Kingdom of Ashes

by Rhiannon Thomas

  She stared at the wick and willed it to burn. She thought of flames, thought of her own anger. How had it felt, the last time she had exploded with fire?

  “If you burn down my library, I’ll never forgive you.”

  She jumped. Finnegan stood by the stairs, a book tucked under his arm.

  “I wasn’t going to burn down the library. I wasn’t doing anything at all.”

  “Not going well?”

  She lay the candle on the ground. “The book said you have to take magic in from the air,” she said. “But it feels wrong.”

  Finnegan bent down beside her. “You think it’s more a case of directing it out?”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “But that goes against everything the book says about magic.”

  “But the author never met you.” He picked up the book and weighed it in his hands. “You have magic in Alyssinia, but no one else does. It would make sense if you have your own source of magic. Like the dragons.”

  But that didn’t explain why she would be different. She looked at the rows of books before them, the thick layers of dust showing just how old some of the knowledge must be. It would take forever to read them all. Her parents had never allowed her to read any books on magic during her childhood, as though even the mention of it would trigger the curse. They’d left her completely ignorant of the things that she most needed to know.

  “In Alyssinia, the king said that people had stolen all the kingdom’s magic. Could that be possible? Could that be why it vanished?”

  “I don’t know,” Finnegan said. “It couldn’t really be stolen, could it? It didn’t belong to anyone in particular. Seems to me that it just got used up. There was magic in Vanhelm, until gradually there wasn’t. And then there was magic in Alyssinia, until eventually there wasn’t. Maybe it’s a resource, and there’s only so much.”

  “Then I think I got more than my fair share,” Aurora said. She picked up the candle again. “How can I learn how to use my magic if no one’s seen anything like it before?”

  “First, you need a better place to practice,” Finnegan said. “Somewhere with less chance of destroying thousands of priceless books and incurring my undying hatred.”

  “I’m willing to risk it,” Aurora said, but she smiled.

  “I have to go to some meetings,” Finnegan said. “You read. Resist the urge to burn my books. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Aurora spent the rest of the day among the library’s dustiest books, pausing only to eat. The books’ pages were yellowed and fragile, some seeming on the verge of disintegrating in her hands, but their archaic language offered nothing new. They all referred to magic as an external force that only a lucky few could influence. They spoke of great deeds that had been accomplished with magic, of power channeled to grow better crops and end droughts, magic used to influence minds, magic even used to kill, but each time, the user was tapping into something in the air, helping it bloom or perverting it for their own twisted needs. No one seemed to burn with magic of their own. If they did, no one had written about them.

  But then, it seemed, truly powerful users of magic were rare. Some people could use it for small tasks, and healers were common enough to deal with the day-to-day ailments of the villages, but there were few who could use it to manipulate, to control, to destroy. A few male sorcerers, who traveled to share their talents for a price. And, every now and again, a fearsome witch.

  The first, the books said, had been Alysse.

  Aurora leaned closer, her fingers hovering over the page. Alysse had been her hero as a child, but her own experiences since awakening had soured those stories of the beloved magical queen.

  The books seemed to confirm her newfound cynicism. At first, the story was familiar—Alysse was the daughter of one of the first people to cross the sea to Alyssinia, and people thought of her as the last remnant of Vanhelmic power, a memory of what Vanhelm could have been, if its own magic had not faded away. She had not known about her talents until she left Vanhelm for Alyssinia, an endless forest where the magic was untouched. The land that was so forbidding to the others seemed to whisper to her, and she taught her people how to hear the whispers too.

  Yet as Aurora turned the pages, the story changed from the version she knew. Alysse had too much power, it said. She could have made the trees bow to her if she wished it, could have changed the direction of rivers and snatched birds out of the sky. People feared her, toward the end. A girl who could talk to nature and make the land welcome them was sweet, useful. A woman with those powers, bold and fearless and unbowed by anything, was something else. They did not trust this sorceress who could make so much happen with her thoughts. And so they murdered her, a few days before her coronation. The Alyssinians had crossed the ocean for opportunity and magic, but feared it once they found it, in the hands of their once-beloved princess.

  Aurora sat back on her heels. She had never heard a hint of this before, but after her experiences in Alyssinia, it made sense. And which was more likely: a beautiful queen who vanished into the mist, or a princess forced to vanish before she ascended to the throne, because other people wanted her power?

  Perhaps Alysse was able to defy those trying to control her. Perhaps she ruled, and was happy, and the truth just got twisted in a myth across the sea.

  Aurora was not sure she believed it. Alysse may not have been Alyssinia’s first queen, but she was Alyssinia’s first witch. And that, Aurora was realizing, was a dangerous thing.

  EIGHT

  FINNEGAN RETURNED TO THE LIBRARY AFTER DINNER, and led Aurora through a door on the second balcony. The room beyond was small and square, with a table in the center, a few boxes against one wall and an empty grate. “This is the antechamber that connects my rooms to the library. I thought it might be a good place to practice, so I cleared it out.”

  “You cleared it out?”

  “My servants cleared it out,” he corrected. “Either way, there are candles in the boxes, and there are no books to burn. I thought it would help.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” She walked over to the nearest box and looked at the candles inside. They were all different sizes, all different colors, as though Finnegan thought the shade of the wax might make a difference. She picked out a solid, square-looking one and placed it on the table. Then she stepped back and stared at the wick.

  “Wait!” Finnegan strode toward her. “The necklace. We should remove it first. I’d rather you didn’t burn the whole palace down.” He picked it up by the chain and unclicked the clasp. The metal tickled Aurora’s neck as he pulled it away.

  The dragon was a small thing, but she immediately missed the weight of it. She pressed her fingers to the spot where it had rested.

  “Do you think the necklace is why my magic got so out of my control, in that village in Alyssinia?”

  “Possibly,” he said. “But I’d rather not be in my own chambers when we find out.”

  Finnegan stepped back into the shadows, and Aurora focused on the candle again. All she had to do was light it. She had done that before. So she stared at it, forcing her intention through the air, willing it to obey. Burn.

  Nothing happened.

  She could feel Finnegan watching her. Waiting. Anticipating her magic. “Do you have somewhere else to be?” she said.

  “Trying to get rid of me, dragon girl?”

  “No,” she said. “But aren’t you worried? I don’t know anything about controlling my magic. And I’m pretty sure I once nearly set Rodric on fire. Don’t you find it . . . unnerving? It would be safer not to be here.”

  “Unnerving?” Finnegan laughed. “Aurora, it’s amazing. You have the power to make things burn, just because you want them to. You can stare a dragon in the eye and live to laugh about it. Why wouldn’t I want to be there to see that?”

  “Because I could set you on fire.”

  “I didn’t know you were so concerned for my well-being. Don’t worry, Aurora. I’ll try not to incur your wrath.”
<
br />   Now it was her turn to laugh. “Do you think you can manage it?”

  “No,” he said. “But I’m willing to risk it.”

  She brushed her hair away from her face and stared at the candle. “The problem is that I don’t know how to begin. I’ve tried before—standing in a room, trying to set a candle on fire. And it’s never worked. Not once. It’s always been accidental. Or if I meant to do it, it’s as if . . . I was so caught up in the moment that I couldn’t even think about it. It just happened.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t try so hard,” Finnegan said. “Stop focusing on lighting it.”

  “I should focus on not lighting it?”

  “I mean,” he said, “that you can’t do anything simply by willing it. If you think to yourself, walk, you won’t move anywhere. You can’t think about moving your foot. You just have to move it.”

  She ran her fingers through her hair again. “That’s not true,” she said. “Children must have to think about walking. And how am I supposed to practice if I’m not supposed to think about what I’m doing?”

  Finnegan stepped closer and rested a hand on her shoulder blade. “Well,” he said, his voice low. “What did it feel like, the last time you used magic?”

  She closed her eyes, reaching for the memory, for the traces of magic that she had not allowed herself to feel. It felt like power, like desperation, like she could no longer be contained by her bones and skin. Dangerous.

  But as she stood in the darkened room, she only felt like herself. Flesh and blood and golden curls, too aware of the walls around her.

  “It’s hard,” she said. “To feel something that you don’t really feel.”

  “If you felt it once, not so long ago, you can feel it again.”

  She remembered the first time she had tried to light a candle, locked in her room in the castle in Petrichor. The thing that had finally caused a spark was her frustration at how useless she was. How she smiled, and curtsied, and watched as her life was crushed away. How even her parents had betrayed her, how everyone was so busy celebrating her that they never once considered her as a person of her own.

  She bundled all those thoughts together, and she pushed. Light, she thought. Light.

  But nothing happened. Not a breath of air moved.

  She squeezed her eyes closed. She could summon fire, she had seen the proof, but there wasn’t so much as a flicker now. Could she only use it in Alyssinia, where the memory of magic was fresher? Or was it meant to be out of her control?

  Finnegan ran his hand from her shoulder to her elbow. “Did you know you had magic, before you fell asleep?”

  “No,” Aurora said. “I didn’t.”

  “If using it was easy, you would have noticed before. It took a lot to bring it out the first time. Of course it’s hard to control.”

  “But I never tried to use magic before.” There was no evidence that she had even had magic before. She had been frustrated then, hadn’t she? She’d been angry. But she had never made anything burn.

  The magic could be a remnant of the curse, traces of powers used to try and awaken her. It might not even be hers.

  But Celestine had told Aurora that she had been created with a spell, a bargain between Aurora’s mother and the witch. Was that the reason she had magic? Was it a twist that Celestine added to the deal?

  “Maybe it can’t be controlled. Maybe that’s part of the curse. Celestine would never let me have magic I could actually use at will, would she?”

  “Maybe,” Finnegan said. “But I don’t think so.” She could feel his breath against her ear. “Don’t think about it so hard. Try finding the fire. Grabbing on to it. Trust that it’s there.”

  “It’s there,” she said. The charred village was proof of that. “It’s like . . . it comes when I’m angry, when I’m not actually thinking about it. When I’m scared, when I’m threatened, it’s there, almost without a thought. But otherwise . . .” Otherwise, she couldn’t find a trace of it. How could she control something that only appeared when she stopped trying to control it?

  “Well,” Finnegan said slowly, “if you think about it, you’re being threatened all the time right now. Considering what King John’s up to.”

  “So I should be constantly afraid, and then I’ll get stronger?” That did not sound like strength. “No,” she said. “No. I should feel angry.” Those were the times she had used magic. When she hated the king, hated Rodric, hated herself. When she had wanted to see things burn. “It’s fire,” she said. “Fire isn’t afraid.”

  She turned back to the candle, and turned her thoughts inward. At first, she thought of her anger at herself, for how useless she had been, how she had caused so much damage in her quest to be good. Then she forced those thoughts away. Her magic needed to be her strength, and she couldn’t be strong while tearing herself apart.

  Instead, she dug into that lingering feeling of betrayal . . . King John threatening her at the wedding, the key clicking as Iris locked her into her room, Celestine smiling her hungry smile, Tristan staring at her from the rooftop as blood ran in the square. And then she pushed further, into those unfair thoughts she could never acknowledge—fury at Rodric, for waking her. At the people in Alyssinia, for thinking she was their savior. At her own mother, for making a deal with a witch when she knew it must go wrong. None of them had ever given her a chance. None of them had treated her like a real person. She didn’t want to be their savior, didn’t want to be their queen, but they did not care what she wanted, not for a moment.

  The pressure built in her chest, pounding in her ears. She did not think light, but she grabbed the feeling and pushed it toward the candle.

  It burst into flame.

  Finnegan lunged forward to extinguish it. “Maybe a bit smaller next time,” he said. “Candles do have wicks, you know.”

  “You want me to unleash all of my anger and only start a small fire?”

  “Not unleash it,” he said. “Embrace it. Then find the spark you need.”

  She stared at the deformed remains of the candle. “It’s like . . . the fire, the feeling of it, rushes out of me. Maybe if I can contain it somehow, and pull out a tendril of it . . .”

  This time, the magic came more easily. A surge of power, a spark around the wick of a candle.

  By the end of the evening, several candles flickered, and a large fire burned in the grate. She was conscious of every beat of her heart. Her limbs ached, but it was a comfortable kind of tired, like she actually fit in her skin.

  She sat on the floor, her legs tucked beneath her. Finnegan had an arm draped around her shoulder, and she didn’t even mind, didn’t want to shove him away. Hours of practice had made them feel closer. In tune. Hours of picking up fragments of her anger and pushing them across the room, of sharing her feelings with words, of him coaxing more out of her than she knew she had. One stubborn part of her still wanted do it alone, to have the magic be her power, but sharing it with Finnegan, accepting a partner, did not mean it wasn’t hers. She felt . . . open.

  “Well,” Finnegan said. “I suppose we’d better stop for tonight.”

  He turned his head, his nose inches from hers. He was not grinning now. If he just shifted a couple of inches, he could kiss her.

  She glanced at his lips.

  It was just the dark, the candlelight, confusing her thoughts. But her heart pounded faster, and her breath hitched as he slipped almost unperceivably closer.

  He was going to kiss her.

  She couldn’t let him kiss her. Not now, not when things were so confused, not when she needed this alliance to work. She ducked her head. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I should rest.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said, as he sat back. “I’m not going to kiss you.”

  “Why not?” She did not mean to speak, but the words rushed out before she could stop them. They were not what she would have wanted to say. I don’t want you to kiss me, perhaps. Or how dare you assume? There had been something
there, a moment, but that did not mean she was desperate for him to kiss her.

  “I’m waiting for you to kiss me. I feel like you’ve been kissed enough times in your life. But if you leaned up and kissed me, if you were so overcome that you couldn’t resist . . . well, that would be something worth seeing, wouldn’t it?”

  She stood up. “You’ll be waiting a long time.”

  He stood too, utterly calm, smiling his infuriating smile. “Don’t worry, Aurora,” he said, as she walked away. “It’ll be worth the wait.”

  NINE

  SOMETHING FELT DIFFERENT WHEN AURORA AWOKE the next morning. A maid had opened the window, letting in fresh air, but something about the room felt a little too sharp, a little too cold.

  Aurora rolled onto her side and burrowed deeper into the blankets.

  A rose lay on the pillow next to her. A piece of paper was wrapped around the stem. Aurora sat up, her hair tumbling around her face. Was this some joke from Finnegan, a comment on last night? She picked it up. One word had been written on the parchment.

  Soon.

  Aurora recognized that handwriting. She had seen it burned into the wall of her tower, taunting her for a life long lost.

  Celestine.

  Celestine had been here. In this city, in this palace, in her bedroom while she slept. Aurora dropped the rose and scrambled out of bed, avoiding the flower as though it might bite her.

  She spun on the spot. Celestine was not there. Not in the room, not lurking in a corner, waiting to be noticed.

  Aurora ripped the blankets off the bed and threw the pillow aside, hunting for another message, another clue. Nothing. Her dresser was untouched, as was her desk. Just the open window, and the rose on the pillow.

  She picked up the flower again, careful to avoid its thorns. Celestine had broken in while she slept. To do what? Threaten her? Warn her?

  She must know that Aurora had been practicing her magic. She must have seen her conjure fire, and this was her way of congratulating her or unsettling her. She wanted Aurora to know she was close.