“But is there enough?” Alesh looked at Ral, who just smiled at the rest of them.
Yudai fell quiet, so Tatsu leaned in. “How many do you think are on her side because of the fear of retribution?”
“I don’t know. But if I had to guess, more than half—I don’t think many nobles would willingly support a mage usurping the throne, no matter how bad things became. And if this is what she’s doing to her enemies…”
“What happened to their property?” Jotin asked.
“It was given to the poor, the ones who lived in the slums,” Yudai said. “Likely it would be those who had family within the mage ranks in the castle, or maybe those who worked as servants there.”
Tatsu didn’t want to look at Alesh, because he knew what he would see, but his eyes shifted unbidden to her features anyway. There was silent agreement shimmering there, a sudden sweep of admiration for what Nota had done. He couldn’t fault her for the feeling—Alesh knew better than most how easy it was to fall to the bottom of society, and how hard it was, once fallen, to climb back out. Her mouth stayed shut, but he knew she wanted to comment and was glad that she refrained.
Jotin cleared his throat as if to disperse the tension webbing between them. “We should continue. Our goal is the palace?”
“Maybe,” Yudai said, and all of a sudden, his courage seemed to have failed him. “Or we could find somewhere to wait for tomorrow.”
“It’s not a bad idea to get some rest before facing her,” Tatsu said.
Yudai didn’t reply to that. Instead, he turned to Ral. “What do you see?”
Ral shook her head, which Tatsu thought was answer enough.
“Listen,” Alesh began, and Tatsu’s relief at her silence was short-lived. “I know Nota’s done some awful things, like killing your father and using you for… well, using you, but turning out the nobles and giving their property to the poor isn’t one of them.”
“Don’t.” Tatsu’s snap was harsher than he’d intended, though still too late to stop her.
“I’m telling him what he needs to hear,” Alesh said. “The concept of nobility is a system that keeps people in poverty for the benefit of the rich.”
“Nobles aren’t only found in Runon.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not saying that they are! I’m saying that the plight of the poor is always ignored by kings and queens, and—”
“That’s not the issue at hand here,” Tatsu interrupted.
“Isn’t it? From where I stand, it seems like it’s the basis for everything. It’s the rich thinking that they are more important than everyone else and taking what they can accordingly, and Yudai needs to be better than that.”
“How can I believe that the nobles are better than others when the worst betrayal I’ve ever suffered was at the hand of my own father who wore the crown?” Yudai asked, low and dangerous.
His tone seemed enough to give Alesh pause before she kept going “Then you see how unfair it is to keep some people down just to elevate others.”
Yudai didn’t answer right away, though his eyes tightened.
“Remember the people who have helped you,” she said, quieter than before.
“I do,” Yudai said curtly, “and I will.”
“None of this really has anything to do with confronting Nota,” Tatsu said.
Yudai sighed. “No, she’s right. It has everything to do with Runon and the throne itself. But even if you agree with the decision, I’m not going to go any easier on the woman who killed my father.”
“I’m not asking you to,” Alesh told him. “Just be a better king.”
Tatsu had asked the same of Yudai weeks ago in the desert sun, and whatever doubt he’d had that Yudai would fail to meet his expectations had disappeared. He knew Yudai would be better—Yudai already was better, in every way a person could be. Tatsu could promise that without ever having known the man Yudai had been before the siphon began.
There was a long stretch of tense silence.
“The closer we get to the castle, the more obvious we become,” Jotin reminded them. “We are not inconspicuous here.”
“No,” Yudai agreed. “We’re just lucky that people here are too swept up in their own problems to notice.”
But it was then that Tatsu noticed the clacking footsteps several roads down despite the ringing that the siphon had left in his ears. It was too loud to be that of the few defeated figures milling about the area, and he recognized the sound from the last time he’d been in Yuse—the sound of soldiers’ iron-studded boots across cobblestones. A moment later, the sound blurred into a thudding of weight as the stone-lined path merged into the dirt lane, and it was too late. They’d already been found.
The guards rounded the corner before Tatsu could summon the words to warn the others. With swords raised, they advanced on their group in a sweeping formation that filled the road and blocked their escape. Even running in the other direction would be useless, for they needed to go into the city and not out, and Tatsu was willing to bet that a second group was coming around the back to flank them and box them in.
“You were saying?” Alesh grumbled and pulled Ral closer to her side.
The guard in front said something in Runonian that Yudai countered with a growled response. Tatsu, however, put his hands into the air. He’d grown used to being taken in by guards, and there was little point in arguing it. The guards—and likely Nota as well—already knew who they were and why they were in the city. There was little hope of escaping.
Their hand had been forced, and the confrontation would happen sooner than any of them wanted.
“Hands out,” the first guard said in Common, and Tatsu stuck both hands forward in compliance. The shackles that were clamped around his arms were heavy and thick, uncomfortably tight and rusted where the binding met the linked chains.
It wasn’t clear how they’d been found until they began to move, trailing after two pairs of the soldiers down a wider cobbled lane. The fallen noble woman that Yudai had spoken to in the square was cowering near one of the shop buildings, and the guard in front stopped to hand her a small piece of silver.
“Don’t blame her,” Yudai said before Alesh could comment on the transaction. “She’s probably desperate to get back into Nota’s good graces if she thinks it’ll restore the life she used to lead.”
Tatsu twisted his head around as they were pushed forward to watch her curl in further on herself around the coin, and he felt only emptiness in his stomach.
The march towards the palace took less time than Tatsu had thought it would. Perhaps his memory of Yuse’s size was wrong, or maybe staying within the city for days before they’d snuck into the castle had skewed his recollections. If anything, it seemed that he would remember how long it took to drag Yudai’s limp form out of the city and into the hills, but that too seemed hazy with time and distance, another lifetime ago. Trudging after the guards, hands clasped together with iron, felt like a finality, the last chapter in a journey he’d never meant to start. Yudai’s crown was at the end of their path, but so was Nota, and with her were the answers to all the questions that swirled inside him.
It was hard to justify the two being in the same place. The soldiers led them through the double doors carved deep with a relief showing a man holding a shining rod atop a jagged mountain, the main palace entrance that they’d bypassed when sneaking in through the servants’ quarters.
“When this starts,” Yudai said over his shoulder, “get out of here.”
It seemed to be aimed at all of them, but Yudai was a fool if he thought Tatsu would join the others in their escape.
“Get Ral out,” Yudai ordered, the sort Alesh would be all too happy to obey.
There was barely time to process more than that before they were shoved through a second set of majestic-looking reliefs and into a wide, high-rafted receiving chamber.
Tatsu was a step behind Yudai, but even glancing around Yudai’s shoulders, the scene within the castle wasn
’t what he’d expected. He’d thought it would resemble the gathering in Dradela with nobles lined before the queen and the court mages arced around the back of the throne. But the chamber was nearly empty, and as the soldiers marched them down the center and towards the apex, the room felt very cold.
There was only one person within save for their group and the guards who had escorted them, and she sat on an intricately carved chair dotted with translucent crystal and flaking bits of dark paint.
The soldiers stopped, and the one in charge stepped forward to announce them in Runonian. There really was no need for it—Nota rose immediately from the throne. She knew Yudai. She knew the lines and curves of Yudai’s face better than Tatsu did, and the realization churned the meager meal in his stomach.
Yudai’s shoulders squared into an impressively straight line from tip to tip.
“Welcome home, Prince Yudai,” Nota said. She stepped fully into view from around Yudai’s figure as Tatsu shifted to the right, and he got his first look at the woman who had been the shadows behind them since everything began. She was shorter and smaller than he’d imagined, with hair swept back into a high bun that was just beginning to gray at the temples. Her eyes, rimmed with dark kohl, were the same teardrop shape as Tatsu’s own, narrowed out at the group of them, and all of it chilled him down to his toes. There was so much of his own face mirrored there, from the sweep of her cheekbones to the long point of her nose.
“You knew I’d come,” Yudai said. “You baited me with that letter. Did you think that I’d let you get away with murdering the king? Murdering my father?”
Nota ignored him, her gaze sweeping instead across the contingent of guards and their prey bound in shackles. “You didn’t come alone, I see. Have you managed to pick up some strays?”
Yudai visibly bristled, but Tatsu was the one to step forward past the foremost line of soldiers and their dimpled breastplates.
“That depends on your definition of the word ‘stray’,” he said.
He saw the awareness in her eyes as the truth dawned on her, and her expression, though pinched at the edges, didn’t seem surprised.
“Hello, Mother.”
Twenty-One
“Cover your face,” Yudai said under his breath, and that was all the warning that they got before the windows of the chamber lining the walls above the wood reliefs exploded in a shower of colored glass. A few of the shards nicked Tatsu’s arms held up as a shield in front of his eyes, but the majority of the glass was swept away with the burst of magic-conjured wind. When it tunneled through the chamber, it took with it the guards standing around them, and their armor clanked noisily across the floor stones as they were pushed clean of the doors themselves. It was an impressive show of power on Yudai’s part to keep the wind from affecting his friends while targeting the others, and though Tatsu couldn’t see his mother’s expression, he wondered if she’d registered it too.
She had to have—she knew what Yudai was capable of. Knowing the full extent of his abilities had been the driving force behind her decision to turn him into a weapon.
As Tatsu lowered his arms back down, the shackles on his wrists began to glow. There was a split second of heat against his skin and then the iron fell with a loud clang. Around him, he could hear the echo of the same thing happening to the restraints on the others.
On the dais holding the throne, Nota raised her hands up.
“Alesh!” Yudai snapped, and she needed no further encouragement. She grabbed Ral’s arm and took off through the still-open doors behind them with Jotin trailing behind her. Tatsu, for his part, pulled his bow free from the leather strap across his back. He might not have full use and movement of his left arm, but it was enough to hold the bow steady, and there was no way Tatsu was letting Yudai face Nota alone.
The buzzing in his ears roared loud and insistent as both Yudai and Nota’s magic flared up in the space between them.
Yudai surged forward first with an angry cry and a trail of air moving so quickly around his hands that licks of fire were sparking out to either side. He dashed towards Nota’s position and pushed the flames out in front to reach for her. The fire got only as far as the front step of the elevated floor before it was extinguished by a gust of wind, but all of it happened so quickly that Tatsu could barely follow. They were summoning and adjusting their hold on their respective magic too fast for his eyes to properly focus.
Yudai turned a last-second corner and twisted, the wind at his fingertips grabbing the shards of glass still littering the floor and pulling them up into multi-hued clouds. As he continued along the room, the trail of stained glass curled around him, first a tail and then hugging close like a vest. Nota cried out in a wordless exclamation as she started towards him with her fingers curled into claws in front of her.
They met behind the throne and slipped briefly out of view, so Tatsu took the respite to ready an arrow and notch it against the bowstring.
When they spilled out from behind the wooden chair, the gap between them had closed somewhat. Yudai shoved his palms towards her and brought with him another burst of wind, and Nota picked up the rest of the glass shards and held them in front of her as a block against the onslaught. Hoping to remain on the periphery enough to be ignored, Tatsu crept along the outer edge of the room with his fingers tight around the fletching of his arrow. They were moving too fast for him to see a clear shot.
Nota gained on Yudai until she was very near to him before he shifted his focus and threw his arms out wide. He scooped them down low in front of him, and when he raised them back up, Nota flew up with them. She hung precariously balanced on the cyclone-like wave of air—and then the throne itself broke free from its place nailed to the floor and thudded hard against Yudai’s left side.
Yudai fell, and so did Nota, though the latter managed to catch herself with her own magic before she hit the ground. She was quicker than Yudai as he struggled to get back onto his feet again, and the glass soared towards him in a barrage of sharp edges and reflected light.
Tatsu let his arrow fly.
At the last second, she noticed it coming and spun, gesturing at it with her hand to redirect the arrow’s course into the nearest wall. But Tatsu had only ever needed his attack to be a distraction, and in the time she’d lost protecting herself, Yudai had righted himself. Hands outstretched at his sides, he manipulated the air into flames again.
When it hit her, the fire burned away half of her coiled hair, leaving behind angry red stubble. She shrieked and fell to her knees, rolling away, but even with the agony of her skin that the flames left behind, she didn’t yield. There was a snap in Tatsu’s ears as magic flaring up stronger than before from the pain feeding it.
Nota summoned so much wind that one of the brightly painted banners near the door ripped free from the stones. The brunt of it slammed Yudai back against the opposite wall, high enough that his toes were several hand spans above the floor tiles. The magic kept him there, struggling and writhing against its hold, as Nota shakily stood back up.
“You stole my life,” she seethed. The burn marks extended down her cheek and had taken off half of her right eyebrow, and already, the exposed part of her scalp was blistering. “Simply by being born, you stole the future I was going to make my own. Instead, I remained a slave to someone else’s whims.”
“And then you gave me that punishment too,” Yudai said.
She moved towards him with purpose, so Tatsu also began to slink around the broken stone from where the throne had been lifted away. The whirl of their magics colliding overpowered the soft sound of his soles against the tiles. Nota seemed to have already forgotten that Tatsu was also there—at least her eyes never left Yudai’s face as she advanced.
“You deserved it,” Nota said. Her fingers curled down into her palms. “You were a bossy, arrogant child who thought the world would be given to him on a silver platter, never noticing the misery of others. Did you ever think to look at the miners toiling in the mountain? Or
the farmers barely putting food on the table?”
“I was a child!” Yudai exclaimed. There was a sputter of his magic against hers, like his ire at her words quickened the energy in his blood, but then it faded and his arms flattened against the wall once more.
“A child who would be king,” Nota said, “and was never taught to care for anything but himself. You and your greedy father stole the riches of this country off the backs of the men and women you work as animals!”
“You stole my crown,” Yudai said, more growl than anything as he clawed and pushed again at the magic holding him against the wall.
“It should have been mine! Mine and my son’s—”
The opening felt too fitting to be ignored. Tatsu slammed his boot into the back of her knee, and she crumpled into a heap, crying out when the burned side of her head hit the floor. Her hold on Yudai collapsed as well, and he tumbled down. Yudai barely managed to catch himself and propelled a few steps forward in the process, while Nota recovered quicker than Tatsu could have imagined. He hadn’t even turned to check on Yudai before he was lifted upwards and shot across the room towards the broken windows.
There was so much force behind the magical push that he had to grab hold of the wooden pane to keep from flying completely out the window, and leftover bits of glass embedded themselves in his palm. He was dangling, helpless and vulnerable, and he’d re-announced his presence in the room by involving himself in the fight. His thoughts jumped wildly as he tried to find a course of action that wouldn’t result in breaking his legs on the drop back down. Relief came when Yudai’s magic swirled around him in a protective cocoon and began to float him to the floor.
He got halfway down before Nota slammed her fist into Yudai’s face.
Maybe it was surprise that she was still up and moving after everything, or perhaps it was shock that she’d resort to something as base as a fist-fight. Whatever it was, the blow caught Yudai so off-guard that he toppled backward head over heels. The magic dispelled beneath Tatsu and dumped him unceremoniously onto the tiles. Pain flared up in both knees, throbbing slightly out of time with the ache from the glass in his hand.
The Mage Heir Page 26
