The Mage Heir

by Kathryn Sommerlot

  Yudai fell silent, jaw snapping shut with such force Tatsu could hear his teeth knock together. There was a long pause when neither spoke, and Yudai’s eyes, distant after the wall slammed down in front of them, never left Tatsu’s face.

  “You’re wrong,” Yudai said, his voice low but not soft. There was an edge of something there that Tatsu hadn’t heard in many months, a deliberate shield dividing them. “I was a king last night when you kissed me. You just didn’t know it yet.”

  They stood like that for a very long time, unable to cross the space widening between them, until Yudai drew in a slow breath.

  “So this is it now? This is how we’re going to be?”

  Tatsu just shook his head. Yudai caught the corner of his mouth between his teeth and held it there, eyes turned up towards the ceiling, the safest place there was to look. He took one deep breath and then another before he released his lip to run his tongue across the flesh.

  “Call them back in,” he said, and there was nothing there: no emotion, no spark, no softness. Yudai was hard edges and thick barriers again, the man Tatsu had carried out of the palace walls, the man he didn’t know. Something caught and pulled within Tatsu’s lungs, an ache that threatened to split him whole.

  Yudai was a king, and Tatsu was the son of the woman who’d spilled the blood to make him one.

  “Your Majesty,” Tatsu said and bowed with mostly his shoulders before going to the far door to open the portal again. There was only Alesh on the other side, propped against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest.

  “We weren’t sure you’d come back out for us,” she said as she stepped back into the middle of the corridor. “The others went to talk to Hysus.”

  “Ral?”

  “She’s fine,” Alesh said. “Jotin is looking out for her. I think she likes the mages.”

  Alesh followed Tatsu back into the receiving room. Yudai refused to look at Tatsu, but his eyes did settle on Alesh’s face briefly.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked.

  “We go after Nota,” Yudai said, fingers twitching at his sides. “She’s the end of it all, no matter which issue we focus on first. I have to confront her to drain her. It’s the only way I get my magic back.”

  Alesh nodded before her expression changed. She stared at the window beyond the both of them before she tilted her head to the left and narrowed her eyes. “The letter she sent would have been several weeks behind us.”

  “What do you mean?” Yudai asked.

  “The letter came after you, but the messenger indicated it was sent direct. That means Nota tracked you well enough to know exactly where you’d gone. Instead of going after you, she sent a letter with a message for you that only you would read.” Her eyes turned up. “Why would she bother with that if she thought the mercenaries had killed you?”

  Her forehead bunched further as she glared at the crease where the wall met the floor. “Why would she—”

  Her jaw snapped shut as her eyes widened, and she stalked out of the room without another word, leaving Yudai and Tatsu in her wake. There was a pause, and then Yudai turned to Tatsu with confusion written all over his face.

  “What is she talking about? Where did she go?”

  But Tatsu stared at the open doorway left swinging behind her swift departure as things began to take shape in his mind. He’d ignored it—he’d ignored everything he should have been able to see all along, and Alesh had caught the thread of the web he’d inadvertently let them fall right into.

  “Nota had been planning a coup,” Tatsu said. “She’d been forging alliances and figuring out how to assassinate your father. That was her plan: ‘a life for a life.’ She’d never been trying to take yours.”

  “She didn’t hire the mercenaries.” Yudai’s eyes widened. “Then who—?”

  “No,” Tatsu breathed, and he took off down the hallway that Alesh had hurried through without conscious thought. Oh, he’d been the fool indeed. He’d been so wrapped up in Yudai and his own feelings that he’d failed to see what had been right in front of his face. The Joesarian walkers had never given away their position or sold them out.

  “Alesh!” Even with the burst of speed that fear and panic supplied him, Tatsu couldn’t catch her, and he didn’t know where the others were. He skidded to a stop at a junction of corridors all lined with stone and flickering candles, heart pounding in his chest as he spun, trying to gauge which way to go. There was the slam of a door at the end of the hallway to his right, so he took it, praying to whichever Joesarian god might be nearby that it was the right one. “Alesh!”

  Behind him, Yudai’s steps followed him. “Tatsu, what’s going on?”

  Tatsu couldn’t find the air to spare in order to reply. He kept running, trying to get to the end before Alesh did, but deep down, he already knew he was going to be too late. She’d put the pieces together before him.

  He took a corner far too close and banged his elbow against the stone. Grimacing, he tucked his good arm against his side and continued to where the corridor ended in wide double doors announced the dining room. The others were inside, and he could see them through the opening in the swinging doors, banging behind the banner of Alesh’s braid.

  “Alesh, don’t!” he exclaimed.

  Leil turned at the sound of his voice and found Alesh’s knife waiting for her. Tatsu tumbled to an ungraceful stop, his legs refusing to obey commands, as Leil’s lips parted in a silent circle of pain. Alesh pulled the weapon free and leaned in near Leil’s ear.

  “You put my sister in danger, you traitorous snake.”

  “Alesh,” Tatsu said, a warning.

  Alesh grabbed for the back of Leil’s hood, spun the woman around, and dragged her blade deep across Leil’s throat. The blood hit the floor before Leil’s body did, and after the echo of the thud subsided, there was nothing but their ragged breathing and the stunned silence of the others in the room.

  “What have you done?” Tatsu asked.

  “What had to be done.” The look Alesh spared him lasted for only a second, too quick for him to pinpoint anything of substance. “She’d been revealing our position the entire time.”

  “You can’t prove that,” Tatsu said and shook his head. “Alesh, you can’t prove that!”

  “You know it just as well as I do! All those times she was using magic—Tatsu, she was showing them where we were! That was the only reason she came with us!”

  Beneath Leil’s crumpled, unmoving form, Tatsu could see the gold bracelets around her wrists, and his stomach roiled. He’d wanted so badly to believe in her and her guilt, her desire to make things right again. She’d talked of her family as a cherished thing that she missed, but her actions had always been those of the queen who controlled her. Though Alesh was probably right, the betrayal that stung deep in his bones wasn’t aimed at Leil—it’d never been her fault. She’d only been the pawn.

  Behind him, Yudai burst through the doors and then stopped, and though Tatsu couldn’t see over his shoulder, he knew Yudai had to have recoiled from the sight. There was a sharp intake of breath, and then, “Gods.”

  “Tatsu, you have to understand,” Alesh said.

  “You can’t just kill people that you think are guilty,” Tatsu replied, voice rising. “You can’t just—Alesh, now you have no proof and her blood on your hands!”

  “How long before she brought more mercenaries to us? How long before she put my sister’s life at risk again, or all of ours? She was a traitor, Tatsu.”

  On the far side of the room, Jotin moved forward. He knelt down by Leil’s body, ignoring the pool of blood expanding beneath her dark robes to put a finger to her wrist. Tatsu wasn’t sure why the man was checking to see if she was still alive. Alesh had gone deep with her knife, and there was nothing of Leil’s throat left to salvage.

  “I did what I had to do to protect us all,” Alesh said, sparking and angry.

  “You can’t just do things on your own!” Tatsu cried. “She was still a
person, Alesh, and she deserved the dignity of explaining herself!”

  Alesh’s faced twisted. “Are you angry that I took matters into my own hands without asking your permission? Or are you angry because I did what you knew you’d never have the strength to do?”

  “We never questioned why you came with us.” Tatsu took a step back towards Yudai and the doors.

  “You don’t have to, I’m here to help!”

  “That’s what Leil led us to believe as well,” Tatsu said. His eyes fell down to her body once more, and there was a final flutter within his chest. She’d risked everything by showing up in Moswar, even if she had been sent by the Queen of Chayd. And even though all the pieces made sense together, it hurt to see the final end of things. The Queen of Chayd had every reason to want Yudai gone, for the crown on his head would see her own actions brought to light. But looking at Leil’s blood on the stones felt wrong, a step too far in the other direction.

  He’d thought her a friend—he’d thought Alesh a friend as well. With a sinking feeling, he realized he could have been wrong about all of them.

  He took another step backwards.

  “Tatsu,” Alesh tried and reached for him.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Just don’t. We’re leaving.”

  Tatsu turned for the doors, aching for air, since there seemed to be none remaining in the dining hall.

  “What do you mean?” Yudai asked, insistent. “We’re leaving?”

  “She was a traitor under our noses the entire time,” Tatsu said. “Do you trust anyone anymore? Every person here could be desperate enough to give away our position. So who here are you going to trust?”

  Yudai’s jaw clenched visibly before he said, voice low, “You.”

  “Then let’s go.” Tatsu’s fury was leaving behind an odd, empty sort of nothing. “I’ll get you to your throne.”

  They made it out of the doors and back into the hallway before Yudai’s hand found Tatsu’s forearm to stop him.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Tatsu pulled away from the touch, which had started to burn—only in his mind, no doubt, but still just as jarring. “I’ll do what I need to do, Your Majesty. We leave before the sun disappears.”

  Seventeen

  They were very quiet as they made their way beneath the soft light of the moon on the dusty sand, and Tatsu wasn’t sure which of them was responsible for the silence. It wasn’t as if there was nothing to say, for it was the opposite, and Tatsu’s mind was spinning with too many thoughts and words that wanted to fly free from his teeth. But Yudai said nothing, and so, in turn, Tatsu kept his mouth shut as well. The quiet grew thunderous and deafening between them until it was nearly as loud as a shouting match would’ve been.

  Tatsu longed to return to the time when they would have quarreled. With a verbal spar, he knew he could have read it for the trust it truly was. Instead, there was nothing, and the sudden emptiness between them was a far keener sort of pain after knowing what it had once been filled with: promise and possibilities and them, a tangle of lonely sighs and longing smiles.

  Following the stars was easy with the lack of clouds covering the map. Going over the mountains would take far too much time, but the Arani Pass had been reopened before Tatsu had even left Chayd and knowing both that Nota had not been responsible for the assassins and that their method of discovering their location was gone made the choice an easy one. They would head northeast until they reached the valley that connected Joesar and Runon, the path carved deep between towering peaks.

  When Tatsu shared his plan with Yudai, he received very little by way of a response.

  “Is there something else you wish to do instead?” he asked.

  “No,” Yudai said, but there was something in his tone that Tatsu couldn’t read, and he no longer felt comfortable enough to press at it. “We need to get to Nota, and that’s the fastest route.”

  They walked until dawn’s first rays began to peak over the horizon line, and Yudai’s pace had slowed considerably. He was fighting against his body’s exhaustion and the lingering effects of the reversal, and while he never said anything aloud, Tatsu could see the pain etched in the lines on his face.

  “You need to rest,” Tatsu said. “We stop here for now.”

  It wasn’t until after he’d prepared the tent against the rising sun that Yudai spoke again. “Why do you think she did it?”

  “Alesh?” Tatsu asked.

  “Leil.”

  It was exactly the right question to ask, and also the worst. Tatsu had been thinking of little else, save Yudai himself, the whole time they’d been trudging beneath the stars. He’d tried so hard to summon righteous anger and fury against Leil’s actions, but no matter what, the end result was always just sadness.

  “I think she was a prisoner,” Tatsu said and thought of the gold bracelets on her wrists, thick and wide like jailer’s shackles. “I think the queen could command her to do whatever she wanted, and Leil had no choice but to obey.”

  “You mean all those things she said in the temple.”

  Tatsu busied himself with retying the stretch of old, oiled leather as their makeshift tent before he asked, “Was she right?”

  Yudai looked at him in question, so Tatsu clarified, “About the mages in Runon. Is it true, what she said?”

  “Yes. I suppose.”

  “You told me,” Tatsu said slowly, “a long time ago, that the mages were afraid of you being royal. Because you had magic and the throne, and they would no longer be needed if that were the case.”

  “Yes.” Yudai raised his eyes to meet Tatsu’s gaze without flinching.

  Tatsu swallowed hard. “You need to be better.”

  One of Yudai’s eyebrows rose to his hairline before Tatsu could shake his head and explain. “You need to be a better ruler. You need to… you need to fix that. You need to change those things. Mages are people too—look at you. They have families and hopes and dreams, and they shouldn’t be shackled to the whim of the royal family like that.”

  Yudai was watching him with an unreadable expression, and Tatsu ducked his head, cheeks heating. “You just need to be better than that.”

  “I will,” Yudai said. “I will be.”

  It was the sort of promise that, only two days ago, Tatsu would have accepted by reaching his hand out and taking hold of Yudai’s fingers. His arm was still itching to go through with the action, even as he tried to temper the feeling down, and across from him, Yudai’s expression seemed to reflect the same internal struggle.

  After a long moment, Yudai looked away with a frown. His tongue darted out to wet his lips as his mouth twisted into a sour sort of grimace.

  “If I ever am king anyway.”

  “You will be,” Tatsu said.

  “I have to drain Nota to take the throne,” Yudai said, as if Tatsu could have forgotten.

  If Yudai was waiting for Tatsu to try and convince him otherwise, he’d be waiting for a long time. Tatsu said nothing. His mother’s death—the death of the strange, faceless apparition of the woman he knew had birthed him—was an acceptable end to the whole of their story. He wondered somewhere, in the back of his mind, if his father would have agreed with him, but then pushed the thought away.

  “You should rest,” he said instead, and dropped down onto the skins near Yudai’s position. With the siphon under control, the life around them should be at no further risk while they slept.

  Yudai’s gaze was soft and open for a second. It looked like he wanted to say something, but then the moment passed, and he was a king once more, untouchable and unreachable.

  “Alright.” He lay down without argument.

  Even so, it was a long time before Tatsu slept, haunted by the ghost of a kiss that he ached to reclaim.

  Progress with only the two of them was quick, even with the inevitable drag that accompanied Yudai’s recent ordeal. They stuck close to the Dar-Itusk Basin for a few days until Tatsu felt confident that they were n
earing the Rist-walker camp, and instead of revisiting the walkers that he was sure would not welcome them, Tatsu took them north by the light of the stars.

  The biggest problem was simply not knowing where the dominion settlements were. Tatsu suspected that Jotin had deliberately steered them around the various villages to avoid any issues, both with the uncontrolled siphon and their suspicious origins, and that had made sense at the time, but Tatsu knew the settlements had to exist. After all, Moswar was not the only city in Joesar, and the dominions all had to boast their own modest towns to have any autonomy. They needed to find the clusters of people in order to restock their food supplies and fill their skins with water, and Tatsu was unsure where on the mind-map he’d been trying to create of the desert that the settlements might be.

  As they moved away from the basin’s clumped, weedy dirt, they found themselves back in the larger, rolling dunes of the mid-desert, which made finding both food and water a more difficult task.

  It felt strange to be traveling with Yudai and have the air between them stretched thin and awkward. It reminded Tatsu of the Shyreld and the slow ascent into the hooded peaks there, when he hadn’t even known Yudai’s name, and the prince’s distrust of him had been so palpable and thick he could’ve run his fingers through it. They’d gone backwards, and the worst part of it was the knot of regret that sat heavy in Tatsu’s belly. It was his fault that their relationship had changed; it was his fault that Yudai felt like a stranger again.

  Sometimes when they slept, fitful and sticky beneath the sun, Tatsu couldn’t get his body to relax enough to drift off. On those nights, he’d turn and stare at the curve of Yudai’s shoulder and the unruly hair on the back of his head, yearning to reach out and touch it again.

  It wasn’t until the fourth day, when they had long left sight of the cliffsides and were down to their last scraps of dry, salted meats, that Tatsu saw a settlement on the horizon. It was not nearly as impressive as Moswar, and the buildings, built smaller and lower, barely changed the horizon until they drew much closer. Tatsu didn’t know which dominion of Joesar they were in nor whether the village would welcome them, but a permanent structure usually meant that the trade routes ran through it. He assumed there would be enough traffic there to merit some kind of a market.