by Anna Holmes
Jarven folds and unfolds his hands a few times. “You have spies at your disposal. Wouldn’t it be more cautious if you were to remain and send a small number of them instead?”
Probably. The same lump in my throat I’ve been battling all day resurfaces. I wonder, again and again, if this isn’t the same childish disbelief that drove me out to the slave camps in the first place, if I’m a year older on paper but not in bearing. I push the lump down and tell him, “I am queen, but the vows I swore are no different from a guard’s. My first duty is to safeguard Elyssia. Orders will move quicker, quieter if they don’t need to change hands so many times, and that speed and delicacy may make the difference. I am the spy. Can I count on you to preserve my cover?”
He weighs his head in his hands, his fingers worrying the strands of his white hair. At length, he picks his head up. “Yes, Your Highness.”
“Thank you. Captain Pollock has her orders to increase the guard discreetly in response to the envoy’s arrival. All that remains is to maintain the story and to ensure that word doesn’t get round that I’m not home. Should I not return by the time the envoy arrives here, you have license to divulge this conversation to the rest of the cabinet and proceed as though I am incapacitated.” I stand. “And on that pleasant note, I have packing to do. All my best to your husband and the little ones.”
He chuckles, still a bit shaken, but I see him firm his resolve as he approaches the door to open it. “They’re always tickled to hear it.”
“Then I’ll continue to say it.” I pause in the doorway. “Thank you for the trust you place in me.”
“And you in me,” he says, bowing. “All will be as you order.”
And throughout, the earring stays quiet. I climb the stairs to my bedroom feeling considerably lighter.
Chapter Eleven
Alain
I know how the war was won, but even so, the motley assortment gathered on the mountain path to the east of the capital is…less than reassuring. Bannon all but disappears in the early morning mist—a handy trick, until someone tries to find him to talk to him. Gavroth Rye keeps taking my pulse for reasons he has yet to explain. This is almost certainly elevating my heart rate. Caelin is, as always, the opposite of Bannon, a beacon in the fog. She discusses riding in hushed tones with August, whose poorly adjusted armor rattles around as he tries to get used to sitting on his ancient mare. And then there’s me, blue light still seething under my skin, flaring like lightning along the lines of my scars atop my nervous horse. Of us, I think Tressa is the only one presently capable of anything resembling apprehending someone, but she keeps hunting for Bannon in the drifts of mist.
It must be cold, judging by the flush to August’s cheeks and the sheer amount of clothing everyone else is bundled in. I can’t tell. I’m built to withstand the depths of our often icy seas. I have a cloak, but that’s more for muting my sheer…blueness. The intermittent flashes startled Maribelle as I attempted to coax her from her stall this morning, and she keeps turning her head back anxiously, as though to check what exactly is astride her. I fish my hand out from under the cloak and stroke her slender neck. “Just me,” I murmur.
She huffs and faces forward again, her breath curling in the air around her nostrils. I don’t know if she found that a comfort or not. We’ve been all over together, Maribelle and me, but I’m not seeming much myself these days. Caelin brings Navigator closer, and the two horses bump heads. That seems to calm her. “All right?” Caelin asks quietly.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Alain,” she persists.
“Perhaps a little less than,” I answer with a taut smile. Pretty sure my horse suspects I’m turning into something horrifying as we speak, and she’s always been gifted with a simple sort of wisdom. “Where—?”
A bright green beam splits the air between Caelin and me. We whirl, the clicking of crossbows and whine of swords unsheathed and the tense creaking of Tressa’s bowstring quickly overtaking any conversations. I close my eyes and listen to the beam. It lacks the urgency of an offensive spell, and the more I calm my pulsing blood and try to really listen, the clearer the faint coaxing of an object spell becomes. I hold up a hand and inform our companions, “I believe that’s just our tardy prince.”
Caelin lowers her sword, but doesn’t put it away. As the fog splits to reveal Prince Breeches riding in on a silky white stallion, she gestured with the blade to the box emitting the beam. “What the hells, Daryon? If Alain were a little slower on the analysis, you could be full of holes right now.”
“And on fire,” Gavroth adds, tucking away a glowing vial.
“My friends,” he says, out of breath. “I apologize. It took me some time to locate an adequate mount.” Caelin’s expression tightens a little as she sizes up the horse. I know a fraction of what she does, but even I can tell this beast is suited much more to parading than travel. “I thought to—" His eyes light on August, and for a moment I think they just might bulge out of his head. August ducks to adjust his stirrup, and Daryon shifts in his gilt-edged saddle. “I thought to signal to the Raiders on my way to you,” he finishes at last.
Caelin sighs and sheathes her sword. “A little more caution, if you please. Nerves are running high. What is that?”
“A heading. The Raiders have given us a location for a meeting.”
“Could be a trap,” the Bannon-cloud muses. The sun cannot finish cresting the mountains fast enough.
Caelin considers a moment, then turns Navigator in the direction of the beam. “We’ll bear that in mind as we approach. That thing doesn’t give a distance, does it?”
Daryon holds up the device. Caelin has to dodge the beam before it hits her in the eyes. “I am unsure. I usually just follow it until I find a ship.” As he gestures with it, a metal arm pops out of the box. He frowns. “It does that. I do not know why.”
I sigh and dismount stiffly, holding out my hand. “Give it here. Bannon, I assume you have a map?”
Prince Tightpants looks affronted but hands the tool over anyway. I take it into the weak patch of sunlight at the snowy ledge and tug at the metal arm. The octant pops free of the metal box, the pin on the oculus already tightened by a clockwork contraption inside the box. Clever. Bannon materializes next to me. “You assume much.”
I pause between trying to match the angle of the oculus to the sun and glimpse him begrudgingly unroll a map. “Looks like I was right, though.”
“Loath as I am to admit it. There’ll be no living with you.” He spreads the map on a rock, trying to pin the curling corners in the stiff breeze.
I find the glint of the sun in the glass, then train the reflection on the map until it lines up with a spot here in the mountains. I set the point of the octant into the spot, and the ocula clicks around a bit at a time until it shines a light on a spot on the map. I pivot the octant back and forth until the point dances over to the center of the reflection. The moment it does, the oculus clicks back to an upright position and the octant begins to fold. I count its paces quickly and mutter my calculations under my breath. “Fourteen nautical…on horseback…little more than half a day?”
“Does that sort of measurement work overland?” Bannon wants to know.
“By sky or by sea, a ship is a ship,” I tell him, sliding the octant back into the box and handing it back to the prince. “Cover that thing up, will you? That’s a good lad.”
Daryon looks down at the box. “But if I do…how will we know where to go?”
Bannon looks up from where he has his finger pointed on the map. Silence takes its stranglehold for a moment too long, and he clears his throat. “Caelin, what’s here? The closest city’s a ways off.”
She pulls Navigator closer and leans over as far as she can to see what he’s indicating. “The old aqueducts,” she says, setting her jaw.
“So it’s almost certainly a trap.”
“Probably,” Caelin sighs, reaching out a hand to help me up. “Which is why we’re not going to follo
w the beam. We’ll circle around by way of the Tanglewood.”
“Is that safe?” August asks uneasily.
“S’long as you don’t go drinking the water,” Gavroth answers, “sleeping up next to the trees, or eating the dirt or anything that grew in it or touched it.”
“What can you do?”
“Pass through as quickly as possible on your way somewhere else,” Tressa answers with a dry smile, shouldering her bow to give me a boost back up to Maribelle’s saddle. “And don’t linger.”
The Tanglewood is a perfect lesson in the duality of magic, nature, and what happens when they merge. I owe my innate abilities to Elyssia’s unique isolation and magical elements, and that’s before the Legion put anything in me. Elemental folk became the way we are thanks to thousands of years growing and learning on a pair of magic-laced rocks in the middle of the Soltarian Sea. That resulted in people who can nearly fly or breathe underwater or grow plants from their skin. It also resulted in poisonous forests and the sort of creatures who have learned to live there.
Maribelle instinctively shies from the trees and their snarled, protruding roots. Some unlucky souls cut a path through the wood hundreds of years ago, and she is solidly grateful for that sacrifice now. I pat her side, giving the blue-streaked trees a sidelong glance myself. “Steady,” I tell us both.
I haven’t spent enough time in the vicinity to notice whether this is normal or not, but every time the wind crests, the creaking of the boughs picks up in a high pitched song. The trees are afflicted with the same thing I have. Cryst in the riverbed mingled with water and other elements of the soil and seeped into the wood and changed them. A queen long before Caelin ordered a barrier constructed so no more land could become tainted and this forest's festering could be limited. Unlike me, though, this forest is thriving with the additional energy. Green-blue leaves still hang on the trees despite the chill. Those that fall do so very slowly indeed, borne by the cryst. They make a robust purple carpet for the forest floor. Creatures move among it, unseen. Maribelle’s ears twitch with each rustle.
I barely hear them. The wind hangs nearly dead in the air, but with each gasp the trees seem to wail in a plaintive, reedy voice. In the spaces between, the same buzzing that permeates my body. I feel my chest time its rise and fall to the vibrations of the forest. The constant throb of my leg fades—even the saddlesoreness in my thighs and lower back ebbs away. Soon I’m not sure I’m seated on Maribelle at all. I could be floating here, suspended in the same space as those slow falling leaves.
“Alain,” Caelin’s voice cuts in. Gravity and soreness and sense reassert themselves, and I am acutely aware of everyone’s eyes on me. The flares of blue light beneath my clothes keep pace with the glimmers amongst the bark. Daryon in particular eyes me with a shrewdness I’d not have expected of him. “What happened?” Caelin asks, pulling Navigator closer.
I glance around at my gawkers, and she gestures to them with her head. Tressa takes up the lead again, pointedly leading the Folgian on. August plods on, too, and I am left with Caelin and Bannon and Gavroth, which in this moment is not wholly disagreeable. I lower my voice a bit. “It…it’s like it was talking to the trees. From inside me. Is that possible?”
Bannon tilts his head from side to side. “In a manner of speaking. We contain cryst at ports in part to protect the dock workers, but also to keep it from reacting with the ships’ drives. But that’s more about keeping the casings from warping under opposing energies.”
Gavroth scratches lightly at the scar under his copper beard. “I mean, it makes a certain amount of sense. If you overload a cryst drive, the stones just pass the magic back and forth and it snowballs until….”
“Until what?” Caelin asks, eyes narrowing.
“Until one or the other explodes,” I answer dully.
She turns her head back in the direction we came. “We should leave.”
“We’re halfway through,” I interject. “Might as well try to get where we’re going. We can’t contain the forest, but….”
Gavroth chuckles uneasily. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a lead-lined coat lying around or some such.”
“No, but Bannon has something in his bag that could at least keep me from casting unconsciously.”
He looks down at the saddlebag, startled. “How did you…?”
“Everything in this place is alive with magic. Except the dead spots where those cuffs are.”
Caelin fixes Bannon with a glare. “Riley. I told you. He’s not a prisoner.”
His chin falls forward to his chest. “I know, Cae. But we’re working with forces we don’t understand. Even if— even though he has no criminal or malicious intent, precautions might need to be taken.”
“He’s right,” I add.
She looks at me, her face still flushed. “Alain…I know this is upsetting, but this—self-punishment thing you’re doing….”
I shake my head. “It’s not that, love. It’s making sure we’re all still here to solve this. All right?” Her amber eyes settle on the manacle scars around my wrists, then flick back up to me. I nod. My throat’s been tight since suggesting it. I can’t even sleep with all of my limbs under blankets for the middle-of-the-night panic. My body remembers too well the feeling of being bound, trapped, straining against something I know won’t break from the inside. “It’s okay,” I promise.
It has to be.
Bannon fishes in his bag, and I roll my sleeves up, forcing a few good breaths. The trees’ humming fills my lungs between inhale and exhale. It makes the feeling of the cuffs around my elbows and the manacles around my wrists, coated with the same alloy that kept my magic suppressed in the camp, slightly easier to stomach. Strained as my breaths might be, they’re at least mine alone.
Bannon looks down, then inclines his head to Caelin and urges his roan horse onward to catch up with the others. Gavroth holds out a different chain, a narrow one meant not for restraining, but suspending. A tempered glass flask dangles from it, a child’s-fist-sized chunk of lead inside. “This’ll protect your heart,” he says, slipping it over my head and adjusting the length until the flask hangs at the center of my chest. I’ve seen the dock workers wear similar protectives, though I never imagined the danger might come from inside the body. He looks at it a moment longer. “The Legion asks much,” he says, his mouth skewed to the side. “Too much, it turned out. This is…shit.”
I nod. This is oddly touching. He seems to be turning something else over in his mind, but at last, he claps a giant hand to my arm and joins the rest of the cavalcade. Caelin moves Navigator directly alongside Maribelle and covers my hands with hers for a moment. I manage a weak squeeze back, and she leans over for Maribelle’s lead, wrapping it around Navigator’s. She keeps us to the rear of the party, neither too fast nor too slow, but far enough back that my chained wrists and their effect are no one’s business but ours.
If the trees reach out for me again, I don’t feel it. The wood fades into normal, seasonally appropriate barren trees, and Bannon turns back to free me. The second the manacle locks click open, I yank my hands free and pull for air, the gills at my neck flaring against my collar. He sets to work unlocking the weaker cuffs at my elbows. “We’re nearly there. How do you want to play this?”
Caelin turns her gaze on the crumbling stone structures looming over the tops of the trees in the dying light. We still haven’t completely caught up with the rest of our motley party yet, but we’re close. “Daryon is the one who asked for the meeting, ostensibly. I doubt they’ll be excited to see an entourage.”
“He’s usually surrounded,” Bannon points out.
“But not today. He also dismissed his bodyguards when we were discussing this. Despite them not speaking Standard. I don’t think they’re involved in whatever he’s running on the side.” She thinks, tugging at her borrowed, plain steel gorget to keep it from pressing into her scar. In spite of everything, I have to laugh internally. She’s finally learning to blend in when
sneaking around her own country, at least as far as someone who sheds light can. “Perhaps he and I should go in while the rest of you keep a perimeter. Crow might run.”
“And if she doesn’t?” I ask. “There’s very little I can do to hamper her magically from four hundred feet back and behind a bush.”
Caelin nods slowly. “Point taken. The three of us, then.”
Bannon’s eyes dart to me for a moment, eyebrows sinking lower and lower. I keep waiting for his mouth to open for the objection, but at last, he nods. “We’ll be watching from the ledges. Give the signal if you need us to move.”
She claps him on the arm and dismounts, patting Navigator’s broad face. “I need you to behave for Riley,” she tells the horse, making very stern eye contact. He whuffs, blowing stray strands of her braid into her face.
I start the struggle downward, trying, as always, to decide whether to try to balance on the bad leg or to land on it. “Good luck, Bannon. Best hope he’s not hungry.”
“I plan to feed him August first,” he returns wryly.
“What?” August asks.
“And you behave for everyone else,” Caelin tells Bannon. “Come on, Daryon. Let’s go fix your bungle.”
He sighs heavily and goes to follow close at her side. Caelin grasps my hand, and I am only too happy to position myself between them. He mutters something under his breath in Folgian and sulks along behind us.
Chapter Twelve
Caelin
The aqueducts have always been ruins, since the first Elyssian thought to put pen to paper. The old stories tell of an ancient attempt to bring water to the parched High Plains, but that was always a fool’s errand. The rain-swollen river thunders over one crumbling stone tier down to the next to the next before pooling into a misty basin before us. Alain follows each enormous archway with his eyes, though whether he’s checking for magic or just awed by the enormity of the structure, I can’t tell. Daryon, on the other hand, is constantly swiveling his head to look in every direction he physically can. “Nervous?” I ask.
