Crown of Secrets (The Hidden Mage Book 1)

by Melanie Cellier

  Everything depended on your bloodline. Mages handed down the ability to control power to their children, as the commonborns handed down the lack of ability. And because some mages had more natural strength and control than others, mages formed marriage alliances designed to increase the future strength of their families. And none had more carefully cultivated generations of strength than the royal line. Being born as royalty ensured a birthright of great power.

  Until me.

  Here I was, child of our current queen’s younger brother, daughter of two of the strongest mages ever to live, and I was utterly without access to power. It was a great accomplishment, really. The first child ever born to a mage not to inherit their ability. I’m sure the Royal University would have loved the chance to study me. Thankfully my royal status was enough to prevent that, at least.

  But I had received the education of a princess, even if I could not use all of it, and I easily understood the import of the composition in Layna’s hands. The mage assigned to this team had cleared this section of wall of old workings and then left. In what he no doubt felt was an abundance of caution, he had provided the commonborns with one of his compositions—a working designed to give a section of rocks a final check before the workers began clearing it. The sealed commonborn probably had a small stack of similar, unworked compositions in a pocket somewhere, to release as they progressed with their work.

  Once such a thing would have been impossible. Commonborns were not allowed to possess written words. Only the richest among them could afford to purchase compositions from the poorest and least powerful of the mages—the only mages who would stoop to such a degradation as selling compositions. And these purchased compositions were carefully sealed and color-coded for purpose, ensuring a limited range of use.

  It was my parents who had changed all of that. They had traveled to the previously closed Sekali Empire and discovered a different world there. A world where all commonborns were sealed as young children, their access to power blocked, allowing them free access to the written word.

  The discovery of the sealing composition had rocked both Ardann and Kallorway. But neither of our kingdoms could follow in the footsteps of the Empire. The sealing composition drew directly on the energy and power of a mage, and when it worked its purpose, it sealed the mage as permanently as it sealed the commonborns. In the Empire, whole clans were devoted to this purpose, the sealed mages raising their unsealed children in the knowledge that by one day taking their turn to seal a large collection of commonborn children they would serve their people and bring honor to their families.

  But the enmity between the two southern kingdoms was of long standing, and centuries ago we had decimated our mage numbers in ancient battles. We didn’t have enough mages to make the sacrifices of the sealed Sekali clans, even if we could have convinced or compelled enough mages to do so. And so my parents had suggested a compromise.

  Instead of imprisoning mages who had failed the Academy and proved themselves unable to control power to a sufficient degree, those mages would conduct sealing ceremonies instead. There were not, of course, a great many failed mages, but their numbers were joined by those mages who had misused their power in severe enough ways to warrant permanent imprisonment. Now we could imprison their power instead of their bodies, clearing the mage cells and benefiting the commonborns at the same time. Sealing ceremonies were much rarer in Ardann now, but they had been common at the beginning, thanks to the traitorous mages who had attempted to help Kallorway seize control of our kingdom.

  I had no way to know if this man was recently sealed or had been sealed two decades ago while young. Many of the sealed now worked as teachers in the commonborn schools, served as officials at the palace and among the disciplines, or worked for the rich commonborn merchant families. But others, like this man, chose to ally themselves with mages, working in partnerships.

  I considered the man in front of me. His bearing proclaimed him a soldier.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’ve recently finished with the Armed Forces?”

  The man looked surprised, some of his color slowly starting to return now that I was showing no sign of handing out angry punishments.

  “Aye, that’s right, Your Highness. His Lordship and I heard there was better gold to be had with the clearing teams.” He referred to his mage partner using the general honorific awarded to all mages. “I’m not getting any younger, and I have to be thinking about laying something aside for retirement.”

  Layna sighed, speaking quietly, her words directed at me.

  “That mage still should have known better. He would have been fully briefed.”

  I shrugged. “We’ll have to ask him when we get to Bronton.”

  In the Armed Forces, many tasks were completed by sealed commonborns without the physical presence of their mage partner. But Layna was right. This mage should have known the same principle didn’t apply here where maintaining his post at the Wall offered only boredom, not danger.

  Sealed commonborns might be able to safely read and use compositions provided by mages, but sealing didn’t grant them the mage ability to sense power. The mage should have known that some of the compositions embedded in the Wall might have been crafted to resist probing compositions such as the one he had provided to his team. What those compositions could not do, however, was hide their own power. The mage needed to be present so he could feel any lingering workings he had initially missed. He would have felt the power and, if he didn’t sense it in time to dismantle it, he would have been able to protect his men, at least.

  I frowned, my eyes wandering to the injured man who was now being tended by one of his worried-looking companions.

  “We can’t leave yet, though. We need to heal that man first.”

  Layna grimaced, looking from the worker to me. “You know my compositions are all keyed to you specifically, Your Highness.”

  I narrowed my eyes and drew myself up to my full height—which wasn’t saying a great deal.

  “Yours may be, but don’t try to pretend all of theirs are.” I gestured at the three mage officers still surrounding us.

  As my personal guard, Layna keyed her compositions to me—both to render them useless if they fell into other hands and to make it easy to resist temptations such as this one. She had been trained to keep her whole focus on her charge. But the same wasn’t true for the other guards who had been assigned just for this journey. And I knew one of them was only on assignment to the Royal Guard from the healers.

  “That man was injured in service to Ardann—and due to the negligence of the mage entrusted with his care. He’s a laborer, so there’s every chance he can’t afford a healing clinic. And clearly we can’t trust the mage in charge of this team to do the right thing by his workers. So it is left to us to act. And if you won’t, I will.”

  I reached slowly for one of my internal pockets, the movement making my position clear. I wasn’t in imminent danger which meant I far outranked Layna—she had no authority to prevent me using one of my own stored compositions. But neither would she want to see me deplete my supply—not when I was the only royal in Ardann who lacked the capacity to restock. Every one of the compositions I carried for my protection had been provided to me by others.

  The captain blew out an exasperated breath. “Very well. We will heal him and then make all haste to Bronton.”

  She gestured at one of the mage guards, and he broke away from us to jog toward the injured man. I watched him go, my bottom lip gripped between my teeth. How wonderful it must feel to know that you could bring healing and relief with the stroke of a pen.

  I shook off the thought, looking back at the man still kneeling before us.

  “You were following orders, and this situation is not of your making,” I said. “But it is not safe for you to work out here without a mage present. I assume you’re also staying at Bronton?”

  The man nodded.

  “Once your companion has been healed,” I cont
inued, “you must assist him back there. By the time you arrive, we will have had the opportunity to talk with your mage. This situation will not happen again.”

  The man swallowed but nodded, not voicing any protest.

  “I will be passing back this way soon,” Layna said in a deceptively soft voice. “So you may be sure that I will follow up the instructions I give to this mage. And those instructions will make it clear that the blame rests solely on his shoulders.”

  “Thank you, Captain, Sir.” The man clambered back to his feet and saluted, clearly still a soldier at heart.

  Layna gestured a dismissal and attempted to herd me toward the carriage. I complied, softened by the reminder that she did care about these people. She just cared more about her job, which was protecting me—however unworthy of such protection I might be.

  My parents had gone to great lengths to impress on the court that, power or not, I remained a representative and symbol of the crown. And when your mother was the most powerful mage in history—famous throughout Ardann, Kallorway, and the Empire—people tended to listen when she spoke. Maybe my lack of power wouldn’t have galled me quite so much if it wasn’t for the constant comparison with her. The one and only Spoken Mage.

  When he was younger, Lucien, my older brother, had petulantly pointed out that he was a spoken mage as well. He had inherited my mother’s unique ability to access power through spoken compositions. But when I tartly reminded him that he was heir to the throne and should be content with that, he had fallen sheepishly silent. Perhaps he had remembered who he was complaining to.

  I sighed as I reluctantly climbed back into the carriage. I had never blamed my brother for the occasional outburst. He and I each had our own burdens to bear, and we had no one else to safely vent with outside of each other and our younger brother, Stellan. Royalty weren’t permitted to whine about the burdens of their position to others.

  In the privacy of the carriage, I rubbed a hand over my face, more tired than I had reason to be after the brief excitement. I needed to pull myself together before we reached Bronton. Layna was on the warpath, but we didn’t know how senior the mage in question might be. If he had spent many years in the Armed Forces, he might be inclined to look down on a captain of the Royal Guard.

  He would not, however, look down on a princess of Ardann.

  I sometimes thought my parents had put more effort into teaching me how to wield authority like a weapon than they had with my brothers. They rarely spoke of my deficiencies, but I could see how my lack had motivated so many of their actions.

  The carriage rolled through the open gates of Bronton, the sounds of the bustling town filling my ears. Bronton had grown larger and more prosperous since the war ended, bursting at the seams of its sturdy walls. Once a center of war, it was now a center of trade, no longer surrounded by an Armed Forces tent city. When we were children, Lucien had often requested stories from the time our parents spent here in their youth. He had favored the tales of battle and cunning, while I preferred the ones of true love, promises exchanged, and a glittering Midwinter Ball.

  Even then, I had sensed that I would never wield the sort of power required to triumph on a battlefield. If I wanted to make use of what birthright I possessed, I would have more luck in the politics of the ballroom.

  The ability of a mageborn child to control power stabilized at age sixteen, so it was only in the months since my last birthday that my parents had been able to conduct a full range of private tests with me. But mages had early means of probing their children’s future strength. And my parents’ extensive testing had only confirmed the early indications—I was in every way like a sealed mage. I could safely write but not because I could control the power my writing released. I could safely put pen to paper because I could not access power at all.

  I had avoided Lucien for a full two weeks after my parents finally gave up their efforts. But eventually I had relented. It wasn’t my brother’s fault he had inherited both our father’s ability to write compositions and our mother’s ability to speak them, while I had inherited neither.

  With the ability to both write and speak compositions, Lucien’s power almost rivaled our mother’s. Mother was limited by her inability to prepare compositions in advance, an impediment that meant it was difficult for her to work complex compositions quickly. But she retained one skill my brother had not inherited.

  A mage’s ability to compose was limited by their energy reserves. Accessing power burned energy—just as running or lifting heavy stones did—and if a mage poured too much energy into a composition, they could incapacitate themselves for days, or even die. To prevent this, mages rarely wrote open compositions that drew on their energy once released. Instead they limited their workings to the power they could store in the parchment at the time of crafting the composition. Mageborn trained for four years at the Royal Academy to increase their skill and stamina so they might maximize their natural limits for both strength and complexity in a working. And still some workings remained outside our grasp, their scope too great for any mage.

  Mother, however, could use her power to access the energy of others, making her personal capacity almost limitless. It was the one skill my brother had not inherited. But even without it, he was incredibly powerful, having not only dual abilities but also the natural strength he inherited from both our parents.

  He was the culmination of everyone’s expectations. Even my father’s older sister, now queen, had anticipated unprecedented power in the children of a royal prince and the Spoken Mage. So great was her certainty and her dedication to the crown that she had given up the possibility of a family of her own.

  Queen Lucienne had made Ardann strong despite the tumult of great change and social upheaval brought about by the end of the war and the discovery of the sealing composition. And she had done it through unstinting sacrifice. She would not weaken Ardann by producing heirs to the throne who would be overshadowed in power by their cousins, her brother’s children. Instead, she had remained single, and when Lucien showed early signs of inheriting the strength of both his parents, she had promptly named him her heir.

  Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if I had been born first, a universal disappointment. Perhaps it would not have been too late for her to marry still at that point. But then, perhaps I would not have been so powerless if my brother had not received both of my parents’ abilities before I ever arrived.

  I stomped on the resentment before it could blossom in my mind. I only had to look to my aunt to know that a royal had no business wallowing in self-pity when her kingdom had need of her. And I was determined to prove myself as capable as her, even if I didn’t have access to power.

  As the cobblestones of the town clattered under the wheels of the carriage, I allowed myself a single moment of disgruntlement. Did my sacrifice really have to involve spending four years among our enemies?

  Chapter 3

  The carriage came to a halt, returning my thoughts to the immediate moment. Layna’s face appeared at the window.

  “Stay here,” she said before disappearing again.

  I peered after her. The Armed Forces still had a major headquarters in Bronton, and she had led us into the courtyard of their building. Mages drawn from all disciplines, as well as retired mages, were being used in the effort to dismantle the Wall, but the Armed Forces were overseeing the task.

  I could hear Layna shouting something across the courtyard, sending gray-uniformed commonborn soldiers scurrying before her. She stopped outside the large double doors, glancing back at me and making no move to enter the building.

  After several drawn-out minutes, a grumpy-looking mage appeared. He wore the silver robe of a mage officer in the Armed Forces, but from Layna’s expression, he was the retired officer we were seeking.

  He eyed her up and down, his eyes narrowing at her gold robe.

  “Who are you?” he asked, his voice carrying to where I sat. “Is this commotion really necessary? I was r
esting.”

  Layna crossed her arms and snorted contemptuously. “Yes, resting on the job. I didn’t realize the Armed Forces had grown so lax after two decades of peace.” She paused to glare at him. “And I am Captain Layna.”

  The man drew himself up, chest puffing out. “You’re in Armed Forces’ territory here, guard,” he spat at her. “And General Griffith himself is in residence at the moment. You should watch your tongue. A bit far from your jurisdiction, aren’t you?”

  I straightened my circlet and pushed open the carriage door. The movement attracted the man’s attention, his eyes flying to the vehicle which he had apparently failed to note previously.

  I stepped down with full dignity, moving slowly and purposefully, my eyes not leaving his face. I was already dressed in the white robe of an Academy trainee, but it was the gold circlet on my head and the insignia on my carriage that proclaimed my true rank.

  “The captain is exactly where she is supposed to be,” I said, ice in my voice. “Unlike you.”

  The man swept into a deep bow. “Your Highness, I didn’t realize you were here.”

  “Evidently.” I looked down my nose at him—an impressive feat given he was significantly taller than me. “And I am glad to hear that the general is in Bronton at present since it seems I will need to call him to order for the control he exercises over his subordinates.”

  All color drained from the man’s face. The elderly general, past due for retirement, ruled his discipline with an iron fist. He had spent a lifetime building his position at court and would not treat kindly a mage who earned him a royal rebuke.

  He was also, officially, my grandfather. But our rather complicated relationship—one that had never included any great affection—was irrelevant here. When I spoke with the authority of the crown, I spoke with a voice far older than even the seventy-year-old hardened general.