Reign of Darkness

by Michaela Riley Karr

  Evan’s expression was grim as he pressed his lips into a thin line. “You didn’t give it enough magic. It’s too weak to stand. All you can do now is reabsorb it.”

  “How do I do that?” I asked frantically.

  “You’re still connected to it magically. Find that connection and break the bird back down the way you created it,” Evan answered stoically.

  Rapidly, I found the tether in my mind that linked the bird with me and drew upon my magic. The wren evaporated back into tiny glowing spheres that quickly disappeared, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  A few moments of silence went by as Evan measured my expression. He spoke slowly and carefully as he said, “Remember, Lina. It’s just an Einanhi. They’re not real.”

  My shoulders slumped as I stared at the little patch of dirt where my failed bird had lain. I could barely see it now that the sun was beyond the western mountains where Mineraltir lay. Evan shrugged a half-witted, nonverbal apology, and turned to his wife. Apparently, our lesson was over.

  Glumly, I stood and shook my rucksack and blanket of any dirt they had collected, and tiptoed my way around the silent, exhausted camp to where Sam sat beside our slumbering children. He gazed at the fire forlornly, still upset about being forced to leave Lunaka. I squeezed his shoulder, just enough so he could feel my love but not so much that necessitated a response, and then I laid out my blanket and rucksack again. I plopped down, stretched my weary muscles, and peered up at the darkened sky. No stars were visible tonight, and it made me feel that much more isolated from the rest of the world as I fell asleep.

  The next morning, we all fell back into our routine of feeding the three children breakfast, packing everything up, Evan’s absorbing of his Einanhi squirrel, and mounting our horses yet again. I tried very hard to put the image of my weak little wren out of my mind, but it wasn’t working. As I climbed my tawny gelding and the Ranguvariians at the front of our party began our walk, I looked over my shoulder.

  Soläna still lay there in the distance, nothing more than a long, dark hole since the town itself was buried so far below. Wisps of black smoke lilted from the canyon as the churning heart of Lunaka’s capital, the mines, pumped into existence for the day ahead. Morning light reflected from the castle windows as servants opened them to air the Royal chambers. Homesickness flooded me so hard that I could smell the earthy, coal dust and hear the whisper of the wheat heads rubbing against each other in the Lunakan wind.

  With every hoof my horse planted into the ground on the path away from Soläna toward Stellan and Canis, the port town, it seemed like miles of distance were materializing between me and the people I was supposed to be helping.

  Chapter Six

  A s days bled into weeks, I found myself no longer looking at the world around me. It hurt too much. Instead, the days brought letters to and from Frederick via Ranguvariian, which allowed me to spend my endless hours in the saddle decoding the rich language of the Archimage Palace’s history book.

  Thankfully, Frederick never asked why I spent the vast majority of our letters asking for definitions of words that I painstakingly copied from the book when no one else was looking. While I wasn’t anywhere near finished, the first several chapters were transforming from confusing, lofty words to meaningful – and downright surprising – stories.

  The first few chapters detailed accounts that I had heard before in school, although in a much less sugar-coated way. While my meager education had glossed over such topics as the enslavement of the Rounans, it had completely left out things like stealing land from the indigenous Ranguvariians and the establishment of the Archimage position. This book gave the real story.

  I knew the nostalgic tale of how my ancestors were the few lucky ones to evacuate not only Gornan, their homeland oceans away, but Rounia as well where they stopped and acquired “helpers” before having to leave once again. They then “discovered” Nerahdis and created a new order that would avoid the corruption of Gornan and Rounia under Emperor Caden, the youngest son of the previous Gornish emperor, who promised a different world.

  While this book did agree that Emperor Caden had the best of intentions, it painted my ancestors’ story in a far darker light. The Rounans were slaves, and even once they were freed, they were kept from being equal in other ways. My limited education also had suggested that Nerahdis was utterly empty when the Gornish arrived, but this book detailed how the Gornish took advantage of the “ignorant” Ranguvariians who believed they could share Nerahdis. Instead, they were pushed back and back until the Gornish had control of everything. Our history apparently wasn’t as golden as they taught in the schools.

  When Emperor Caden’s three sons, Joshuua, Ivann, and Spenser, became of age, he divided Nerahdis into the Three Kingdoms I knew today to keep his sons from starting wars over who would inherit. Joshuua became the first king of Mineraltir, Ivann of Auklia, and Spenser of Lunaka. Even after doing this, Emperor Caden could foresee that his sons would begin to quarrel as soon as he was gone, so he created the Archimage to keep the Three Kings in check. This story mostly matched up with what Dathian had told me last year, but it was the next chapter where things turned mind-blowing.

  Emperor Caden sent scouts all around Nerahdis to discover someone who could become the Archimage. The book got confusing here, even though Frederick had sent me definitions for all the words, because it started discussing magical theory that was quite frankly so far over my head it hurt. What I could decipher was that not anyone could become Archimage. Emperor Caden believed it had to be a young man who, while not being born with magic, had the capability of receiving it.

  This reminded me of how we had to search for Rayna. A newborn born of mages to whom we could bequeath Allyen magic because otherwise she would have been too old and her birth magic too defined. Emperor Caden’s theory was a bit different, but similar, although I didn’t fully understand it. It sort of made sense that he needed someone more the same age as his sons instead of a newborn, although I’d have to do more research as to how it could even work on someone so old.

  They searched for two years before they found a boy named Rhydin Caldwell. An eighteen-year-old from a town in Lunaka that no longer existed: Diagalo.

  I was getting toward the end of what I had managed to translate into common terms, but I couldn’t keep my nose out of my book. Rhydin was the only child of a wealthy, Lunakan merchant, and he was described as a “good-natured, young man with a lot of potential and a knack for astronomy.” While I gawked at this, the scouts apparently thought him such a good candidate that Emperor Caden met with him within the week.

  As I turned the page, I nearly pulled a lock of hair out at my frustration. The narrative pulled back out! It didn’t detail how Rhydin became Archimage, or if it was even his choice! It only gave a brief summary about Rhydin being successfully given all the different magics of Nerahdis – fire magic, water magic, and wind magic – in order to transform a common boy into someone with dominion over the Three Kings.

  This astounded me. I shook my head in sheer disbelief. So much power given to such a young boy. It far exceeded what I’d had to deal with when my Allyen magic awakened. Then, to my dismay, the chapter ended.

  I slapped the book shut loudly as I returned to the real world in frustration. I was still waiting on Frederick to supply me with my latest list of definitions before I could decode the next chapter, so I couldn’t find out what happened next yet. Groaning, I tucked the book away and resituated Rayna in front of me.

  By the looks of the sun and how much our horse had slowed down, I guessed it was nearing evening. We crossed the second river a few days ago, which meant we were very close to Canis now. If I didn’t know any better, the regular prairie speckled with trees around me suggested I was just as close to Soläna as I’d ever been.

  Sam’s mahogany stallion clopped along in front of me, so I squeezed my gelding faster to catch up, unable to stop thinking about my book. I’d yet to share it with anyone, but my mind
brimmed with so many questions and observations that I felt like I needed to tell someone about what I’d read right now. He still wasn’t quite speaking to me, so I hoped that the surprise of this information would pique his interest and open him back up so we could return to normalcy again.

  “Sam, I’ve gotta tell you something!” I said cheerily, although only loud enough for him to hear.

  “Oh?” Sam answered quietly, his eyes darting to me quickly before returning to the road ahead of our caravan. Kylar snoozed on the saddle horn in front of him.

  “It’s about that book. The book I’ve been reading. It’s a history book about when Rhydin became the First Archimage!” I gushed, eager to finally share my secrets with my husband.

  That earned more of a glance from Sam, although he still returned his gaze to the road. “I’m surprised that even exists. Where did you get it?”

  “Uh,” I uttered, gulping. My “helpful presence” story seemed awfully insane at the moment. “That…uh…that doesn’t matter! This book is about Rhydin! The Rhydin he was before he became the Rhydin we know!”

  “Lina, those books were all destroyed centuries ago. Why do you think everyone forgot Rhydin even existed? The First Three Kings were so ashamed of their failures that they wiped him from history, even from the Archimage Palace itself. The Rounans tell of it,” Sam grumbled, turning toward me fully, finally giving me the attention I desired but not in the way I ever imagined. “Besides, we all know you’re not very good at reading.”

  Heat flushed my cheeks. I tried to ignore the dagger in my heart, crying out, “I trust who I got the book from! And I may not read very well, but Frederick has been helping me! This book is real, Sam. I’m trying to share it with you of all people.”

  A pained expression flashed across Sam’s face. For a split second, it looked as if I had slapped him in the face, but it was rapidly gone, which puzzled me. Once it became apparent that he was not going to respond, I urged my horse faster once again in my pain, leaving him in my wake.

  How could Sam be so callous? I knew we’d had a falling out over leaving, but that final silence was so out of character for him that it felt like being rubbed with sandpaper. I peeked over my shoulder once or twice, eyeing Sam’s glum expression out of the corner of my eye, but I stayed ahead of him. Childish or not, it was him who needed to apologize and cross the gap between us now. I’d tried.

  After several minutes of staring at the veins of copper in my gelding’s otherwise nut-brown mane, I noticed that a different horse had slowed its pace to walk aside mine. The thin Bartholomiiu beamed back down at me from the height of his seventeen-hands-tall, midnight-black horse, his eyes again shading the lightest of colors of pea green into the sea of white. He was covered head to toe in a heavy cloak, as always, to prevent other travelers from realizing he wasn’t human. My eyes grazed across the horrific scarring that would forever mar his throat and darted back to the copper strands in front of my hands.

  “Believe you, I.” A raspy, nails-on-a-chalkboard voice said.

  I rapidly met Bartholomiiu’s gaze, shocked at both that he could speak and that he’d heard my conversation with Sam. “You do?” I asked.

  “Yes!” Bartholomiiu nodded like his head was on a spring.

  A smile cracked my weary heart. I was just about to share everything else I had learned with Bartholomiiu, anxious to ask for his advice on how to handle this information, when suddenly, one of his long, pointed ears twitched.

  As the rest of the caravan came to a halt for whatever reason, Bartholomiiu’s eyes were washed pure white again as he stammered incoherently, “Why green are the trees?”

  My shoulders slumped like air being let out of a balloon, but I said nothing. It was my fault Bartholomiiu was like this. That in some ways, his mind had been reduced to the capacity of a child’s. But he had already improved so much, so I hoped even more that he would continue to do so.

  Ahead of us were only Rachel, James, and Evan, sitting still in their saddles as their horses pranced and kicked their legs. I motioned my gelding forward to see why we had stopped, seeing as we probably still had an hour or two of daylight left of the day. Bartholomiiu followed me automatically, his personality gone for the time being.

  There were three people dressed in clothes littered with holes standing next to a wagon that was stacked to the heavens with every material possession a person could own. Rickety chairs, barrels of supplies, and clinking iron pots and pans were roped to the sides and tops. Their wagon was hitched to a couple starving-looking mules pointed southwest, the same direction we were going.

  Although Rachel had slowly become quieter with each day that passed, she had apparently already quizzed the three tired travelers with the usual questions disguised as niceties: why they were headed to Canis and so on and so forth. I wasn’t quite prepared for the turn their conversation had taken when I reached earshot.

  “Emperor Rhydin is the best of men!” declared the youngest of the three travelers, a man who appeared to be in his upper teens or lower twenties. “He’s cut taxes on the common folk and raised them on the rich!”

  “Yes!” An older woman added, coils of black hair sneaking out from under the kerchief on her head. “If it weren’t for him, we could never’ve afforded food after the crop failed. Those Royals and nobles have far too much money anyhow!”

  The eldest of the travelers, an aging man, piped up, “I ne’er thought I’d live to see the day the Royals were struck down. Things’re finally looking up!”

  My brow furrowed. I cut Rachel off before she could respond, “What do you mean the crop failed? Planting season just finished and Lunaka has had plenty of rain. What part of Lunaka are you from?”

  Rachel eyed me with icy daggers, a silent warning not to reveal who I was.

  “The Canyonlands ‘round Soläna, ma’am,” the young man answered as he fingered his threadbare hat gingerly. “We got just the right amount of rain, you’re right. But the seedlin’s never came up. Plumb died right there in the ground despite all the sunshine and rain. Pa’s never seen anything like it!”

  The color drained from my face. How could this be? The Canyonlands contained some of the most fertile ground in the kingdom. I should know, I grew up there. Spilled my blood, sweat, and tears there to reap a living from the ground as an adult and alongside the man I called father as a child. Some years were rough, of course, but this had been a good year. There was no logical reason why the crop would have failed so early.

  Unless it had nothing to do with the weather or the land or the seeds, nature in general, at all.

  With Rachel’s eyes boring into me, I shook my head, pushed my horse back into a walk, and said softly, “I’m sorry to hear it. Perhaps Emperor Rhydin isn’t all he’s cracked up to be.”

  The three travelers stared at me in confusion, but I left them in the dust. I had to say something to even remotely shake their confidence in Rhydin, even if it was subtle. Regardless of whether the blooming, possibly far-fetched theory in my mind was true or not. I’d need more evidence first.

  We traveled the rest of the day before making camp at the last tree line. After weeks of patchy prairie and forests, the horizon was beginning to level out, and I could vaguely detect the sting of salt in my nostrils. We were so close to Canis, my aching back, legs, and rear sang their song of exhaustion even louder. Maybe tomorrow, Rachel had said. Tomorrow. For the first time, I was actually looking forward to reaching Canis since it meant not having to sit in a saddle day after day after day anymore.

  Seconds before I could drop to the hard earth after feeding Rayna her supper, a hand tapped my shoulder. Evan’s gaze was level with mine when I turned. “It’s time to try again, Lina. It’s been weeks.”

  I grimaced, the image of my poor little wren twitching on the ground too much to bear. “No, thanks. You can be the Einanhi-creator of the family.”

  “Lina, they’re not real! Their pain isn’t real.”

  “It sure looked real!”
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br />   “You killed Duunzer without batting an eye,” Evan muttered, crossing his arms over his chest. “How is this any different? Besides, once you get familiar with the process, that’ll never happen again. This is a skill you need to know.”

  I groaned, “Duunzer was an evil dragon trying to kill everybody, there’s a difference!”

  “Even so,” my brother answered quietly, “your ability to make an Einanhi could make the difference between your life and death.”

  My jaw clenched tight. “Fine.”

  I slid to the ground quickly and set Rayna onto her wobbly feet to allow her to run around for a little while before bed. In hopes of getting this over with as soon as possible, I instantly shut my eyes and recalled all the details of my little Lunakan wren that I had painstakingly conjured up the first time. Then, I took a deep breath and focused on the warm spot in my chest until I could push my magic outwards.

  Once again, an oblong, golden orb slightly smaller than my fist materialized in front of us, and my anxiety heightened as it began to draw magic from me. I felt its drain clearly, yet I waited, wanting to make sure that it got enough this time. I didn’t want to see another floppy bird on the ground when the bubble of magic burst. After a few more moments, I cut it off and said, “Anadlu.”

  The orb of magic vanished, and in its place stood a slightly larger than normal Lunakan wren, its red breast puffed out. A flood of relief washed over me when the bird continued to stand strong, tilting its head from side to side, instead of collapsing into a ball of feathers again. I smiled, and I noticed Luke and James stationed on the opposite side of the campfire nodding at my little creation.

  “Alright,” Evan broke the silence as he stared at my Einanhi warily, “give it an order.”

  “Uh, okay,” I answered breathily, excitement still pumping through my veins. Turning back to the bird, I said, “Go keep watch.”

  Instead of ushering itself off obediently as Evan’s squirrel did night after night, the bird remained stock-still for perhaps five seconds. Then, it went utterly berserk.