by Elise Kova
“Are you wondering why I summoned you?”
“I honestly find it quite clear.” Vi stepped beside the woman, looking out into the expansive archways and paths of the fortress before them. “You showed me kindness, allowing me to leave. And when you did, I abused it, going farther than I should have. In the process, I endangered your daughter.”
“You went farther than you were supposed to?” Sehra interrupted her list of transgressions with a look of genuine surprise.
“I figured Ellene would’ve told you.” Vi cursed her luck. The girl used to tell her mother everything. But it seemed, with age, she was learning how to keep a secret.
“I expected it, as did Jax.”
“Yes, well…” Vi tried to find her previous thought. “Even still, I endangered Ellene and Jayme with my outburst. I should have stayed here, and trained more after being so recently Awoken.”
Sehra looked straight ahead, out over the treetops of the fortress. She was rigid, regal, everything Vi hoped she could be someday; she had a long way to go.
“I am not going to punish you.”
“I may be the Crown Princess, but I should not be above punishment.” She didn’t particularly enjoy reprimands. But getting off, free and clear, felt wrong.
“There’s no time now for punishments,” Sehra said ominously. “We have too much work to do, you and I.”
“Work?” Vi repeated, glancing from the corners of her eyes at the woman. She had yet to move. She was hardly even breathing.
“Yes, I was waiting for today to begin. I was waiting to be certain, beyond all doubt, for the knowledge I will impart to you has never been heard by ears outside my lineage.” Vi had no idea what Sehra was talking about. “Why do you think it is that you have struggled so much with your flames?”
“I… I don’t know. Everyone always said I was a late bloomer, like my mother. But I have Awoken. And managed to find control in the jungle. My magic…”
The man in the cavern flashed through her mind, his glowing emerald eyes, the singular word he’d uttered. Something had changed with that man, that word. What had he done to her? What was that word that had echoed in her the next time her magic was unleashed?
“And?” Sehra pressed, reminding Vi she had stopped talking.
“And I think I have a better understanding of my magic. I think Uncle Jax will be able to teach me now and—”
“Jax can teach you nothing.”
“What?” Vi turned to face the Chieftain, anger bringing her spark to the surface faster than talking about it had.
“He will teach you as a Firebearer.”
“That’s—”
“That is not what you are. You are not a Firebearer, Vi. Not at your core. Certainly, you are able to create and manipulate flames, but this is a manifestation of your expectations for your own magic and the expectations of those around you.
“Like nature versus nurture. You have been nurtured by Firebearers, so you and everyone else believes that is what you are. But that is not your nature. That is not your magic.”
“I’m certainly not a sorcerer of any of the other affinities.” Something about this conversation felt like being backed against a cliff ledge, knowing she was about to be pushed over. Everything was about to change.
“No, you’re not. You are like me, like Ellene. You can control an element, but it is merely a fraction of your true power.”
“What?” Vi whispered. She knew what Sehra was alluding to before she said it, but it didn’t make sense. It was so jarring that her brain only interpreted the logical conclusion as confusion. Even when Sehra said the words, they sounded like a lie.
“You, Vi Solaris, are a Child of Yargen.”
Chapter Eleven
A Child of Yargen, like Ellene and Sehra. One who could harness a strange and mysterious power. A power very few possessed—a gift rarer even than Windwalkers like Vi’s mother. But there was just one problem with Sehra’s claim…
“All of the Children of Yargen are in your lineage.” Vi shook her head. “Ellene is like a sister to me, but I don’t think that’s close enough to count.”
“Perhaps it is.” Sehra shrugged, an action that seemed far too light-hearted for the seriousness of her words. “We know that while certain lineages have similar magic, magic is not in the blood. Two commons can give birth to a sorcerer. Why not two who have no relationship to Yargen giving birth to a Child of Yargen?”
“Because it’s never happened,” Vi challenged. It was bold. Sehra certainly knew the history of her land and people far better than Vi did. But Vi knew this much. She’d talked with Ellene about it to the point of circles countless times before. All swirling around questions like, why didn’t the Tower of Sorcerers in the South recognize the magic of Yargen? Or, what really was the magic of Yargen?
“You are a special case,” Sehra agreed, as though such a simple explanation could put her concerns to rest. “But we always knew you would be. We planned for this.”
“We?” Vi repeated. “Who’s ‘we’?”
Sehra began to walk over to the far side of the room. “Your mother, father, and me.”
Everything went from not making sense to being downright impossible. “Let’s say I believe you, that I’m a Child of Yargen—which is an incredible amount to believe at face value, just as an aside. How would my mother know? Or my father? Or you? Why keep this information from me all this time?”
Sehra paused, looking back. Conflict was written over her face at what her next words should be. She placed a palm on the wall before her, and the wood folded like an accordion, revealing a small sunlit study Vi had never seen before and certainly had never known was there.
“Perhaps it would be best if I started at the beginning… Come.”
Vi didn’t want to. She wanted to stand and demand answers, order them as the Crown Princess if that’s what it took. Yet she couldn’t seem to find words. Her arms hung limply at her sides and her spark seemed dull and quiet, even without her forcing it to calm.
Her parents had known?
Was this insane belief what had kept her trapped in the North for so long? That question alone, the need for the truth, was ultimately what drove her to follow Sehra.
The study was narrow, similar to Vi’s own, wrapping around the circumference of the tree. Windows, no bigger than archer’s slits, let in the midday sun through a lattice of woodwork. It reflected off bookcases filled with scrolls and manuscripts alike. It sparked off motes of dust, as though magic filled the air itself.
“When I was a girl, younger than you, even, I was engaged to be wed to your father…”
Vi knew the story. Shaldan was the last nation to fall to the Empire’s armies, becoming the Solaris Empire’s “North.” Vi’s grandfather, the late Emperor Tiberius Solaris, sought to tie subservience with blood and engaged her father—Aldrik—to Sehra. But when the Mad King Victor murdered the Emperor and stole power, the engagement was called off. In its place was the wardship Vi had lived for the past seventeen years.
“… it was just before the uprising of the Mad King. When the last Emperor Solaris was still alive and I was engaged,” Sehra continued the story, nearing the end, “I was visited by a traveler.
“She possessed the magic of Yargen, unequivocally, and knew the words of the Goddess, drawing the future from them. She told me of the Emperor’s impending downfall, the violation of the caverns, and the rise of the Mad King. She also told me that Vhalla Yarl must wed Aldrik Solaris, for they would give birth to two children. One would bear his forefather’s position in the capital of the Empire. But the other, the first to be born, would be a girl, a Child of Yargen—a daughter imperative for the future of our world.”
This was insane.
It was more than insane.
“She… This visitor… you said she could see the future? She was a Firebearer?” Vi swallowed, staying focused even as dizziness spun the room.
“No. I saw in her the power of Yargen and it was
a magic that was far beyond even mine. She used it to tap into Yargen’s plan for us all.” Sehra motioned to two small chairs seated on either side of a circular table at the end of the bookshelves in the far back of the room. “Sit, you look weak in the knees.”
“No,” Vi whispered. “I—I don’t want to move until I know the truth.”
“Which is what I’m telling you.”
That was not the truth she wanted to know. They were not the words Vi wanted to hear. The truth she was after was far more personal than prophecies or mysterious visitors.
“Is this why I have been kept in the North all this time? I was supposed to go home at fourteen. All those times it wasn’t the logistics of travel, the timing being wrong, or the plague. It was stalling because of something a traveler said to you?”
Sehra paused, shifting slightly to face Vi directly. She didn’t back away or hesitate. It would be admirable, if her words didn’t suddenly feel like they carried the weight of Vi’s collapsing world.
“Yes.”
She couldn’t breathe. The air in the room was gone. It was only the spark in her lungs, rattling around them. She would spit fire if she wasn’t careful.
“I was trapped here for seventeen years because of what some woman said?” Her voice was rising with her anger.
“She was not just ‘some woman,’ she was a Child of—”
“I don’t give a damn what she was!” Vi seethed. The thin veneer of royal decorum had cracked and fallen away. All that was left was a frustrated, utterly unapologetic, and extremely tired young woman standing among its pieces. Meanwhile, Sehra calmly folded her hands before her, unflinching, taking Vi’s searing verbal blows. “She—I could’ve had a life with my family. I could’ve known my brother. I would’ve had a home rather than being the Empire’s latest territory to lay claim to!
“I am too Northern to be Southern. I am too Southern to be Northern. Eastern to be Western. Western to be Eastern. I belong nowhere, and to no one, and it’s all because of some stupid magic and the words of one person—whose name you don’t even know.” Vi guessed on that last point, and assumed she was right when Sehra didn’t correct her.
Sehra’s eyes narrowed slightly. Her voice was still calm, level. “Heavy is your burden, isn’t it, your highness?”
Vi stilled. The rigidness in her spine relaxed and every vertebra rattled until she slumped. She gripped the bookshelf for support and left black singe marks in the shape of her fingerprints.
She pressed her eyes closed, stopping the burning there so the books didn’t catch. Even emotional, she managed some form of control. Her spark was burning her once again. But this time it was slow. She would die raked over coals rather than in a blazing inferno. She would keep it wound tightly in the spool that was her channel.
“You belong nowhere, because you belong to the goddess herself. You are her chosen child, more than even I or Ellene, as you were hand-picked outside her lineage.”
“I don’t want this.” Vi opened her eyes narrowly, looking up at Sehra through her top lashes. The woman still hadn’t moved.
“No child chooses the circumstances of their birth. Rich parents, poor parents, high and low. We are all handed the starting point. What you make of every step thereafter is what defines your life.” The woman’s eyes were as hard as the green stone they mirrored. “What do you choose, Vi Solaris?”
Vi pushed away from the bookcase, swaying slightly, and forced the jelly from her knees by tensing her muscles. The leg wounded by the Noru attack still ached, but the pain was a welcome momentary distraction. She took a deep breath, trying to find a corner of her mind that was cool and collected for her to curl up in. She wished she could throw her whole body into the void right now.
“You said my parents know this?”
“They do. They knew they could not teach you on their own. I am the only woman on this continent who knows anything about the power of Yargen, and it is my destiny to teach you.”
Betrayal was dripping from her pores. Even when the logical side of Vi’s mind tried to rationalize through it, all she could think was that thanks to some stupid traveler, she had been trapped away from her family—away from the place that should’ve been her home—for her whole life.
“I want…” Vi’s shoulders sagged. She turned her head up toward the ceiling to keep the moisture welling on her bottom lids contained.
She didn’t even know why she was crying. Perhaps it was the fact that the veil of the unknown had finally been ripped off. Or perhaps it was the agony of knowing what could’ve been if it were not for some woman. If Vi should ever meet that traveler, then she too would know the full extent of Vi’s agony.
“I want to handle this with grace, Chieftain. I want to remain poised and listen. But how can I? How am I supposed to trust you after you’ve kept this impossible secret from me?”
“Because it was impossible,” Sehra said simply when Vi’s eyes fell back to her. “When I saw the flames today—white, not orange—saw how they rippled outward like strands of Yargen’s pure light—when I felt them... I was given my proof and I knew that the time had finally come.” Vi remembered how the magic had been spinning out from her skin like burning threads. “And you saw the light too, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what I saw.” It was a lie and Vi knew it. But she didn’t want to admit to this impossible truth.
“Yet the fact remains that you saw enough for what I am saying to seem believable to you. Before today, if I had told you I had met a traveler who foretold your birth—you, a Child of Yargen, despite one never being born outside of my lineage—and it was my destiny from the goddess herself to teach that child… would you have believed me?”
“I hardly believe you now,” Vi muttered. Then, she let out a heavy sigh. What was the point of continuing to fight this? “You truly believe it’s your destiny to teach me the magic of Yargen?” Sehra nodded. “So much that you gave up your engagement to my father, the potential to sit as the Empress?”
“Having an heir to the throne sympathetic to my people from growing up in my care was a fringe benefit,” Sehra remarked almost a little too coolly.
“You have to understand, this is all very hard to believe.”
“And you must understand that, thanks to the endless impatience of the Senate and your delay in Awakening, we have less time than I would’ve wanted for the actual teaching, so I cannot afford you the luxury of processing this slowly. Your mother and I could only stall them for so long. That was the one thing the traveler got wrong; you were supposed to show signs of this magic much younger.”
“Why not just teach me earlier?”
“As I said, and as you already know, because this knowledge is sacred. Ellene won’t even learn it for a few years yet—when she is mature enough to handle it. You shall be the first outside my family to know it. I had to be sure.” One thing was becoming painfully clear. Sehra had never done anything she didn’t want to. Vi had always thought her engagement to Aldrik at thirteen had been cruel. Now, she wouldn’t be surprised if Sehra was the one to have suggested it.
“Will you truly let me go in the spring?”
“Only if I have fulfilled the destiny set out for me by Yargen. Only if I have fulfilled the promise to your mother and taught you what she entrusted you to me to learn.”
Vi took a deep breath through her nose, letting her eyes flutter closed, and exhaled through her mouth. She didn’t want to hear one more mention of her parents from Sehra’s lips. Every word she spoke of them made Vi’s stomach churn and the last thing she wanted was tension from the first moment her mother arrived in the North.
If learning this magic was what it took to return home smoothly—for Sehra to let her go, for her powers to remain under control, for her parents to be pleased, then Vi would do it.
“All right then, where do we begin?”
Chapter Twelve
“Would you care to sit first?” Sehra asked, motioning to the chair once more.
>
“Very well.” Vi finally acquiesced, crossing over and sinking into the plush chair. She rested her elbows on the armrests, watching Sehra as she went to skim the shelves, her many braids swaying back and forth between her shoulders. The gold beads woven throughout clinked together softly.
“First, you must learn about the world. Nothing will make sense about the power of Yargen until you do.” Sehra pulled a heavy tome from the shelf, set it on the table between them, and then started back to the shelves to retrieve something else.
Despite Vi’s outbursts, the Chieftain’s demeanor hadn’t changed. Vi had always thought Sehra was fond of her, given her calm and congenial nature around her. Now, after endangering Ellene, after all but yelling at her, Vi was beginning to think that Sehra’s tranquility was merely the woman’s fundamental nature. It was as though a veil was being lifted from her eyes and she was seeing the world as it truly had been all along.
She wondered if Sehra had ever felt any genuine fondness for her.
Likely not, Vi decided, still bitter. She was a means to an end for Sehra—whether that meant fulfilling her supposed destiny or seeing a sympathetic ruler sit the throne. Vi suspected that even her hunts were somehow a ploy for her to find her magic. For all she knew, Sehra’s traveler and the mysterious dark purple-haired man were in cahoots.
“I know a fair bit about the world,” Vi forced her voice to stay level. She would have no more outbursts. She couldn’t afford them. She was not a child and she needed her full mental faculties to think through her new situation logically.
“You do have an understanding of this world—our small corner of it.” Sehra walked back over with a dusty scroll in hand. “Which, as you’ll see, is quite different from the world.”
“What’re you—” Vi was cut short as she unrolled the scroll before her. “What is this?” she whispered.
“Aires. The world, as it’s known beyond our lands.”
Even her maps would betray her today, it seemed.