by Deva Fagan
“Er…” I hesitated. Telling the truth—even just a part of it—was a risk. Mother would be furious if she knew. She’d say I was compromising my position, wasting the element of surprise.
Betrys closed her notebook, giving me her full attention. Her gaze slipped to the book in my hands, and a slight smile touched her lips. “Have you gotten to the part about the enchanted cream puffs? Isn’t it brilliant? And he doesn’t even consider the possibility of—”
“Layering charms in different types of custard?” I suggested.
“Exactly!” She gave me a nod of approval that filled me to the core with warmth, until I remembered what I’d really meant to ask.
I gripped my resolution firmly. I was no good at Mother’s political games. I had to do this my way. Master Betrys had always treated me with respect. She deserved no less in return.
“I was just wondering… you know how my mother visited me this morning?”
“Indeed. I gather it was more than just a social call?”
“Yes. She’s worried about the Liberation.”
Betrys arched one brow. “Is she?”
“I guess there are, er, rumors that they might be trying to find the lost crown of Medasia. You know, the one that summons the Black Drake?”
A flicker of something passed over her face, too quickly for me to identify. She adjusted the cuffs of her blue velvet coat. “Mmm. Even though it’s commonly understood that the crown was destroyed?”
“Mother said the Liberationists don’t believe it. They’re looking for it. And they—they think you have it. Because you’re Terwyn Drakesbane’s great-granddaughter.”
“They’re going to be disappointed then,” said Betrys wryly.
“Please, Master Betrys. They’re probably the ones who sent that Furtive to snoop around your study, and who knows what they might try next? The Liberationists aren’t a joke. They’re murderers and rebels.”
A faint noise came from the other end of the seat, but when I glanced toward Moppe, she had retreated behind her book.
Betrys’s brown gaze held me with a heavy weight of deliberation. “I’m certain that if the crown were out there, it would be well guarded. And that it would be found only by someone who had earned it. Someone who understood its power and would use it wisely.”
What did she mean by that? “Do you—”
The carriage jerked to a stop, stealing the question from my lips.
“Ah, here we are,” said Betrys. “Now, I suggest you focus on the task at hand. Both of you,” she added, sweeping her intent stare to include Moppe. “There’s much you need to learn to walk this path. And I can’t give you all the answers.”
She was out the door before I could ask anything more. But maybe I didn’t need to. A jog of hope lifted my heart. The crown would be found only by someone who earned it. Master Betrys must have told me that for a reason. Was it only to reassure me that the crown was safe? Or was it a challenge?
* * *
“What is this place?” Moppe asked as Master Betrys led us to a narrow trail that ran along the top of the cliffs. Behind us, the horses stamped and shivered. I could hear Mr. Thesp trying to soothe them.
The waves surged and fell below. The air held a wild tang that matched my own dizzy spirits, spinning high as the circling gulls. I knew what I had to do now. Finding the crown would solve all my problems. I’d prove to Betrys I was her magical heir and I’d satisfy Mother. I could go back to my magic and never have to think about politics again.
Assuming I could do it, of course. I couldn’t even make a turnip dance. How was I supposed to find a long-lost magical artifact? I beat back the doubt squeezing my chest. Anything could be solved with hard work and research. And Betrys had said herself I was here to learn. So I’d best pay attention.
“The Cave of Echoes,” Master Betrys was explaining, as she marched vigorously onward, completely ignoring the enormous void only a few feet to our left. “Legend says that this is where the god Rhema came to die—or to sleep, depending on what particular branch of religion you follow.”
No one believed in the sleeping gods, except for superstitious shepherds up in the hills, who would come into town every once in a while, claiming to have met one of the gods in their dreams. More likely it was too much spice wine, my mother said. Still, a part of me wished it were true. Imagine what all-knowing beings could teach us!
“But what’s in the cave?” I asked, alert for anything that might relate to the crown. “Why are we here?”
“You’ll see soon enough. Stay close, girls. It gets a bit steep here,” Master Betrys warned, before plunging down along a set of narrow steps carved into the cliff face.
I waited for Moppe to go first—and to gather my own courage for the perilous descent. But she halted beside me.
“Are you really trying to find that crown?”
So she had been listening, back in the carriage. “Maybe,” I admitted. “Why?”
“What are you going to do with it if you find it?”
I drew my shoulders back. “Keep it safe, of course. Stop the Liberation from using it to destroy the Imperial Navy.” My stomach pinched as I spoke. If only someone had stopped them before this. Before they killed my brother.
“You don’t know that’s what they would do. Maybe they just want to keep the people of Medasia safe. To stop the Imperials from stealing our dye and tossing anyone who doesn’t like it on a prison barge.”
“What are you talking about? No one’s stealing our dye.”
“The Dyers’ Guild keeps glomming up more and more harvest territory,” said Moppe. “How are regular fisherfolk supposed to make a living?”
Heat flushed my cheeks. The purple dye extracted from the spiny-shell snails was Medasia’s most valuable export. Mother said it was the council’s job to make certain the supply was stable, for the good of everyone. I wished Moppe would stop staring at me like that, with daggers in her gaze.
“I don’t know about any of that,” I admitted. “But it’s my duty to keep the crown safe.”
Moppe crossed her arms. “Your duty? Why you?”
I floundered for a moment. In truth, Mother had thrust this upon me. I hadn’t chosen it. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t brutally aware of the danger of the crown falling into the wrong hands. Not to mention Mother’s veiled threat against Master Betrys. “Because I care about the future of Medasia.”
Moppe lifted her chin. “And you think you’re the only one?”
Then she marched past me, trotting down the precarious trail after Master Betrys. I hastened to follow, but Moppe must be half mountain goat. Curse it! What had she meant by that? Was she going to try to find the crown too?
The dizzy spin of the gulls seemed to have caught hold of my belly. Everything was whirling. But I couldn’t afford to panic. Mother always said worry only wasted energy. I stood for a moment, counting each breath that swooshed in and out too fast. I could do this. I simply had to forge ahead and do my best.
By the time I caught up, Moppe had rejoined Master Betrys, and the two of them were staring at the path ahead.
Or rather, at the broken, tumbled stone and gaping void where the path should have continued. It was gone now. Fallen away, leaving only the sheer cliff.
“What do we do now?” Moppe asked. “Fly across?”
“That is an excellent question,” said Master Betrys. She leaned back against the cliff face. “What do you think, Antonia?”
A jolt of excitement rippled through me, driving back my worries about the crown, at least temporarily. A magical challenge was exactly what I needed. I recognized Master Betrys’s casual, cool tone. The thoughtful tilt of her brown chin. She wanted me—well, us, I suppose—to find a solution.
“There aren’t any true flying spells,” I told Moppe. “There’s magespeak to rise and lower—so you can float—but if there was a word for fly, no one knows it anymore. So much was lost in the Shattering.” The great earthquakes had devastated this part of t
he world ages ago, bringing about a dark time that ended only with the birth of the Regian Empire.
I took a step closer to the edge. The sight of the crashing water and sharp-edged boulders below made my belly flip and spin, but I needed to see what we were working with. The rockslide hadn’t taken the entire trail, which zigzagged down the cliff in a series of switchbacks. I could see the next bit below, marked by a single brave salt pine.
“Is there a word for fix?” asked Moppe.
“Yes, but it only works if you have the pieces of the thing you’re trying to repair. All the stone’s already crumbled away.” I gestured to the crashing waters below. As I did so, my eye caught the salt pine again.
“I’ve got it!” I cried, the spell already forming in my mind. It was elaborate, tricky, and used a variation on Filroy’s Technique that I’d been dying to test out. I went over the long incantation twice, feeling the shivery sense of rightness that sang out from a well-balanced spell. Then I spoke the words, clearly and carefully.
I squinted over the edge. Below, the salt pine shivered, branches nudging out a few inches. I ignored the feeling of Moppe and Master Betrys’s eyes on my back and recited the spell again. Another shiver, nothing more.
“What’s it supposed to be doing?” asked Moppe.
I stifled a groan. “Growing. And then transfiguring into a sort of staircase. Using Filroy’s Technique,” I added, hoping Master Betrys would see that at least my theory was sound, even if my execution was… less than impressive.
“An excellent idea, Antonia,” said Master Betrys. “I can always count on you for innovative solutions. Moppe, why don’t you assist?”
I ground my teeth. That wasn’t fair! I was the one who’d come up with the spell. And there was no “assisting” in magic. Joint spellwork was theoretically possible but rarely attempted. Fine, then, let Moppe try. Though she didn’t look particularly eager about the prospect.
She hesitated, hands clasped around her midsection. Was she… nervous?
“Do you remember how it goes?” I asked, taking the opportunity to repeat the long string of magespeak a third time. I glanced down hopefully at the salt pine, but it only shivered again.
“I heard,” Moppe answered, dropping her arms to her sides. But still she made no move to approach the edge. She swallowed. “It sounded more like a novel than a spell. Why do you need so many words just to make a tree grow?”
“Because we need to tell the magic what to do,” I said. “That’s how magic works. The first two words tell the tree to grow, but you need the rest of it to add the transfiguration.”
“What if I say it wrong? Will it go all”—she made a chaotic gesture—“berserk, like the turnips?”
“Magical power is a responsibility,” said Betrys. “I’m glad you recognize that, Moppe. But you can rest assured I won’t let anything get out of hand.”
“I could write it down for you,” I offered. “If you can’t remember.”
Her jaw tightened, and she gave a sort of shrug, as if casting off a cloak. “I’m fine. It sounds easy enough.” She sauntered forward to the edge of the trail, spread her arms dramatically, then called out the spell.
Or at least, the first two words.
“Tree. Grow.”
Then she hesitated, stumbling over the tricky conditional phrase for the transfiguration. “Blast, what was the next bit?”
I was about to tell her, when a branch bristling with needles exploded up directly in front of me, followed by a scaly brown trunk. I stumbled back, falling smack on my backside, staring up at the enormous salt pine that suddenly towered over us, shoving out spiky green branches in every direction.
Moppe gave a cry of pure delight. “It worked!”
I smothered a stab of longing. “It didn’t work,” I said. “You only did half the spell!”
Moppe lifted her chin. “At least now we have something to climb down.”
“Only if we transfigure ourselves into squirrels.” I scrambled to my feet and marched back to the edge of the cliff, ducking under several inconveniently placed branches. I took a deep breath, then repeated the rest of my spell.
The salt pine quivered, the branches shifting so that they formed a helpful spiral down the trunk. Several smaller twigs even twisted up into helpful handholds. “See?” I said triumphantly.
“Excellent work, both of you,” said Master Betrys. “Joint casting like that is rare. It requires a particular harmony between the casters, something not just anyone can attain.”
I gave Moppe a skeptical sidelong glance. More likely it was luck. I barely knew the girl, after all. And if I was a pianoforte, she was a blaring trumpet. We would never be in tune, let alone harmony.
“But come along,” Betrys went on. “It’s not far now.”
She led the way down the steplike branches, heading for the lower trail. Moppe and I both moved to follow, meeting at the cliff’s edge. “I could have climbed down,” Moppe said archly. “But I guess it’s not bad to have steps.”
I uncrossed my arms. “Steps wouldn’t help if the tree was twenty feet too short,” I admitted. “You’ve really never done magic before?”
She bit her lip, shaking her head. “I didn’t expect it to be like this. My grandmother always said it was dangerous. But that”—she gestured to the tree—“was like… like when you swim way out to sea and the waves scoop you up. Is it like that for you?”
I hesitated, uncertain how much I wanted to admit to this strange new girl, especially after what she’d said about the crown. But I loved magic too much to stay silent. “I—I feel like I’m singing with a grand chorus.”
She grinned. “I’ve never heard any grand chorus. But I guess it’s kind of the same.”
For a moment we just stood there. More words crowded my tongue. Stories of magic, all the things I loved about it, the wonders and the splendors. It had been so long since I’d had someone to share that with. I realized I was smiling. Smiling at her. Heat flushed my cheeks, and I set off hastily down the steps.
Friendship is a luxury with a very high price, Mother always said. If Moppe planned to try to find the crown too, then she was my competition, not my friend. That’s what Mother would tell me, certainly. But when it came to talking about magic, I just couldn’t seem to help myself.
Moppe followed after me. “So you can do anything, if you know the right words?”
“In theory,” I said. “The words tell the magic what to do. If you don’t have the right words, the spell won’t work. Or it does the wrong thing.”
“There must be… a lot of them. A lot of words.”
“There are five thousand, six hundred eighty-seven known words in magespeak as of the last accounting, not including proper names. Wait, no!” I gave a little hop as I descended the final branch. “Five thousand, six hundred eighty-eight. I forgot about hiccup. They just discovered that one a few years ago.”
“That many?” Moppe’s brown eyes grew wide. “How do you learn them all?”
“You need to have a good memory,” I said. “And you need to study. But if there’s a word you don’t know, you can usually find it in a book.”
“A book?” asked Moppe, with an odd flatness to her voice.
“Master Betrys has dozens of grimoires,” I continued, warming to the topic. “And the Schola Magica has even more! The Grand Library’s collection contains over a thousand volumes!”
Moppe’s expression turned glassy; doubtless she was as overwhelmed by the possibilities as I was. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” I said. “Imagine what it would be like to read them all.” A happy vision rose in my mind of myself curled in a reading chair at the end of a long aisle of shelves, surrounded by piles of magical tomes. I would get there. I’d make that dream come true.
“Indeed,” said Betrys as we caught up to her. “But too many grimoires have been destroyed by time, by hateful hands, by the Shattering. Too many words were never recorded, or simply forgotten. That’s why we’re here.” She des
cended the last slope of the trail onto a wide ledge, where a dark slash split the stone of the cliff.
It looked no different from countless other caves and crevices I’d seen along the shoreline, and yet my heart skipped faster as I moved to join Betrys before the opening. A chill washed over me. My skin shivered, though I couldn’t be sure if it was anticipation or foreboding. “What do you mean?”
“You’ll see, soon enough.”
Betrys spoke a short incantation. A luminous golden orb blossomed in the empty air above us. It floated after her as she stepped into the cavern. “Come along, girls,” she prompted. “You’ll be safe enough if you stay in the light.”
4
MOPPE HESITATED, staring into the cave after Master Betrys’s retreating form. “Safe from what? Do you think there’s something alive in there?”
“Whatever it is, we have to face it,” I said, marching forward. Master Betrys had brought us here for a reason, and I didn’t intend to disappoint her. Moppe scurried after me a moment later.
We both hastened to catch up with the circle of golden light. Not that I was scared, of course. I simply didn’t want to miss anything Master Betrys might say.
But Betrys remained silent as she led us through the downward-sloping tunnel. With every step, the passage seemed to narrow, until I could have reached out my hands and touched both sides at once. Not that I’d want to touch these walls: slimy and tinged green, tufted here and there with pale, bulbous mushrooms that looked disturbingly like watchful eyes.
I let out a long breath when the narrow tunnel finally opened, spilling out into a vast cavern. The glow of the conjured light gleamed across what looked like a forest of glittering conical trees.
But these were trees of stone, grown by dripping water and time: stalagmites. And above, a mirror-forest of stalactites hanging down from the high cavern ceiling. A thousand colors shimmered: rose, nutmeg, gold, charcoal, even a deep purple as vivid as the dye that had made Medasia famous.
