by Rin Chupeco
Also by Rin Chupeco
The Girl from the Well
The Suffering
The Bone Witch Trilogy
The Bone Witch
The Heart Forger
The Shadowglass
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2020 by Rin Chupeco
Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks
Cover art © Jill De Haan
Internal design by Ashley Holstrom/Sourcebooks
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Epilogue
Glossary
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
Felipe Gómez Alonzo
Jakelin Caal
Claudia Patricia Gómez González
Juan de León Gutiérrez
Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez
Carlos Hernandez Vasquez
Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle
Remember their names.
First, do no harm;
King thou may be,
thy divine right to magic
is no cause to be
as wicked as you wish.
—“The Maidenkeep Cycle,” The Matter of Avalon
1
In Which a Kiss Does the Exact Opposite
The frog wasn’t Tala’s fault this time.
Short-circuiting Winona Burgess’s bespelled car? Accident, but yeah—that was her doing. Nullifying the glamour spells in Sandra Monroe’s phone? Sandra was a horrible bully; Tala remained unrepentant. Negating the cheating enchantment Devon Nash tried to smuggle in during last week’s calculus test? That was deliberate; Mrs. Powell graded on a curve. Magic barely worked in Invierno, this dry, forgotten armpit of a town in Arizona, so nobody ever knew Tala was responsible.
Turning people into frogs, though? That’s a completely different skill set.
Wordlessly, she watched it hop on unsteady legs, speeding away like it owed her money. It made for a rock, missed, and landed right on its ugly face before giving up. It turned yellow eyes toward her and ribbited accusingly.
Five minutes earlier, it had been a freckle-faced young boy named Mark Anthony Jones.
The wildest thing was not even the frog boy—it was that Tala was only the second most unusual person in Invierno. The winner of that unwanted prize went to the person standing next to her: two years older, with a shock of wheat-yellow hair and nervous blue eyes. “He shouldn’t have picked on you,” he reasoned.
“Most of them do.” Still, Tala was grateful. She didn’t want to get into trouble for punching someone again, no matter how much they deserved it.
She had watched Mark transform, already pudgy and toad-like by nature, into an even pudgier and more toad-like creature. His skin adopted a greenish hue that only deepened as the change continued, while his arms and legs and then the rest of him shrunk and bent. His eyes widened and kept widening, his lips retreating and stretching grotesquely. And then, having settled into his final form, he’d croaked, slimy tongue hanging halfway out of his mouth in a way frogs had never done before in the history of time, because Mark could never do anything right.
It was not the shocking experience Tala thought it would be. In fact, it had been almost satisfying. That Mark had bullied her for most of their passing acquaintance had something to do with her schadenfreude.
“Sorry you had to kiss him,” she said.
“Yeah, well. I don’t mind kissing guys. Just this one,” he said as he wiped his mouth, and then paused again before adding, “Not like I kiss guys all the time” a smidge too defensively.
“You didn’t need to do that for me.”
“He called you a half monkey. That’s not right.”
Lots of things weren’t right that people did anyway. Tala had gotten enough vicious texts from girls over the years to fill a scrapbook. The school had suspended her for three days once for getting into a fight with a boy who’d spread rumors that her mother was a mail-order bride. She didn’t have magic to fight with, but her fists did a good enough job to compensate. She shrugged, pretending like it didn’t bother her. “I get a lot of those.”
“Do your folks know?”
“My mum has talked to some of their parents.” She wasn’t entirely sure what her mum had said the last time, but she had definitely terrified people to the point that they hurriedly crossed to the other side of the street when they saw her coming. “I won’t tell anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she offered. Magic—hurl-a-fireball-like-you’re-a-wizard-from-the-Middle-Ages magic, anyway—was banned in the Royal States of America. Anyone caught using it could face steep fines, imprisonment, and even deportation. The effects of magic had been devastating during the last war, and the fear still lingered. Fortunately, learning spells required obsidian stones containing powerful magic that people called glyphs, and those were hard to come by outside of Avalon. The innately gifted like Tala and her mother usually just put their heads down and pretended to be normal like everyone else.
Spelltech, on the other hand, was more widely accepted. Spelltech was the loophole—if a spell is cast on an item instead of on a person, the original caster still takes on the sacrifice but allows anyone else use of said item. This magic had more restrictions and les
s variety. Cheaper versions could still work using inferior, artificial glyphs imported from China.
But even sanctioned spells never seemed to work in Invierno, like magic didn’t want to be caught dead here either. Spelltech cable, for instance, generally produced five minutes of programming followed by two hours of static—cable providers who’d move into the area hoping to net a hefty market share, more often than not found themselves moving right out again. And it took a lawsuit to learn that Steedbrew Extra Bold Coffee Elixir didn’t work, not because the company was a scam, but because most caffeine spells just didn’t function in town either.
“I’m Alex…” A significant pause. “Smith. I live down the street.” The boy looked down. “Probably not the first meeting you envisioned,” he added, a little miserably.
He was still trying to keep up the pretense, though Tala knew who he was. Lola Urduja and her parents had been planning Alex’s arrival for weeks. Tala had been instructed to treat the prince like she would a normal person. As if she had friendships with other nobles to compare to.
But even then, no one had told her that Alexei Tsarevich, the last remaining prince of Avalon, could turn people into frogs. “I’ve never met royalty before, Your Highness, but it’s not so bad.”
She’d said the words softly, but the boy darted a quick, fearful glance around all the same. “You shouldn’t be saying that,” he muttered.
“Seems like maybe you need to hear it every now and then.”
“Ha. Maybe I do. Been bounced from place to place enough times, it’s hard to remember who I’m supposed to be.”
“I’m Tala Warnock. I live here.” She gestured at the house behind her. “Looks like we’re neighbors.”
“Looks like it. Any interesting places around here?”
“There’s the abandoned Casa Grande domes to the west, if you like graffiti and mold. And ghosts. Some people hear one moaning at night there.” The Casa Grande domes were a fire hazard in the form of an abandoned tech facility. The business failed and the company had moved on, but nobody had gotten around to pulling the whole place down yet.
“Sounds like it could only be improved with a wrecking ball.”
“They’ve been trying. Apparently it’s also the only thing around here that doesn’t reject magic, and the walls had been coated with some weird spell that’s made it invulnerable.”
Alex made a face. “I take it not a lot of things happen in this town.”
“That’s a good assumption, yeah.”
“Warnock. So, you’re Kay’s daughter?”
“Yup.”
Alex looked unconvinced, probably because Tala was short and brown as can be, and her father was a pale-skinned, bearded mountain.
“Well, he is my father. I look more like my mom.”
“People say I look like my mom too,” he said, and a bitter smile crossed his face.
“I’m sorry.” History books and Wikipedia had not gone into the specifics of his parents’ deaths, but Tala could only imagine. How do you offer your condolences to someone whose parents were killed when he was only five years old? How do you cheer up a prince whose kingdom had been literally frozen, seemingly for all of eternity?
The last war was only a dozen years ago. It was called the Avalon-Beira Wars, and it was a battle to the death between both kingdoms, which ended with Beira’s ruler, the Snow Queen, missing, and Avalon in ice and totally unreachable. Other countries hadn’t been exempt from the violence. What little was left of Wonderland had been further decimated. Its explosion set off tsunamis along Eastern Russia, California, Japan, and the Royal States’ West Coast.
The lingering magic from Wonderland hit other parts of the world as well. The Kati Thanda was now a frozen lake amid the deserts of Western Australia. Fighting broke out after the Chinese kingdom’s Yangtze River became inundated with fish that could supposedly grant wishes. Even now, travel advisories in Brazil warn that one out of every hundred thousand visitors to reach the Sugarloaf Mountain’s summit in Rio de Janeiro inexplicably turn into swans.
It was still a bad time to be Avalonian; refugees found within the Royal States’ borders were rounded up and deported without their day in court, magic-proficient or not. The Royal States’ king was known for such cruelties. King John Portland (unaffectionately known as “King Muddles” to detractors and the internet, mainly for his generally incoherent speeches) was from an extended branch of the confusing Jenga mess that was the American royal family tree, the first of his dynasty after the more beloved King Samuel had passed.
“It’s not your fault.” He paused. “You’re not gonna tell, right?”
He could have been talking about the curse, but Tala knew he wasn’t. Some things were frowned upon even more than magic. When she was six, her parents had sat down with her and talked about how some boys like other boys and how some girls like other girls and also some like both and how there were some boys and girls who weren’t just boys or girls, and so on. That was around the time Mr. McLeroy’s daughter was supposedly making a scandal of herself with another girl and had been kicked out of their house as a result. Tala’s father said McLeroy was a shite old bampot and if anyone deserved a good kick to his tiny bushels it was him and not his daughter, the poor bird.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she repeated meaningfully, and glanced down at the Mark/frog hybrid. They lived on a dead-end street few people bothered to go down, so it’s not like anyone else was watching. “But won’t he know?”
“Nah. He’ll change back in a few hours and forget everything.” Alex spoke wearily, like he had enough experience with it to fill out a résumé.
“How do you do it?”
“Always been able to. But it’s a censured spell.”
Censured spells were the worst kinds of magic, the ones punishable by death. Magic worked using a system of equivalent exchange, her mother had explained to her once: the more powerful the spell, the more you had to give up to earn it, and the consequences varied from person to person.
The effects on humans can be permanent; last year, a pyromaniac two towns over had purchased a fireglyph from some internet black market and received an extremely low tolerance to the cold for his troubles. He wound up burning down two houses but was eventually caught after he was found nearly frozen to death in front of his open refrigerator.
But magic powerful enough to be classified a censured spell was the sort of magic world wars were fought over. It was the reason the kingdom of Avalon was gone, its sole surviving royalty missing and presumed dead, and its citizens scattered and in hiding. Censured spells were a constant fixation with King John, since he was convinced a magical assassination attempt was just around the corner.
Luckily, turning assholes into frogs wasn’t that powerful a spell, though Alex’s curse working just fine despite being in Invierno did suggest it was a stronger one than it looked.
“What did you give up for it?”
“The ability to form normal relationships with other people, I guess,” Alex said with a shrug, but his hands trembled slightly. That was clearly not the whole truth, but, censured or not, he was scared. Tala felt bad for asking something so personal.
“Well, Lola Urduja did tell you my secret, right? So we’re even.”
“What secret?”
Tala felt just a little bit insulted that nobody had cared enough to inform him about her. “Try turning me into a frog.”
He stared. “You saw what happened to him, right?”
“Yeah, but that’s not going to happen to me.” At least, she hoped so. “Do you, uh, have to do it on the lips, or would a cheek or a forehead work…” Tala was sixteen and a self-professed cynic. This was her first kiss, but she was old enough to dismiss the sentimentality of it. This was technically more of an experiment than anything else.
“No. It has to be on the—” Alex rubbed at his eyes. “Lo
ok. I’ve blundered my way through this enough for you to realize I’m gay, right?”
“Pretty much, yep. I’m not gonna propose to you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
He actually grinned at that. “Don’t blame me if you suddenly start chasing flies.”
It was only a quick peck, a didn’t-really-count-as-a-kiss kiss, not too unpleasant, and over quickly. Tala didn’t turn green, or develop bulging cheeks, or discover a newfound urge to hop.
“That’s never happened before,” Alex finally said.
Tala laughed, pleased with herself and also relieved. “Magic doesn’t work on me. It never has. My mom’s the same, but we’re not supposed to tell anyone. We call it an agimat; a charm, in Tagalog.” Other curses didn’t work on her, and neither did glass magic, or oath-binding contracts, or the spell-infused vending machines littered around town that surprisingly worked despite the Invierno curse but didn’t stop her from drinking free bottled sweet tea for years. But indirectly sabotaging spelltech machinery for personal gain didn’t carry the same risks as attempting temporary amphibianship. “So, are we even?”
Alex stared at her. “You’re one of the Makilings,” he finally said. “The spellbreakers. They’re the only ones with agimats.”
“Tala Makiling Warnock,” Tala agreed. Granted, Tala dela Cruz Warnock was what it said on her passport, since the Makiling name was an infamous one, and her parents knew enough about the system to have taken earlier precautions. “So you have heard of us.”
Alex said nothing for a full minute. But then his smile popped up like flowers after a long rain, and Tala had to muffle a squeak when he scooped her up in a hug. “Yes,” he said. “We’re even.”
And he began to cry.
It must be a strange kind of relief, Tala thought, to find someone you couldn’t accidentally damage for the first time in your life.
They were coconspirators now, so plans were carefully made. Mark the frog was carried back to his home where, two hours later, he woke up dizzy and disoriented on his front lawn, with a puzzling inclination to eat bugs.
The Jones family moved away not too long after that, and Tala was almost certain it had nothing to do with Alex and his curse.
