Of Fire and Stars

by Audrey Coulthurst

  “No,” I said. “I cannot marry someone who won’t save his own sister. And I will die before I marry a person willing to sacrifice his cavalry for a war clearly plotted by Kriantz for his own gain. If you want an alliance with Havemont, bring Mare back. I’ll marry her instead. Gladly.” My conviction burned more brightly than my fear. My days of being afraid were over.

  “Never,” he said.

  “Then let me go,” I said, and flicked my hand in the direction of the smoldering chair. It burst into flames, and the release felt good. Like galloping Shadow. Like kissing Mare. Like freedom. More power rose to take the place of what I’d lost. I could barely hold it in, as though speaking the truth of what I wanted had finally freed my magic as well as my heart.

  “Liegemen!” he called.

  The door opened and several liegemen stepped in. Their salutes faltered as their eyes flew back and forth between Thandi and the burning chair.

  “Please escort Princess Dennaleia to her rooms,” Thandi instructed. “And post four guards at her door tonight. I’d like extra security through the wedding in case the enemy”—he looked at me—“decides to make another attack.”

  They swept me away from the room like trash. Temptation to burn them all sat near the surface of my skin, but I had to save my power for the one who deserved to die: Lord Kriantz. If I could stop him, all their plans would fall apart. I didn’t care how dangerous using my gift had become.

  After the door closed behind the liegemen, I retreated to my bedchamber so that Auna could help me undress. Once I was free of the cumbersome dress, I’d actually be able to do something. But Auna had done no more than started to take down my hair when the door to my receiving room burst open and my mother walked in.

  “Dennaleia,” she began.

  “No. Not tonight,” I said. The last thing I needed was a lecture from my mother. The hearth surged with flame, making the room uncomfortably warm. If my mother agitated me any further, the whole castle would probably burn.

  “I am not here to say what you think,” she said, sitting down on my bed.

  I didn’t believe her until she put her hand over her face and closed her eyes like she couldn’t find the strength to go on. Swathed in the layers of her dress with her face in her hands, she seemed very small.

  “Auna, you are dismissed for the night,” she finally said.

  Auna curtsied and hurried out of the room.

  Mother stood up and took over where Auna had left off, removing the seemingly infinite layers of my skirts and loosening my corset with gentle hands. I could not remember the last time she had touched me at all.

  “Thandilimon showed me the chair,” she said as she helped slip a night shift over my head.

  “I tried to tell you,” I said. “I tried to ask you why this was happening. You never have time to talk to me. Everything is about decorum. Protocol. Making the right impressions on others. Smoothing things over and never talking about what is truly going on.” As I spoke, sparks burst out of the hearth.

  “I thought I could protect you,” she said. “When you were young, your gift was so small. With the blood diluted, I thought it would stay that way. I’m sorry, Dennaleia. I was wrong.”

  She sat me down at my vanity, and in the mirror her eyes were shadowy with unshed tears.

  “What diluted blood?” I whispered.

  My mother took a deep breath. “You know that I am from one of the outer provinces of Havemont. South, in the Kavai Mountains near the Zumordan border.”

  I had heard the story a thousand times. How my father met her on his coronation tour. How instantly smitten he was with her regardless of the fact that she was a lesser noble. How he surprised the people of his kingdom by taking such an improbable woman as his wife, and how that choice had united the kingdom more than anyone expected.

  “My mother is not truly my mother. My birth mother was Zumordan. My mother’s handmaiden.” The confession seemed to cost her with every word, her hands trembling.

  My mother, the most regal person I knew, was of impure blood.

  “My parents tried for many years to conceive a child, but it never happened. My mother and her handmaiden came to an agreement with my father, and I was born. In a way, I had three parents.” She pulled herself together, speaking as flatly as though she was reciting the information from a history book. “No one knew the truth. They told me when I came of age, once it became clear that I might become a queen.”

  “How could you not tell me?” I struggled to speak through the tightness in my chest as my eyes stung with tears. All along, the explanation for my gift had been right there, and she had deliberately hidden it from me. My arms went numb with increasing power. The oil lamp on my bedside table exploded in a burst of flame, showering the area with broken glass. A gust of wind blew open one of my shutters so violently that the top hinge snapped.

  My mother jumped, and her hands shook even harder as she finished unwinding my hair.

  “No one could know,” she said. “Your father and I agreed when we married. If the truth about my blood came out, it could endanger the Havemont crown. The kingdom always comes first.”

  “I can’t hide my truth, Mother,” I said. “It is stronger than I am.” That was the only thing of which I was sure.

  “I know,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry, Dennaleia. I thought I had done the right thing. I never had any hint of magic, nor did my birth mother. We didn’t know this could happen.”

  I told her then about the knife, the Gathering, and Karov’s words of warning. I told her what Kriantz had done, and about Thandi’s refusal to listen to me. I had nothing left to lose. The attack on Zumorda had become inevitable. And with Nils dead, the Recusants locked up, and me as the only suspect for magic use, nothing that came next could be good.

  “Thandi may still marry me for the alliance, to perpetuate this foolish war,” I finished. “But after that, I’m as good as dead.”

  My mother rested her hands on my shoulders and met my eyes in the mirror.

  “You are my daughter and I will always love you. And in this matter, I must admit that I do not know any better than you. But if you can forgive me for not telling you about your grandmother . . . then I will forgive you for making your own decision about this and doing what you must.”

  I reached over my shoulder and covered her hand with my own, wondering if I had ever seen my mother as she truly was. Yes, she was a queen, but she was also simply a person doing the best she could with what she’d been given. Not so different from me. We had both made mistakes, and we would both have to pay for them.

  She kissed my cheek and departed with no further words, leaving me with the chaos of my thoughts and the insistent surging of my magic. I paced over to my bedside and removed the green book from among the singed glass shards of the lamp, stroking the cover absently. If only I had control like the mage in the book, I could burn my way out of the castle, or send a fireball after Lord Kriantz to destroy him.

  Beneath my feet, the fraying edge of a horse halter peeked out from under the bed frame.

  At the sight of it, memories of Mare overcame me.

  My heart fell into pieces as numerous as the stars. Our moments together burned inside me more brightly than any fire: her clever words, her hand in mine, her arms around me, her fierce kisses.

  Her love.

  In that instant, everything snapped into place. I knew what I had to do. If sacrificing myself for the kingdom was necessary, I would risk myself to stop the war and save Mare, not die slowly being persecuted by Thandi for crimes I had not committed.

  I stripped out of my night shift and pulled on my riding pants, boots, and as many layers as I could. I topped the haphazard ensemble with my simplest cloak and opened my other shutter to the night. Only the cold wind greeted me—the garden below stood empty and dark. Thandi hadn’t counted on the memory of Mare helping me out the window of Ryka’s ready room to give me courage.

  Looking down made my stomach seize
with nausea, but there wasn’t time to indulge the sensation. I tossed the rope over the wall and swung a leg over the windowsill, the distant lamps of the stables beckoning me from across the gardens. I clambered down our makeshift ladder to the ground and ducked in through a door, taking the same route Thandi had shown me when we walked beneath the castle.

  Once underground, I raced through the tunnels and shoved my way into the armory. Swords, axes, and maces hung on the walls, but armor and other random objects lay about in various states of filth and disrepair. I didn’t know where to look for the Recusant artifact the Directorate had been using to test people for Affinities. But I was a magic user. Some part of my gift had to help me.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, drawing as cautiously as I could on my gift. Beside a pile of battered shields, something glowed—the edge of a silver bowl mostly concealed by a smudged rag. The glimmering intensified if I didn’t look at it head on. That had to be it. I snatched it and ran. It felt alive in my hand, like Karov’s dagger.

  I paused at the entrance of the barn tunnel. Though there wasn’t much time to spare, I could still do something more for my kingdom, and for others like myself. I hesitated only a second before taking the dungeon tunnel instead. It ended in a metal gate at the heart of the dungeon, and I could see the prisoners’ cells beyond it. But a guard also stood blocking the way, and two more paced near the main entrance of the dungeon on the other side of the room.

  I closed my eyes and reached with my gift for the oil lamps in the hall outside the main entrance, far enough away that they were out of sight. Once I had them in my grip, all it took was the barest nudge, and every one of them exploded. The liegemen ran out of the dungeon and into the hallway, leaving my path clear. Prisoners pressed forward in their cells, trying to see what had happened, and reached for me when I came out into the light. The cells of the dungeon were not even keyed—just heavily barred with latches that would open only from the outside.

  They cried out in a mass of voices I couldn’t untangle.

  I held up the silver bowl, which glowed blindingly in my hands as I let my gift rise into my fingertips. Most of the prisoners shrank back as quickly as they had come forward, the voices settling into screams of fear as they pressed themselves against the back walls of their cells. But a few remained at the fronts of their cells, faces still pressed to the bars.

  “It was you,” a man with a gray beard said, but his words held none of the judgment or fear of Thandi when he had said the same. His voice held only wonder.

  I unlatched the door of his cell and handed him the bowl. It dimmed in his hands.

  “Free your people,” I told him, pointing to the way out. The Syncretic Circle could return to doing their part to help other magic users in Mynaria and make the kingdom safe.

  As for me, it was time to go for a ride.

  FORTY-TWO

  Mare

  I CAME TO WITH THE RHYTHM OF HOOFBEATS pounding into my head. Gritty floorboards pressed against my cheek, boots barely visible in front of me in the near dark. I tried to reach for the bench above me with numb hands, only to find my wrists snugly bound. All I could do was roll onto my back. Above me, Lord Kriantz looked on with an implacable expression.

  “Ah, you’re awake,” he said. “The journey to Sonnenborne will be more comfortable that way.”

  “You bastard,” I whispered. He’d killed Nils. I tried to channel my pain into anger, into something that I could use. I kicked out with my bound feet, hoping to burst open the carriage door, but one of his two men put his blade to my shins. My body trembled with the force of my rage and sorrow, my head throbbing. Denna had seen everything so much more clearly than me. I should have trusted her. I should have stayed by her side even if it broke my heart.

  “I hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” he said. He spoke with no malice, only the eerie calm of someone with an objective and no regard for anything standing in his way.

  “What do you even want from me?” I fought my bindings in frustration, wishing I could sit up and have the conversation with him eye to eye. We were supposed to be equals. We had been, until I’d compromised his plan.

  The soldier sitting alongside him raised an eyebrow and a blade, but Lord Kriantz waved him off. I posed no threat in my state.

  “Well, it’s not exactly you that I want, though I would have been happy for us to have a partnership. Thandi underestimates you, I think. Perhaps in time you will agree with me that an alliance between our kingdoms is for the best in spite of the means.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. He could drag me halfway across the world if he wanted. Eventually I would find a way to escape, and he wouldn’t see me again until I found a way to destroy him for what he’d done to my friend and was about to do to my kingdom.

  “Think about it from my perspective,” he said. “The tribes of Sonnenborne have nothing but desert. What do you think we want?”

  “Other than goats to hump, I won’t begin to try and guess,” I replied, straining against the ropes again. One of the soldiers jabbed me in the ribs with the toe of his boot to stop me.

  “Zumorda,” he said, ignoring my insult. “The resources of Sonnenborne are finite. For hundreds of years we’ve continued to move farther north as resources dwindle and the earth grows more arid. Without new land my people will die. We can’t survive more than a few winters where we are now. You don’t know what it’s like to watch your own people starve in the streets, withering away in the sun. I am the closest thing to a ruler that Sonnenborne has, and I didn’t work to bring so many tribes under my banner simply to watch my people suffer and waste away.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with Mynaria.”

  “It has everything to do with Mynaria. Sonnenborne needs allies in order to take land from a kingdom as powerful as Zumorda. Yours is the only kingdom with enough strength to support us.”

  “So you take me? I’m worth nothing. Don’t you realize that I’m a joke even among my own people? All you’ve done is sabotage us. The death of both Cas and my father has left us weak, and we’ll be weakened further when you send our cavalry to fight a pointless war. What do you plan to do once Thandi realizes the Zumordans weren’t to blame?” Words were the only weapons I had left.

  “Once a war begins, the source of instigation won’t matter. Thandi won’t hear a word against the trusted friend who stayed by his side through the worst days of his life, though it’s a pity I had to end King Aturnicus to ensure my place. But a green king is far easier to work with than a seasoned one, especially when he believes I put my life at risk to save his father. At least a generous donation to the most hotheaded Recusants made it easy to get rid of Casmiel, who was the only one who had the potential to decipher my intentions.” His voice held no emotion. He had never cared for any of us.

  “I will kill you with my bare hands.” I lunged at him but succeeded only in slamming my skull into his knee as I fell to the floor of the carriage.

  “That won’t be necessary.” He laughed. “You will come to appreciate me in time. This marriage is a business arrangement. I won’t ask anything more of you.”

  I spat at his feet. I would sooner die than give him anything he wanted. Without my freedom, Denna, Nils, or even my horse, there wasn’t anything left in the world that I cared for.

  He laughed again. “You’ll be a fun project, Princess. You certainly have the fighting spirit my people need.”

  I rolled onto my side away from him and fought the ropes that bound me until my wrists grew slick with blood. When I was no longer able to struggle, I lay still until the rattling of the carriage wheels numbed me. No one had seen me taken, and amidst the festivities my absence wouldn’t be noticed until it was too late.

  FORTY-THREE

  Dennaleia

  OVER AND OVER I WHISPERED PRAYERS TO THE SIX AS I rushed around the dark stables. The members of the Syncretic Circle hovered in the shadows outside, waiting. I didn’t know how we would all get out, but if I
charged the gates, perhaps they could follow. I worked in the dimness; lighting a lamp would draw attention I couldn’t risk. Fumbling with Flicker’s saddle, I struggled to make sense of the unfamiliar tack. I had considered taking Shadow, but Flicker was bigger—big enough to carry both me and Mare. I would bring her back or die trying.

  Flicker shifted from side to side as I fought with the leather and buckles, craning his head around curiously. He was so tall I had trouble getting leverage to tighten the girth. Bridling him was a fresh nightmare, my hands shaking as I stood on a rickety stool to reach high enough to slip the snaffle into his mouth and the crownpiece behind his ears.

  “May the Six keep us,” I said, leading Flicker into the dark practice yard.

  From the moment my leg swung over the saddle, I knew that he was nothing like Louie or Shadow. Each of his strides was big enough to unseat me, and the energy in him burned as surely as the fire beneath my skin. And though staying on was the most important thing, and I should have been more concerned about the Recusants behind me, all I could think of was Mare. With a white-knuckled grip on the reins, I pulled up the hood of my cloak and guided Flicker into the night.

  “Halt!” the gatesmen called out as I approached the castle wall.

  “Is that you, Princess . . . ?” One of them squinted up at me, and I pulled the hood of my cloak even more closely around my face.

  “Yes,” I said. “There was an unmarked carriage drawn by two gray horses that left a sunlength ago. Which way did it go?”

  “Your Highness, you shouldn’t be leaving.”

  “Tell me which way the carriage went.” I hoped they couldn’t hear the tremble in my voice.

  “I believe it went south, as that’s the only city gate open this late at night. But you can’t leave. Orders of the king.”

  “The king’s orders can go straight to the Sixth Hell,” I muttered.

  “Pardon?”

  “I said, what’s that burning smell?” I pointed to a tree next to the gate and glared at it as hard as I could, urging my magic to rise. A prayer to the fire god rose to my lips, and I murmured it into the night. A breeze stirred, but nothing else happened.