The Mage Heir

by Kathryn Sommerlot

  “Of course,” Tiran said, and she disappeared back into the sanctuary with the alchemist beside her. After their footsteps had faded away, Yudai sighed, heavy and weary.

  “This temple…”

  “It would be quite a journey,” Jotin finished. “The Dar-Itusk Basin is near the southern bounds of Joesar, and runs in a line across our sands, dividing the desert from the coast.”

  “But we can’t stay here,” Tatsu said. “Not with the mercenaries after us. I can only assume that no one would bother hiring only one.”

  “Which means there are bound to be more,” Alesh said and crossed her arms over her chest defensively.

  Yudai’s expression was dark. “And I’m a threat to this whole city should they find me again. I doubt the council would even let me stay after the incident at the Raydrau.”

  “So, it appears the mage’s temple is our only real choice,” Tatsu said.

  “I suppose we might find some answers anyway,” Yudai agreed, but his tone didn’t sound optimistic about the prospect.

  “I would continue with you to the temple,” Jotin said. When Tatsu’s head snapped towards him in question, he shrugged, the barest hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Somehow, I would like to see this through.”

  “Somehow?” Alesh repeated.

  The smile on Jotin’s face grew more pronounced. “I’m intrigued. And you’ll need a guide.”

  “I’m glad my situation amuses you,” Yudai said with bite. Tatsu glared at him and Yudai’s eyes rolled a bit before his shoulders hunched over. “Sorry. It’s been a rough day.”

  “Then we’ll head to the mage’s temple?” Tatsu asked Alesh, who sat on the edge of the bench, poised and ready to bolt upright. Next to her, Ral sat, her hands folded demurely in her lap. “Are you both coming with?”

  “I don’t see any way around it,” Alesh replied. “Ral clearly wants to go with you, and there’s not much use of me trying to stop her.”

  “I’m glad to have you,” Tatsu said, and he didn’t miss the way Yudai’s face twisted into a brief grimace.

  “I’m accompanying you as well,” Leil said.

  “No,” Yudai replied immediately. “Why would you want to?”

  Her fingers, held together in front her body, began to knit together in erratic movements. “This is partly my fault—”

  “Yes,” Yudai interjected.

  “—and I want to help, as much as I can.”

  “Alright,” Tatsu told her, just as Yudai repeated his earlier answer of: “No!”

  Silence settled over the group. Yudai stared at Tatsu for several breaths, his jaw tightly clenched. Then, as the tension began to buzz like an agitated hornet against Tatsu’s ears, Yudai said, “Tatsu, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  He didn’t even wait for Tatsu to agree before stalking out of the room and into the high ceilings of the sanctuary. There was a sharp twinge of pain in Tatsu’s temple that rippled across his forehead.

  “We’ll be right back,” he said and followed Yudai out near the thick-trunked tree that was reaching up into and beyond the wooden rafters.

  Yudai whirled on him before Tatsu stopped walking. “What are you doing?”

  “Look, I know why you are upset right now—”

  “Tatsu! Alesh I can deal with, even though I don’t trust her not to decide she’d rather take whatever the Queen of Chayd is offering for my return, but you want the mage to come as well?”

  “She’s offering to help.”

  “She,” Yudai hissed, “was one of the people holding my mouth open so they could pour these poisons down my throat.”

  “And I was the one to haul you out of Runon’s castle for the queen,” Tatsu said. He spread his good arm out to the side with his palm facing the sky. “We’ve all made mistakes. And I think we need all the help we can get right now.”

  Yudai looked away, frowning deeply. “I don’t trust them.”

  “We need them. We need people on our side.”

  “It was easy when it was just us,” Yudai sighed, and his eyes flickered up a bit.

  “Well, I also got stung by scorpions and almost died when it was just us,” Tatsu pointed out. “So maybe this way is better.”

  Yudai barked out a short laugh. “That’s not what I meant.”

  He fell silent, and more than anything else, Tatsu wanted to reach out and trace his fingers across Yudai’s bare skin. The desire surprised him, and fumbling for anything that might help distract him, he asked, “What did you mean?”

  “I just… I liked it when it was just us.” Yudai’s eyes, dark and hooded, seemed to roam over Tatsu’s face, searching for something.

  So did I, but the words got caught between Tatsu’s teeth, and he couldn’t stammer them free. Despite the inherent dangers they’d thrown themselves headfirst into, part of him longed for the slow days atop the mountains before they’d stepped foot on the desert sands. He rarely felt comfortable around others, but on the peaks with Yudai, there had been a sense of familiarity and peace.

  Things were different. They were different, and now that they knew of everything happening in Yudai’s blood, they had no choice but to chase down possible answers.

  Yudai’s shoulders seemed to unwind, the tension and solitude of the prince falling away. “You—”

  Tiran appeared in a doorway at the edge of Tatsu’s vision, on the side of the sanctuary itself, and Yudai’s mouth snapped shut. His arms crossed over his chest as if to deflect a physical assault.

  “We’ll need directions to the mage’s temple,” Yudai said, loud enough that she could hear. “Apparently, we’re all going.”

  Ten

  They spent the next nights preparing their supplies for the journey, save for Yudai, who was confined by council orders to the palace grounds in hopes of avoiding any further incidents. Jotin volunteered to go to the Raydrau, and Tatsu was glad for it. He didn’t care to return to the space where the magic had erupted; he had enough nightmares without needing to add any more.

  On the third evening, as they woke from their daytime rest, Tatsu was packing up his allotted weight into his pack when Alesh rapped her knuckles against his door and slipped inside, her re-plaited braid swinging over one shoulder.

  “Listen, I wanted to talk to you,” she said and shut the door behind her. “I’ve been thinking about the other day, when Leil talked about the Joesarian poisons they used on Yudai.”

  Her arms curled around her chest. “Remember when I left Ral to stay with you, the day that started this whole thing? Remember how I… how I said that during that job gone bad, I could hear bottles clanking in the crates?”

  “Yes,” Tatsu said, unsure where the conversation was going.

  “We had an anonymous buyer and drop-off point, but I don’t think they were ever supposed to get there.” Her eyes flashed when she leveled a stare at Tatsu. “I think it was all going to the palace.”

  Tatsu paused halfway through folding his leather gloves into a small triangle. “That was well before anything with Yudai began. The queen wouldn’t have had any use for the toxins at that point.”

  “This whole time, I’ve been thinking that I did this to you,” Alesh said. “That I dragged you into this by getting you involved. It wasn’t until you got back with Yudai and started talking about your mother and that magic barrier that I realized it was the other way around.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Alesh’s arms tightened around her torso. “We were jumped halfway to the drop-off point by the guards, but I think that was always planned. And most of the others were either killed or arrested—I think I was the only one who got away. They let me go, Tatsu. They let me go because they knew I’d lead them straight to you.”

  “Alesh.” Tatsu’s mouth had gone very dry.

  “It was always about you,” she said. “They knew I’d go to you when I was injured and it would give them cause to arrest you. They never wanted me.”

  “If that’s true
…”

  “The queen was playing a very long game,” Alesh said, “with both of us.”

  Tatsu’s bad wrist ached, sympathetic to his heart. “Why are you telling me this? You know it doesn’t change anything.”

  “It’s something to think about when it comes to dealing with royalty,” Alesh told him. “These are the games they play with those they consider pawns.”

  It was useless to tell her that Yudai was different. Tatsu would only be wasting his breath if he tried, so he stayed quiet and stared down at his half-finished pack, resentment building in his veins.

  “I spent some time with Tiran,” Alesh said, changing the subject as she stared at the far wall. “She had some suggestions for our journey.”

  “What kind of suggestions?” Tatsu asked.

  “She was concerned that the residual drain is increasing in frequency and gave me some ideas on how to keep the rest of us safe from it.”

  Keeping his tone as neutral as possible, Tatsu asked, “And what did she have to say about that?”

  “Don’t look at me like that. I’m just trying to keep my sister safe. The drain is dangerous.”

  “I never said it wasn’t,” Tatsu replied, “but I’m also not going to keep Yudai at arm’s length out of the fear of something that isn’t his fault.”

  Alesh sighed. Her eyes slid to the right, across the closed door and then back over the clean swept tiles beneath her boots. “Tiran suggested setting up two camps at night, to avoid any possible complications with the drain’s magic.”

  “No,” Tatsu said and returned to his work of readying his pack with only one hand.

  “Will you hear me out, please?” Alesh tried. “I’m just making sure that the rest of us don’t get killed by this thing—”

  “He’s not a thing, he’s a person.”

  He looked over his shoulder just long enough to catch Alesh level him with a stony glare. “I wasn’t talking about Yudai,” she said. “I was talking about the drain.”

  “Which is part of him,” Tatsu said, “so, actually, they’re pretty much one and the same.”

  There was a long silence, and Tatsu could hear Alesh huff under her breath. The air was cooling down within the rooms as the sun fell, but it was still stifling, and Tatsu was glad they would be heading out into the open sands. Being cooped up within the palace was unsettling and left pinpricks of frustration beneath his skin.

  “I know Yudai doesn’t like me,” Alesh began.

  “Yudai doesn’t trust you,” Tatsu said. “And when you come up with things like this, it’s not all that hard to understand why.”

  “Being cautious doesn’t make me a bad person.”

  The fight left Tatsu’s blood, crumpling his shoulders forward. “No, it doesn’t. But it’s not easy being in the middle of you two. I feel like I’m constantly betraying someone.”

  “This isn’t a fight, Tatsu. We’re going to the temple together. You don’t have to choose a side.”

  It felt an awful lot like he did, but Tatsu bit his tongue to keep that thought inside.

  “The drain is only affecting plants,” Tatsu said. “It hasn’t touched living people yet.”

  “Yet,” Alesh repeated, eyebrows rising. “But I’m not going to let my sister be the first, even if it means making decisions that anger people.”

  She left Tatsu’s sleeping quarters, and Tatsu had to swallow down his irritation as he finished getting the supplies into his pack before leaving to join the others.

  Jotin led them out of Moswar and into the moonlit dunes beyond the city limits, turning them south shortly after they passed through the gates. Near the settlement, the sand was packed and hard, with a well-worn path snaking around and down, and they had to step around the scraggly clumps of desert weeds to avoid the sticky leaves catching on their clothing. The flashback to the sayld and its monstrous pincers pushed Tatsu to take greater care as they walked, but there were no rings on the ground to indicate that there were any more of the creatures lying in wait for an evening meal.

  They were a motley group altogether. Jotin led the pack with his hawk alternating between a perch on his shoulder and the clear night sky, and he moved with so much quiet confidence atop the sands that the crunching beneath his boots sometimes faded completely. Leil was next, with her dark hood and the gold bracelets hidden beneath her robe, and behind her, Alesh and Ral kept the pace in the middle.

  Tatsu missed relying on his bow with a fierce, sweeping ache, but even without it, he stayed in the back with Yudai, who seemed hesitant to quicken his steps and join the others. Tatsu was glad to be out of the city, even if it meant returning to the relative unknown of the Joesarian desert. Yudai, however, looked more glum with each of his half-hearted steps.

  “We’ll find some answers,” Tatsu said when Yudai’s morose gait grew too much to bear. “The high priest will be able to do far more than Tiran could.”

  “Maybe.”

  “When there’s nowhere else to try, that’s when there are no other options,” Tatsu said. “And even then, we’d find something.”

  “We?” Yudai parroted. When he raised his head, his expression was full of scorn. “Do you think that all these people will stay when the options start falling away, one by one? Do you think that the others will be willing to bleed and die for something that may never be fixed? Something that may kill them?”

  Tatsu stared at the overlapping footprints in the sand from the group ahead of them. “I know you’re scared, but people aren’t just going to desert you like that. Pushing people away who are trying to help isn’t going to encourage them to stay longer.”

  He expected a snapped remark from Yudai and was a little impressed when nothing of the sort came.

  “Yeah.” Yudai sighed instead and ran a hand through his unruly hair. “You’re right. I’m just… more used to people turning on me than the opposite.”

  “I know.”

  Yudai laughed a little, and he bit down on his bottom lip before glancing at Tatsu. “This may come as a shock to you, but I don’t particularly enjoy feeling vulnerable.”

  “No.” Tatsu gasped and raised his good hand to his chest in mock surprise. “I had no idea.”

  Yudai sidestepped to bump against Tatsu with his shoulder, and the smile remained on his face. “When the vultures come, I’m offering them you first.”

  They continued along behind the others, a good number of paces back, as the stars winked overhead.

  “Thank you,” Yudai said softly, some time later. “I don’t really think I say it enough, but I mean it. What you’re doing for me…”

  “I know,” Tatsu repeated and smiled.

  Yudai looked sideways at Tatsu, though his eyes were obscured behind his hair. “I couldn’t do this, any of it, without you. I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for you.”

  Instead of answering, Tatsu reached over with his good hand and squeezed Yudai’s wrist, and the silence between them was infinitely lighter.

  Alesh stayed true to her word, and she and Ral set up their camp several paces away from the others. She offered no further explanation, and Yudai pointedly ignored the entire set-up process. Eventually, Leil joined them, and the group slept split three and three.

  Yudai didn’t comment on the arrangements, but the next evening, as they blearily pulled themselves out of fitful sleep in the sweltering heat, there was a ring of decayed weeds around the tent that he’d used.

  Tatsu didn’t touch the withered remains, but Yudai showed no hesitation in pulling up a clump of them. He watched the leaves disintegrate in his hand.

  “Alesh was right,” he said, voice low, and Tatsu didn’t think the others could hear him as they repacked their own supplies across the clumped sand. “It’s getting worse.”

  He raised his chin to stare at Tatsu. “It might be dangerous for you to be around me.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s affecting us. The only indication that it affects people at all was—”

  “
—the Oldirr elder and her tribe,” Yudai finished, his expression dark. “And you saw what it did to them! It drained every last bit of life they had, killing everyone in its wake.”

  He fell silent, and Tatsu could think of nothing to say in response.

  “I’m not letting that happen again.” There was an edge of steel to Yudai’s voice. “Not to you. Not after everything.”

  “It won’t,” Tatsu said, but a web of doubt had started to spin itself around his insides. He’d woken already tired and had assumed the blame was with the high desert temperatures. He pressed three fingers against his forehead and closed his eyes, focusing on the blackness behind his eyelids. Perhaps the exhaustion had come from the drain, but there was no way to know for sure without a physical sign.

  “We don’t have any indication that it’s draining us,” he said.

  Yudai turned to Jotin, who was rolling up the leather skin to wrap several thin cords around the bundle. “Tomorrow, you should sleep in the other tent.”

  Jotin was standing right next to them—he’d clearly heard the concerns. His gaze moved between them for several moments before he said, “Alright.”

  “You too,” Yudai ordered Tatsu.

  “Don’t be silly,” Tatsu said.

  “I’m not. And I’m not asking either. I’m not going to be held responsible for hurting you.”

  Tatsu rose, kicking a bit at one of the dead weeds. “When it comes down to that, I’ll move. But until that time—”

  “Tatsu.” Yudai sighed.

  “Stop arguing,” Tatsu said and tossed Yudai his pack. “If your magic is draining all night, you might need to save your strength.”

  By the middle of the third day, they’d made their way into a strange section of the desert that was bombarded by erratic strong winds, catching the granules and lifting them up into the air like a dance. It was difficult to make good time through the gusts, and none of them seemed happy when their progress was slowed.