by JA Andrews
The thrill of the idea pushed away the loss of both the light and the gems. She’d never been able to move energy on her own.
“Whatever you did,” Rass said, her eyes bright, “it was enough. The grove has what it wants.”
Sini focused on the trees. The longing was gone. She placed her hand on the ground. It felt like normal earth, and paid her no heed at all. She blew out a pained breath.
Silence fell until Douglon cleared his throat, his expression ragged. “Does anyone know how long it takes for trees to give birth to elves?”
Chapter One
Sini stretched under the thick blankets until her feet slipped past the bottom and the early morning chill nipped at her toes. She shrank back in, curling into a ball. Stretching her mind out the window, she found the gentle power of the sunlight. Not much had managed to dribble down into the narrow valley of the Keepers’ Stronghold yet, but she drew in what sunfire she could through the shutters and wrapped it around her feet, warming them. She left her eyes shut, thinking of nothing, listening to the sounds of birds and the distant stream.
It had been more than four years since she’d escaped the Sweep with Will and Alaric, and the fact that she could lie in bed as long as she wanted still felt as indulgent as it had on her first morning here.
A niggling irritation left over from the night before prodded her. Her paper on Naponese linen. She groaned. It must be almost dawn. She should have slid the paper under Keeper Mikal’s door before she’d gone to sleep, but it had all been too frustrating.
A wave of something rolled through her like a ripple through water.
Her own vitalle lit up like a fire. A small plant by her window glowed dimly with its own energy. There was no sign of life next to her in Rett’s room. The room on the other side of her was empty as it always was. She shouldn’t be surprised by that after all this time, but she never could quite break the habit of checking. Couldn’t quite give up the hope her younger self had held. Dim echoes of life came back from farther away in the Stronghold: Gerone below in the kitchen. The Shield puttering about his books. The twins upstairs, probably already seated at their desk.
A second wave came quickly, followed by a pause, and two more waves.
“It’s so early, Rett,” she mumbled into her pillow.
He’d made up the code himself. That pattern meant come. Seeing as he used it daily to get her attention, Sini had tried to convince him that a simpler pattern might be better, but he had grown flustered by the idea of changing it and she’d relented.
One of Rett’s few skills was the ability to cast out, a process that was mostly effortless and involved flinging out a wave of curiosity, a kind of searching. To anyone sensitive to vitalle, the wave would light up anything living around them. Almost every other form of magic was beyond him, and after four years of valiant effort here at the Stronghold he still read only at a rudimentary level, but he could cast out.
It had been one of the first things she’d learned on the Sweep and Rett had used it daily to call her. Lukas could feel the waves as well, and had suffered it as an irritating disruption, until the day he’d wrenched his hip outside the city. It had been Rett who’d felt Lukas’s call and found him.
Here at the Stronghold, all the other Keepers would have felt the waves as well, but if Rett’s favorite way of calling Sini bothered any of them, they were too kind to mention it.
The waves Rett had sent were from below her and fairly weak. He must be outside. Probably wanted to show her something about that baby lamb that wasn’t growing fast enough.
She sent out two of her own waves without even opening her eyes. Where?
Wave, pause, wave, wave, wave. Library.
She opened her eyes to the gloom. That was more interesting than the growth rate of a lamb.
The darkness had relented somewhat, although it would be hours before the sun was visible over the cliffs surrounding the narrow valley. Books, papers, ink, and quills were merely dark shapes on the desk near her bed. A fat candle sat on the corner waiting with a superior sort of air, but she ignored it.
Bracing against the chill, Sini pushed off her blanket and hurried to her small wardrobe. This was the third morning in a row that the air had held the crisp chill of fall. She tossed off her nightgown and pulled out the light purple tunic Will had brought back last summer. Her thick leggings were such a dark blue they looked like a black puddle in the gloom, but nothing was black in her closet except the Keeper’s robe hanging off to the side. There was nothing drab, and definitely nothing grey.
Just a shadowed grey, Lukas had called the black Keeper robes. The symbol of a slavery as real as ours.
But her foster brother had been wrong. The robes were soft and sturdy. They symbolized something lasting and meaningful. She ran her hand over the fabric, then grabbed her wine-red cloak, instead. She pulled the wool over her head and found her boots. Unsure where her comb was in the dark, she ran her fingers through her hair. A year ago she’d cut off most of her blond locks, realizing that short hair needed less maintenance. The snipped ends tended to splay out wildly from behind her ears, but no one here was likely to care about that. She wove the pieces near her face into something as braid-like as she could manage across the crown of her head to keep any stray pieces out of her way.
Sini almost walked past the candle again on her way out, but it was so defiantly unlit that it demanded her attention. She squared her shoulders and set her fingertip next to the wick. Gently, she pushed some vitalle toward it. A light pink glow left her finger and clung to the wick for just a breath before dribbling down. It filled the top well of the candle and spilled over the edge the way clouds sometimes poured over the cliffs.
The wick stayed perfectly cold.
Sini hissed out an irritated breath and poured more energy into it. The pink grew brighter, but there was no path for it to follow into the wick. Enough energy to incinerate a tree slid uselessly down the candle and faded.
Rett’s waves rolled through her again. Come.
She snapped off the flow of vitalle and glared at the pink mist dissolving into the air.
Irritated, she stalked out her door, into the center of the open tower.
White walls stretched up three stories to a tiled ceiling, and down two more to the dark wood floor. A ramp curled along the wall, spiraling past other arched doorways like her own. Windows dotted the far wall and the pale stones reflected the little light that trickled in, making the whole tower glow with a milky whiteness.
The tower filled her with a sense of rightness and, just as she did every morning, she breathed in the scent of freedom and safety.
At the bottom she crossed the wide floor. The library wing was a smaller building attached to the back of the Stronghold on the ground floor. She passed quickly through a short hall into the library, moving out of the white rocks of the Stronghold into warm brown stone. The hall spilled out onto an aisle running between the round walls lined with bookshelves and the wide-open center of the library. Like in the main tower, a ramp spiraled around the open center, connecting the floor she stood on to the others.
Three stories above her, a glass roof showed the pale blue of the morning sky. Four more levels lay below her. A few circles of golden light lit stretches of bookshelves, but this early the library was mostly silence and shadows. The colorfully-tiled floor at the bottom was faded to swirls of grey or black in the early light.
If the main tower smelled of safety, the library smelled of wonder. Tens of thousands of books on every subject imaginable. She wound around to her left to an open space filled with several tables. At one particularly wide one covered with a huge map of Queensland and their southern neighbors, the big form of Rett waited patiently. His distant expression cleared when he noticed Sini. A candle mounted on the wall next to him lit both his face and his feet which stretched all the way out the other side of the table. His dusty brown hair was beginning to grey, and he still wore the black Keeper’s robe he’d fit into ef
fortlessly when they’d arrived four years ago. Sini had put her smaller one on twice, but both times it had felt too much like someone else’s clothes.
Rett had no such problems. Of course, Rett never overthought anything. He was…different. An accident involving magic years before Sini had meet him had killed his twin sister and left his own mind damaged. He seemed aware of the fact that he was more like a child than a man, but content with it, all the same. His memories of his sister, who he’d been incredibly close to, were indistinct and confused. As far as anyone could tell, he felt only a nebulous sorrow about her, and Sini couldn’t decide if that was a kindness or its own extra tragedy.
“A letter from Queenstown,” he said eagerly, handing her a small piece of paper filled with script. She sat in a chair opposite him. The nearby window gave no light yet and it was too chilly outside to open the door for extra light, so he reached forward and touched the wick of a candle sitting near her. A clear green light from his finger streamed onto the wick and it instantly, effortlessly, burst into flame.
She spared an annoyed look at the cheerful flame. Despite Will’s early assurances, she never had learned to do magic without some assistance. Maybe there was a reason Rett fit in a Keeper’s robe better than she did.
Neither Rett nor anyone else in the Stronghold could see vitalle moving. In fact, they only knew of one person in history who could—Keeper Chesavia—and she’d lived almost two hundred years ago. The Keepers found Sini’s abilities fascinating, and often had her watch when they manipulated energy, recording what she saw. They were endlessly fascinated by the differences in brightness and focus of the light, and the fact that each of them produced vitalle in a different color.
She’d give up the ability to see the energy in a heartbeat, if it meant she could actually use hers to affect inanimate objects. Living things weren’t a problem. When she touched a person or an animal, the life energy in them was accessible to her. She could take vitalle out of them or put some in. She could even help their bodies heal, in a limited way. But inanimate things were utterly out of her reach—there was no path between herself and the object. When she’d been on the Sweep, the burning stones Lukas had made had helped her. He’d given her rings with gems that could create the path she needed. The Keepers, though, didn’t approve of burning stones, and even though Alaric had used some to save Evangeline, he didn’t like to talk about it.
Sini tilted the note toward the flame but hadn’t even finished reading when Rett burst out with the expected question.
“Does this mean they found Lukas?”
She smiled at his unflagging hope. She’d met Rett and Lukas when she was twelve. The two men, also slaves on the Sweep, had become her foster brothers—protecting her and creating a bit of happiness amidst all the hardship. It was Rett’s greatest desire that Lukas come to the Stronghold and join the Keepers like he and Sini had. Nothing would dampen that: not the four years that had passed without this happening, not the fact that every Keeper was convinced Lukas had declared himself their enemy, not the fact that he’d flown away from the Sweep on a dragon. If Rett believed the Keepers were good, there was no room in his mind to comprehend anyone thinking differently.
Sini did her best to protect Rett from the truth, but everything about Lukas was more complex than Rett could understand.
“Let me read…There was a sickness in a flock of sheep along the southern border. A wasting disease that killed fourteen ewes and caused six lambs to be born blind before it stopped.” The words gave her a sour taste. “No one knows the cause or what cured it.”
Rett grinned and bounced his feet, jiggling the tabletop. “That’s just like on the Sweep.”
Sini nodded, the similarity not striking as happy a chord inside her. It was the disease they’d seen on the Sweep, or one incredibly similar. A rival clan had used magic to poison their sheep.
Lukas had been the one to find a cure.
“Lukas saved more sheep,” Rett said, his voice proud. “Who else could have?”
Sini kept her eyes on the paper, trying not to let him see her disquiet. It was likely that Lukas was the only person outside the Sweep who could have healed them. Then again, a magical illness couldn’t get all the way from the Sweep to southern Queensland without infecting anything before this without some help. And it was likely that Lukas was the only person outside the Sweep who could have done that as well. What why? Maybe he was perfecting the cure? She wrinkled her nose at the idea of testing it on some poor villages’ sheep.
She glanced at the map. Piles of similar notes were stacked along the southern border. It had begun last year with sightings—a red dragon flying over Napon and Coastal Baylon. Seeing as Lukas had flown away from the Sweep on a red dragon, and seeing as no other dragons were known to exist, Alaric had begun sending reports to the Stronghold of disturbing events along the southern border in an attempt to figure out what Lukas was doing.
Then they’d received reports from spies embedded in Napon that Lukas had surfaced and was calling for the overthrow of Queensland, and the destruction of the Keepers. She’d managed to keep that fact from Rett’s notice for quite a while, now. Lukas had always said such things on the Sweep, but Rett seemed to have forgotten.
Ever since, Sini and Rett had catalogued any odd events that Alaric sent them from the capital. There were plenty of problems they deemed natural, and unrelated to Lukas. More common sicknesses or poor crops after late spring frosts. But other events, although often small and isolated, were more difficult to explain. The ones she tracked most closely were like this one, connected to something she knew about Lukas, or something that might require magic. Animals with diseases that reminded her of ones from the Sweep, especially if they started and stopped mysteriously. Game found starved amidst lush vegetation. Small waterways that had turned bitter for a week, then cleared.
The task of determining whether these were things Lukas was capable of was complex, though. He was certainly capable of the magic needed, she just didn’t know what his purpose might be. What was the point of killing off a few animals here and there? It didn’t fit the Keepers’ fear of a diabolical mastermind trying to destroy Queensland. The times Lukas had turned to violence in the past, he’d believed that one targeted strike of overwhelming force was better than widespread violence. These occurrences were too scattered and ineffective for him. Or maybe all of this was Lukas just practicing his skills to keep them honed.
There was an irritatingly tall pile of notes stacked on the map along the southwestern country of Gulfind. Gold merchants from the mountain country had stopped traveling to Queensland since midsummer, and no one knew why. Sini could see no connection to Lukas, but Alaric insisted these events “felt important,” so she kept track of them as well.
Sini had seen two gold merchants in her life. One had come through the slums when she was small. The man must have gotten lost on his way to the vineyards. He’d hurried his wagon past with an air of panic. Sini’s mother had spit at him as he passed.
Another had come through the Sweep. That was unusual enough that Sini had snuck out with Lukas to see the man meet with Killien. He’d been fatter than anyone Sini had ever seen. The two men had sat for hours, talking about Gulfind and the lands the merchant had passed through. In the end Killien had traded two good horses for a piece of gold.
“Killien doesn’t care about the gold,” Lukas had whispered to her. “He only wants information. Gold is like poison. Those people in Gulfind live high in the mountains. All they have is gold. They have to travel to other places to buy food or they starve, yet they love the gold too much to leave it.” Her foster brother’s voice had dripped with scorn, and he’d plucked his grey slave’s tunic. “We’re slaves because we were captured. That gold merchant chose his slavery. It’s just his shackles are made of gold.”
Rett interrupted her thoughts. “Lukas doesn’t know where we are. The Stronghold is hidden.”
Sini nodded, agreeing for the hundredth time to thos
e words. She set this new note along the northeastern corner of Coastal Baylon where it had happened and weighed it down with a small rock.
“If he knew where we were,” Rett assured her, continuing along the same line of thought he followed whenever Lukas was mentioned, “he’d come.”
Sini kept her face down, the thought a dull ache. “Maybe. He doesn’t know the Keepers like we do. He thinks they’re…” She paused, unwilling to repeat Lukas’s words. Manipulative and impotent. Too weak to even protect those of us who should be Keepers from being taken—right out from under their noses. If I ever have the power, I will see them rooted out and destroyed.
She’d never bought into the hatred of the Keepers that plagued the Sweep, and after four years of living with them, it seemed ridiculous that anyone could think poorly of them. But Lukas had embraced the hatred fully.
“He thinks they’re bad?” Rett waved the idea away. “We’ll tell him the truth.”
She looked up at his eternally optimistic face and let it bolster her own hope that he was right. “We’ll certainly try.”
The door to the outside opened, letting in a bit of hazy dawn and a breeze that made the pinned-down notes flutter. The candle next to Sini flickered. She tried to get her finger next to it fast enough to bolster the energy before it went out, but the breeze snuffed it into a useless ribbon of smoke. The door swung shut and the map in front of her faded to darkness. She gave a low, exasperated growl.
“Help you, Sini.” Rett touched the wick and it burst back into flame. He looked so pleased with himself that it dissolved a little of her irritation.
“Thank you.” She glanced behind her at the approach of an older man with a perfectly combed white beard and an immaculate Keepers robe, even though he was probably returning from feeding the chickens.
Sini froze. The essay.
Keeper Mikal was one of her two tutors. While the other, Keeper Gerone, believed learning should be mostly a wild, student-led game of exploration, Mikal held more formal views—on everything. Including that essays should be at his door before dawn on the day they were due. Sini’s current paper was sitting up on her desk next to that fat, obstinate candle.