Splendor and Spark

by Mary Taranta

  But now I have his address. Who else knew I was looking for him?

  My eyes fall to the book. North. He used to leave books for me in his wagon. Recommended reading, he called them, when really they were gateways to conversation—to friendship. Is this a token of peace to smooth the start of our journey, when we will have no choice but to share close quarters as we head into the Burn?

  But the book that accompanies the letter is a medical text, its pages worn thin, dog-eared, with notes in the margins. Inked diagrams and illustrations are preserved beneath sheets of vellum, marked with careful notations and discoveries tabulated for future reference. Why would North want me to learn medicine? Usually the books he offered were historical or geographical; this is just—

  Oh.

  There, on the inside cover, a delicate bookplate edged in fine scrollwork, framing a familiar family crest. This book belonged to Thaelan. And only one person in Brindaigel would have known that.

  The boy who killed him.

  Picking up the address again, I consider the implications. Alistair knew my mother’s plan to escape Brindaigel, to hunt down Merlock and stop the Burn. And as much as I loathe admitting it, his father played a pivotal role in her attempted escape. Since then Alistair has always known more about my mother than I have, maybe even including who her contacts are, and where they live.

  Only Alistair would believe he could earn my forgiveness through a bribe of information.

  Still, energized, I ball Frell’s address in one hand and listen at my door to ensure Bryn didn’t return to her room after breakfast. Hearing only silence, I slip back into the hall and head straight for the servants’ stairwell. Chadwick will be expecting me in the barracks for one last training session, followed by an all hands meeting before lunch, which gives me two hours to track down Dimitr Frell—and finally get the answers I need about my mother.

  * * *

  Like most of the palace, the library was stripped bare long ago by savage nobles exploiting a missing king—and then a child prince with no power—selling off whatever was valuable for passage off the continent to escape the Burn. While most of the shelves now sit empty, the bolted ladders rusted into place, North’s travels across Avinea have yielded a small crop of maps and books. With the library’s broad tables for paperwork and heavy doors for privacy, Chadwick has been using the library as an impromptu war room. Most of our mandatory meetings have been spent detailing how to carve poisoned hearts from under unyielding ribs—the only way to kill a hellborne—or how to stem the flow of an infection through the use of tourniquets when Sofreya’s spells no longer hold. Even swallowing pills pressed into shape by the palace doctor. Harmless powder here in the palace, but out there in the Burn, the real ones will stop our hearts before the Burn can transform us into monsters. Five days is all it takes to do so, ten with Sofreya’s spells. But with North’s blood already infected, we’ve given ourselves seven.

  One week to save the world.

  With Chadwick in such high demand this morning, I assumed the library would be empty, everything already packed away for the journey. Instead I find North at a far table, maps spread around him. And in a chair pulled close beside him, hunched forward with a grim expression, sits Alistair.

  They fall silent simultaneously as North tenses, leaning back, his hands dropping into his lap. Alistair grabs something off the table and slides it into his jacket pocket as he stands. His chair catches against the threadbare carpet and twists out of position. He corrects it with one hand, watching me warily even as he forces his trademark smirk.

  My surprise at seeing them together dissolves into suspicion. What business could Alistair possibly have with North? “What are you doing?”

  Alistair’s eyebrow arches. “Nothing.”

  “Doing nothing is a waste of time,” I say, folding my arms across my chest. “Why aren’t you in your laboratory? You claimed you could figure out a way to cure the infection.”

  “I’ve only been here one day, Faris—”

  “You’ve had two weeks in Brindaigel.”

  His expression darkens, smirk vanishing. “I had other responsibilities to attend to in Brindaigel.” A hand rakes through his hair before falling back to his side. “I am still the king’s executioner.”

  Frell’s address digs into my hand—and a needle of guilt stabs low in my belly, demanding my tolerance, if nothing else. But Alistair awakens the worst in me, a primal need to attack first. “Then I guess you’re already two weeks behind,” I say.

  Swearing beneath his breath, Alistair faces me fully, eyes flashing. “A hypothesis is useless without experimentation. I need blood if I’m going to remove poison from it. Are you volunteering?”

  North avoids my eyes, but his fingers tug at his sleeve, as if to hide what might lie underneath. Temper flaring, I storm toward Alistair, reaching for his pocket. He tries to stop me from retrieving what’s inside, but I block his defense, my dress straining at the seams with the motion. Alistair relents, and I withdraw a glass syringe from his jacket, still warm, filled with a dark, viscous fluid peppered with flakes of gold and violet. I’ve seen infected blood before, and yet it still makes my stomach sink to see North’s. This is what lies in his veins, thickening beneath the skin. Killing him.

  “If you need blood, you take it from me, not him,” I say, voice shaking.

  Alistair doesn’t flinch from my stare. “I need several vials. Half a dozen at least.”

  “I have blood enough for that. You need only ask.”

  He shakes his head, lip curling. “Of course,” he says sardonically. “Forgive my oversight. I nearly forgot that I’m only here on your good grace, Faris Locke; I will henceforth post all requests through you.” Glancing to North, Alistair nods his head in acknowledgment before turning lazily toward the threshold. Halfway there, he starts to whistle, then pauses once he reaches the threshold. “You know where to find me,” he says to me with all the arrogance he once demonstrated in Brindaigel. “You don’t even have to knock.”

  I scowl after his retreating backside.

  “I can spare a vial of blood,” North says, drawing my attention back to him. He begins rolling up his maps, his movements stiff, jerky. He’s in an overcoat—on his way out the door, no doubt, for one last look at the Mainstay, our chartered ship. With Merlock’s last verified location being in the capital of Prevast, deep in the heart of the Burn, we’ll save time—and magic—by sailing around the kingdom instead of riding through it.

  “You can’t afford to take any risks,” I say. “And letting him slide a needle through your skin, into your veins—if he’d gone too deep, or not deep enough—”

  “You sound like Benjamin.”

  I bristle at the comparison. “Captain Chadwick understands what is at stake.”

  “And I don’t?” North snorts, sliding several maps back onto a shelf behind him. “I’ve been fighting this war long before you had any reason to, Miss Locke, and I’ll be fighting it long after victory carries you into the sunset.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek, wounded by the callous implication. Yet it’s true: The moment he takes his throne and dissolves the spell binding me to Bryn is the moment I take Cadence and run, far beyond the reach of Bryn’s family. I might become free, but I will not be forgiven.

  Yet my daydreams of faraway places are only that: dreams. In truth all I know of the world is contained on the maps in this room.

  “You cannot guilt me for wanting my freedom,” I say.

  He groans, hands scrubbing at his face. “Faris—”

  “Baedan almost killed you for less blood than this,” I snap, brandishing the syringe at him, sickened by its weight, its warmth. “You’re being reckless, and it is not like you.”

  His expression sharpens, turns brutally cold. “Pembrough is here on your request, you may recall. I would have thought that came with some degree of trust in his efforts—”

  “He has a loyalty spell above his heart,” I interrupt. “Perrote s
ays the word, Alistair hands this blood over, and Perrote forges his own weapon to kill Merlock. Now you have two competitors, not to mention a bloodbound wife who will certainly fight.”

  “I’d like to see Perrote drag himself into the Burn to hunt for my father.”

  “He doesn’t have to. He has an army and magic enough to send in his place.”

  And North does not. A wedding gift of hand-me-down magic and a small contingent of new recruits is abysmal protection against a tyrant, no matter how confidently North lies about more volunteers coming before the winter. Avinea is too fragmented, its unpoisoned cities too few and far between, most operating under their own rules and self-proclaimed leaders. Travel is dangerous, and the truth is, no one would make the journey for an infected prince that no one believes will succeed.

  Even after North kills his father, the fight for Avinea will have only just begun.

  Neither of us speaks, but as North gathers up his remaining maps, I tent my fingers on top of them, pinning them in place. “I’ll put them away.”

  North stops, suspicious. “What are you looking for?”

  It’s like its own kind of fistfight, the way we keep circling each other with our words, exchanging blows. I know him, but he knows me too, and knows that my motives are more than simple housekeeping. It’s these small reminders that threaten me far more than accidental meetings in a darkened kitchen.

  “You’re expected at the Mainstay,” I say.

  He wants to argue with me but resists, dropping his chin and exhaling softly. He releases the maps. “Don’t be reckless,” he says at last, his anger broken, replaced with resignation.

  “Likewise.” I pointedly offer the syringe to him.

  “Keep it,” he says, brushing past me. “You may need it one day.”

  It isn’t until he’s gone and I’ve settled myself at the table that I realize what he meant. Giving me his blood now is a contingency plan in case he fails, so someone other than Bryn or Baedan can inherit.

  He’s already preparing himself for failure.

  Six

  THE ONGOING COMMOTION WITHIN THE palace is cover enough for me to slip past the milling servants unchallenged. It took longer than I wanted to pinpoint Dimitr Frell’s address on North’s outdated maps of the city, and I have less than an hour for my questions before my training with Chadwick. The lack of time is both infuriating and a relief. I want answers, but I don’t know how many I can handle, when I’ll have to leave in the morning without the chance to pursue them further.

  Despite my rush, I slow as I near the harbor and its labyrinth of crates and fishing tarps. There’s something sharp in the air, just beneath the usual brine of salt. Expectation, maybe, or hope. From here the city, the kingdom, and the Burn all lie behind me so that all I see is open water and a wider world than I ever expected to find. Like when I would sit on the roofs of the Brim and frame the stars between my hands, the ocean pulls at my stomach with a heartsick yearning for more than I’ve been given.

  Most of the ships docked here are smaller doggers meant for fishing, with the occasional larger vessels that exchange news and meager supplies between the coastal cities of Avinea when the weather is good. The Mainstay is one of the former, captained by a woman named Davik and crewed by her two brothers. They were the only ones willing to risk sailing beyond the safety of the harbor this late in the season.

  I catch a glimpse of Captain Davik now, face tipped to the sun while her brothers carry crates up the gangplank, the sleeves of their woolen sweaters pushed up to their forearms, exposing a tangle of tattoos—all ink, no magic. While other captains wanted payment in spells, Davik asked for money. “Something useful,” she said.

  Guards appear on the gangplank, North safely shepherded amongst them, and I quickly continue on before anyone recognizes me. The city itself is not nearly as hopeful as the harbor. The people here are mostly displaced from other areas of Avinea, but their hope for a safe haven has been worn down to a more basic hope for survival. The Burn isn’t the only thing destroying the kingdom; its people have also been corrupted by years of reliance on magic, followed by years of hardship without it. Guards maintain the peace where they can, but even they were raised on magic spells and easy answers, and have as little patience as those they protect.

  The address Alistair gave me leads me to a narrow alley off an empty street in one of the many abandoned quarters of the city. Some areas were decimated by a coughing disease one frigid winter years ago, after mercenaries stole the spells protecting the inhabitants; other areas teeter on the brink of becoming small pockets of the Burn after spells were stolen recklessly, without finesse, leaving fraying threads of magic that no one, not even North, will risk trying to salvage. I don’t know the cause of this street’s desolation, but I feel it, a dark, rotting history entrenched in the very cobblestones.

  The address leads me to an abandoned storefront half-collapsed into ruins, and I scan both it and those around it with mounting frustration. I have no pocket watch, but I hear the seconds ticking at the back of my mind as I search for some clue that Frell—that anyone—lives here. But then, in an alley between two buildings, I come to an age-stained door that has warped out of its frame and now hangs loosely off rusted hinges. Despite its decrepit appearance, however, it swings open silently at the press of my hand, revealing a staircase leading to the apartments upstairs, with broken furniture blocking the way. At first glance this building seems like another dead end, but the air lacks that squalid feel of the other buildings around it, and the furniture is too neatly placed, with enough room to maneuver if you know where to step.

  I set enough traps outside my rooms in the Brim to recognize this one. Frell must be here, and he doesn’t want company.

  For the first time, I reconsider what I’m doing; not from fear of Dimitr Frell, but fear of the answers he might give. For ten years my mother has been a mystery to me, her past cobbled together from memories and stories and the occasional surprise discovery. To label her a hero or a villain was entirely based on my whim, and a selfish part of me wants to keep that small measure of control over her. Once I know the truth, there’s no escaping it. I’m a realist, after all—a survivor. Dimitr Frell lives alone on a forgotten street in a city that keeps no records. He did not escape Brindaigel to the bright new life of freedom that Thaelan and I always planned for ourselves. He’s still hiding, but from what?

  Yet I’ve come this far, scarred inside and out. Who else can tell me who my mother really was, what she expected of me? If she tried—and failed—to kill Merlock herself, what made her think her six-year-old daughter could do it? What is really buried beneath my skin? A spell? Or a vendetta?

  An ounce of your strength, I think to myself, and start up the stairs.

  I pick my way over the furniture as the entire building seems to crack and sway around me. The wallpaper is worn thin in a visible line up the wall—shoulder height, as if someone has spent years leaning against it for balance.

  Two doors stand opposite each other on the landing above: one closed tight and the other broken down to reveal an empty apartment beyond. My heart lurches unexpectedly, and I dry my sweaty palms along my skirt. Touching the small dagger I carry beneath my cloak calms me, and I knock firmly. “Dimitr Frell, I need to speak with you.”

  No reply.

  Hesitation turns to frustration. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t be here, and despite moments ago wondering if I even wanted to see him, now that there’s a possibility I won’t, I refuse to accept it. We leave in the morning, with no clear promise of return. I don’t want this stone left unturned while I’m out in the Burn, with no guarantee I’ll have another chance.

  Decided, I twist the doorknob, and am surprised when the door swings open with an eerie screech.

  This is madness, I think, even as I duck through the narrow opening. “Mr. Frell?”

  There are two windows ahead of me, with curtains drawn against the light. An oil lamp sits on a crooked side
table adjacent to a battered love seat stacked with books. A tarnished sword lies unsheathed on top of them, and empty spools litter the floor. Overhead, intricate woven designs hang from the ceiling. Several have begun to fray, and loose threads dangle, wafting in my wake. Fascinated, I reach out, trailing my fingers through the threads. The entire room feels like an untold story.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

  I spin, heart slamming into my throat, as I squint into the murky darkness. A middle-aged man with glasses and thinning dark hair watches me from a doorway across the room, barely distinguishable from the shadows. Thin, knobby, he wears threadbare clothes and stands with a permanent slouch—one I recognize from my own father, earned from hours spent over tedious needlework. He’s a tailor, then, or was once.

  Is this the tailor Merlock referred to? It wasn’t my father?

  “Dimitr Frell,” I say, recovering my voice. I retract my hand, returning it to my blade.

  “I have not been called that name for many years.”

  But he doesn’t deny that it’s his. Emboldened, I take a step closer, the floors creaking in warning. “My name is Faris—”

  “Locke. You look like her.”

  “So I’ve been told,” I say slowly. He knows who I am—even seems to have been expecting me. My pulse races, a drumming beat in my chest, but I force myself to stay steady, to not rush into this and lose my way. My chin points toward the threads above us as I struggle to keep my excitement in check. “What are they?”

  “Spells,” he says, his own face tipping to the ceiling. His expression changes into something reverent, like a doting father amongst his children. He caresses one gently, fingers deftly sliding across knots and braids.

  Of course. Without magic to use, he had to rely on something more readily available. Dimly, I wonder what my mother’s spell would look like on display like this, or the binding spell. Then, more concretely, I wonder what kind of madness drives a man to go to such efforts.

  “So,” he says with a weary sigh, forcing my attention back to him. “You’ve brought me the spell.”