Kingdom of Ashes

by Rhiannon Thomas

“I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” Aurora said. “I didn’t realize that—”

  “Orla,” she said. “My name is Orla, not Your Majesty. And do not apologize. It is not your fault that my son is inconsiderate.” She looked Aurora up and down again. “So you’re the one who’s been causing so much trouble in Alyssinia.”

  “I did not mean to.”

  “A shame. If you’re going to cause a fuss, you might as well be in charge of it.” Orla smiled then. “I didn’t expect to see you. I told Finnegan that going to Alyssinia was a fool’s errand. He’s not half as charming as he thinks he is.”

  Aurora laughed.

  “When he came back empty-handed . . . well. I hoped it’d finally got through his head that he can’t always control everything. But here you are.” Her eyes narrowed. “And why are you here? Should I be planning a wedding? Because it seems awfully rushed.”

  “She’d never marry me,” Finnegan said. “Not when dear Prince Rodric is available. I offered Aurora refuge here. She decided to take me up on it.”

  “And there is no refuge for you in Alyssinia? No group rallying to your cause?”

  “It’s not safe there at the moment, Your Majesty,” Aurora said. “And Finnegan offered—”

  “Oh, I’m sure Finnegan offered many things. None of which he can follow through on. But you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. King John likes us none too well as it is.” Orla turned to the girl still lingering by the stairs. “I assume you have not met my daughter, either?” When Aurora shook her head, she sighed. “This is my daughter, Erin. Erin, the Princess Aurora. I’m sure you two will have much to talk about.”

  Erin gave Aurora a small smile and a nod, and Aurora smiled back.

  “We must talk soon, Aurora,” Orla said, “but I am afraid you have caught me at a bad time. Not all of us are as idle as my son.” She turned to him. “Finnegan, I expect to see you in the greeting hall in five minutes. Do not be late.” And she strode away, head tilted toward her daughter as they continued their conversation from before.

  Finnegan did not move. “Well,” he said. “At last you’ve met the current and future rulers of Vanhelm.”

  Aurora frowned. “I thought you were the future ruler of Vanhelm.”

  “I’m the elder sibling,” he said. “But who could resist my sister’s effortless charm?” His usually flawless smile looked rather forced. “I trust you can entertain yourself for the evening? We’ll talk more tomorrow. Lay out our plans then.”

  Aurora watched him stride away. She did not think she had ever seen Finnegan unsettled before. Part of her wanted to hurry after him, to challenge him on his abrupt departure, but she sensed it would be a mistake. Better to use the time to process what she had seen in the waste and plan her next move.

  But too much had happened over the past day for her to sit quietly and rest. She missed Nettle’s now-familiar presence, the calming way she hummed through the quiet. Even if they did not discuss or do anything significant, she wanted to see her.

  A guard directed her to Nettle’s rooms, but Nettle immediately ushered Aurora out of the palace again, insisting that Aurora needed to breathe fresh air without the threat of capture or dragons pressing down on her. They ended up sitting at a round table outside a street corner café, eating a spread of breads and jam. Aurora watched the passing crowds warily at first, but nobody even glanced at them. None of them seemed to care in the slightest who she was or what she might be doing.

  They talked about many things, but nothing serious. No news from Alyssinia, no strategy for the future. A breather of a conversation, after the exhaustion of the past couple of days. But Finnegan’s one almost insignificant omission kept playing on Aurora’s mind, demanding to be investigated.

  “Finnegan never mentioned he had a sister,” she said, as she spread jam on another slice of bread.

  “He does not talk about her much.”

  Aurora lay down the knife, keeping her expression neutral. “Why not? Do they not get along?’

  “They do,” Nettle said. “But there is tension there. He is a little jealous of her, I think.”

  Aurora could not imagine Finnegan being jealous of anyone. “Why?”

  “They are quite similar,” Nettle said. “But they express themselves rather differently. They are both good at reading people, but Erin tends to be quieter about it. She keeps her findings to herself, while Finnegan . . .” She laughed. “You have seen Finnegan. And because of this, his mother sees those good traits in his sister, and not in him. She sees Erin as a ruler, like herself, and Finnegan as a bit of a joke. Finnegan does not like to be thought of as a joke.”

  “He’s told you this?” Aurora said.

  “It is what I have seen. I may be wrong.”

  Her tone implied it was unlikely. And if Nettle believed it, Aurora was inclined to believe it as well.

  “Finnegan called her the future leader of Alyssinia,” Aurora said carefully. “But he’s her older brother, isn’t he? So he will be king, however his mother feels.”

  “It is not unheard of for heirs to be ignored. Finnegan’s grandmother was the younger sibling, I believe. Her elder brother was thought unsuitable to deal with the dragons. And the people of Vanhelm have had queens for two generations. Finnegan would be a change, and he worries that it is a change people will not accept. But for now, he is to be king.”

  Finnegan as king. The image did not quite fit. Aurora could not imagine Finnegan stuck on a throne, listening to complaints, dispensing laws, dealing with the minutae of Vanhelm’s politics.

  “So that’s why he wants my help? He thinks it will make people accept him as king?”

  “Perhaps,” Nettle said.

  Aurora sat deeper in her chair, picking at the food in front of her. It would explain his initial interest in her, his openness to the idea of her magic and her connection to the dragons. He needed her to bolster support. But so many things still did not add up.

  “Finnegan was so eager for me to see the dragons today,” Aurora said. “And when I saw one, it was like . . . I didn’t feel like myself. But I also felt more like myself. I don’t know how to describe it. But when we got back to the palace, Finnegan walked off, without talking about it. If it’s so important to him—”

  “It is important to him,” Nettle said. “But if there is one thing that can throw him off, it is his mother. You will see. I believe—”

  “Hey! Hey, lady!” Aurora and Nettle both looked up. A red-faced man strode toward them. Aurora shrunk away, but Nettle lengthened her neck to stare back at him. “We don’t want your kind here.”

  It took Aurora a moment to realize that he was talking to Nettle, not her. The singer looked at him for a long moment, and then turned to Aurora. “I believe,” she said again, “that he—”

  “Hey!” the man said. “Don’t ignore me. You’re not welcome here.”

  “I live here,” Nettle said evenly. “And you are disrupting my conversation.”

  “You think you can come here, eat our food, take up our space, and we’ll accept that? You people are all the same.”

  “You people?” Aurora stood. “What exactly does that mean, you people?”

  “People like her,” the man spat. “Foreigners. You think we got enough to spare? She should live in her own kingdom, not take up ours.”

  “People like her?” Aurora echoed. “I’m not from Vanhelm either. Why are you not shouting at me?”

  The man spluttered.

  “She has as much right to be here as you do.” Aurora could feel the anger rising within her, the burning. She took a deep breath, forcing it back. “How dare you?”

  “Is there a problem here?” A thin woman in an apron approached the table. She looked at Nettle. “Miss, you’re disturbing the other customers. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “This is absurd!” Aurora said, but Nettle just pushed her half-finished plate away and stood. Her expression did not change. With an upward tilt of her
chin, she turned and walked off. Aurora scrambled after her.

  “Nettle, what—”

  “What was that?” Nettle said. “That was Vanhelm, Aurora. Such an advanced kingdom, so hardworking, so welcoming . . . but so low on space, so concerned about resources when they can grow little themselves. They must have priorities. And for some, that means that only certain people should be allowed to take up space here. True Vanhelmians. People not like me.”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Aurora said.

  “It is what it is. Do not concern yourself, Aurora. I am used to it, although it is more common in Vanhelm now than it was.”

  They walked in silence for a little longer. Then Aurora glanced back in the direction of the café. “We didn’t pay,” she said.

  “I know.” And finally Nettle smiled.

  SEVEN

  BY THE TIME FINNEGAN KNOCKED ON AURORA’S DOOR the following morning, she was prepared. She shoved a piece of paper under his nose before he had finished saying “Good morning.”

  “Here’s my plan,” she said, as he stepped through the door. “Of how we should proceed.”

  “It’s lovely to see you too, Aurora,” Finnegan said. “I did sleep well.” He took the paper from her and read it. “This is an admirable effort, but do you really think you can plan things out this much?”

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” Aurora said. She had been up and dressed for the day since dawn, tossing her thoughts onto paper and honing them for the prince’s inevitable appearance. “We need to know what we’re doing.”

  “And you had to write it down?”

  “I wanted to be clear.” She moved closer, pointing to the scribbled words as she spoke. “I have to learn how to use my magic to help Alyssinia. You want me to use it to get rid of the dragons. So. First I learn how to control it. We practice. You help me learn more about magic in general—what it used to be, why it disappeared, what magic the dragons have—and about my curse and what happened to me.”

  “Because I’m the expert on the subject?”

  “No,” she said. “But you seem good at puzzling things out. We’ll learn how my magic works, and what my connection to the dragons is.”

  “And hopefully figure out how to deal with them along the way?”

  “Exactly. If I’m going to stop the dragons, make them sleep, we’ll have to go to that mountain that Lucas mentioned—back where it all began. And once I’ve done that, you’ll help me go back to Alyssinia, stop the violence, and replace the king.”

  “Simple,” Finnegan said. “I can’t imagine a single thing that will go wrong.”

  “I hope you can,” Aurora said. “Then we can fix them before they happen.”

  Finnegan laughed. “All right, dragon girl,” he said. “I’ll play.”

  “Good.” She moved to fetch her cloak. “We should go to that Institute where Lucas works,” she said. “That’s probably the best place to start.”

  Finnegan rested his hand on hers, stopping her movement. “Wait,” he said. “I have a better idea.”

  He took her downstairs and through the door into the palace’s private wing. The rooms beyond were far smaller than she would expect for royalty, but bursting with personality—books open spine-up on side tables, fluffy rugs, shelves full of knickknacks that seemed to have more character than value. Some rooms had big windows, overlooking the street or interior gardens, while some were lit only by skylights in the ceiling. There was no corridor, no sense of order, just room after room, thrown together in some unfathomable system that would break the spirit of even the most determined thief.

  Finally, Finnegan opened a door and gestured for her to go ahead of him. She walked through, somewhat nervous of what she would find.

  Books. Everywhere, books, covering all the walls except one. That one was floor-to-ceiling windows, letting morning light cut patterns on the wooden floor. Staircases spiraled up the sides of the bookshelves, stopping at balconies every seven feet or so, before twisting upward again. They went up, and up, and up, beyond the ceilings of the other rooms, beyond even the ceilings of the rooms above, right to the roof of the palace itself. And every shelf was full, every space bursting with paper, with stories and knowledge.

  “Finnegan—”

  “I know. Impressive, isn’t it? Even I don’t know all of what’s here. There are too many books to get through in twenty-one years. Too many books to get through in two hundred years. I’m sure there’s something in here that can help. Even the Institute’s resources can’t compare to this.” He headed straight for one of the spiral staircases along the side of the room. The steps turned so tightly that Aurora’s head spun by the time they reached the first platform. “This is the duller stuff,” he said. “About plants, mostly. Edible plants, healing plants . . . useful if your kingdom’s not a wasteland.” He continued up the staircase, past the second balcony, and the third. “Now here is information on creatures. Much more interesting. Unicorn legends are somewhere over there, phoenixes, too; the lower alcove has the more mundane creatures, and this,” he said, as they stepped onto the highest platform, “is all that we have on dragons.”

  “All of it?” There were only four shelves of books here, and half of them were empty. Aurora walked to the nearest one and ran her fingers along the spines. The older ones all had mystical titles—The Legend of Dragons, The Day the Dragons Died—while the newer volumes contained history, anatomy, maps of their domains.

  “We know three things about dragons for certain,” Finnegan said. “That they exist, that they hate water, and that they kill us. Everything else is guesswork. No one gets close enough to dragons to learn about them and lives to write a book.”

  Aurora twisted her dragon necklace between her fingers. “But some people must have got close,” she said. “To get dragon’s blood.”

  “But they didn’t live long enough afterward to write about it. Or to do much of anything, in most cases. They might have gathered a few theories, but no facts. No proof.”

  “If you have dragon’s blood,” Aurora said, “that must mean you know how to hurt them. Why haven’t you fought them before?”

  “Because we can’t hurt them,” Finnegan said. “Not really. We tried to fight them, when they first returned. It didn’t work well. First it was cannons and spears, but these things seem to eat metal. They weren’t affected at all. Then some genius tried to make spears and arrows out of ice, thinking that would cut them and melt their magic. Well, they did cut them, but then the weapons melted, and they were left with very angry dragons irritated by minor wounds. The men gathered a little blood for further research, but that was all that they ever achieved.”

  “And this hard-won blood was put in a necklace?”

  “It was a gift for my grandmother,” Finnegan said. “They thought it would honor her. She was less than impressed.”

  “A gift you just happened to have with you in Alyssinia when you met me?”

  He laughed. “You are far too suspicious, Aurora. I had it sent to me after your first hint of magic. I wanted to see how its magic responded to you.”

  She ran her finger along the rough edge of the dragon’s wing. She tried to picture the blood inside it, how it had once pounded through a dragon’s veins.

  “But how did you see that I had magic?” she said. “You seemed to know before I did, and there were a million more reasonable explanations for what happened. What made you see?”

  “I paid attention.”

  “And you expect me to believe that?”

  “What can I say, dragon girl? You’re hard to look away from.”

  She expected to see a mocking smile, a teasing bow, but he continued to search the shelves, all hints of smugness gone.

  “I have a book,” he said, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “About dragons. It was my favorite when I was younger. I’ll lend it to you after this. You should know the legends too.”

  “Oh,” Aurora said. “Thank you.”

 
; They walked on to a third floor platform, halfway around the room. Most of the books there must have been over a hundred years old, their bindings falling away. Some of them did not look like they had been touched since the library had been built. But one small area was dust free.

  “Here,” he said, “are all the books we have on magic.”

  A single volume poked out a few inches, ruining the smooth line of the shelf. She slid the book free. The surrounding books clung to it, as though it didn’t quite fit.

  “You’ve been reading this one?” she said. He nodded. “Then this is the one I’m going to read first.”

  “You don’t trust me to tell you what I’ve learned?”

  “I just think we should start out in the same place. It’ll make things easier.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll be back in the dragon section if you need me.”

  She watched him stroll away, and then sat and opened the book. The first line seemed to stare back at her, printed in a large and elaborate font.

  Magic is energy, uncontrolled.

  She turned the pages almost too fast for comprehension, trying to absorb the words with glances alone. Magic was energy, wildness, nature, it said. It was a part of the world, separate from any individual. Some people could tap into it, influence it, but most could not.

  Yet that was not true for Aurora. At least, she did not think it was true. Her magic had always burst out of her. You burn with it, Celestine had said. The power came when her emotions were strongest, and it always seemed to come from her, from her anger or frustration or fear.

  She placed the book open on the floor and seized a candle from the table. She stared at the wick.

  If magic came from the air, surely she would need to draw it in, like breathing. She breathed in and tried to feel magic in the air, searching for a hint of fire.

  Nothing. It simply felt like breathing. She closed her eyes and tried again, but still it was the same. She opened her eyes, and this time she tried pushing flames toward the wick, willing it to light.

  Still nothing happened.

  She wasn’t entirely surprised. Her magic rarely appeared when she wanted it to. But she needed to learn how to control it, to tap into the power lingering under her skin.