by Elise Kova
But the deeply ingrained stoicism of royalty won for them both.
They had shared words. They had been reunited. This moment felt different. This moment felt like the first time they were actually seeing each other, free from panic, fear, and worry.
Vi took a deep breath.
“It’s been a while. I’ve much to tell you.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“It started with a watch…” Vi began as they sat at the bow of the boat. The seas were blessedly smooth, the salt spray from the hull cutting through the ocean misting her legs as she hung them over the side between the railings. “This watch—or what’s left of it, to be specific.”
“I recognize it.”
“You do?”
Her father hummed softly. “Even charred and broken, I’d know it anywhere. After all, it was this watch that gave your mother her magic back.”
“Magic… back?” Vi repeated.
“Have we never told you that story?”
“I suppose not.” Vi had heard of rare cases where sorcerers lost their power through a process called eradication—diminishing magic to the point that it created a block in the channel. But she’d never heard of her mother going through it.
“When the Mad King rose up, he gravely injured your mother and, in the process, robbed her of her magic. There was a brief time when her command of the wind was gone.” Aldrik’s eyes drifted closed and he sighed, for a moment living in a time well before Vi’s birth. “We didn’t think she would ever regain her power. But it seemed she had made an unintentional vessel—that watch. It housed enough of her magic to reopen her channel.”
“Fritz said that Mother was reunited with her power when the world was darkest, thanks to this. But I didn’t know…” Vi turned the watch over and over in her hands. Magic has an odd way of finding us when we need it most. He couldn’t have known when he’d sent the watch how right he’d been. “It gave mother a connection to her power; it gave me a connection with mine,” she whispered, mostly to herself.
“Your magic, Vi…” Her father left the sentence hanging, clearly expecting her to fill in the blank.
“It’s not like yours, after all.” She looked back over the deck, toward the cabin. Her mind was an ocean of memory and Vi was sinking into its depths. “It’s like his.”
“His?” Her father turned, following her attention. “Ah… Taavin, you called him?”
“He’s a Lightspinner. Like me.” Her voice nearly quivered at the end. “I-I’m not a Firebearer.”
Aldrik was quiet, looking back out over the sea for a breath. Eventually he turned to her, tilted his head, and asked, “So?”
“My magic isn’t like yours, like grandmother’s, like anyone in the Ci’Dan line or anyone on the Dark Isle for that matter.”
“Just as Sehra predicted.”
Her parents had known, thanks to the traveler, that she would have unique magic. At first, Vi had hated the traveler and what she’d done to her life. But now, sitting next to her father—a father she had rescued thanks to that magic—Vi found her rage had quelled. Had it not been for the traveler, Aldrik would be dead.
“Speaking of family, does your mother know where you are?”
“I’m not sure.” Vi glanced at him, feeling as if she was about to be scolded. “I told Romulin. He may have mentioned something by now.”
Aldrik shook his head, letting out a chuckle. Had her father always looked so old? Sounded so tired? It seemed he’d aged ten years in the five it had been since she’d last seen him.
“My foolish daughter… You could’ve been killed, you know.” His face fell from the controlled mask of the Emperor into the raw emotion of a father.
“You could’ve been killed if I hadn’t come to rescue you,” Vi countered stubbornly.
“This streak of recklessness, you get it from your mother.” Despite his words, her father had a proud smile, as if he were silently taking credit for the fact.
She blurted out rough laughter. “Mother would say differently I think.”
“Exactly. She’s reckless and stubborn.” His eyes were glassy and tired. But still, no tears fell. This time it had nothing to do with the trappings of royalty, and everything to do with the fact that they were soaking in the relief of being finally, finally reunited.
“I know about her,” Vi confessed. “I know why you left.”
“You do?”
“Yes. And I want you to know that I’ll save her, just like I saved you.” Vi stared out at the sky. The bloody dawn had turned into a pastel blue with spots of white in the distance. Not a cloud of red lightning in sight.
But Vi could still feel Raspian out there. She could feel him in her blood now—in the weight of the broken watch around her neck. Taavin was right: Raspian’s power was growing day by day, perhaps in part because of her. She had been the one to first sail through the storm of red lightning, to inspect the tears in the Twilight Forest, to throw herself into one of those tears, and then to use his words…
It was possible her actions were giving him footholds in the world. Vi’s jaw tightened. It didn’t matter; she’d be the one to undo him.
“Vi,” her father said painfully soft, “Sometimes, you can’t save everyone.”
Vi jerked her head toward him.
Aldrik Solaris had always been an imposing figure. Dark hair, taller than most. He wasn’t particularly broad, but he could command a room with little more than his presence and a look. Vi loved her father dearly, but he could be frightening to a young girl, especially when she’d done wrong. She had always seen him as an insurmountable force of nature.
But right now he looked like a tired old man.
“I will save our family,” she vowed. “First our family, then the world.” She’d saved him from the clutches of Adela; the rest suddenly seemed manageable.
“How did you even know to save me?” Her father shifted, bringing up a knee and resting his forearm on it. The skin of his shin was exposed through a long rip in his clothes. Everything he wore was in tatters—a shadow of former Imperial glory.
“I had a vision of the future, specifically of you on the Isle of Frost.”
“So you can see the future?” Vi made a noise of affirmation. “You share that much with your grandmother—my mother—then.”
“I thought so but… It’s a different sort of sight.” Vi tucked her head, running a hand through her hair with a sigh.
His father tapped her chin. “Do you not peer along the lines set out by the goddess?”
“I think so but—”
“Do you look into flames?”
“Well, yes, but that may just be because I—”
“Daughter, you are of her blood, as you are of mine, as you are of your mother’s. You don’t need proof in magic or tokens. You don’t need the world to validate it. It’s here.” He tapped her breastbone under her collarbone and above her heart. “It’s in the woman who’s sailed across the world and risked her life to reunite that family.”
Vi hung her head now. She would not allow the world to see the few stray tears fall. Her father’s arms wrapped tightly around her for a long moment, his chin on the top of her head. As if he understood, as if he knew that for one long minute she needed to hide from the world and give in to the overwhelming emotions before she drowned in them.
She straightened, finally, rubbing her face when her tears would no longer betray her.
“But this talk of saving the world,” her father finally continued. “You’ve risked enough, Vi. Come home.”
“Father… I can’t,” she protested weakly. It was a tempting prospect, even before he elaborated.
“You can. You are the crown princess of the Solaris Empire. Your home is on the Main Continent.”
Vi sniffed as a bitter smile crossed her lips. Her father still called it the Main Continent, and she had long since begun to refer to it as the Dark Isle. Vi could argue it was because that was how those on Meru knew it. But it was more than that
.
She had called it the Dark Isle more because that was how she saw it. Her worldview had changed, and Vi didn’t know what it would take for it to change back… if it ever would.
“You’ve done your share, return home,” he repeated.
“What about mother?”
“You’ve been on the Crescent Continent longer than I. Do they have a cure?” Vi shook her head. “Then them summoning me to discuss a cure was a lie.” Vi glanced at her father, filing that information away. Who had summoned him? Ulvarth, or the queen? Had Taavin known? Her heart protested against that last question. “Let’s go home.”
“But mother…”
“Your mother is strong. The strongest woman I have ever met.” Nothing short of wonder, admiration, and love filled his voice. Vi watched as her father gazed out to sea, his brow softening. Only to nearly choke on his next words. “But I have been away from her long enough, and if ill is to befall her, I should be by her side, as she would seek to be by mine.”
“But I can save her,” Vi reiterated, stressing each word.
“How? Daughter, I believe you can move mountains. But I need your help filling in the blanks of how you believe so adamantly that you can accomplish something the most skilled clerics and sorcerers on the Main or Crescent Continents have not.”
“Have you ever heard of the Champion of Yargen?”
“I can’t say I have.”
Vi chewed on her lower lip a moment, trying to figure out her next words. She knew of the rise of the Mad King and the fall of the Crystal Caverns. It would be an understandably trying topic for her father. How could she broach it all without sounding as though she blamed him? She didn’t, of course. No one knew what the Crystal Caverns really were and it was not his fault they had been opened.
“Long ago, Yargen—we know her as the Mother, and Raspian—we know him as the Father, were at war.”
“At war?”
“Yes, well, the Crones of the Sun got their stories a little twisted at some point in history. They’re not lovers; they’re sworn enemies. Anyway, when the war was over, Yargen won and sealed Raspian away. That seal was broken, and he’s back now. He’s behind the White Death.”
“If you stop him, or seal him away again, the White Death goes away too?” Vi gave a nod. That was the same logic she had used—the same thought she’d hung all her hopes on these past months. “But how can you accomplish such a task?”
“Well…” Vi picked at the hem of her tattered, sun-bleached shirt. “Because I am Yargen’s new Champion.”
“You?”
“Yes, and because—hold on.”
Vi scrambled to her feet. She had to prove to him she wasn’t talking madness. Heart pounding against her chest, Vi sprinted over to the cabin, quietly leaned in so as not to disturb Taavin’s slumber, and grabbed the scythe. She returned, sitting back down and setting it between them. Her father regarded the bundle warily and Vi took a deep breath.
“I think—know—I can defeat him because I am Yargen’s Champion. Taavin is her Voice; he can hear her words and knows how to get to the flame of Yargen in Risen. That’s the other piece of Yargen’s power.” Vi knew she was talking too fast, but couldn’t slow down. She was working up to this moment and her words were in a race with her heart. “And because I have this.”
Vi undid the straps wrapped around the scythe, pulling back the fabric covering it. Even in the bright, early morning light, it sparkled and shone with a magic that filled her with delight and hope.
At least it did until her father scrambled backward, looking on in horror.
“Throw it overboard,” he demanded.
“Father—”
“That, Vi, is not the solution. That is the problem.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I know what this is,” Vi insisted.
“You clearly do not.” Aldrik reached forward, hesitated with his hand hovering above the pole of the scythe, then made up his mind. He grasped it, but not before Vi gripped it with both her hands on either side of his. She held on firmly as he tried to wrench it away and make good on his demand to throw it overboard. “If you knew what this was, you would not be holding it in the first place. Now let it go, Vi.”
She knew that tone. It was the same tone that would have had her shaking as a child. But she wasn’t a child any longer.
“No. You need to listen to me, Father.”
“Vi—”
“Listen, please,” Vi pleaded. But she knew that alone wouldn’t be what got through to him. Vi knew she had to prove she wasn’t the reckless child he thought she was. “I know this is a crystal weapon and I know their history. I know Mother found a crystal weapon that led to the rise of the Mad King and the destruction of the crystal caverns.”
“Do you know it was that same crystal weapon that stole her powers?” Aldrik’s voice lowered, becoming sterner by the moment.
“What?” Vi breathed.
“Do you know it was a crystal weapon that also began the War of the Crystal Caverns before the Mad King?”
She didn’t. Her father was pointing out dangerous gaps in her knowledge left and right. “No,” Vi said calmly, leveling her eyes with her father’s. “I don’t know those things, though I would like to. What I do know is that the Crystal Caverns are gone. All the other Crystal Weapons—fragments of Yargen’s power—are gone with it. And this may be the last thing we have to stand against an evil god trying to destroy this world as we know it.”
They engaged in a staring contest. Vi didn’t back down. Her father sighed heavily, releasing the scythe and staggering away as though it had wounded him.
“Neither of us should be touching it…” he murmured, running a hand through his dark, limp hair. “You may have gotten recklessness and stubbornness from your mother, but damn if I didn’t pass along that fire in your belly.”
Vi felt somewhat proud. Continuing her efforts to calm the situation, she acquiesced to his request, slowly laying down the scythe.
“I think I’m able to touch it without issue since I have Yargen’s magic—I’ve felt normal handling it for some time now. But you’re likely right in that you should limit your contact.” Vi didn’t know if the scythe could taint him in the way the crystals of the Crystal Caverns were said to have tainted men who had come in contact with them. The scythe had been removed from the Dark Isle so early, perhaps it had escaped the slow weakening of the barriers holding back Raspian and the affects of his powers on the crystal.
It was a plausible theory. But to test it, Vi would have to risk the crystals twisting her father into a monster. So she wasn’t about to find out if she was right or not.
Aldrik settled back into his earlier seat. Vi glanced at Arwin over her shoulder, but whatever thoughts the woman had about the outburst, she was keeping them to herself. Luckily, Taavin hadn’t seen Aldrik nearly throwing their one crystal weapon overboard. She didn’t want him to have a negative impression of her father.
“Vi, nothing good comes of a Solaris touching a crystal weapon.”
“Father, I—”
“It was a crystal weapon that sparked a whole new thirst for conquest in my father.”
“How?”
“Our family has a dark history tied to these. One we cannot seem to escape.” Her father stared at the scythe as though it had hypnotized him. “Your great grandfather held one in his vaults—a crown stolen by Adela that was later recovered by my brother.”
“Uncle Baldair fought Adela?” Vi had heard stories of Baldair’s prowess with the sword. Still, she couldn’t imagine anyone without magic standing against Adela.
“No. I found out much later he discovered it in an old pirate hideaway one summer at Oparium.” Aldrik sighed heavily. Talk of his late brother always cast a cloud over him. Usually, Vi would change the subject. But this was the first time she couldn’t afford to spare her father from these thoughts; she needed the truth. “But it was brought back, and my father eventually learned of that crown. He th
ought he could use it to someday conquer the Crescent Continent…”
“Grandfather was born with a taste for conquest,” Vi tried to say as delicately as possible.
“It was a crystal weapon that led to my mother’s death.”
“What?” Vi had to open and close her mouth several times before she finally found words. “She died in childbirth.”
“So the official story goes. But it was really because she was the last head of the Knights of Jadar.”
“The extremist group?”
“They weren’t always so.” She’d been taught as much. But it was still odd to hear. “My mother as the head of the knights was said to have been in possession of their sacred relic—the Sword of Jadar, which was—”
“A crystal weapon,” Vi finished with a whisper. “And then mother found the axe.” Sword, axe, crown, scythe. They were all accounted for. And all of them had passed through her family’s hands.
“Fiera was ultimately killed by men who sought to unleash the powers of the caverns. She died protecting that sword.”
“Was the sword destroyed in the rise and fall of the Mad King as well?” Vi asked delicately. Her hushed tones had little to do with Arwin. Her father’s eyes seemed more sunken and haunted with every word, despite his voice remaining level. These were old wounds, yet they still oozed.
“No, it was destroyed when I used it to kill a man. And with that act, I began the War of the Crystal Caverns.”
“You…” Vi placed a hand on the deck, leaning, trying to catch her father’s eyes. But he avoided her gaze at every turn. “Father, you—”
“It’s the truth, Vi,” he spoke firmly, leaving no room for doubt. “I was taken to the caverns. I was misled. But that is no excuse. It was my hand and my actions that led to the death and suffering of our people—that helped pave the way for your mother to be used as a tool and nearly die in search of that same power. Now you—” Aldrik reached upward, grabbing her shoulders, shaking her gently “—you wield one as well. And I will not see you suffer the same fate. These weapons attract lies as easily as foolish, power-hungry men.”