by Imogen Sera
“You’re getting better!” she grinned and clapped twice. “As I was saying, dragons are hard to kill, and while I could certainly kill you, there are about a million heirs after you that I’d have to go through one by one. I thought I was on to something with what I did down here, what with killing all of your women, but then apparently human mates are a thing now and it’s really inconvenient for me. It’s so much easier for me to control you, sow a little discord, and let you morons kill each other.”
“You did this?” he asked, gesturing across the buried lake to the large cracked stone. “You caused the plague?” He seethed inwardly. He wanted nothing more than to jump off the table and murder her with his bare hands, if he couldn’t shift and do it with fire. He wanted to wrap his hands around her slender throat and watch the life leave her eyes. He knew he couldn’t though, she wouldn’t have him free to wander around the room if she didn’t have meticulous precautions in place.
She stood and faced him. “I did. It didn’t go quite how I planned, but what’s life without a little trial and error?”
He stared at her, his eyes blazing, and she seemed to shrink slightly under his glare.
“I need to go,” she said, “I’ll be back when I can. I’m very sorry, but I’ll have to tie you up.”
“May I have some clothes?” he asked, gesturing at his nakedness.
“No, but please don’t worry about your virtue,” she said, her wide smile turning into a sneer. “I really fucking hate dragons.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Focus on what you want to know, then reach in and take four,” Morwich said, holding a black velvet bag open to Ingrid. She counted the small smooth objects between her fingers and pulled her hand out. “Now put them in here.”
She dropped them into the crystal bowl he held.
“Now read them,” he said, pushing the bowl onto the table in front of her.
“They’re rocks,” Ingrid said.
“They’re runes, you ignorant simpleton.”
Ingrid ignored that. “Well they look like rocks. What am I supposed to read?”
“You arrange them like this,” he said, tapping at the top, bottom and two sides of the tabletop. “Each one will tell you where it wants to go.”
Ingrid fought against the impulse to roll her eyes. She picked up the first rune and examined it closely. It did have a symbol on it, she saw, so faded from use she could barely make it out. She held it close to her chest, concentrating on the coolness of it. Where should it go? Bottom. She was surprised that the answer had formed so clearly for her, and as she placed it on the table, near to her, she looked up to see Morwich’s narrowed eyes.
She ignored him as she repeated it for the three other runes. She could feel the old man’s eyes on her, studying her, but she tried to ignore her self consciousness at such a silly exercise and focus on the task at hand.
When she finished she looked at him triumphantly and he examined the table carefully. He made a noise of approval, and Ingrid flushed with pleasure.
“I assume you thought of the king?”
Ingrid nodded.
“Well, you’ve done it correctly.”
Her heart thumped in her chest. It was that easy? She would know where he was? “What do they say?” she asked, hardly able to contain her excitement.
“He’ll come home if he’s lucky,” Morwich responded flatly.
“That’s it? That’s all it says? I could have told you that.”
The old man pointed at each rune in turn. “Husband, journey, luck, home.”
Ingrid’s face fell. This exercise was useless. She wanted to learn to break a spell and find him, not sit here and play with rocks.
“That’s the thing about runes,” continued Morwich. “It’s not reading the answer that’s hard, but asking the right question.”
“May I try again, then?” Ingrid asked, expecting to be berated, but the old man just grinned.
.....
After hours of practice Ingrid didn’t have any new information, but she was getting better at reading the runes. She didn’t even need to really concentrate to see where they would go, and she was slowly able to discern what each position meant. What the runes themselves meant was trickier as there were so many and Morwich refused to give her any kind of guide, but she came to recognize the runes for ‘husband’ and ‘safety’, and her heart lightened each time she drew them together.
She had to leave the lesson and a grumbling Morwich quickly when she realized she was running late for the council meeting. She grinned to herself remembering his parting words. She couldn’t wait to get back to learn more from the hostile old man.
The advisers were droning on about some tiny matter or other, and Ingrid could hardly keep herself from shouting at them that their king was missing, her love was missing, and nothing else could possibly matter until he was home safely. She kept her silence, though, pursing her lips together. She knew that all was being done that could be done, and although it wasn’t enough to satisfy her, she acknowledged that nothing would be enough to satisfy her until he was with her again. She wished for the millionth time that she’d told him about her feeling that he shouldn’t leave. He would have believed her, she knew. He always believed her, especially when she didn’t believe herself.
Tarquin walked with her to dinner. He had become Ingrid’s constant shadow, and she knew it was his way of keeping his word to his lost brother. After she’d shouted at him that she wasn’t going anywhere his company improved. Ingrid didn’t mind having him around, especially since they were nearly equally sullen over Helias’s disappearance.
She missed him desperately, missed him deep in her bones, missed him like her chest cavity had been torn open and scraped clean.
She dreaded nighttime. Just a glimpse of the sun sinking lower in the sky was enough to send her heart pounding and palms sweating. As she settled down into bed each night, exhausted from her days of training and meeting and entertaining and negotiating, she couldn’t find sleep, but instead found herself repeatedly reaching for his pillow to shove her face into. He hadn’t even been there long enough to leave his scent on it, but she loved it just the same, knowing he’d rested his dear head there. She held it to her all night, never straying from her side of the bed, knowing if she stayed on her own side and kept her eyes shut, then for a few blissful moments in the morning she would forget and feel that he was with her. She didn’t lose him just once, this way, but lost him again every morning when she woke, every time she turned to share a thought with him.
She was drowning.
.....
A month passed in that way; fast-paced busy days and agonizing endless nights. She was meeting with the council more and more frequently, and after she had been firm and thrown her power around a few times she was confident that the awful old advisers finally believed her capable. She allowed her ladies to dress her each morning, knowing that despite her desperate wishes to sink into an ocean of grief, she was still a queen. If she had any hope of Helias returning to a kingdom that wasn’t in tatters she needed to play her part to hold things together.
Her friendship with Tarquin had surprised her. He was always there with her, always watching and sneering and generally making people uncomfortable, but as she spent more time in his presence she began to understand why he was Helias’s favorite. He had moments of being obnoxious, but many more moments of making her laugh with his cynical view of the world or quiet awful thoughts. He didn’t talk much, but he was easy to talk to.
Caelian and the guards remained asleep. She checked in on them frequently, but the palace physician had informed her several times that there was absolutely no change. She worried over them, too, but found her emotions dulled by the underlying ache of her missing other half. Morwich had informed her that surely a spell was responsible for the sleeping soldiers, and she had set him to research it in his spare time.
Her lessons were going well, she knew, since Morwich had recently called her new
skills barely adequate. He’d called her a dumb tart with the next breath, but she’d chosen to ignore that, as she did with most things he said. She’d moved on from runes to cards, and then to defense, cloaking and protection spells. When she’d questioned this, the old man had called her a vapid twit, and asked why she thought that the skilled trackers had somehow not found a trace of their king. She’d turned the thought around in her mind a bit, and found that she had felt a bit like a vapid twit for never considering it before.
“I’m considering,” Ingrid said to Tarquin one evening after dinner, as they sat in her sitting room with her ladies, “inviting some of the residents of Dragongrove here.”
He sat up noticeably straighter, she saw, and wondered at that. “Why?” he asked bluntly, but there was something else there too.
Ingrid shrugged. “I’m lonely. I miss friends.” She needed a shoulder to cry on, but she wasn’t about to tell him that.
Tarquin nodded nearly imperceptibly.
“If anyone accepts we can arrange for an escort from the border to here, I assume?” Ingrid asked, knowing the answer.
Tarquin nodded again, distractedly.
Ingrid moved to her desk then, sorting through the mess there to find parchment and a pen. Tarquin followed her, watching her write until she was uncomfortable enough to say something.
“Do you need something?” she asked shortly, and he stood still for a moment.
“Are you inviting all of them?” he asked.
She shook her head. “That seems excessive. Lily and John, of course, perhaps Ian, maybe Mira?” she thought out loud, listing them to herself.
Tarquin raised an eyebrow at her.
“Oh right, I forgot you hate Mira,” Ingrid said, sighing to herself. “But I like her. I think you can put aside your ridiculous snap judgments and behave politely.”
“Whatever you command, your majesty,” he sneered, and Ingrid rolled her eyes and threw a pen at him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ingrid’s lessons were becoming more difficult, and compounded with all of her other duties and the gaping hole in her chest she felt constantly on the verge of collapse. Her lessons were becoming far more difficult; in addition to learning about spells she had begun learning to cast very basic ones, and she’d learned that casting was quite physically taxing. She’d managed to hold up a shield in front of her for a few seconds, long enough to block a giant book that Morwich had lobbed at her, and as the old mage had clapped his hands in delight Ingrid had collapsed on the floor in exhaustion. She progressed from shields to cloaking, and found them to be similar techniques. After cloaking was Finding, Morwich had told her mysteriously the day before, offering no information as usual.
So she stood on the roof of the tower waiting for the old mage, freezing wind whipping her hair around her face, feeling as if she might blow away at any second. He appeared suddenly in front of her, and at her gasp he narrowed his eyes at her.
“You’re never paying attention, Ingrid,” he shouted over the wind. “How can you be a queen when you can’t even see an old man in front of you?”
She refrained from rolling her eyes. He was constantly spouting reasons why she couldn’t be a queen: she mistranslated words, she didn’t concentrate when mixing potions, she slouched in her seat, she took her tea with milk. The old man was frustrating, but also her only chance at getting her mate back, so she took his endless criticisms as cheerfully as possible.
He set to explaining Finding. It was how one would find a lost pocket watch, perhaps, or a stray sock, or a king that had disappeared. It worked by concentrating on the lost item until you could see it quite clearly, and then looking out from there to see where it was. It was one of the simplest forms of magic to use, he explained, but one of the most difficult to use correctly. Ingrid had a natural talent for Knowing, though, and that seemed to give Morwich more confidence.
“Alright,” he said, “we’ll start with something easy. I’ve stolen your mother’s hand mirror and hidden it. Find it.”
Ingrid gaped at him. “You were in my chamber?”
“Find it,” he repeated, not acknowledging her.
She sighed as she stood still, relaxed her standing form until she felt a semblance of peace, and shut her eyes. She didn’t know how to begin, really, so she started with the mirror. She pictured it in her hand. She pictured it on her vanity. She opened one eye to see Morwich staring at her intently.
“Is it still in my chamber?” she asked.
He rolled his eyes at her. “You have to see it, Ingrid. What color is it? What does it feel like in your hand? You have to concentrate.”
She shut her eyes again, hands clutching at her windblown skirts. She pictured the silver mirror, tarnished in spots from her poor care of it. She pictured the ornate ‘L’ engraved on the back, the roses winding around it, the thorns that twisted around the handle. It was heavy, heavier than it looked, and whenever she held it, it warmed quickly in her touch. She liked to imagine that some of that warmth was left over from the millions of times her mother had gripped it. As she focused the image came into sharper focus, then shifted slightly. It was no longer sitting on her vanity, but on a dark background, something lumpy… mud? She focused on that, and found herself jumping when she faintly heard a horse whinny.
She opened her eyes and grinned at Morwich. “It’s in the stables.”
He seemed impressed. “I knew the little simpleton had it in her!”
“Thank you, by the way, for leaving one of my only family heirlooms in the mud.”
The old man shrugged. “It’s an easy item to start with. You have a strong bond with it and it has a distinctive look.”
She bit her tongue. “Again?” she asked, and he looked delighted.
Much later her face was numb, her hair was tangled, and her mind was exhausted, but she could locate nearly every object that Morwich had presented her with. She could see that he was impressed despite himself.
“So,” she said once they’d returned to his room in the tower, “that’s how we find him?”
“Yes, those are the essentials,” the mage replied.
“Why haven’t you just done it then?” she asked.
“I’ve tried,” he said, “but besides the fact that he’s actively being hidden, I have no connection to him. You might be able to do it with enough effort and luck, but it won’t happen for me.”
Ingrid chewed on her lip for a moment as she dropped gracelessly into a chair. “Should I give it a try?”
“No harm in trying,” he said.
She was already shutting her eyes. She saw him immediately, eyes bright and smiling widely, the sun glinting off his golden hair in her front garden. She focused on his features, his broad jaw and tall stature and easy smile. She noticed everything, his vague scent of cinnamon and something that she wasn’t able to place, the warmth of his skin over his hard arms, his intimidating presence. He never came into focus, though, and she opened her eyes a minute later.
“Again,” Morwich said.
This time she closed her eyes and imagined him in her bed. Her old bed, the one at her home, before she’d been a queen and she hadn’t been quite so alone. The feeling of him braced over her, the pressure between her legs, his hot breath and whispered words. Her eyes flew open.
“I need to rest,” she announced, leaving quickly, nearly running back to her room. This was the most ridiculous torture, seeing him so clearly, feeling him and being held by him, and yet none of it was actually true. She would submit herself to it for him, though, of course she would.
She shut her eyes again, and then he was in her old kitchen, kissing her until she was breathless.
She wept into his pillow as day turned to night.
.....
Ingrid tried constantly to Find Helias. Whenever she was bored in a council meeting, or listening to guests over dinner, or lying in bed in the morning, having experienced his loss anew. She was making absolutely no progress. He was easy to see,
but impossible to See. He came to her mind with almost no effort, always in the form of some sweet memory from their time at Dragongrove, but she was never able to focus well enough to bring him into clarity.
Her mind was preoccupied with thoughts of plotting and scheming. She tried to write down things she knew to keep track of them, but nothing obvious jumped out at her. She knew that Reis had been expecting Helias. Reis was safely in the dungeons, but still sleeping, and couldn’t be used to get information. She knew that someone had been spreading misinformation about Helias. She knew that Morwich was hiding something. She knew that her ladies treated her strangely.
What she didn’t know was what any of this added up to. She didn’t know who had taken Helias, or for what purpose. She sighed her displeasure, going through her notebook for the third time since she’d sat down, then laid her head on the desk, loneliness and despair overtaking her.
