awake.”
Her mother’s too-bony fingers wrapped around her forearm, pulling Aurora’s hand down and against the queen’s cheek. “And you are alive.”
There was no stopping the tears then. Aurora could not fathom the pain she had put her mother through, the worry and grief her mother had suffered needlessly, because her plan went awry. If she had been brave enough to tell her mother the truth, if she had not kept so many of her fears about Cassius to herself—Aurora could not think of what might have been. There was no going back to fix her old mistakes; she simply had to do better moving forward. And this time, she knew that trusting people with her truth, the whole truth, was the only way they would possibly make it through.
Sometime in her crying, Kiran had slipped from the room, perhaps to inform the others of the queen’s waking. She took one of her mother’s frail hands between both of hers—it felt small and delicate, like a tiny bird.
“I have so much to tell you, Mother. Beginning with the fact that I love you so very much, and I am sorry I left you so worried.” She could not bring herself to apologize for leaving in the first place, not entirely, though she had plenty of regret and grief over the decision. She could have handled it better, left fewer people in jeopardy, prepared her mother in some way, perhaps. But she would not regret the things she learned and the ways she grew on that journey. She could not. “I had planned for you to receive a note explaining the truth of my disappearance, but things did not go as planned.”
Her mother listened through the evening and most of the next day as Aurora filled her in on everything that had happened, stopping occasionally when her mother’s body called her back to slumber. Aurora started from the beginning—from the way she had foolishly gotten wrapped up in Cassius’s flirtations, and overheard his true plans to control her and the crown. She left out details when necessary. Though she loved her mother, and she hoped by the end they would come to see things the same, she would not risk the identities of her friends and compatriots should her mother cling to her old ways of thinking about magic. They talked of the Locke family, and what occurred in the days after Rora disappeared. Aurora actually had to fill in some gaps for her mother there, using the knowledge she had gleaned from Taven. It seemed her mother had been incapacitated for a very long time indeed. They were sidetracked a few times as the queen asked for news of the kingdom, and how she had come to be wherever she was (which Aurora had refused to tell her). Aurora gave her the necessary information about the Locke takeover and the rebellion, and the Stormlord, but held her mother at bay when she wanted to continue asking questions about the current state of affairs. For one, Aurora was not entirely sure herself, having been cooped up here for days. Furthermore, she knew her mother would be determined to help against the Stormlord’s attacks, and she was far too weak to do anything but lie in bed for now.
So instead, Aurora tried to draw her into stories about her time in the wilds. She spoke at length of the changing landscapes, and the storms they encountered, and the emergence of her magic. That got her mother’s attention. The excitement that flushed over her features was almost enough to make her look healthy again. But Aurora was careful to weave her story slowly, leaving her mother in the dark about the nature of her powers as much as she had been, building to the discovery that she was something more than Stormling, something other. Though she hoped her mother could see the error of the prohibition of the natural magics on merit alone, she would make this about her if she needed to. If she had to make her mother choose between Stormling traditions alone and a free and fair way forward with her daughter, she would. Traditions and power and pride should not mean more than human lives.
Finally, when Aurora had told enough of her tale that she decided it was time to hammer home the truth to her mother, to prove once and for all that she would never be the perfect Stormling princess her mother had always desired, she began to unfasten the vest that hid her secret. She laid herself bare in front of her mother, presenting her truth with the light that beat in her breast.
“You see, when I took my first Stormheart, it did not happen for me like the others. The emotions I had been experiencing, the violent bursts when storms were near, they were unintentional uses of spirit magic. The old tribes were right. It is unrestful souls of the dead that truly lie at the heart of a storm, and somehow because I have a natural connection both to souls and to storms, I took the storm’s heart, the lost soul, into myself instead of gaining a talisman for use with magic.”
Aurora’s mother looked at her in wonderment and confusion. She reached out a finger, hesitating before she reached the skin where skyfire streaked underneath. “Does it hurt?” her mother asked.
�
��Not anymore.”
Her mother’s eyes lifted to hers. “But it did.”
Aurora shrugged. “I took another soul into my own. That kind of conquering comes at a cost.”
“But what does it mean?” Aurora’s mother asked, gesturing at the phenomenon in front of her.
Rora hesitated, unsure how her mother would react to the next piece of news. “You remember what I told you of the Stormlord? How he is said to have the ability to conjure storms at his bidding?”
The queen nodded. “I am still not sure I believe it. He is probably another one of those hunters, using fear to intimidate in my absence.”
“He is not a hunter, Mother.” Aurora flexed her fingers, trying to summon the same feeling of urgency she had felt in the palace when she had shocked the maid into giving them answers. At first, she only got a tiny spark, then the hair on her arms began to stand on end, and bright white light shot from the tip of her forefinger to her thumb in one strong, steady bolt. A few smaller branches arced around her fingers, zigzagging back and forth with a series of crackling pops. “He can call storms, Mother. As can I.”
To rule fire was to be the mediator of all magics—the closest thing to the law in days of endless chaos.
—An Examination of the Original Magics
15
The bed was on fire.
Nova was kicking and screaming, but her limbs were tied down to the posts and the linens were blazing, her clothes right along with them. The entire mattress below her was an eruption of flame, but she could not get away. Nor was she burning. And beyond her watering eyes and the billowing clouds of smoke filling the room, she could see the face of Prince Cassius, cast in an eerie glow by the yellow-orange blaze.
He was smiling.
He knew.
He knew.
“Nova. Nova.” She came awake gasping, and bolted upright on the bed, surprised when her limbs came up easily at the slightest jerk. Only Jinx’s quick reflexes kept their heads from colliding.
“You are safe,” Jinx assured her over Nova’s fast, gulping breaths. “You were beginning to make noise. I did not want to bring in the guards.”
Nor did Nova. She was grateful that they had largely been left alone the last few days. She had even managed to relax some in the daytime. But she had little control over where her mind wandered during the night, and it never failed to venture toward the worst of scenarios.
Jinx reached out, and Nova jerked backward before the other witch’s hand could land on her arm where it had been heading. “Don’t,” she said. “I am not under control.”
Jinx tilted her head, those large eyes of hers seeing too much. “Is that a common occurrence for you?”
Nova closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, on the in-and-out, the way her body moved and expanded. Each time she released a breath and her chest lowered, she imagined the fire being pushed deeper and deeper from the surface of her skin. When it was buried enough that she felt safe, she opened her eyes and looked at Jinx again.
“All is well.”
The earth witch maneuvered her way onto the foot of the bed, and Nova pulled up her legs to make room. Jinx sat with her legs crossed, her hands hooked around her knees. She looked less ferocious this way, with her feet bare and the entirety of her body folded up into a surprisingly small knot.
“Can you explain to me what happened there?” Jinx asked.
“It was nothing. I had a nightmare. Sometimes my nerves get the best of me, and when they do, the fire inside rises up. It does not know how to tell the difference between true danger, and the dangers of my unsettled mind.”
“So if I had touched you…”
“I might have burned you. I am not sure. Better not to take the chance.”
“I imagine that is how you have had to live much of your life here. Not taking any chances.”
Nova shrugged. “At least I had a life here. I could have been caught back in Taraanar or any number of times since then. It was a miracle each day I sat in that cell and did not set the entire place alight.”
“Perhaps you should have.”
Nova shook her head hard.
“You don’t understand what is inside me. You, your gift is about creation and balance and beauty. Mine is destruction. It is death. Even if it had gotten me free, it likely would have hurt many who did not deserve it in the process. I do not let it out, not ever if I can help it. Every time I do, it only brings worse things upon me and those I care about.”
“Surely you cannot resist it completely,” Jinx said. “I let out trace amounts of earth magic without even trying. It’s a natural reaction anytime I am close to the natural element. I feed off the earth and plants and the trees, and they off of me. I suppose with fire, you are not surrounded as constantly, but I assume you have the same natural propulsion as I.”
“I am drawn to it, of course. And the flames do rise closer to the surface when I am near natural fire. Also when I am agitated or emotional, as I said. But I have become quite practiced at burying the magic deep enough that I have at least some control.”
“Burying it?”
“Yes,” Nova answered. “It is the only way to be completely safe. I do my best to avoid contact with people, but sometimes the soldiers do not give me any choice. I need as many barriers between my magic and my skin as possible to keep from burning them.”
“So you do not touch anyone. Ever?”
“I have. It is just easier if I don’t.”
“But you shook my hand. I have touched you several times since then, and you said nothing.”
Nova felt an unfamiliar heat creeping up her cheeks. She checked her magic, but the flames were still safely locked away. It had nothing to do with that.
“I think it is different with other magic users. I was always more comfortable with contact with Aurora too, but I did not understand why. I thought it was because we were friends, and I simply trusted myself never to hurt her.”
“That could still be it. Magic is intuitive. It is a part of you. When engaged correctly it should flow according to your desires and intentions, not against them.”
“Perhaps that is how your magic works, but not mine. It has always been the monster in the depths, wreaking havoc no matter how I try to control it.”
Jinx peered at her, and Nova had to fight not to squirm under her attention. “You are so afraid of yourself.”
Nova smiled sadly. “You would be too if you knew the damage I could do. I saw a man’s face burn before my eyes when I was naught but a child, all because he had frightened me, and my magic did what it does best. My child’s brain reached out for help, as if seeking out a household pet for a protector, but I came back bound to a dragon instead.”
“Flare-ups happen to every magic user. It is difficult to find the right balance.”
“I cannot afford flare-ups,” Nova said, struggling not to let her voice rise in the dark room, lest she bring the guards upon them.
“Pushing your powers down as if they do not exist will not prevent them. It will likely only make flare-ups more common. You have to find balance between your body and the magic.”
“And how am I to do that?” Nova said, clutching her fingers into desperate fists.
Jinx held up a hand, palm up. “Let me teach you.”
“Here?” Nova asked, aghast. “You want to teach me magic, here?”
“I want to teach you balance and trust. You will never control your magic if you cannot trust it.”
“Then I will never have control, because I cannot envision a world where I can trust what is inside me, where I can trust a brain and a body that always seems to betray me.”
The earth witch must have lost her patience, for rather than continuing to offer her hand, she reached out and placed it on top of Nova’s balled fist. Spine straightening, Nova froze, but like before, her magic stayed dormant in response to the other witch’s touch.
Jinx said, “I know you feel impossibly alone. And I cannot pretend to know
what it is you have suffered. But at the heart of every human there is a secret or a lie. Sometimes those secrets are inherited through no choice of our own, like yours and mine and even Aurora’s. Sometimes we pile on lies for survival. Or sometimes we are given a lie by someone else, and we hold it tight, try to turn it into the truth, even though deep down we know it for what it is. I have a friend who thinks he does not deserve happiness, that all there is to life is danger and the fine line between life and death. It is a lie, but he has lived with it so long that he has convinced himself it is the truth. I think your magic is much the same. You had a horrid experience in your youth, and it convinced you your magic is something to be feared, which is a truth. But it should not be yours. Magic makes you strong, it makes you whole. That fire was given to you for a reason, because it is meant to balance you in some way. And the more you push it away, the more out of balance you will be.”
Nova’s heart was beating fast. She had never met anyone like Jinx—so sure of herself and her place in the world. She wanted to bottle the confidence rolling off her and keep it with her always so that when she needed it, she could pull it out and bask in it all over again.
“Will you try something for me?” Jinx asked.
Nova nodded, unable to even contemplate telling the witch no.
“Give me your other hand.”
Nova did so, and Jinx placed Nova’s palms flat against each other, pointing in opposite directions, then laid her hands over the outside of each. She scooted forward until both of them were sitting with their legs crossed, knees touching, Nova beneath the blankets and Jinx on top.
“Close your eyes.”
Nova followed her direction, though the steady thrum of her heartbeat had only increased.
“I want you to unbind your magic.”
“But—” Nova cracked one eye to find Jinx looking at her.
“It will be fine. Remember, you said it does not react to other witches.”
“So far. That does not mean it will not ever.”
