Secret in the Stone

by Kamilla Benko

  Queen Estelle d’Astora, the last queen of Arden and the hero of Arden’s history, who, legend said, had turned herself and the last unicorn to stone to save them both from the fearful blade of the hunter. Who most of Arden believed would one day return, bring unicorns back to Arden, and drive the wraiths away.

  But of course, Claire had learned, legends lie. Her heart knocked hard against her chest as she slipped by the statue queen’s cold smile. She hoped Anvil had heard about what happened to Queen Rock—who had destroyed it, and why. Had it really been the Forgers, like Jasper had said?

  “Hi!”

  Claire jumped as Lapis’s curly head popped out around a corner, followed immediately by Zuli’s sparkling eyes.

  “We thought you might need some help getting back from Terra’s,” Zuli explained. “I know Starscrape like the back of my hand—”

  “—and I know it like the back and the front of my hand,” Lapis interjected.

  “—but it’s a big place, and easy to get lost in,” Zuli finished, completely ignoring her brother.

  It was nice of the Gemmer twins, it really was, but after the day she’d had, Claire felt about as trusting as a balled-up porcupine.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” she blurted out. As soon as she said it, she could practically hear Sophie’s sigh in her head. But instead of laughing at her, the twins looked at each other in surprise.

  “Because,” Lapis said, “even princesses need help.”

  “And you’re going to help all of us by waking the moontears,” Zuli added. “Once magic is strong again, we won’t need to stick around here making sure the Citadel stays put. We’ll be able to travel to the mines of Mount Rouge, see the living stone of the Sparkling Sea, and maybe even converse with a wyvern.”

  Her words seemed to bounce along with her curls. “I could even discover a new mineral or two—all thanks to you!”

  Claire blushed, pleased, but also once again overwhelmed by the pressure. So much depended on waking the moontears …

  “Besides,” Lapis added darkly, “we heard Geode bragging at dinner how he got you in trouble. He wasn’t supposed to bring you to S.A.S. at all. He was just supposed to let you know Terra would be late. This way!”

  Claire looked to see Zuli pulling back a moth-eaten tapestry to reveal a hidden passageway.

  “It’s a shortcut,” she explained. “The Citadel is full of secret halls, if you know where to look.”

  “And we do!” Lapis said, bounding in. “Mother and Father are in charge of mapping the passageways. No one knows more about the Citadel’s tunnels than us.”

  “Except Mother and Father,” Zuli pointed out.

  Claire followed the twins, glad they were her guides. Without a map, it would have been impossible to navigate the meandering tunnels. Eventually, the twins pushed on a stone slab, and Claire found herself at the bottom of the spiraling staircase leading to her shared tower room. She barely had time to thank the twins before they were off, racing each other to their family apartments.

  Reaching the landing, Claire saw gold light stitching the door to the floor. Good. Sophie was back.

  “Claire!” Sophie exclaimed as soon as she walked in. “Finally.”

  “What happened to you?” Claire asked, taking in her sister. Sophie’s hair was pulled back in its ponytail … along with enough twigs and leaves to make an entire nest.

  Sophie flopped onto her straw pallet and groaned. “Goats. It was awful! They eat everything!” She held up the tips of her hair and Claire realized that the ends had clearly been gnawed on. “Grandmaster Carnelian has forbidden me from attending any more Gemmer lessons. He says it’s too dangerous for ‘someone like me’ to be around a bunch of untrained apprentices.”

  Someone like me. Claire knew what those words meant. Someone without magic.

  “But where do the goats come in?”

  Sophie sighed. “I’m supposed to be helpful. Carnelian took me down to the kitchens, so I spent the day running errands for Cook Koal, weeding, delivering lunch trays, goat watching, that sort of stuff.”

  Propping her cheek on her hand, Sophie sighed even louder. “I don’t get it, Claire. How can you be magic and not me? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Claire flinched. Sophie’s careless words buzzed straight into her heart, stinging all the worse because she had asked herself the very same question. But Sophie didn’t seem to realize what she had said, because she prattled on. “Honestly, today was the worst.”

  “I didn’t have a good day, either,” Claire said, and opened the wardrobe to pull out a nightgown.

  Sophie sat up. “Please. You had magic lessons all day. How bad could that be?”

  “Bad,” Claire snapped. “It’s not fun when you spend the whole day embarrassing yourself!”

  Sophie’s eyebrows shot up and her mouth dropped into a round O of surprise.

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said, her ribs feeling tight. She didn’t want Sophie to be mad at her. Not on top of everything else. “I just mean—”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Sophie said. “I want to hear all of it. Tell me more?”

  As the girls prepared for bed, pulling on nightgowns and de-twigging Sophie’s hair, Claire told her about her day, even down to the humiliating moment she’d been relegated to folding rags with the preambles. The theory behind magic, however, fascinated Sophie, and Claire tried to answer Sophie’s questions as best she could, recalling everything Terra had told her, until her mouth was as dry as a freshly laundered towel. Finally, after checking to make sure the Kompass was still safely hidden at the bottom of their wardrobe, they blew out their candles and clambered into the two trundle beds.

  “I miss cell phones,” Sophie said into the dark. “Think how much easier it would be to know what Anvil’s found out.”

  Cell phones. Batteries. Internet. How funny all those words sounded in the marble halls of Stonehaven. And how funny that they’d become so strange to her in such a short amount of time. Suddenly, Claire was afraid.

  She had been in Arden for weeks now, and already the world of Windemere felt as though it was being erased away. But what if home wasn’t what was being erased. What if it was Claire?

  Everything has the possibility of changing, Terra had said. But Claire wasn’t sure she wanted everything to change that much.

  “Claire,” Sophie’s voice interrupted the darkness. “I was thinking … what if it wasn’t the Forgers who destroyed Queen Rock, like Jasper said? Or any of the lowland guilds for that matter.”

  Turning on her side, Claire stared at the spot of dark where her sister’s voice had come from. “What do you mean?”

  “I was just thinking, when I delivered lunch to Jasper today, I got a look at his desk. It was covered with papers, but not letters. More like … battle plans.”

  “Battle plans?”

  “Yeah, you know, maps with little flags and stuff. It made me think that maybe Stonehaven is up to something … that maybe the Gemmers destroyed Queen Rock?”

  “Why would they do that?” Claire asked in surprise. “They love Queen Estelle. She’s the only Gemmer everyone likes.”

  There was a crackling of straw and Claire imagined Sophie turning on her side and squinching her face. “I’ve seen the kitchens, Claire. There isn’t all that much food on a mountain. Despite all the jewels, the Gemmers don’t have much else. Maybe they set the Forgers up as an excuse to attack them and take their supplies.”

  Turning her sister’s words over, Claire thought about it. It could make sense, but …

  “Why wouldn’t the Gemmers have set up the Tillers, then?” Claire asked. “They’re the ones with all the food.”

  “Oh.” Sophie shifted. “That’s a good point.”

  Of course Sophie would come up with the most dramatic option. Mom always said that the most dangerous thing was a bored Sophie. When she had too much time, her imagination would run wild, trying to come up with Experiences. Most of the time, they were harmless, but a few
times, like when they’d tried to scale the roof of a rotting garden shed, Sophie’s Experiences had been dangerous.

  Claire snuggled under the goat-hair blanket, trying to cocoon herself away from Sophie’s “theories.”

  “Clairina?” Sophie’s voice came once more, and Claire almost groaned. She was so sleepy, but her sister continued. “I get that today was hard. But you’ll wake the moontears soon. I just know it. There’s got to be a reason we found our way here, don’t you think? There’s a reason we found the chimney. There’s a reason we’re princesses.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  But Claire didn’t wake the moontears the next day.

  Or the day after that. Or even the day after that.

  Every evening, Claire went to Terra’s study to try a different Gemmer technique on the necklace—from attempting to deconstruct it on the pottery wheel, to using the erosion of wind and water, to the most obvious use of a chisel. Nothing worked. The moontears remained as secret and silent as they always had been.

  Though she could squeeze light out of a jewel, it was never as brilliant as Zuli’s and Lapis’s or as quick as Geode’s, and even the preambles’ Gemglows were stronger. She could barely keep up. She wasn’t even sure if she was keeping up as opposed to messing up.

  One week after her disastrous first class of S.A.S., Claire sat in Mineral Properties, her eyelids feeling heavy as rock. She’d spent all last night practicing, and now could barely stay awake.

  “You’re going to poison us?” someone asked.

  Claire’s head jerked up, snapping her out of her daze. What had she missed? Looking around, she saw Zuli frowning at Scholar Terra—who frowned right back at her.

  “No,” Terra said, huffing out slightly. “You will be poisoning yourself.”

  Claire’s mind scrambled as she tried to remember what today’s lesson was. Something about kneading the clay at room temperature? She squinted at her slate. At the top, written in bold letters were the words: CLAY PROPERTIES. Below it was half a sentence: Clay is …

  Blinking, Claire stared in dismay. She sat up tall in her chair, trying to catch a glimpse of the very full slate next to her. But unfortunately, Beryl, the tallest, but also the quietest apprentice, noticed. Shooting her a dirty look, he curled his arm around his work.

  “But what if our Grail doesn’t work?” Zuli pressed, her mouth a thin line.

  A Grail. All right, so they were supposed to make some sort of a clay cup.

  Terra pulled out a vial from her skirt pocket. “I have the antidote to the poison, of course. Really, Lazuli, what kind of monster do you think I am?”

  Zuli blushed, and Claire noticed that her hair, which tended to spring out in every direction at once, seemed particularly spring-like today. Zuli caught her eye and Claire gave her a shy smile. The girl smiled back.

  “When are we ever going to use this?” Geode complained from his pottery station.

  Terra threw up her hands, her dangling emerald earrings clinking together as she shook her head. “There are many times a Grail would be useful. Beryl, how about you give us an example?”

  Beryl immediately ducked his head as everyone turned to look at him. “Well,” he mumbled to his tabletop, “if you were traveling and you couldn’t start a fire, the Grail would let you drink water safely without boiling it.”

  Terra nodded. “Good. And who can tell me the theory behind the Grail?”

  Claire kept her own head down, hoping Terra’s eyes would skip over her and settle on someone else. No such luck.

  “Claire?”

  “Um,” Claire stalled, looking around the room for some inspiration—that was it! “Inspiration, dedication, courage?” she offered hesitantly.

  Terra narrowed her eyes, then slowly nodded. “True, those are the rules behind the theory of all craft. You do need to feel inspired to create a Grail, and you must be dedicated to keep working the clay, even if it crumbles beneath your hands. And, of course, you need the courage to try to make one, even when you might fail … But what specific property of rock are we using to filter poison from water? Lapis, can you tell me?”

  So that’s what they were supposed to be doing: crafting a clay mug that would allow them to drink poisoned water safely—somehow, they had to make the clay recognize the poison, and filter it out of the liquid. But even though Claire now knew what she was supposed to do, she still had no idea how.

  When Terra was finally convinced that the apprentices properly understood the assignment, she plopped a handful of wet clay onto each of their desks. Geode immediately began to pound his mound flat with large whacks of his fist, but Zuli shaped hers into tiny balls first. Glancing behind her, Claire saw Lapis had rolled his to look like a long, skinny snake.

  Claire stared at her clay. She really, really didn’t want to poison herself. Tentatively, she stuck her fingers in, and got to work. She kneaded with as much concentration as possible, trying to listen to the shape this particular lump of clay might like to take, but apparently her clay wanted to be a lumpy pancake, because it kept falling apart in her hands.

  “Time’s up,” Terra declared an hour later. Claire groaned and desperately tried to shove her handle onto the mug. For one blink of an eye, her Grail had a handle … and then it bowed inward like a clothesline and slowly fell off. Claire glanced enviously at Zuli’s desk, where a perfectly formed clay teacup sat.

  “I said, ‘time’s up!’ ” Terra repeated. “Put everything down, please, and place your Grail in the oven for some quick drying.”

  Claire made one last desperate attempt to squash the handle on, but it was no use. She hoped the handle wasn’t key to filtering poisons.

  Hands shaking, not from magic, but from nerves, Claire set her Grail on the drying rack as Terra instructed. Minutes later, Terra carefully removed the dried, hardened Grails from the oven. They all were the same flat red-orange of flowerpots. Only one looked different from the rest. Not just different, but pathetic: Claire’s. Her handleless Grail had collapsed in on itself, looking like a stiff, crumpled handkerchief. Behind her, someone giggled. Claire’s neck burned hot.

  One by one, the apprentices lined up in front of Terra. Zuli went first. Accepting the vial from their scholar, Zuli let a drop of a bright green liquid—poison—into her Grail. Cautiously, Zuli swirled the green stuff into the water in her cup before taking a sip.

  Nothing happened.

  “Well done, Lazuli,” Terra said, nodding her head in approval and making a mark on her slate. “Perfect results.” Zuli smiled happily.

  Lapis went next, his trial going similarly except for a slight hiss of steam that had been absent in Zuli’s. Terra kindly pointed out that there was a hairline fissure in his clay.

  Claire’s stomach twisted and rolled as, one by one, the apprentices drank water from their Grails. Even Geode managed not to poison himself, though after sipping from his vessel, he’d gotten a nasty case of hiccups.

  By the time it was Claire’s turn, her stomach hurt so badly that she wasn’t sure she would even be able to tell if she were poisoned or not. With trembling hands, she accepted the vial from Terra. The poison was a bright green, the same shade as one of the poisonous frogs Claire had seen in the zoo’s rainforest exhibit. Carefully, she let one droplet fall into her Grail.

  Pop! … Popopopopop!

  People screamed as Claire’s goblet exploded in a shower of hissing water and clay shards. Zuli dashed under a desk while others ran to the back of the room. An acrid scent lingered in the air, something similar to the smell of plastic too close to the stove.

  Terra ran to a window and flung open the shutters. Soon, a cool mountain breeze whisked in, clearing away clouds of red dust to reveal the blackened, twisted remains of Claire’s failure.

  That night, Claire could barely keep her head lifted as she ate her stringy stew in the dining hall. All around her, Gemmers munched, scraping their silverware against the bottom of their bowls, but even during meals, they were still wor
king. Dusty quarry workers spoke with an anxious group of architects Claire had spotted earlier that day dangling from flying buttresses. Scholar Pumus, too, barely picked at his dinner as he conversed with a man still holding his pickax and measuring tape.

  But while the grown-ups always seemed worried, there was constant movement in the hall. The young preambles roamed from table to table, seeking leftover dessert, and the older apprentices gobbled their meals next to their parents before rushing off to join their friends, always giving a wide berth to the rickety table the Martinson sisters had claimed for their own.

  Not that they were ignored; that would have been preferable. No, instead they were watched from a distance—as if there were a glass wall between them and everyone else—and Claire couldn’t go anywhere without hearing a whispered “princess.” Occasionally, she thought she saw a parent nudge their kid toward their table, but no one ever came to sit with them. Claire guessed it was because they didn’t want Sophie’s lack of magic to rub off on them, but she kept that thought to herself.

  After helping in the kitchens, Sophie was allowed to eat with her. Usually, Sophie had a story to tell about what she’d learned (eavesdropped), but today Sophie was looking just as burned out as Claire felt. Her sister rested her head in her ink-stained hands.

  “How was your day?” Claire asked

  Sophie sighed. “I was forced to help Cook Koal take inventory of the kitchen supplies. There are”—she yawned—“exactly 524 clay mugs with handles, and 1,276 without. In case you were wondering.”

  “Better than my day,” Claire said. She told her about the clay Grail and how it had exploded all over the classroom, leaving a hard little round of blackened clay instead of a poison-canceling drinking cup.

  “Hmm,” Sophie said, looking thoughtful all of a sudden. Which, Claire knew, was not always a good thing.