Fall of Thrones and Thorns

by Jennifer Ellision

  Master Izador, my new teacher, guides me through motions that will facilitate water swimming through the air. The first day he instructs me, I simply observe his motions. The next, he guides me through them, a process which we repeat in the following days.

  When I am given a respite from this, he takes me down to the ocean. Staying near large bodies of water is another method, I’m told, that has had success in restoring water Elemental abilities more quickly than they might otherwise. There, we concentrate on the more innate gifts being a Wielder grants us. I dive beneath the waves and breathe the water in deeply. I watch schools of fish flit by, the likes of which I never saw in rivers back home. I float on my back beneath a crescent moon, feeling at one with the tide.

  It’s so peaceful here.

  But I’m not fool enough to think it’s the sort of peace that can last. My heart throbs as my thoughts jump to how Aleta must be handling all of this. And what is Langdon up to as we rest on our laurels? His last play with the ships failed and he’s still for the moment, but that can’t last. This calm is the eye of a storm we’ve only just begun to weather.

  I’ll keep working on my Throwing. But I need to know what my aunt is doing about the rest of it.

  Master Izador bows deeply as he leaves me for the day, and I use a cloth to wipe the salty residue of the ocean from my skin. Dusk’s red light greets me as I stride into the white halls. The light comes through clear, a cool breeze flitting like a bird through open windows and columns.

  For all of Lady Helen’s scoffing at the word “palace,” that's what this would be called in Egria. The architectural styles are different, but it’s just as expansive. And unlike the confusing monstrosity of the Egrian palace, its halls have a straightforward pattern that is much easier to navigate. It’s still strange not to be escorted throughout the house by an armed soldier. The only way I’d escaped that fate in the Egrian palace had been by sneaking out at night through secret passages and into clandestine corridors with Tregle and the others.

  There are Wielders posted strategically throughout the home, and I inquire if any of them have seen Lady Helen without success until one tells me that she returned a short time ago and may be found in the courtyard.

  After thanking him for the direction, I poke my head into the area he mentioned and swear. Empty but for the small plants decorating its corners. Aunt Helen isn’t here either.

  My stomach rumbles at the precise moment that she chooses to make her entrance. “Hungry, are we?” she asks, lips quirking into a smile. “I’d just sought dinner myself and thought to find you. We haven’t had much opportunity to speak before now. Are your lessons done for the day?” She hands me something warm wrapped in a cloth napkin.

  “Thank you. Master Izador just left and I’m starving,” I admit, accepting the food with a sheepish grin. I unfold the napkin and bite into the flat bread folded around seasoned meat. “This was delicious,” I say, lifting the napkin in gratitude when I’ve finished inhaling the last morsel. “I need to thank you for your hospitality as well. You have a beautiful home.”

  “It’s your home, too, now.”

  Home. The word strikes a pang of longing in me. It’s been so long since I’d thought of myself as having a home. The Bridge and Duchess had been burnt to the ground and I’d wanted nothing to do with Da’s ancestral lands at Secan once I’d heard of them. And when I’d stayed in the Egrian palace, I’d just been…adrift. Aimless, in a sense. I didn’t know where I wanted to be, but I knew it wasn’t there.

  I’ve experienced so little of what Nereidium has to offer, but I like what I see. Maybe, when everything has settled, I could make a new home here.

  Aunt Helen offers me a hesitant smile, and just as hesitantly, I return it.

  She sucks in a quick breath and my grin vanishes. “Blessed Kyrene. You look very like your mother when you smile, you know.”

  My smile vanishes. Makers. My mother. Da told me for years that my mother had died in childbirth, but I now know that isn’t true. I ache with curiosity over the queen who survived birthing me, but I save those questions for another time.

  The air is clear. Our eyes are equal parts friendly and nervous as they dance away from each other, both eager and afraid of the connection we know waits for us. It would be a shame to spoil the mood with conversation that could only end in tears and broken hearts.

  “You keep mentioning this ‘Kyrene,’” I say. “Who is that?”

  She frowns. “Izador should be mentioning her in your lessons. Has he failed to do so?”

  “No,” I assure her quickly. “He’s mentioned how important she is to your people, how we all owe our abilities to her, but I meant—who is she to you and I? You said—”

  “Ah.” Her expression clears. “Our ancestor. You recall me telling you last night that my—our people are descended from the first of the Water Wielders?” I nod. “I shall have to assume your lessons myself soon,” she murmurs, a finger to her lips in thought as she wanders back to the main part of the house. “It isn’t the same to simply hear of it.”

  I follow. Clearly, she’s unwilling to say more right now, so I move to discuss what I’ve sought her for. “Any word from the governors? Have you a plan for Egria?”

  “Some word, yes. They make their way here surely. There can be no action until then.”

  Politics tie our hands and my frustration is mounting quickly. I struggle with my inclination to tread cautiously with my aunt and the urge to lash out in my exasperation. Just because there aren’t Egrian ships on the horizon doesn’t mean they don’t make their way here, even now.

  She puts a hand on my shoulder as I struggle with silence. “They’ll be here within the week, niece. Try to have patience.”

  A breath huffs out of my lips. Patience. Never my strong suit. But very well. “May I see my friends, then? They must be worried about me, and we’ve been through a great deal together. I confess to missing their counsel.”

  A shadow darkens her expression, but she banishes it so quickly that I think for a moment I imagined it. “They’re safe in other houses in the acropolis. We’ve lent them servants so that they may be cleaned and properly outfitted when next we see them, but there is still business here that we must attend to.”

  I imagine the look on my face is very similar to how she looked with her shadow-darkened cheeks. My brows furrow. Business be damned. I’ve barely been without them for months, and when we were separated, it was only under duress. Aleta will be shutting everyone else out by now. I’ll never recover our friendship if I don’t speak with her soon. I’ll be lucky if she doesn’t already hate me.

  “You will see them soon, Highness,” she says quickly. “I can appreciate your loyalty to them, but think of your people. We need to inform the masses of your return, let the people have a moment to rejoice in this unexpected blessing. When the governors arrive, we’ll need to meet with them so that I may formally acknowledge you and let them know that, of course, as is your birthright, I’ll be stepping aside so that you—”

  “Stepping aside?” I cut in quickly, my heartbeat picking up. Makers, no. I am in no way, shape, element, or form ready to take on the duties of a queen. Serving ale to the governors, I could probably handle, but things like settling a dispute, strategizing for war? They’re hardly my strong suits. It’s only recently that I even learned how to defend myself in amateur hand-to-hand combat. It’s why I’m so grateful for the supports of people like Liam, who can train me. Caden, who’s a born strategist. Aleta, whose cold logic can deflate any argument.

  A spasm of pain goes through me. Being without them is starting to feel like missing a limb.

  She gives me a sympathetic look. “It’s all a bit much, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve no idea,” I manage to choke out. Up until this year, I’d thought I would be a barmaid for the rest of my days, but that illusion has unraveled bit by bit.

  “I’ve some idea.” She walks in a slow circle around me, surveying me from head to t
oe. “I mentioned last night that you are not the girl that the Egrian king has tried time and time again to hold over me. He’s sent letters by way of messenger—attempting, to no avail, to follow them to our shores—and threatened the girl. But where he failed utterly in reaching our shores, my spies managed to infiltrate the Egrian palace. It took no more than a tiny prick of the baby’s finger over a water goblet to realize she was not Princess Aleta. But better to let him think he had the upper hand and remain distracted than to give in.”

  A chill runs down my spine at her words as it strikes me how very easily Langdon could have taken Aleta’s life if Helen had revealed her. Given how unpredictable Langdon’s whims are, it’s equally surprising he didn’t kill her in an attempt to force Nereidium to bend to his will.

  “So that begs the question,” Helen goes on. “Where were you while the other Aleta was trapped in the Egrian capital?”

  The memories flick past and I have to take a moment to compose myself. “It’s a story I’d rather not dive into at the moment,” I say.

  “We all have such stories,” she says. Her lips twist in a look of commiseration.

  I imagine my birth parents play quite prominently in these stories of hers. But she respects my silence. And so I respect hers.

  She bids me a good night and I blink. Without me realizing it, she’s led me back to my room. In the fading light of day, I watch her walk away, leaving me with only my imaginings to fill in the gaps of my memory.

  ~~~

  True to her word, Helen takes a more active hand in my lessons. Once I am dressed and ready for the day, I find her waiting for me in the hall.

  She raises a brow at me. “My staff informs me that you appear to be on the hunt for something in my halls.”

  I color, swearing internally. They’re correct. Often, when Izador had left for the day, I’d taken to poking curiously around Helen’s home. I’d hoped… I don’t know what I’d hoped. To glean a bit of insight into the sort of people my birth parents were, I suppose. I can’t imagine that two such grand homes existed on the same island, so they must have lived here with her and Helen’s simply rebuilt. “I thought…”

  “It wasn’t here,” she said.

  She sees my intent that plainly? “I—” I mean to explain myself, but she continues.

  “I assume you’re searching for something of your parents. Your nursery.”

  My tongue is too thick in my mouth. “I thought my nursery burned.”

  Helen’s eyes are steady. “Indeed it did. Your whole home burned. But I—” Here, her eyes stutter and she looks down at her hands. “I had it cleaned up, of course. I could hardly let it sit like that. Black soot festering. Ash coating the air like a tangible fog.” She swallows hard. “If you’d truly been inside, there would have been no chance that you’d survived it. I found my sister and her husband’s bodies…” She leans heavily against the wall, groping for something to support herself. She’d planned to have this conversation with me—she sought me out for it. But the toll it’s taking on her is something else entirely.

  “I rarely let myself think of them. The state of them. Unrecognizable. Just two skeletons, skin desiccated and black around the bone. I never quite worked out how they’d managed to kill them. Two skilled Water Wielders—it should have been no trouble at all for them to have extinguished a flame before it sucked all of the moisture from the air.”

  I, of course, know exactly how it was achieved. Katerine had removed the air from their lungs first. They’d been dead before the blaze had even been ignited. But I’m spellbound by Helen’s story and find that I have to grope for the wall myself, imagining it as she relives the night.

  “I’d thought that I was strong enough to see them. But afterward…” She shakes her head. “I should have immediately assumed your mother’s duties as Kyrene’s vassal, but I felt as though I was living enshrouded by the very smoke that consumed you all. The governors had to assume all overarching duties. Amazing given that they are rarely able to agree which direction is up and which is down.

  “I thought I’d lost you all, but the hand of Kyrene was at play in this.” She looks at me and quirks a small smile in my direction, but it’s distant, like she’s looking beyond me somehow.

  Da’s hand had been at play. Not some damned ancestor. Not anyone’s answer to a god. Da had interrupted King Langdon’s machinations and spirited me away from this island to keep me safe from Egrian plans.

  “Your friend… At first, thinking she was you, that you’d somehow inexplicably survived, buoyed me. But once I learned that it was all a ruse, I was enraged. That anger has been what’s sustained me, pulled me from the dark depths of grief.”

  “Until now,” I finish.

  She smiles. “Until now,” she agrees. She straightens. “I don’t think you’d want to see the house. It’s been cleaned just enough so as not to be a hazard, but I don’t think you’ll be able to glean any happy memories amid the remnants of the place.” She shakes her head again. “Enough dwelling on the past. For now, at least. We must look to the future. I’ve summoned the governors here to the mainland, and we must wait for them to arrive. In the meantime, there are duties that are rightly yours. If nothing else, I think you should learn about them.”

  I can’t fault her for making sense. She’s not asking that we do nothing, only that we take a moment’s pause. So I push off from the wall, brush off the draping fabric of my skirt, and motion her ahead of me. “I await your lead, Aunt.”

  We ride down the mountainside on the backs of those deformed horses—mules, Helen says they’re called. The city that greets us is one of white-washed stone. People laugh and spill out into the streets from the open shops, many of them, men and women alike, clothed in the now-familiar draped fabric that Helen wears—that I’ve begun to wear myself. I still miss my breeches that I’d worn in the old days from time to time, but these togas are vastly preferable to the corsets that I’d been bound into in the Egrian capital.

  “When did the tide come in for you?” Helen asks suddenly. “It had to have been recent for you to have such little control over the water.”

  She’s been peering into my lessons. My cheeks heat. Izador had only just allowed me to attempt a small manipulation over the water yesterday. It had worked, but my control was tenuous. He’d concluded that I needed a bit more time and more glasses of water yet.

  I try not to linger over my embarrassment that she’d witnessed that. My mule hits a hard angle on the path, and I grit my teeth as I’m jostled in the saddle.

  When the tide came in, she’d said. I suppose she means when I Revealed. “On my seventeenth birthday. It was…” I search for words to sum up the waves surging into the ballroom. The screams of people terrified they’d drown or crash onto the rocks below. I settle on, “A bit of a disaster.”

  She looks rueful. “Our family’s moments of revelation often are. If you’d been here, you would have been up at a temple, alone, for the weeks surrounding the anniversary of your birth.”

  “I was at a banquet.”

  She laughs, surprised. “Blessed Kyrene. Did everyone survive the evening?”

  I can’t join in her laughter. I’ve yet to find the humor in that night. “Only just.”

  We come to a stop in front of a stone structure, and I dismount, following Helen’s beckoning hand into the building. Baskets laden with fruits, meats, and bottles of wine spill across the ground.

  “What is this?” I ask, toeing a fresh grape curiously. “Some sort of trading post?”

  It can’t be. Where are the people? Products litter the ground, but are unsupervised, unobserved. They lay before white stairs that ascend to a great chair. No. A throne. Its arms are covered in shells and barnacles. Its seat is ancient, worn by time and the elements and waves, sculpted from stone arches overhead.

  “It’s a temple.”

  Hesitantly, I take a step inside. My footsteps are swallowed up by the shadows and empty space.

  “I though
t you said that the temple was on the mountain’s peak.”

  “It is. This is for her modern incarnation. Her descendants.”

  A chill straightens my spine. “What do you mean?”

  Helen takes a slow step, beginning a circle around me. The smile on her face, the connection we’d begun to forge, is missing. She avoids my eyes as she speaks, tone reverent. “We rule by divine right. As Kyrene’s descendant and her vassal on the island, our people bring their problems to the reigning monarch. The governors of the individual city-states deal with the minor problems presented by those on their islands, but many Nereids travel at great personal expense to reach the mainland—to reach us. The representation of the first blessed Water Wielder, made flesh.”

  Without meaning to, I take a step backward. Makers, they think me close to a god. I couldn’t be further from such an ideal if I tried, and it makes me more uncomfortable than I can say. I’ve never been a devout practitioner of faith in the Makers, but it seems sacrilegious to pretend that I have any mysticism to me.

  Not to mention the attention it will mean. Attention that I’ve had quite enough of. I squirm, my gaze traveling the throne’s seat, its arms. In its embrace I’d be imprisoned. On display like an animal in a menagerie.

  Helen can’t expect me to—

  But she does. Her eyes move from me to the throne that we are both dwarfed by.

  “It will be your turn soon,” she whispers.

  Five

  Aleta

  At a loss as to what to do with myself while the others occupy themselves swinging weapons about, I leave the house to roam the city.

  Breena had continued up the mountain after leaving us, but the houses the Nereids provided us with are at the edge of their acropolis. I can fill my ears with chatter that means nothing to me. It’s bliss after days of listening to the others clatter into the room after an afternoon of training. They squabble around, rehashing recent arguments as I stew in silence.