by Natalie Mae
“You lived,” Kasta says. “They have no reason to believe the knife still worked.”
He says this like it’s a simple fact, like he wasn’t the one with that knife. I stop at the threshold of the exit, where white marble yields to paving stones, and he does too, reluctantly looking back at me. I scrutinize his stony features against the dawn: the tightness of his lips, the guarded darkness in his eyes. I don’t know what I’m searching for. Regret, maybe. Or any indication of the boy he could have been, the one who confided in me, the one as desperate as I was to prove he was worth something, even without magic.
Does he remember the promises he made in the caves, to be a good king?
Does he wish he’d dropped the knife and trusted me?
But instead it is me—reminding myself of what he is now and that he killed Maia to become it—who regrets ever wondering at all.
“Fine,” I say. “But I want to go first, alone, and you can follow in a few minutes.”
Kasta shrugs. “Fine.”
The answer is so unexpected, so agreeable, that I nearly argue with him just because it feels like that’s what we should be doing. But staying near him feels like drowning, and I grip the skirt of my jole and stride outside. Into the cool desert morning. I breathe it in, the tightness easing in my chest, and push the memories away with the sight of the manicured trees, the scent of cactus blossom and fresh lemon. From the tour with the handmaiden, I remember the Mestrah’s garden is the first turn past a hedge trimmed in the shape of a warhorse, at the end of a path bordered by pomegranate trees. But even amid such beauty, I listen for the rustle of footsteps behind me. For the shifting of leaves, the beat of wings.
The sheath taps against my ribs.
I arrive at the Mestrah’s garden, alone.
A black gate marks the entry, its iron bars bent in symbols for the gods. The massive windows of my room run above one entire side of it, where trellises of red and gold ivy cascade like feathers. Green hedges border the rest, within which a vast, emerald paradise sprawls, dotted with well-manicured trees, orange calla lilies, and tiny white flowers that dust the grass like powdered sugar. An Icestone path cuts through it like a ribbon, the chill from which I’m sure will feel divine in the heat of the afternoon, but right now feels frigid.
I start toward the circular platform at the center, rubbing warmth into my arms. A figure sits alone there in a white tunic on an alabaster bench.
The Mestrah is praying. He faces me, but with his eyes closed and his body hunched forward, he can’t see me. The fingertips of his right hand touch his forehead, and it’s humbling to see him like this before the gods, without a priest, making a submissive gesture he has never made to any living person. I hesitate, not wanting to intrude.
Then he coughs, breaking the picture. His ribs heave and blue songbirds scatter from the trees, and a serving boy rushes in with a chalice of tonic. Between coughs, the Mestrah forces some of the medicine into his mouth, and after a painfully long moment, he swallows and notices me.
He straightens and slowly gestures that I should come forward.
“Mestrah.” I kneel and touch my fingers to my forehead. The Mestrah coughs again, though it’s weaker.
“Rise,” he says. I do, and he glances behind me. “Where is Kasta?”
“He’s coming.”
Disapproval flickers across the Mestrah’s face. He knows I couldn’t have known where to meet him without Kasta telling me.
“You did not walk together,” he says.
“The last time we were alone, he drove a knife into my heart. Please forgive me for wanting to be cautious.”
His brow rises. Sapphire eyes study me, uncomfortably familiar, and I avert my gaze. My entire future rests in this god’s hands. I chide myself for my tongue and wait for his reproach.
His voice is quiet. “Do you worship the gods, Zahru?”
I glance up. “Yes.”
“But you consider what Kasta did to be personal.”
Darkness stirs in my chest. “He cut my wrist to make me the sacrifice. My death was not the gods’ will.” And neither was Maia’s.
The Mestrah sighs. “Even if that were true, you are not dead. It was not a sacrifice he made you, but a queen.”
“But that wasn’t—”
“What he intended?” The Mestrah shakes his head. “Look at me, Zahru, when I am speaking. We are nearly equals.”
In shock, I look up. He’s already a much different god than the one I remember chastising Kasta before the Crossing, and I expected him to continue treating me as a peasant, at least until I start meeting his requirements. But he defended me at the meeting yesterday. And now he’s telling me to look up.
“In a moon’s time,” he says, “you may well be running a country beside my son. You do not have to forgive him. But you do need to understand what he did. Orkena means more to him than any one person, any one life. And so it must be for you. You do not have to make your sacrifices in the same way. But they must be made, if Orkena is to survive.”
The words are an eerie echo of what I once told Jet, and I set my jaw.
“Yes,” he says, more to himself. “This hunt will be very telling.”
Dismissal threads his tone, and my chest squeezes. Even if he’s giving me a chance at this, I haven’t impressed him yet in any measure. Not that I thought it would be easy, but I don’t think I’m off to a good start.
The Mestrah’s gaze shifts, and I tense at the hollow, heavy presence that follows.
“Kasta,” the king says. “Join us.”
Kasta does, stopping too close to me, and I edge away as he bows. The Mestrah frowns at this, too. But it was he himself who said I didn’t have to forgive Kasta.
The king gestures that we should sit, and we do, taking separate benches from the four smaller ones that surround him.
“We will begin simply,” the Mestrah says, “with a technique that you can practice while you’re away. After you return, I will gauge the progress you’ve made on it. And next time, you will arrive together.”
A warning glance at us both.
“You have felt by now the bud of your powers.” He lifts the crystal glass of tonic from the serving boy’s tray and takes a sip. “The ability to sense strong emotions is the first stage of any mental magic, as your mind opens to a new part of the world. For some magic, like my own ability to read minds, I must let those emotions in so I can locate the memories beneath them. But to use Influence, you must press back on what you feel. You will learn to take hold of different feelings as deftly as a musician forming a chord, and when you’re ready . . .” His gaze slides to me. “You will learn to change them.”
I don’t know what I was expecting from magic that could affect people’s hearts, but it was much more along the lines of being exceptionally charming and likable. It wasn’t this.
“Change them?” I echo. “You mean, control them?”
“You understand, then, why it is a power that only gods should wield.” He dabs his brow with a cloth. “I will only be able to guide you so far as what I’ve read of it, and what I understand of my own abilities as a mind reader. No one has wielded Influence in centuries. It will be up to the pair of you to determine how best to use it.”
Kasta glances my way. “But if we can’t use it on each other, how will we practice?”
“On volunteers.” The Mestrah gestures to a pair of men in brown tunics. “Starting with servants. And as your powers advance, on people of greater magic.”
The servants shuffle forward, and nerves prickle my arms. I’m definitely not ready to work on people yet. I’ve barely begun to understand what Influence even is, let alone what I’m expected to do with it, and the thought of changing them, of making them adore or obey me for no reason beyond my wanting them to, feels like the worst kind of manipulation. Much more like slave and master than
subject and queen.
But then, I remind myself, isn’t that where the title of Mestrah—Master—comes from?
The Mestrah sets his hands on his bare knees. “Today, we will work on simply finding and identifying emotions. Don’t try to change anything yet. Just open your mind to the energy surrounding your volunteer, and amplify it until you can tell me what he’s feeling.”
I breathe out. This, at least, seems innocent enough, and sounds very much like how my father taught me to use my Whisperer’s abilities—to listen first, and let the feelings come on their own. As the shorter of the two men stops before me, I tell myself this is the only part of Influence that I’ll use outside of these sessions.
The man looks back at me with gray eyes, his shoulders square, his long black hair a sleek curtain down his back. I don’t need any magic to know he’s nervous. His gaze skips between my face and the symbol on my chest, and very quickly to anywhere else.
“Jener,” the Mestrah says, addressing the servants. “Each of you was given a piece of parchment with an emotion. You may now open it. Recollect memories that evoke that emotion, and continue to do so until your dōmmel has correctly named what you’re feeling.”
My volunteer reaches into his tunic pocket and unrolls a small note. He inhales as if to steel himself, and I wonder if it’s for the emotion he’s supposed to feel or for being involved in this at all.
He looks across at me, and I hold my breath.
But whatever he’s feeling, it isn’t strong enough to reach me the way the desperation from the woman in yellow did. The chill of the Icestone path curls around my legs; finches chatter and argue in the trees. Food? they ask. Mine! Give! I try to tune them out, to focus on only the man, but the birds are too loud, and when I reach for the man’s emotions, I only get bursts of the animals’ joy and irritation. I wish there was a way to turn my Whispering off. But then I remember Jet pulling away from me in the closet, the spark of anger that had moved through his fingers. I reach for the man’s arm.
“Zahru,” the Mestrah snaps. “Did I say to touch him?”
I freeze. “I . . . it’s easier for me to read emotions through touch. I’ve actually done this a couple of times. It’s the same with Whispering.”
“It will be critical that you use this power without doing so. If you’ve already felt human emotions through touch, then it teaches you nothing to do it again now. Read his emotions from there.”
Wow, I mouth, snatching my hand back. I clasp my elbows and wait until the Mestrah turns his focus to Kasta.
“Good job, Zahru,” I mutter, because if the Mestrah isn’t going to say it, I feel like someone needs to. “How impressive that you’ve already mastered half of this little exercise, before we’ve even had a single lesson—”
“Zahru.” The Mestrah leans on one knee. “I may be ill, but I can still hear.”
I clear my throat and refocus. My volunteer shifts on his feet. I feel Kasta’s eyes on me, but I don’t look over.
But fine, if the Mestrah wants me to do this without touch, then I will. It can’t be that different from Whispering. I just need to do what I did with Fara all those years ago, to unfocus from what I can see and hear, and sense the energy that lies beneath. Like learning to look past the reflection of the sky in the river, and see the fish and the seagrass. I look into the man’s eyes. Past my reflection. And there, faint but present, is the nudge of something new, like the first day my Whisperer powers surfaced.
And I realize—I might actually be good at this.
“Joy,” Kasta says.
My focus shatters. I gape at Kasta, who looks far too pleased by my reaction.
“Close,” the Mestrah says, his brow high. “See if you can refine it further.”
Apos. Kasta is absolutely not allowed to do better at this than me. I was the one raised to read emotions, even if no one appreciates that, and I know if I could just block out my Whisperer abilities, I could focus enough to get it. I resist the urge to reach for the man again and press the birds’ chatter to the back of my mind. The man doesn’t want to hold my gaze, but I need him to, and even though the Mestrah didn’t tell us to do this, I think of how I communicate with the animals—how I can send my own emotions across to ease their mind. I try sending calmness now. That he should trust me, that we’re safe, that he can let me in—
Something cracks in my mind, and the man looks into my eyes.
Anxiousness splinters through me. I gasp as syrup-thick sorrow flashes under my skin, then scalding anger, then icy fear. This last one lingers, frigid hands grappling up my spine, until my heart quickens and nightmares flood my vision: Hen, her body broken and bleeding; Jet with a sword through his heart; Atera on fire, the flames clawing the sky. And then the images bleed into an inky darkness, and a hollow hum grows in my ears—
I break the contact, shoving him out of my head. The garden snaps into view. The Mestrah and Kasta stare at me, as well as Kasta’s volunteer, and I wrap my arms around myself, shivering.
“Fear,” I say. “His emotion is fear.”
Which is the point my volunteer’s eyes roll into his head, and he collapses.
“Gods!” I yelp.
“Brek?” says his companion. He shoots a panicked look at the Mestrah but doesn’t dare move. Two Healers dash over from the wall and ease my volunteer onto his side. My stomach twists. This has never happened with the animals. Their emotions always stay on my skin, never in my head, and certainly never to the degree that I could affect them—
“Zahru.” The Mestrah beckons me over.
I step around the man and the Healers, shaking. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, I—What happened?”
“Did you try to change something?”
Heat flushes my neck. Gods, is that what I did, sending calmness between us? Wanting the man to look up, to give up his feelings so Kasta wouldn’t be faster?
I grip my elbows. “I—I don’t know.”
“Because if you did, without knowing how to control it, you can cause a spike in your subject’s emotion that can overwhelm you and cause you to black out. Or, if you shove back on it as you instinctively did, you’ll do the same to your unfortunate subject.”
He opens his hand to the man on the ground. The man wakes under the Healer’s touch, sitting slowly up, but when his fluttering gaze settles on me, it widens in dawning terror.
“Oh.” My throat tightens. “Right.”
“That will be enough for today,” the Mestrah says. “Jener, you are dismissed. Kasta, how did you fare?”
“Better than that,” Kasta says with a sharp look at me.
“Did you decipher his exact emotion?”
Kasta sighs. “I was close. Then hers started whimpering.”
“Keep practicing, Zahru,” the Mestrah says. “While you’re away, focus only on reaching for emotion, not demanding it. Once you’re able to do this reliably, we’ll work on control.”
A chill wraps my spine as the Healers help my volunteer to his feet. They shuffle out in hurried steps, whispering and glancing over their shoulders, and suddenly I’m very grateful they won’t be able to tell anyone what I did today. And how, on my first try at Influence, I went right for the most horrible part of my magic, like some power-hungry tyrant.
I turn on my heel, ignoring how the Mestrah stands with Kasta, an approving hand on his shoulder as they speak in low tones. For once, it’s Kasta who listened to directions, whose volunteer adamantly did not need the help of a Healer to walk away. I expect him to gloat. To give me the same wicked smile he wore after the Mestrah chided Jet in the war room.
But I swear when he glances over, it’s with a flickering echo of the volunteer’s fear.
XI
I do not think about the Influence lesson on the way back to my room.
I do not think about having to practice it this week, or what explana
tion I’ll give to the guards if I make someone else black out, since I’m not supposed to reveal I even have Influence. I do not think of my tutors, or Kasta, or the hunt I’m supposed to leave on within the hour.
Instead, I think of Hen, and how odd it is that I haven’t seen her in two days.
Granted, I’ve been a little busy, but I thought she would have turned up by now. But just as I resolve to look for her, the Royal Materialist arrives with a list of cities requesting my clothes program, a servant asks my preferences for meals during the hunt, and two commanders who’d been out when I first toured the palace stop by to introduce themselves. They talk my ear off for a quarter of an hour, and by the time they leave, a handmaiden in purple is waiting to take me to the boats.
I would like it noted that I still haven’t had breakfast.
“Do I at least get to say goodbye to my family?” I ask rather snappishly, as again—no breakfast.
“Of course, dōmmel,” the girl says, bowing. “They’re already at the docks.”
So they are, and I have to admit this is a relief since the last time I asked this question, as the human sacrifice, I was told there was no time to see them. Fara, Mora, Jet, and—finally—Hen wait in a landing area near stacks of wooden weapons crates, the river sparkling behind them, and upon it, the palace’s finest ships. Glass party boats, stoic warships, and gleaming merchants’ vessels float between the white oak docks like prized horses in stalls, the hunting ship standing out among them with its dark sides and its gangplanks clustered with servants. It waits on the water like a wooden knife, with sharp black sails and metal railings.
Hen sees me coming and grabs Mora’s arm. “All right, stop talking about death. She’s here. Zahru!”
She hugs me warmly, which is my first warning that she’s been up to something.
“Hey,” I say. “I was just starting to worry about you. Where have you been?”
She beams, as if she was hoping this was the question I’d lead with. Warning bells are screeching through my head. “Oh, I had some things to wrap up at home. Also, it was surprisingly difficult to get your history tutor fired.”
