Of Fire and Stars

by Audrey Coulthurst

  “This is none of my business,” I said. While a part of me leaped at the idea that I could finally be of help, I needed to get away from her before something went up in flames. Also, getting tangled up in anything to do with Zumorda was a dangerous proposition. “Thandi and the Directorate haven’t asked me—”

  “This isn’t Directorate business. This is my business.” Amaranthine stepped aggressively toward me, so close I could smell the cinnamon of her soap.

  “I don’t know anything!” I shrank back against the shelf.

  “I know that,” Amaranthine said. “What I want you to do is find out. See if there’s a way we can verify that the blade is Zumordan. And perhaps see if there’s any information on the kind of magic that killed that assassin. Or Cas. A connection between the two.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin.” A lie. Figuring out where to find obscure information in the library was a game I used to play with my tutors—one at which I had been quite skilled. Probably the section on weapons crafting would be my best chance for information on the blade, but it would make sense to start with geography and political history in order to narrow down the specific region from which the weapon came. It couldn’t hurt to take a look at some architecture books, and perhaps even census records if any were available. The numbness in my hands and face subsided, soothed by the familiar mental exercise of research planning. At least the magic quieted more quickly than it had leading up to the assassin’s death. It seemed to have less fuel, somehow.

  “Perhaps you could look here in the library.” Amaranthine stared at me, her gray eyes bright.

  “You’re already here,” I pointed out. “You can look yourself.”

  “I’m not a scholar,” she said. “You are.”

  “Well, you’re the first person here to acknowledge that,” I muttered. Gratitude welled up—stupid, foolish gratitude that she recognized something so important. It felt good to be seen.

  “Can you do this? Please? I know you don’t owe me anything, but this might help catch the bastards who killed Cas and tried to kill my father.”

  I couldn’t decide what to do. I wanted to help because it was my duty to Mynaria, and because she was asking me to use the skills I’d been so frustrated that Thandi and the Directorate had not yet taken advantage of. She was also handing me the perfect excuse to research my own magic. But it was a risky thing she asked of me. Too risky.

  “I care about my family,” she continued. “They may be dim-witted sometimes, but they’re still my family. And this is my kingdom. And I won’t have some bitch queen tormenting us from afar and playing with us like pawns.”

  “Well, what do you know about the blade?” I asked, curious in spite of my fear.

  “Before Captain Ryka took it from me, I noticed there wasn’t any crest on it. The metal was very bright, maybe even silver. It had a white pommel nut—does that seem Zumordan to you?”

  “I don’t know. Their pennants are white, but that isn’t enough evidence to accuse them of attempted assassination,” I said.

  “Captain Ryka mentioned their crest but didn’t say anything about the pennants. See, you already know things that might help,” Amaranthine said.

  “Don’t you think researching magic could be problematic?” I asked. “There isn’t likely to be much information here, and given that magic use is treason—”

  “It’s a little risky, yes,” she admitted. “But if it helps us figure out who is behind this, I don’t care. Some things I’ve seen in town make me unsure whether magic itself is the problem. It’s whoever is using it against my family.”

  I still hesitated, but a spark of hope came alive in my chest. She didn’t hate magic users unquestioningly. Maybe she wouldn’t despise me if she knew the truth. And helping her would allow me to look into my own abilities.

  I couldn’t say no.

  “All right, fine. I’ll see what I can find out,” I conceded.

  “Dennaleia,” Amaranthine said. “Look at me.”

  The intensity of her gaze made my stomach jump into my throat.

  “Thank you,” she said, vanishing as quickly as she’d come.

  I leaned against the wall for a moment, wondering what in the Six Hells I had gotten myself into. Everything about Amaranthine was so extreme—the way she spoke, the way she moved, the way she looked at me.

  I pressed one hand against the wall, hoping the cool stone might quell the buzzing in my palms. Instead, the stone gave beneath my touch. I jerked my fingers away as though it had burned me. An indentation in the shape of a finger remained in the wall.

  “Your Highness?” a tentative voice said behind me.

  Fear shot through me as I turned around. Ellaeni peered around the end of the row of shelves.

  “The others were wondering if you could help them pick some poems too, my lady,” Ellaeni said. Her face was neutral. Friendly, even. She hadn’t seen anything. I exhaled shakily.

  “Of course!” I said. I grasped my skirts to steady my trembling fingers and followed her back to the group.

  The tittering and whispering stopped as soon as the girls saw me. Only my sister looked at me with a what-in-the-Sixth-Hell expression that meant I’d have to come up with an explanation later.

  “Please excuse the interruption,” I addressed the group. “I would love to see the poems you all have selected.”

  They smiled back falsely, smug with their knowledge of the latest gossip. It would be all over court by nightfall that Amaranthine and I had caused a scene in the library. I shouldn’t have offered to help her. She had taken me down a notch in front of people with whom I should be building up sway. My resolution to obey my mother’s wishes was not going as planned.

  I commented and nodded over each girl’s poetry selection, trying to pay everyone equal attention, but Amaranthine’s request hung over me. When the time came for lunch, I let the girls get halfway to the great hall before I excused myself, insisting that I’d forgotten something in the library. My sister gave me a dubious look, but I waved her off with an innocent smile.

  I stalked back through the library aisles like a thief. None of the volumes were about Zumorda; the Mynarians had done a good job of purging every book on magic. History and architecture yielded no results, and as I’d feared, no census information was available. Even the geography section held nothing except the most simplistic of maps. The detail stopped at the Mynarian border on the west side of Zumorda, and the Havemont border in the north. After what felt like sunlengths wandering through the library, the only remotely promising thing I managed to pick up was an enormous tome on swordsmithing techniques that gave me a headache just looking at it.

  As I passed through the religion section on my way out, a strange chirp came from one of the shelves. I stopped short. A bright blue bird with a belly that faded to white perched on top of a thin green book sticking out from the other volumes on the shelf. Impossible. Mountain bluebirds didn’t live on the plains—only north, in the mountains where I had grown up. When I stepped closer, the bird fluttered out one of the high windows.

  I took the book down from the shelf. Crisp pages yellowed with age parted to reveal an illustration of a man with his hands raised in the air. A storm swirled around him, not of rain and thunder, but of stars trailing streaks of fiery light. It looked like one of those celestial events when the gods sent stars shooting across the sky, but the man had somehow brought them to earth.

  It wasn’t a book on religion. It was a book on magic. Curiosity and fear slithered over each other inside me.

  Somehow the book had been misshelved or preserved—perhaps due to the design on the cover. At first glance the six colored dots looked like the same ones used to denote the gods, but they were in the wrong order. I thumbed through the book, growing more and more apprehensive. It seemed to be a record of the most powerful mages and their work. The introduction outlined the six Affinities: wind, water, earth, fire, shadow, and spirit. Each Affinity corresponded to one of the Six Gods
.

  Alongside the profiles of the great mages, complicated diagrams showed the relationships between the Affinities, remarking that strength in multiple Affinities was rare—and dangerous. I had always thought my Affinity was fire. But there had been the time the door slammed, and earlier today when the stone had softened beneath my touch. Dread raced down my spine.

  Surely my gift couldn’t be more than fire. But then again, I had also thought it small—until I killed that assassin. There was only one way to find out. In an empty corner of the library I sat down in a chair and closed my eyes. Carefully, I let my magic rise into my fingertips, the familiar numbness spreading up my arms. Instead of fire I daydreamed of a soft breeze, summoning it in through the window high above me.

  A gust blasted through the library, flipping the pages of the open books on a nearby table. My heart raced as I wrestled the magic back in. When I opened my eyes, my head spun and I gripped the arms of the chair to steady myself.

  “There you are!” Alisendi appeared at the end of the aisle and hurried toward me, distressed. “Where did that wind come from? What are you doing back here?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I shoved the green book under the swordsmithing tome.

  “You missed lunch,” Ali said. “Thandilimon wanted to know where you were.”

  “What did you tell him?” I made a weak attempt to tidy the books my magic had disturbed, unable to meet Ali’s eyes.

  “That you’d forgotten a book in the library and you have a tendency to lose track of time when reading,” she said, exasperated. “But you’re not at home now—you can’t just disappear like that. People find it peculiar.”

  I started to make up an excuse, but Ali deserved to know at least part of the truth. Once she left, she’d take the secret of my Affinity with her and I’d be alone with it again.

  “I was trying to research your suggestion,” I whispered. “Maybe there is a way to make the fire god’s gift disappear.” I traced a circle on the swordsmithing book, thinking of the colored dots on the one beneath it.

  “Let’s hope to the Six there is,” she said. “But I’m leaving in less than a week.”

  The subtext was clear—without her, there would be no one to provide excuses for me.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said, ignoring how much the words felt like a lie and how desperately I knew I’d miss her.

  “Will you?” she asked, taking my hand, her expression grave.

  “I must,” I said, picking up the books and clutching them to my chest. “Let’s go. I’m going to be late for my riding lesson.”

  Thank the Six she didn’t know that apparently fire wasn’t the only thing I needed to suppress.

  FOURTEEN

  Mare

  PRINCESS ALISENDI’S FAREWELL TOOK HALF A morning, wasting yet more valuable time. Captain Ryka wouldn’t let any members of the royal family ride with the escort for fear of our safety, so we waved good-bye from the front courtyard as her carriage and armed escort disappeared into the city.

  Dennaleia stood straight, but I could see the sorrow etched in her face as she watched her sister leave. Her expression didn’t change as we headed to the stables for her lesson.

  “Have you found anything at the library?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” she said with a sigh, clearly tired of hearing the same question day after day.

  “I can’t stand being trapped in here,” I said. “Let’s go for a trail ride.”

  “Is that allowed?” she asked.

  “It’s safe as long as we stay on the acreage within the castle walls. Besides, who’s going to stop us?” I said, casting a hostile glance at Captain Ryka, who had come down to the barn with us to drill the latest recruits. Even after she’d taken the knife, the Directorate hadn’t bothered to question me as a witness to the assassination attempt—more proof that Cas had been the only one of them with full use of his wits.

  I tacked up Flicker in his war saddle and strapped on my horn, bow, and quiver to give us practice carrying the cumbersome trappings of the hunt. We climbed onto our horses at the mounting block, which Dennaleia now did with ease. She had gotten past the soreness caused by riding nearly every day, no longer leaving her lessons shuffling stiffly.

  As I led her away from the guarded paddock, two liegemen rode up.

  “You have to be joking,” I said.

  “For your safety,” one said. “Captain Ryka’s orders.”

  I rolled my eyes. If the captain wanted me to stay out of her business, the least she could do was stay out of mine. “Fine, but stay out of earshot or I’ll spend the whole ride coming up with new ways to insult your mothers.” I motioned Dennaleia forward.

  The city spread out in our view as the horses picked their way up the trail. Beyond the rooftops, the wind rippled through the golden summer grass like waves on the sea. Trees arched over us, providing welcome shade from the afternoon sun as we made our way into the low foothills bordering the back gardens of the palace.

  “Watch for branches,” I said, ducking beneath a low limb and reaching out to snap off another.

  Dennaleia didn’t respond, but she didn’t fall off her horse, either, so she must have heard.

  The foliage thickened as we rode deeper into the woods, winding down a hill and through a small stream. When the trail finally opened up after the creek, I slowed Flicker until Dennaleia and I rode abreast. I patted Flicker on the neck, trying to figure out how to get the princess to talk, hoping to coax another smile out of her.

  “So how are things going?” I asked.

  “You mean the research . . . ?”

  “That and everything else.”

  “I haven’t found any answers yet, which is frustrating. Everything else is . . . well, it’s hard sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?” Besides riding, I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. I hated court life, but with her grace and diplomacy, Dennaleia seemed born for it.

  “I miss Ali. And I miss Havemont, too. There’s no one I can talk to. Thandi is busy much of the time. And you’re only training me because Casmiel ordered you.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Thandi,” she replied.

  “He would, that useless road apple,” I said. “It’s not that simple. Yes, I was ordered to give you lessons. But you’ve also proven to be more intelligent than any of those mush-minded jackasses on the Directorate.” I needed her on my side. And honestly, she wasn’t bad company, particularly when she let her wit out to play.

  “It matters what you want too,” she said.

  “What I want is to see the determination you had when you first showed up here. The girl who knows half a dozen random facts about arrows for no apparent reason and can calculate a shot trajectory. The girl who gets on a horse even when it’s the last thing she wants to do.” Those were the things I respected most about her—the things that made me like her in spite of my intentions to the contrary.

  “I’ve come to like riding . . . but I don’t feel like that girl right now,” Dennaleia said, so softly I barely heard her.

  “You’re still that girl,” I said. I wanted her to be her best self, not only because it would help me, but because I knew that strength was in her. The events since she’d arrived were enough to break anyone’s spirit. Maybe she just needed to find her way back to something she loved—something that made her feel as alive as she’d looked when she danced.

  “What do you do well?” I asked.

  “I play the harp. Useful, I know,” she said.

  “So invite me over to listen sometime. I’d like to hear you play.” An unexpected burst of nerves followed my request. Music had once had a bigger place in my heart, and picking at old wounds was uncomfortable.

  “All right.” Her tone was noncommittal, but a blush rose into her cheeks.

  “Good,” I said. “Let’s trot.”

  We picked up the pace. I hoped as we trotted through the trees that she could feel the indefinable thing I felt on Flicker�
��s back—the way cares could fall away and leave only the wind in my hair and the sun on my cheeks.

  The guards got too close and I shooed them away as the trail opened up into a meadow with a breathtaking view of the city. Movement in the streets was barely discernible as anything but motion itself. But when we reached the peak of the vista, our horses shied sideways as someone burst out of the woods lining the meadow.

  “For the Recusants!” the figure shouted. An arrow whizzed past Dennaleia’s shoulder.

  “Go!” I shouted, and swung Flicker around to shield Dennaleia and Louie. Both horses took off at a canter, angling away from our attacker. The liegemen urged their horses toward us, but they couldn’t outrun the archer’s next shot. Guiding Flicker with my legs, I unhooked my bow from the saddle and nocked an arrow.

  “Keep him steady!” I shouted to Dennaleia, hoping that she could keep Louie at an even pace. Without my hands on the reins I had no way to rate Flicker’s speed. I sat up straight and sank my heels deeper into the stirrups, knowing I couldn’t take any chances. I didn’t have three shots and targets like in drills. I had one shot to take down someone who wanted us dead.

  Another arrow shot from our attacker’s bow and struck the dirt behind us. I pulled my bowstring back, then stood in the stirrups and turned to let my own arrow fly, all in the space of a heartbeat. My arrow released at the peak of Flicker’s stride and struck the archer in the shoulder. The person crumpled to the ground, lost in the golden grass.

  “Whoa!” I said, and we pulled up our horses. They shifted underneath us, still uneasy, ears pricked toward the fallen enemy. I blew five sharp calls on my horn in the pattern to indicate an emergency, hoping that a patrol was close by to supplement our guards.

  “Get down,” I said. “We don’t know if there are more of them.”

  Dennaleia slid out of the saddle and crouched beside me.