Lord and Servant: (Book I of the Elementals Series)

by Marisol Logan

  Suddenly, Daloes stopped talking. No more questions, no more guided meditations, and he reached for the stone with his wrinkled, pale palm. Veria handed it to him, and he smiled widely.

  “Oh, you are definitely in there!” he elated. “Nicely done.”

  With a pair of jewelry pliers, he set the sapphire into the necklace, and slipped it over Veria's head. Immediately upon falling against her chest, the talisman filled her with a strange sensation. It was just her energy, she thought, but it flooded her with keen focus and a heightened alertness. Suddenly, everything felt alive to her—alive with the same energy as her sapphire. Many small, seemingly insignificant objects called out to her: Daloes' gems from his fortune-telling tent seemed to yell to her that they were fake, a stack of books practically pulsated with the energies of past apprentices, and echoed with the depressing truth that Daloes had outlived all of them except Willis.

  Daloes studied her carefully as she experienced the hut with the new-found focus and energy of her talisman. He joined her in a small, surprised jump as she suddenly felt the letter—the letter she had almost forgotten in her excitement—pulling her in, grabbing her focus. She rushed to it, setting on Daloes' tea table, and snatched it briskly.

  I shouldn't be writing this. Gordon was a good man, I—I can't do this to his family!

  The thoughts were as clear as if someone were speaking them aloud. They didn't burn and sear her like they had done before, but whistled uncomfortably in her ears and made her spine shiver.

  “Are you alright?” Daloes whispered.

  Veria nodded silently. Another wave of of energy from the letter hit her, and she felt nauseous, but that just as easily could have been from the baby, whom she'd also forgotten for the day.

  If I don't do this, they will kill me. And he's already dead...

  She ran her fingers over the signature, her father's name and handwriting, but not her father's doing. It was as if the ink burned her fingertips, the heat from the lie that her father was the signer still freshly burning, even after the passage of almost two years' time.

  But what was the name? The truth had to be in there...if it wasn't Lord Gordon Laurelgate then who was it? She doubled her focus, drowning out the thoughts and energies from the letter and searching only for the truth behind the signature's lie. She clutched her talisman, hanging round her neck, and closed her eyes, feeling a fresh swell of energy through her body.

  “What is the lie?” Daloes urged. “Say the lie out loud!”

  “My father wrote this letter,” she obliged, and immediately the lie hissed and whistled in her head, and her talisman burned like a hot coal in her palm.

  “And what is the truth?!” Daloes yelled eagerly.

  “It was Cadit Ohren!” Veria replied, matching his volume. Her jaw fell open. How did she do that? How did she find that name? It just jumped out of her mouth...like it was just there, laying in wait for a conduit, for a messenger.

  “Good,” Daloes said, taking the letter back. “That is where we stop for the day.”

  “What?!” Veria protested. “I just—I just found out his name! I just made this talisman! We are finally making progress—“

  “We are not going to go after Cadit Ohren,” Daloes explained calmly. “We will have to find another way to continue the investigation.”

  “Why not?!” Veria yelled, her arms flapping in frustration at her sides. “Why make me do this? Why make me find this letter and practice on books and cooking utensils at my house for a week? Why make e go through this if we're not going to find the man who forged my father's suicide letter!?”

  “It was integral to your training,” Daloes answered.

  “We did not just do this for my training,” Veria snapped.

  “No, we did not, but Cadit Ohren is extremely dangerous, so are the people that apparently forced him to write that letter. So that is where this investigation stops, for now,” he said.

  Veria huffed and abruptly spun on her heels, making her way to the door with dramatic stomps. “Fine,” she spat.

  “I knew you'd see reason,” Daloes said with a confident, but gentle smile.

  Veria wanted to scream and protest some more, because she didn't see how any of it was reasonable at all. But there was no point, and Daloes was her Master. If he wasn't going to instruct her, then there was no point in arguing. He had made up his mind. She clenched her fists and gritted her teeth, snatching her cape from a hook by his door before storming through it and climbing angrily into her coach.

  She still fumed upon arriving back at home, coming in through the back kitchen door, not because she asked, but because it had become a habit of the coachman.

  But something was different. It felt like a completely different kitchen...

  The walls felt warm, and hummed softly and happily to her.

  The metal of the lanterns and the cooking utensils and the stove and the stone pot in the fireplace all alerted their existence in a way she had never noticed. They pulsed with the energy of the Earth. They radiated it out beyond their physical structures and beckoned her in with it.

  In her anger, she focused on the pot in the fireplace, and, negligent to what may be cooking inside it, imagined throwing it violently across the room.

  Her heart leapt as she saw it sway, like someone had given it a quick shove.

  Maybe the soup pot wasn't the best idea...Veria thought. Her pulse practically raced, pounding almost frantically with the excitement, but also with terror. What she was attempting to do was illegal, and could get her in a lot of trouble.

  But one little spoon across the room wouldn't hurt anybody, right?

  Realizing that the kitchen was too open to high traffic at this time of the day, and with the cook already having started a dinner that she'd likely be back to check on, Veria grabbed a copper spoon from the utensil rack and jaunted excitedly to her room.

  With chest pounding and cheeks hot, she set the spoon on her dresser and backed up several paces from it. She locked onto its energy, and tried to pull it toward her. It scooted, and shook, moving closer to the edge of the dresser, but not entirely lifting from its surface.

  She remembered vividly how Daloes had lifted the clay tea pot and soared it through the air with its accompanying saucer. She imagined that the spoon was just energy, not even a physical object, but just energy, with no weight, without any reason why it couldn't simply float through the air to her. She closed her eyes, clutched her talisman, and silently told the ball of copper energy to hover to her.

  Hesitantly, expecting to be disappointed, she opened her eyes after several moments.

  And there was the copper spoon, floating a foot from her face, level with her eyes.

  She gasped and let out a sharp, elated laugh, which broke her focus enough that the spoon fell with a tinny clatter to the floor.

  “Fine,” she said aloud, but to no one in particular, “If Daloes won't train me when I want, I will just train myself.”

  Without a waring knock, her door flew open, causing her to jump and her heart to leap into her throat.

  “You're not eating alone tonight, I hope?” Tanisca interrogated, peeking her head into the room. “I heard silverware, or something—I didn't realize the soup was already finished.”

  Her mother surveyed the room with suspicion, her eyes narrowing in on the copper spoon at Veria's feet. Veria had to tell her. There was no way she could lie...

  But she soon realized she didn't even have to come clean. Her mother was perceptive enough to know the significance of the metal utensil.

  “Veria...” she said, in a slow, warning drawl.

  “You said yourself I have to find someway to protect myself!” Veria objected before her mother could continue.

  “Getting yourself Red-Listed?” Tanisca snapped in a harsh whisper. “That is not what I meant, and you know it!”

  “Oh, please, Mother,” Veria whispered, realizing the subject matter was too sensitive for outsider's ears, “like you and
Strelzar never threw some flames around?”

  Tanisca went rigid. “We did, but...”

  “But what?” Veria challenged, cocking her head facetiously.

  “But it was in a very secret location, and he lives with one servant who is never in the training chamber,” Tanisca explained. “You cannot do this in our house!”

  “Fine, then I will go outside—”

  “No!” Tanisca protested, breaking her whisper, worry flooding her voice. “No, not out in the open. You can do it in here. Fine. Just...be careful.”

  “I planned to be,” Veria said confidently.

  Tanisca sighed and shut the door to Veria's room.

  “Okay...show me,” she said, half-intrigued and half-reluctant.

  Veria went through the process she'd had success with moments before, and Tanisca's jaw fell open when the spoon rose into the air and crossed the room to hover in front of her face.

  “I've never...” she muttered softly, placing a hand to her chest.

  “I know,” Veria said.

  “What are you going to do with this, Via?” her mother asked, her eyes still transfixed on the floating copper utensil.

  “I don't know, it just...it feels right,” Veria murmured.

  Everything else seemed to fade into the background: Lord Rames, Andon's desertion, her little bump of a baby and her impending motherhood, her father's death and the revelations about the letter...all felt insignificant as she felt new sources of energy humming and thrumming around her. They filled her and begged her to connect with them, and she felt in that moment the sheer power of knowing that she could move any of that energy any way she pleased.

  She knew the rest of her problems would catch up with her, soon enough. Sooner than she'd like, to be sure.

  But in this moment, she was powerful. She was strong. She was happy.

  She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and saw her eyes, alert, full of energy, twinkling with excitement and squinting just at the corners with the focus of her new hard elemental skills.

  She was no longer lost and empty. This is who she was meant to be. This is what she was meant to do, and she had never been so sure of anything in her life.

  The Second Talisman

  Book II of the Elementals Series

  Coming in

  JANUARY 2017

  Pre Order available now!

  www.authormarisol.com