Splendor and Spark

by Mary Taranta

  “Bright and early,” I agree, pushing past him, inviting myself into his study.

  He closes the door behind me, leaning against it. There’s a strange, eerie finality to the sound.

  I ignore the way he watches me, and examine his room instead. North spared no expense. His bedroom is on the second floor like all the others, but his laboratory—a repurposed study—is on the first floor, tucked into the eastern wing of the palace, as far from the ballroom as possible. There are windows overlooking the sea, shuttered and closed now, but with slants of moonlight that steal through the clapboards. A heavy desk littered with glass and metal instruments takes up the right side of the room; an entire wall is shelves, mostly empty except for a handful of books that sit forlornly in one corner. Medical texts, some in a language I surmise to be Terelese, the language of the Northern Continents.

  A leather chair sits at the desk, and I sink into it, pulling myself closer to the structure of Alistair Pembrough’s thoughts, avoiding the questions in his eyes. I tip a box of pumice toward me, jostling the contents, before letting it fall back again. There are notes, neatly stacked and in impeccable penmanship, diagrams and questions and new ideas scrawled in the margins. Empty vials sit cradled in a velvet case, waiting to be filled.

  There’s something missing between Alistair Pembrough, the king’s executioner, and this, the mind of an intelligent man who was going to be a doctor before duty called him to the dungeons of Brindaigel. Some hidden secret I have yet to discover.

  But do I really want to know?

  I slump down in the chair, rolling a chunk of pumice in my hand. “It’s an improvement over the dungeon,” I say.

  He snorts. “It wouldn’t take much. Do you want a drink?”

  I nod, and he moves toward another shelf, empty save for a glass decanter full of dark liquid. I stare at him as he works. Now that I’m looking, I notice there’s a gauntness to his face that wasn’t there in Brindaigel, deep-pooled shadows and a faint scrub of facial hair.

  “Conclusion?” he asks, after filling two glasses.

  “What?”

  “Scientific process,” he says, handing me one before he leans back against the desk, cradling his own glass to his chest. “Start with a theory, form a hypothesis. Execute an experiment, and examine your conclusions. You were staring. I wondered if you had reached a conclusion.”

  “My conclusion is that you’re still a prisoner like me,” I say softly.

  Whatever happened this afternoon after he stitched me closed fills his face, darkens his eyes, leaves its memory in his motions as he brings his own glass to his lips. He hesitates, then downs the drink in one gulp. “I hate magic,” he says.

  Snorting, I raise my own glass in halfhearted agreement.

  “But science will prevail.” His eyes meet mine before he looks away, thumbs tapping the rim of his glass. “It has to.”

  “So you can leave Brindaigel?”

  “So I can prove I’m not the monster you still think I am.”

  I lower my drink, startled.

  “And so I can leave Brindaigel,” he adds, with a tight, humorless smile.

  It strikes me once again how much this boy and I have in common. Under other circumstances—in different lives—maybe we could have been friends. But Thaelan’s death still hangs between us, and while my head can separate the boy from the order he was given, my heart still finds footholds of accusation. Thaelan didn’t die from lack of a survival instinct, as Alistair once said.

  He was murdered, and I can never forget that.

  I lift the glass to my lips; the alcohol smells smoky and bitter and sweet. It tastes terrible, and I welcome it greedily.

  “I’m sorry,” Alistair says at length. “I should have assumed you would be followed this morning. I thought—” He breaks off, eyeing his empty glass with some regret. “I thought I was helping.”

  “Did you know who he was?”

  “No. Only that he was a watchtower here in Avinea, relaying news back into Brindaigel. Did you speak to him at all?”

  “Barely. Cryptically. At the very least, I now know why my mother chose the night she did, and that I wasn’t her intended vessel for this spell. But”—after draining the last of the alcohol, I grimace and set the glass on the edge of his desk—“desperate times, desperate measures.” Clearing my throat, I softly add, “Thank you for the book.”

  Alistair nods. Dark hair falls forward, hiding his eyes. “I doubt you have much of Thaelan’s.”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  He opens his mouth but hesitates, pushing away from the desk and returning to the decanter. “There was a ring,” he says, his back to me. “He had it with him the day he died, and he asked me to give it to you.”

  My heart seems to stop for one hard moment. “Where is it?” I ask, as if I don’t know, as if I don’t remember the moment Bryn pulled it from her finger and used it to pay North to bring us to New Prevast. The triumph on her face, the smugness—

  “She took it,” Alistair says. “She knew it had value to me, so she took it. And I couldn’t say no, not then. I needed her the same way she needed me. But not anymore.” Returning to the desk, he changes the subject. “Do you know how I met Thaelan?” When I shake my head, he says, “I caught him in the tunnels.”

  “He never told me he got caught.”

  “Of course he didn’t, because practical Faris would have made him promise not to risk his life again, and that would have been the end of escaping.” His smile cracks. “My father was still alive at the time, but everyone knew who I was. What I would become. Most of the recruits down in the barracks were afraid of me, but Thaelan was different. Where others already saw a monster, he saw potential. And so the bribes began.”

  It hurts to hear Thaelan starring in a story different from the one I knew, yet I find myself leaning forward, eager to hear more.

  “It was entirely mercenary at first,” Alistair continues, lost in the memory. “I had no formal education, but Thaelan’s family did. So he brought me books. And then he brought me stories.” He gives me a pointed look, and my stomach tightens. I always believed myself to be Thaelan’s secret, buried beneath the rugs, hidden behind locked doors. Yet Alistair knew everything about me, except my name. Thaelan trusted him—but not entirely.

  “And finally,” Alistair says, “he gave me hope that escape was actually possible. I had something to look forward to, something to plan for. Until my father died.”

  I roll the edge of my glass along his blotter. “Why did he keep us both secret? Had I known you were on our side, that whole night could have been rewritten—”

  “Because Thaelan was never a saint, Faris,” Alistair says with an edge to his voice. “Escaping Brindaigel isn’t nearly so impressive if you have someone holding your hand and marking the way. He never told me your name for fear of implicating himself. Names are power.” He swallows hard and looks away, profile outlined by the fire behind him. “You would have destroyed him if anyone had ever discovered your relationship. And that fear was enough to hold his tongue, even with me. If you hadn’t tried to run that night, he would have married Ellis, and you know it.” He starts to take a drink but stops, setting the glass on the desk instead. “He loved you, but he always had a contingency plan.”

  His words are needles, sharp and itchy under my skin, and yet—it is their honesty that burns the most. Thaelan would have married Ellis. To pretend otherwise is pure self-indulgence. But we always understood that: It was a part of who we were. Two separate worlds, trying to find somewhere to coexist.

  “To be fair, I don’t fault him too much,” Alistair adds wryly, lifting his head to look at me. “I fully intended to leave Brindaigel without Faris Locke if the chance ever arose, no matter what I swore to my father.”

  A few short months ago I was too naive to appreciate strength born of necessity and honesty. But I value it now. “I would’ve done the same,” I say.

  He moves his hair off his face. A touch of ar
rogance returns as he regards me with bright blue eyes. “Liar.”

  I don’t answer, leaning forward so that my shawl shifts, exposing my bare arm across his desk. An unspoken invitation.

  Alistair dutifully loads a glass vial into the iron bracket of his syringe. Prior to drawing blood, however, he traces the raised lines of magic around my wrist, pressing at them with a clinical analysis that is oddly endearing. “Does it hurt?”

  “Only if I ignore her when she summons me.”

  “What happens if you never answer?” He bends forward, pinching my skin, sliding the needle deftly into my vein.

  “The pain just gets worse,” I say, mesmerized by the sight of my blood, brackish and cloudy, filling the vial. “I imagine that eventually something would happen, but I’ve never tested it that far.”

  “You have terrible scientific method.” He gives me a withering look before resuming his work, removing the first vial and replacing it with an empty one.

  We fall into a strange silence, not uneasy but not quite comfortable. With my eyes trained to the moonlight slanting through the window, I say, “I met Thaelan when I was nine. I saw him stealing apples from a street vendor. He made it look so easy. I didn’t realize part of the trick was being a nobleman’s son—that privilege breeds its own kind of invisibility. So when I tried it, I got caught and he didn’t. He paid for my apples, asked for my name, and made me promise to never steal again.”

  Alistair half-smiles, focused on his work. “Did you?”

  “Of course,” I say. “We were poor and hungry and I had Cadence to consider. But that was Thaelan. He saw potential where others saw nothing.”

  Alistair corks each of the vials of my poisoned blood. Seeing them laid out in a neat row in his velvet box sparks a new wave of guilt for how reckless I’ve been with Sofreya’s spells. It would not take much to poison my heart.

  Alistair hands me a bandage for my arm and then carefully closes the lid to the box. Before I can stop myself, I ask, “Are you all right?”

  He looks over, bemused. “What?”

  “Hypothesis,” I say. “If you were to roll back your sleeves, there would be new rungs on your ladder.”

  His expression tightens at the allusion to his self-inflicted battle scars. For a moment he doesn’t move. “It’s a sound theory,” he says at last. “Based on prior research. I can’t fault your logic.”

  Without thinking, I touch his arm. We both freeze in surprise. A simple kindness can be cruel, and yet I don’t pull back. “I see potential in you too, Alistair Pembrough.”

  He gives me a troubled smile. “I see too much whiskey in you, Faris Locke. But thank you anyway.”

  The door flies open, and Cadence bounds inside, breathless and grinning and still dressed for dinner, with her curls sliding across her shoulders. Darjin trots in at her heels. She’s always had a way with animals, and a magic tiger was apparently irresistible. He’s been her newly adopted shadow since she arrived.

  “Pem! You weren’t at dinner, so I brought you dessert!” She brandishes her gloved hands—dinner gloves tonight, no doubt a gift from her new benefactor—clutching two thick slabs of fruit bread wrapped in a cloth napkin. Then she notices me, my hand on Alistair’s arm, and her grin evaporates, the fruit bread faltering.

  “You look beautiful, Cade,” I say with a painful ache, because Bryn can deliver what I never could: dresses and gloves and perfect curls, a life in a palace, and enough food to fill her belly and still sneak some for later.

  “Bryn was right,” she snarls. “You’re a thief just like our mother! Do you have to take everything from me?!”

  “No, Bryn is all yours,” I retort, before I can stop myself.

  She throws the fruit bread at me and scoops up Darjin, bolting back down the hall.

  I stand to follow, but Alistair holds me back. “You’ll never find her,” he says. “Corbin’s former apprentice has been teaching her the secret passages in the palace; she’ll be somewhere in the courtyard by now.”

  I sigh, sinking back into his chair, resenting that he knows her more than I do now. “All I can think about is Bryn’s sixteenth birthday, when you and her rode through Brindaigel in that ridiculous carriage, throwing out flowers to celebrate your engagement. Cadence took hers home, and it died overnight. She was devastated.” I suck in a shaky breath. “What happens when this bond with Bryn dies too, and she realizes that the beauty is only skin-deep? She’s suffered enough disappointment already.”

  “She’s a Locke,” Alistair says with a bracing smile. “She’ll survive.”

  “Why can’t she just live? Why must everything be a battle, with winners and losers?”

  He shrugs helplessly, and I briefly close my eyes, suddenly drained. “Too much whiskey,” I mutter, standing. He moves aside, but as I step past, I pause, grappling with myself. I’ve had weeks to prepare for tomorrow, for saying good-bye to Cadence so soon after our reunion, and yet, in my delusion I imagined it would be with Cadence waving from the arched courtyard of Saint Ergoet’s, where she would be protected by the monks until my return. The monastery’s reputation would keep Perrote and Bryn from any outward attack, to avoid the risk of alienating themselves from the city. But now she’ll be here, burrowed into Bryn’s hip.

  “I have no right to ask—I don’t even know that I should, but . . .”

  “I’ll keep an eye on her,” Alistair says. Then, more quietly, “Come back alive.”

  “I will,” I say. I have to, for Cadence. Whether she wants me to or not.

  Nine

  I WANT NOTHING MORE THAN TO bury myself in bed, but my night is far from over. Chadwick paces the hall outside my bedroom door, ignorant to the furious looks of the guards trailing me down the hall, having finally found me again. He looks up on my approach, relief warring with something else.

  Dread settles in my stomach, cutting through the haze of Alistair’s whiskey. “What’s wrong?”

  He starts to speak but stops, glancing at the guards. “We need to talk.”

  “Of course.” Bypassing my bedroom door, I walk him into the less scandalous parlor instead, closing the double doors behind me with a rise of unease. “Is everything all right?”

  Ignoring my question, he does a cursory check of both bedrooms and our shared bath to ensure no servants are lingering, before he finally looks at me.

  “Kill him,” he says.

  My hands flex around the doorknobs at my back as my heart slams painfully against my ribs. I picture Perrote at the dinner table, silver circlet flocked with blood, and feel my stomach tighten. “Who?”

  “Merlock,” he says, and a for a moment I feel disappointed. “If you have the chance tonight, kill him.”

  In my dreams, he means. I’ll have to let my vices overrun me until there’s enough Burn in my blood to activate my mother’s spell.

  “It’s a risk,” he says, running a hand through his hair, mussing the carefully combed ponytail. “But if it keeps Corbin out of the Burn . . .”

  Then he would be in a better position to defend his palace and his city from Perrote’s inevitable coup.

  Exhaling softly, Chadwick reaches into his jacket and retrieves a blade sheathed in cracking leather, the hilt tarnished with age and wrapped with thread. He hesitates, weighing it in his hands, before offering it to me.

  I accept warily. “What is this?”

  “One of only two blades that were forged with Corbin’s blood,” he says grimly. “Three, if we count Baedan’s. They were given to me so that if he and I became separated in battle, I would have the means of killing Merlock even if Corbin wasn’t with me.”

  I unsheathe the dagger an inch. The blade is polished brightly enough that I catch a glimpse of my frightened expression reflected back. “You would inherit the magic?”

  “Ideally, when a king dies, the heir is present to perform the blood ceremony which will bind the king’s heart to his heir’s. But if the king were to die in battle, or without the heir on hand, a proxy co
uld bind the heart to their own until the heir arrived.”

  Fear simmers, low in my belly, at the hesitation in his voice, the missing warning. “But . . . ,” I prod.

  Chadwick lowers his head, guilty. “The heart of a king is not an easy burden to bear,” he says. “Magic needs a heartbeat to survive, and it will latch on to whoever holds it. But if the carrier does not have royal blood, the magic will destroy him. Or her. Proxies are simply vessels, Locke.” He bumps his shoulders in helpless apology, looking uncharacteristically tired. “The only way to release the magic again is by stopping the heart that holds it.”

  Oh.

  “A proxy,” I repeat. “A polite word for sacrifice.” Is that what I am now, with my mother’s spell locked under my skin?

  Chadwick takes back the dagger and unscrews the rounded pommel, revealing a slender vial of blood hidden inside the hollowed hilt. “Use the blade to cut through the spells Merlock wears. Once they’re gone, he’s like any other hellborne.”

  “And the only cure for a hellborne soul is a carved-out heart,” I recite in a dull tone.

  He nods in approval. “Remove his heart and bind it”—he touches the dark thread around the hilt—“and then protect it with the blood.” He shakes the vial to illustrate. It’s clean, a dark, uninfected red. How long ago did North have this blade made?

  After screwing the vial back into the pommel, Chadwick hands me the dagger. “And then come back with the heart as fast as you can before it takes hold of your own.”

  “And if it’s not fast enough? If something goes wrong? You know North won’t kill me to release the magic.”

  “I will,” he says.

  I make a face to hide my fear. “Could you maybe hesitate half a second first?”

  “Locke, if you can’t do it, I understand—”

  “I didn’t say that.” I clutch the dagger to my chest, out of his reach. “Does it work on anyone? Could I cut past Perrote’s protection spells and kill him with this? Or even Baedan?”

  “It’ll only dismantle the spells of those with shared blood. One cancels out the other, so to speak. So no. It won’t work on anyone who doesn’t share North’s bloodline—anyone who can’t inherit if he dies.”