Crown of Secrets (The Hidden Mage Book 1)

by Melanie Cellier

  “Verene…”

  I waited, but after a long moment he turned away, swiftly closing the door. I sighed and rubbed at both temples.

  “You have plenty of energy,” Bryony said from her place on one of the sofas. “So what was that really about?”

  “Jareth.” I turned back to her. “I didn’t expect him, and I didn’t feel comfortable experimenting in front of him.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Or rather I don’t know him. Not really.”

  “But you know Prince Darius?”

  I ran a shaky hand through my hair. “Maybe not. But…I can’t really say why, but I trust him.”

  “Well, he did rescue you,” Bryony pointed out. “But are you saying you don’t trust Prince Jareth?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to say anything to Darius because it’s just an instinct. But that family…” I shook my head. “They’re not like your family or mine. Do you know some people believe that if Darius doesn’t demonstrate complete loyalty to his grandfather, the general would rather see him dead than on the throne?”

  “Surely not!” Bryony’s eyes widened.

  “And I think their father kept him from starting at the Academy because he doesn’t want him to graduate and become a fully qualified mage. He doesn’t want the competition for the throne.”

  She shook her head. “That’s awful. But what does it have to do with Jareth?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe nothing. But he seems to get on with his grandfather awfully well.”

  “You think Jareth wants to kill Darius?” Bryony sounded skeptical, and I couldn’t blame her.

  “No, of course not! I just mean that trusting one member of that family doesn’t mean trusting another. Jareth already knows more than I would have chosen to tell him. He doesn’t need to see me trying—and most likely failing—to master my ability as well.”

  “I’m sure you won’t fail!” Bryony said, loyal as always.

  “I might. Because we don’t have an energy mage who can take energy for me to practice with. And for all we know, that’s all my ability can do.”

  “We should try right now.” She jumped to her feet. “I have all my compositions with me.”

  I nodded, but slowly. Now that I came to it, I found myself absurdly reluctant.

  “I don’t want to use up all your supplies,” I said.

  “Actually, I’ve thought about that.” She sounded triumphant. “Since I’ll be the one working the composition, the energy will all be going to me unless you actually succeed in taking control of it. And once I’ve received all that extra energy, I can just sit down and write out another composition to store it again. And then we can use that new composition to make another attempt. We could practice all night and I would end up with the same number of compositions I started with.”

  “That actually makes sense,” I said.

  She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t sound so surprised!”

  I grimaced. “Sorry. In truth, I’m just nervous to start. What if I can’t do it again? What if all this excitement is for nothing?”

  Bryony gripped me by both shoulders, looking me directly in the eyes.

  “You can do this, Verene. I understand why you’re nervous. You’ve dreamed of this your whole life, so you’re placing far too much pressure on yourself. But this is your moment. I’m sure of it.”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. It was foolishness to be so hesitant. I had chosen to come alone to Kallorway, and this was nothing by comparison.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s try it.”

  Bryony produced a composition and tore it. I could feel the energy that flowed from her hands, joining the knot of it that already pulsed at her core. I reached for it, trying to follow it like I had in the pit, but it was already gone.

  She frowned at me. “Don’t you need to say something?”

  I groaned. “I didn’t even get that far. But you’re right. I’m rushing this. I need to work out what to say first.”

  We spent several minutes debating the wording and whether I should try to use binding words.

  “I just don’t think I’m going to have time,” I said. “It was over so fast.”

  “What will you try to do with the energy?” Bryony asked.

  “I guess I’ll try to divert it to come to me instead. Does that sound reasonable?”

  She nodded. “It seems the simplest thing to do. So why don’t you just say come to me.”

  We debated for another minute before deciding on that wording, at least for a first attempt.

  But when she tore another composition, and I said the words, nothing happened.

  I grimaced. “I think it’s not just saying the words. I need to be connected to the flow of it as well. At least, that’s how it was last time. It was as much instinct as words. But I need longer.”

  “Give me a minute,” Bryony said. “I’m bursting with energy now. I’ll write a new composition using the stored energy from both of the ones I just used. That will make a stronger working which should give you a bit more time.”

  I waited impatiently while she sat at my desk and scribbled across the top piece of parchment that lay there. When she finished, she looked up at me.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded, and she ripped it.

  Once again I could feel the flow of energy, and the way it connected with her. I pictured the words we had chosen, crying, “Come to me,” much more loudly than needed.

  Nothing happened, and the flow finished.

  I slumped back onto one of the sofas. “Can you see why I didn’t want Jareth here?” I muttered, and Bryony made a sympathetic sound in her throat.

  “We just need to keep trying. It’s hard enough for anyone to master their ability, even when they have experienced instructors to help them. There’s a reason we spend four years at an Academy, you know.”

  “I’d settle for any progress at all.” I sighed.

  “Try to think back over it again,” Bryony encouraged. “What exactly did you say, and what were you thinking? Maybe you overlaid extra meaning on the words without realizing. That’s advanced composition, but you were in a desperate situation—you might have managed it.”

  I put my arm over my eyes and thought back. Everything had been so rushed and hazy, my exhaustion fighting with my instinctive will to live. But gradually I recaptured the moment in my mind.

  I had sensed my energy flowing into the other person, and I had been so angry. They were taking my essence and stealing it away. I had declared it was mine and pictured it coming back to me—and it had come.

  “I said, that energy is mine, or something like that. I…claimed it, I suppose.”

  Bryony’s eyes were focused on a distant point, her mind clearly working over it from every angle.

  “Perhaps you should try saying those words instead?”

  I pictured doing so and grimaced. It sounded so melodramatic in the calm of my sitting room, when I was trying to claim Bryony’s energy. But I was getting desperate enough to try anything.

  “All right. We’ll try again.”

  Bryony turned back to her parchment. “Just give me a minute to write it back out. It’s a strange feeling being so full of energy—and not entirely pleasant. I can hardly keep still.”

  I waited in silence until she was ready. When she looked at me inquiringly, I held up a finger. Closing my eyes, I tried to recreate the emotions of the night before as closely as I could in the vastly different circumstances.

  After a moment, I nodded. “Ready.”

  She ripped the composition, and I latched on to the feeling of energy flowing into her.

  “That energy is mine,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.

  I could feel the moment I claimed ownership over the energy, the direction of the flow twisting and snaking toward me. It hit me hard, sending me falling back against the sofa, gasping for breath.

  “You did it!” Bryony threw hers
elf at me, shrieking.

  I laughed and fended her off, energy coursing through me and making me want to run victory laps around the room.

  “Do we try again?” Bryony asked, jumping up and down as if she had been the one to receive an extra serve of energy.

  I was about to agree when my leg started jittering. I clamped down on it and grimaced.

  “We probably shouldn’t.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “I’m sure you’ll have it mastered in no time.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “But right now, I’m filled with enough energy, I don’t know how I’m ever going to sleep. I’m not sure it’s a good idea for me to try to stuff any more in. And, unlike you, I can’t just compose it away again. So, unless you’ve been hiding yet another ability and you can siphon some of this off…”

  “I didn’t even think of that.” Bryony frowned. “It’s going to make practicing difficult.”

  I sighed. “Not so much difficult as slow. One success a night might be my limit.”

  But as I climbed into bed hours later, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. All my life I had longed for an ability—any ability—I could claim as my own. And now I had one. I might be far from mastering, or even properly understanding, it, but it was mine. I was a proper mage, and no one could claim otherwise.

  As the weeks dragged on, the weather slowly warming again, it was hard to hold onto my sense of positivity. My progress felt glacially slow, given the limitations of my practice.

  Bryony and I had taken to rising early, practicing in the morning before breakfast so I could burn off the excess energy during the day and have some hope of sleeping at night. Tyron was the only one in the Academy who might have noticed the difference in me, but he said nothing, although I noticed him giving me the occasional strange look.

  But now that my efforts were successful, we couldn’t practice every day. Bryony’s idea about turning the energy back into compositions to be reused only worked if I failed. Once the energy was in me, it became useless, and Bryony couldn’t afford to be siphoning energy into me every day, not if she wanted to keep up with all our classes as well.

  On the mornings I succeeded in taking some of her energy, I could feel the difference in combat class. I often beat Jareth and even Bryony now, although I had yet to defeat Darius. The extra energy made me fast and alert beyond my normal levels. It was noticeable enough that Mitchell even commented on my new erratic performance. Some days I performed at my old level while some days I performed with an apparent increase in skill, and he clearly couldn’t account for it.

  Jareth managed to corner me during a bout early on, asking when I would be ready to try my new ability, and I had to agree to both princes joining us that evening to observe me at work.

  I felt so ridiculous saying the words with an audience that it took three tries for my composition to succeed, and I was once again struck by the weakness of my new ability. What good was it in the real world? Even claiming the energy out loud, so boldly and dramatically, went against every instinct of my training. It was distastefully lacking in subtlety.

  Darius was encouraging, however, praising my progress and suggesting a whole range of experiments, several of which I hadn’t tried. But so far, it seemed my ability was limited to diverting the energy being transferred by someone else’s composition.

  He started joining us every two or three evenings after that, though—thankfully without Jareth in tow. With his assistance, we tried experimenting in different ways, trying to see if my ability could be used for other things. I tried taking energy directly from someone who wasn’t working a composition by claiming it as my own. But I had never felt more foolish saying the words, and it didn’t work.

  I could twist one of Bryony’s compositions to come to me instead of her, but I couldn’t initiate one of my own. And when I tried diverting the energy to Darius instead of me, that was just as much of a failure.

  It didn’t help me remain positive that we were making even less progress in our attempt to discover the identity of my attacker. When I confessed to Darius one evening that I was considering the need for a return to Ardann, he startled me by gripping my arm.

  “You can’t just run away now.” His voice was low, and his eyes burned. “That would be letting them win.”

  I bit my lip, unable to meet his intense gaze. “I don’t want to leave, but if we can’t even work out their identity, isn’t it irresponsible of me to stay?”

  He shook his head sharply. “They’ve shown themselves to be cautious. They don’t want to be discovered, or to leave any trace of themselves behind. You’re never alone now, and they haven’t tried anything in weeks.”

  His grip tightened. “I won’t let anyone harm you, Verene. But I have to know who did this. And if you leave now, we might never discover the truth.”

  “Very well,” I said, giving way before the fire in his voice. “I don’t want to leave, turning tail before I’ve even completed a year.”

  That earned me one of his rare smiles. He opened his mouth to say something, but Bryony came out from behind the partitions that separated off her bed, and he let my arm drop, merely wishing us both goodnight.

  “That looked intense,” she said, regarding me curiously.

  I flushed a little, unable to deny it. My heart was still racing.

  “Darius was convincing me not to run away like a coward.”

  “You’ve never been a coward, Verene,” Bryony said. “And it wouldn’t be cowardly to leave a place where a secret assassin is lurking in wait for you.”

  “What a horrifying way to phrase it!”

  She snorted. “Can you deny it, though?” Her face softened. “But I’ll admit I don’t want you to go. It would be horridly boring here without you.”

  “You don’t think I’m being foolish for staying?”

  She considered her answer. “No, I don’t think so. It would be different if you didn’t have us. But I barely leave your side, and Darius watches you more than you realize.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s subtle about it, I’ll give him that. But I don’t think his attention is ever on much else these days.”

  “Goodness knows he doesn’t need to pay attention in class,” I muttered. “I still can’t believe he could do an investigation composition as if it was nothing. Those are complex and require a lot of strength. Did you ever hear my mother tell the story of when she first arrived at the Academy back home? They used one to prove her ability, and it was a big deal for the Academy Head to use it up. The Academy Head! And Darius is only eighteen.”

  “Then you have a powerful protector at your back,” Bryony said. “And don’t forget you were the one who saved yourself when you were attacked. You’re not a weak, defenseless victim.”

  I nodded, bolstered by her words. And in the privacy of my bed at night, I could confess I had another reason for staying here beside the two people who were starting to make it feel like home.

  I wanted to master my abilities. To test them to their full limits and find a way to make them useful just like Amalia had said back at the beginning of our discipline class.

  I didn’t want to run home in fear, I wanted to return home in the summer triumphant, ready to announce to my family and my kingdom that I wasn’t the useless royal, after all.

  Chapter 25

  Once the warming weather turned officially into spring, the instructors all began to talk about exams. My attention was so firmly on the private lessons in my sitting room that I didn’t give it much thought until I was called out of discipline class one afternoon by a summons to Duke Francis’s office.

  My first thought was that he had somehow got wind of my ability, and I entered with some trepidation. However, he looked exactly as he had looked the day I came to ask him about hosting the ball, down to the pen in his hand and the parchment on his desk.

  “Ah, Your Highness, thank you for coming. Please, have a seat.” He gestured to one of the comfortable cha
irs facing his desk, and I sat.

  “I’m sure you have considered the upcoming exams, and your rather…unique position.”

  I blinked at him, taking a moment to realize he meant my apparent powerlessness. I hadn’t actually given it much thought, but I realized now that I should have. Without the ability to compose, I couldn’t possibly pass a composition exam. Returning home having failed the Academy after my first year was hardly the triumphant homecoming I had been envisioning.

  I sat up straighter. “I know it’s not the Academy’s practice to provide a modified exam.”

  “For many years it would not have even been considered,” he said. “However, times have changed. We already have a modified program established for those energy mages who choose to complete their studies here. I have met with the other senior instructors, and it has been decided that a further modification would be acceptable in your specific situation.”

  I drew a deep breath, relieved to discover I wasn’t facing imminent expulsion.

  “The first year combat exam involves physical combat only, despite your occasional battles in the arena. I understand you will not need assistance in passing that.”

  “No, Your Grace,” I said. “I hope not.”

  “Your composition and discipline exams will be theory only and will be timed, written exams conducted in a separate room to that of your year mates.” He gave me a long look. “I recommend that you pay attention in class and study as much as you can. The Academy has already made an exception for you, and there are some who may not like it. We can accept nothing less than an exemplary result.”

  I swallowed, trying to remember the last time I had been properly listening in class. The duke’s tone carried a clear warning, and I suspected I understood it. So far the Academy Head’s neutrality had worked in my favor, but it might now prove my undoing.

  The king’s faction had decided they wanted to use the opportunity of my presence to build a greater connection to Ardann. They might even be preparing to negotiate a formal alliance. And so the duke had agreed to modify my exams to give me a chance to stay.