Realm of Ruins

by Hannah West

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t come to Ivria’s funeral,” Kadri said, appeasing the giant hound by raking her fingers through her rough gray coat. “Or your birthday, for that matter. Elicromancers can be so discourteous, giving mortals no notice while they materialize from place to place. Rayed was only able to escort you because he was already traveling when the missive from King Tiernan arrived.” She pursed her lips at her older brother. “You nearly made her late.”

  “Me?” he demanded. “It’s your friend, not I, who goes out of her way to take in wounded boys like stray puppies.” He gestured at my bloody tunic with its ripped sleeve. I was quite a sight.

  “Oh?” Kadri asked, looking past me into the carriage.

  “We found someone hurt on the side of the road…but we left him at an inn and summoned a healer,” I said, absently picking his grimy blood from under a fingernail.

  “I’ll tell them you’ve arrived and see if they’re ready for you,” Rayed said, brushing past us.

  Kadri turned to a nearby attendant. “Sir, you may please take her baggage to my quarters. And perhaps her dog for some exercise?”

  “Still having trouble giving orders?” I asked, surrendering the leash.

  She laughed. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Some queen you’ll make.”

  “That’s part of why I’m living here instead of at the embassy. I’m learning.” Threading her arm around my waist, Kadri guided me inside the palace. Brandar pressed close behind, upholding the ruse that he could stifle my power.

  “How is Prince Fabian?” I asked, largely to distract myself from the gnarl of nerves in my belly. We traversed a corridor lined with aquamarine panels and marble statues cradling books and instruments. In Arna, our statues clasped weapons and wore elicrin stones.

  “He’s holding a birthday celebration on his ship. It’s moored in the bay.”

  “You didn’t want to join your betrothed for his birthday?”

  Kadri grimaced. “I can’t set foot on a ship. Even if I wanted to return home to Erdem, I couldn’t survive that sea voyage again.”

  “And Fabian isn’t required to attend Realm Alliance gatherings?”

  She scoffed. “Fabian can’t be required to do anything. It’s part of his charm.”

  We fell quiet as we approached a communal chamber, whose ranks of windows looked out on a vast balcony and, beyond, Beyrian Bay. Tiles of blue and bronze flecked the domed ceiling along with etchings of striking sea creatures. Tiered benches rose up from three sides of the central circular area of the room, where the floor held a mosaic rendering of a coiled sea serpent.

  Rayed waved us inside and gestured for the tablets, which I handed off with a measure of relief. We filed through the open doors to lingering stares and murmurs.

  “I’ll find you after,” Kadri whispered, gathering her midriff-bearing teal skirt to step up to the audience area.

  A guard led me to a cordoned-off bench, and Brandar settled next to me. As little as I enjoyed having a shadow, surely he enjoyed being one even less.

  The Realm Alliance representatives sat in the first row, forming a horseshoe curve around the center. These were kings, queens, generals, trade ministers, ambassadors from foreign countries, respected mortals. I followed the arc until I found King Tiernan, his phlegmatic expression securely installed. Neswick and the other Conclave members stared back at me, absorbed by my every move. I caught a glimpse of tawny hair and noticed Jovie sitting behind her father.

  “Welcome,” said Queen Jessa of Yorth, striding to the center of the chamber. “Thank you for answering the call in a time of crises and questions.” She waited for Erdemese and Perispi interpreters to finish relaying her words before she continued. “Thanks to the brave heroines and heroes who came before us, the looming supernatural threats of ages past have been extinguished. We can now share fruitful trade relationships—and friendships—with lands that once feared us. Magic, however, is still unpredictable in nature. That is why, as Nissera’s leaders, friends, and advisors, we have chosen to address the disappearance of the Water as a matter that touches the entire realm and our allies—not just elicromancers and the academy. I ask every Realm Alliance representative here to commit to responding in a way that reflects loyalty not to family, kingdom, or kind, but to the betterment and safety of all people in our sphere of influence.”

  Stares followed me like swirling flies I couldn’t swat away. Queen Jessa became a safe point of focus. The cinnamon braids wound around her head accentuated her kindly young features. She was an elicromancer at least five decades old by mortal years, but of course remained youthful in visage. Her husband was a mortal from Perispos whose years had begun to etch lines on his face and thread silver through his hair.

  “We summoned you here to discuss what tenets might need alterations now that the Water is gone,” Queen Jessa went on.

  My knuckles went white as I wrung my hands in my lap. It spared you and it killed her, I heard Ander say with cruel clarity. It should have spared her and killed you.

  “But another urgent matter has arisen. Masked thieves stole an artifact, a tablet, from a guarded vault in Darmeska weeks ago. Darmeskan leaders tell us the thieves are a part of a secretive spiritual order called the Summoners, who worship a so-called Lord of Elicromancers. The Summoners brought the tablet to Volarre so that Prince Devorian, an Omnilingual, could read the forgotten runes inscribed on it. Devorian believed the runes could awaken the dead, an act of unthinkable—and forbidden—dark magic.”

  As Queen Jessa recounted what Grandmum and Rayed had written her, I wished I could close my ears to the sound of my own name cropping up with incriminating frequency.

  “We must first and foremost attempt to learn the identities of the Summoners who delivered the stolen artifact to Devorian,” she said after she had explained our altercation. “Even Devorian did not know the meaning of the runes he read—therefore we can’t yet know the ramifications of reciting them. If the spell failed to raise his mother and father, what did it do? Who is the ‘Lord of Elicromancers’? Hopefully, the tablet itself can help lead us to some answers.”

  She beckoned Rayed, who passed the tablet halves to Neswick and Professor Strather. The two of them frowned with scholarly curiosity and traced their fingers over the markings before passing them on to the sharp-eyed elicromancer from my hearing.

  “Shouldn’t we first discipline Devorian and Valory?” interrupted a man with a honeyed tenor. I followed the voice and found Mathis Lorenthi, Devorian’s uncle, looking smug and boyishly handsome with golden hair tumbling in curls to his shoulders. “What sort of leadership would we demonstrate by coddling them like children? My nephew should be summoned to testify and speak for himself, like a man. He must face the consequences of breaking a tenet.”

  “I agree!” said Neswick with a thrust of his fist. “If we do not react to their defiance, we will set a dangerous precedent.”

  “We must remember that the last war in Nissera was waged by a single errant elicromancer,” Mathis added, raising a pompous finger to emphasize his point.

  My nostrils flared. Mathis was practically an usurper. His words dripped with selfish motivation. By forcing Devorian out of the shadows, Mathis would not only snatch the crown, he would reveal my darkest deeds.

  “We are facing a threat that could be far more dangerous than two heedless young people, one of whom was still a pupil at the academy barely a fortnight ago,” said the queen. Riding the wave of nods and affirmative murmurs, she continued, “So let us confront our greatest peril first. Valory, come forward and tell us what you learned about the Summoners from Devorian. Did he give any indication that he knew their identities? What led him to believe this incantation could raise the dead?”

  Banishing anger and fear from my expression, I found Kadri in the audience and received a cringe of sympathy. With my pulse throbbing in my ears, I made my way across the tiled sea serpent, stopping on the bronze scales of its belly. I looked up and drew some cal
m from the view of the infinite sea. Down to the east sprawled the port with its jagged rock formations, stone buildings, and dozens of ships bobbing in cerulean waters. I reluctantly turned my back on it to face the audience.

  But before I could speak, a voice cut clean across the open chamber. “Believe nothing she tells you!”

  From the highest tier of benches, Ambrosine snapped to her feet, her lovely features cold as a frostbitten rose. She wore a simple mulberry dress, more mundane than her typical attire, and clutched a handheld mirror to her breast. My heart beat nearly hard enough to bruise my chest.

  “The Summoners did contact Devorian,” she said as eyes around the room alighted on her. “And they did give him the tablet with the incantation. But he never planned to join their ritual. He knew the runes were dangerous and was attempting to learn their identities before reporting them to the Conclave.” She pointed her finger at me. “But Valory Braiosa was desperate. She extracted from her grandmother the truth that the spell on the tablet would bring about ‘an awakening’ of the dead. So Valory tried to use her power to force Devorian to speak the incantation. She planned to use it to resurrect Ivria and undo her greatest mistake.”

  The sickening accusation struck me like a stone to the temple. I grew dizzy, trying to comprehend her flagrant lies. But it all fit together, as simple as a child’s puzzle: Devorian and his sisters had never fallen out of touch. He had been using the mirror identical to Ambrosine’s, the one I’d found in his library, to communicate with them about the possibility of resurrecting their parents after the Summoners arrived. But they didn’t know how to enact the spell without inviting harsh consequences, losing their elicrin stones…until the sisters caught wind of what had happened at the Water. Almost immediately, they beckoned me to Pontaval, pleaded with me to speak to Devorian, and assured me he would listen out of mere curiosity. And then he had uttered the incantation for the first time in my presence. The siblings had conspired to raise their parents and use my reputation as a cover for violating a tenet. I had been lured into a trap and set up to take the blame for their use of a forbidden spell, an abominable one.

  “When Devorian resisted,” Ambrosine went on, descending the stairs, her voice wracked with poignant anger, “she unleashed her dark magic on him.”

  My knees began to quake as she turned the mirror’s face to the audience, exposing the creature my unbridled power had devised.

  The roar that ripped out of Devorian’s fanged, distended jaw erupted through the chamber. The audience released gasps of confusion and horror. Ambrosine tucked the glass back against her chest, whirling to face me with her lip curled in disgust. “Trouble follows Valory Braiosa wherever she goes.”

  “You liar,” I whispered. “You lured me there! You asked for my help.”

  “Why would we ask for your help?” she demanded, calculated, ruthless. “You can only warp and destroy.”

  Hearing her spit my own words back at me churned up a toxic potion of magic and rage that clawed to act of its own accord. I felt a crazed impulse to bring the ceiling down on this trickster, to smash her golden head with glee.

  Brandar sprang from his seat, coming between us. Extending his flat palm toward Ambrosine, he extinguished the light agitating in her blue elicrin stone. He turned to me, his normally expressionless eyes like points of spears. If I didn’t rein in my power, everyone would know that a Neutralizer could not stop me. Chaos would follow. The men who already wanted to imprison me might bring worse to the table.

  I tore my eyes away from Ambrosine and Brandar, finding aghast faces on all sides.

  “Calm down, both of you,” Queen Jessa said, her voice managing to break through the pounding in my head. “We will proceed in an orderly manner, allowing you both a chance to speak—”

  “You wanted me to stay quiet about the curse she cast on Devorian,” Ambrosine interrupted. “You’re protecting her.”

  “I wanted to contain a volatile situation long enough for us to understand what the spell accomplished and how we can stop the Summoners’ plans.” Queen Jessa’s even tone made Ambrosine’s sound overwrought in contrast, but unmistakable whispers of doubt surrounded us.

  “This raises broader questions of what Miss Braiosa might be capable of, Your Majesty,” Professor Strather said, eyeing me like a wolf that might rip out her throat on a whim. “I must be candid: it was unwise to keep this from us.” She gestured at Ambrosine, unable to find words to describe Devorian’s condition.

  “Where was the Neutralizer?” Neswick demanded. I felt more than saw the look Tiernan exchanged with his former personal guard.

  “I snuck out from my bedchamber in the night without his knowledge,” I said. “The princesses helped me escape from the balcony. I lost my temper with Devorian because I had tried and failed to stop him from saying the incantation. He broke a tenet in trying to raise the dead, and my reaction, I admit, was out of control—”

  “She forced him to do the spell!” Ambrosine’s protest tangled with other rising voices until each one became indistinguishable. Jessa tried and failed to reestablish order as the gathering of great and powerful minds collapsed into little more than a tavern brawl.

  In the midst of the chaos, I cast my gaze beyond the open chamber to the ocean and its patchwork of blue hues, imagining myself as nothing but a bit of driftwood washing away to oblivion.

  But I noticed a storm cloud agitating against the otherwise immaculate horizon. I approached the windows, squinting at the growing gray curtain and the rugged white seam skimming along it. Just as I realized it was not a cloud, the pandemonium behind me fell quiet. More people filed to the windows. Jovie Neswick nudged past me, bursting through the balcony doors to a stop at the balustrade, where she stared in awe.

  It was an enormous wave mounting, a faraway wall of roiling sea heading for shore.

  OOTS scuffled and squeaked as mortals absconded. Glend Neswick dashed onto the balcony to seize his daughter by the wrist and drag her toward safety, though she never tore her wide eyes from the impending disaster even as they fled. A few of the elicromancers materialized, including Ambrosine. The air sighed as they ghosted away.

  The remaining elicromancers hurried to form a cluster on the balcony. I couldn’t seem to flinch a muscle.

  Kadri rushed to my side at the window, catching my elbow for balance as she nearly smacked into the glass. “Fabian,” she breathed, beholding the busy port down below.

  “Sokek sinna!” King Tiernan shouted, opening his palms toward the shore. The spell shot forth a shimmering shield from his elicrin stone. “Acasar im doen.”

  The other elicromancers took up the chant, the stones in their medallions swirling with light. More shields bloomed. “Sokek sinna. Acasar im doen.”

  They attached to one another, forming a barrier that spread—but slowly, like tree sap. At this rate, their magic might protect the palace from the surge, but what about the port?

  “Our channels and seawalls aren’t built for a wave of this magnitude,” Queen Jessa yelled as the barrier continued to expand. Her son’s name silently took shape on her lips.

  “Fabian will materialize away from danger,” her husband assured her.

  “He won’t leave his friends!” she shouted. “He’ll go down with the ship before he abandons it.”

  Down in the bay, white sand climbed out of the water, depositing in dunes that formed a crescent around the vessels closest to the open sea.

  “It’s salt,” Kadri said. “Fabian is pulling salt out of the sea.”

  The prince often used his elicrin gift to extract salt from seawater, providing supplies of both the precious mineral and clean drinking water to his people. His gift was useful and his efforts valiant, but I doubted the salt dunes would break the wall of water bringing us certain doom.

  Kadri and her brother clasped hands, their identical mahogany eyes bright with both terror and resignation as the wave swelled and crashed closer, the din mounting from a distant exhale to a deafeni
ng bluster. The elicromancers’ barrier seeped along the coast, capturing the land’s edge in its desperate embrace, not quite reaching the port by the time the wave hung over us, blotting out the sunlight. My knees threatened to give way as I staggered back onto a bench and closed my eyes, listening to the thunder of water clashing against the magical blockade.

  The pounding seemed to last an age. When I opened my eyes again, every elicromancer trembled beneath the weight of the vengeful sea but stood strong, arms outstretched and palms open until finally the calamitous force abated and the water washed back toward the endless blue expanse.

  I stared aghast at the port, where the wave’s pulsing rage had engulfed Fabian’s salt dunes, capsizing boats and crushing docks.

  “No!” the queen cried out. The shield wavered as she materialized away. The other elicromancers collectively dropped their glimmering barrier and materialized down to the wreckage.

  Shock hung like morning fog, until King Basil moved across the room. “We’ll need every hand to help,” he proclaimed thickly, and those of us remaining who couldn’t materialize hurried after him.

  Kadri bunched her skirts and darted ahead of me into the corridor, nearly colliding with a group of green-clad guards hurrying in the same direction. As I pursued her, a sickening dread lingered. Was the lethal wave an unfortunate coincidence? Or, like the blood moon and the quake, was it a link in a chain of repercussions resulting from the mysterious spell?

  The memory of Devorian’s incantation murmured wildly amid my feverish thoughts.

  The scattered crowd passed through the east-facing gates and started across the bridge bending down toward the port. The settling water still thrashed against the seawall below. I caught up to Kadri and she clung to my arm while surveying the port wreckage from afar.

  Whole ships had turned to floating matchsticks in the bay. One merchant ship had been ravaged on the rocks, its broken belly exposed. I could see bodies: bodies in the water, bodies amid the wreckage of the docks and the spilled imported goods.