Ignite the Sun

by Hanna Howard

  “Thank you!” he said, tossing it back to her as he pulled me into the dark street outside.

  The air hit me in a blast, far colder than it had been when I’d arrived in Umbraz. Gasping, I hugged my cloak tight and trotted after him. Shouting rose above the ordinary bustle of the city as somewhere nearby the chaos in the castle began to spill into the cobbled streets.

  “Linden, I don’t—”

  A clatter of wheels and hooves drowned out my voice. A black, one-horse brougham careened around a bend in the road toward us, a man in city clothes on the driver’s bench. I flinched back, but Linden jumped toward it. “Come on!”

  The driver jerked so sharply on the reins that the horse nearly stumbled. The carriage skidded to a halt, and someone inside flung open the door. Linden and I clambered into a plush, candlelit cabin where two other people were already seated: Yarrow, looking drawn and tense in his usual rough tunic and trousers, and a woman with stringy brown hair and enormous aqua-blue eyes, wearing a bizarre patchwork dress composed of what appeared to be strips of seaweed.

  It was unmistakably the naiad servant from Gildenbrook. The one who hated me.

  “You?” I gasped, but Yarrow held up a hand for silence, his gray, lined face distant with concentration as the carriage jerked and rumbled forward again. He muttered something, and my eyes caught on the oblong, flattish disc in the palm of his hand, a single rune carved into its center, glowing all over with silver light.

  A Runepiece.

  The traditional weapon of the mages.

  8

  CHAPTER

  Blackness crowded the edges of my vision. Before I knew what I was doing, I was fumbling with the latch on the carriage door, trying to get out. Someone hauled me back, prying my fingers loose, and I shrieked with terror, flinging out my elbows and lurching for the window instead. I heard Linden grunt as my elbow connected with his chest, but his arms were unyielding as they pulled me down again.

  Everything, everyone I knew and trusted and loved. A lie.

  I sagged onto the seat in listless despair. Where could I go? The whole of Umbraz would be searching for me now, to help Queen Iyzabel kill me. Even my own parents.

  Maybe I deserved it.

  “Siria, look at me.”

  Yarrow’s voice. Something in his composure faltered as I met his eyes, and for a fleeting moment I saw such a range of emotions on his weathered old face that I almost expected him to start crying. My impulse was to trust him, to throw myself into his familiar care and protection, but rationality told me I couldn’t; that as a mage, he was the most dangerous person I had ever met. Not to mention a liar.

  “It’s still me,” he said, as though reading my mind. Maybe mages could read minds. “I haven’t changed. We wanted to tell you last night, but they came for you early. I should have expected something like that, but we were so focused on how to get you away from Gildenbrook that I didn’t stop to think about what she’d be planning.”

  I stared at him for a long, incredulous moment. “Last night?” I gave a wild laugh. “I’ve known you a decade! And you’ve been a mage the entire time?” I looked at Linden, sitting across from me. “And you, a wood nymph?”

  They both started to answer, but I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head to silence them. Furious though I was at their deception, my anger was like a mild windstorm in the face of a rising hurricane.

  Slowly, carefully, I lifted one dappled arm and held it, trembling, before Yarrow’s bespectacled face. In the dim carriage lamplight, the brown dots were less pronounced than before, but still quite visible.

  “What is this?” I said in a low voice.

  He was silent a long moment, during which the clacking of the carriage wheels grew louder. Then he said quietly, “What do you think it is?”

  I made a jerky gesture. “A disease? The pox? Some freakish enchantment?”

  “It’s not a disease,” he said, still in that quiet voice. “You might call it an enchantment, but no one cast it.”

  Dread was spinning up a maelstrom inside me, throwing around words I had heard in the ballroom: transformation, birthright, sunchild. Deep down, I knew the truth already—had, perhaps, known it since I fell to my knees on that platform—but I’d be damned if I accepted it without a fight.

  “Fix me,” I said. “If you’re a mage, use your thrice-blighted magic to fix me.”

  A sad, twisted smile lifted his leathery cheek. “There’s nothing to fix, my girl. This is who you are. Who you’ve always been.”

  I winced at the way his words echoed what he’d just said about himself. “Stop it. Those monsters are extinct. I am not one of them.”

  But Yarrow was shaking his head. He wore a look of mingled doom and determination. “We’ve suspected, Linden and Merrall and I. Suspected for many years. Your hair and age were why we came to you, of course, but then your features, your natural fear of the dark, your obsession with the sun . . . We didn’t know, however—couldn’t know—for certain until today. And now, Siria, I’m afraid there is no doubting exactly who and what you are.”

  My head throbbed like someone was knocking on the inside of my skull. Would the betrayal never end?

  “You knew this would happen?”

  “Suspected,” Linden murmured.

  I rounded on him. “And you just packed that away with all your other secrets, did you? Just decided it was better for simple little Siria not to know, because why should she have the truth about anyone, including herself?”

  “No, Siria, that’s not—”

  “What else have you lied about?” I yelled, interrupting him. “Have you ever told me a single true thing?”

  Linden’s face was a study in devastation; but before he could reply, the naiad sitting beside him, who I had all but forgotten, slid forward on the carriage seat, seized my chin in firm, spindly fingers, and jerked my face around.

  “It is time for you to get over yourself, Princess,” she said, her throaty voice thick with an Elderling accent. “You are a spoiled brat, and these two men have put their lives at great risk on your account. I suggest you stop whining and start trying to earn the unmerited titles you bear.”

  She released me with a look of contempt, and I fell back into my seat, stunned. Yarrow and Linden had both half risen from their seats, but now sank slowly down again, looking tense.

  “Siria, I haven’t introduced you to Merrall yet,” said Yarrow awkwardly. “Though I believe you’ve met at Gildenbrook. She’s a naiad from the Elder Bay, and she’s been watching out for you these last years, ready to act should any unforeseen situation present itself.”

  “Such as this one,” said the naiad in an acid voice.

  A long and profound silence stretched out between us all, while the noise on the streets grew louder, screams mixing with the general uproar. The carriage swayed as it picked up speed.

  After what felt like a long time, Linden said, very quietly, “Without knowing who you were, the truth about us would only have endangered you. But we did try to tell you.”

  I looked up at him, still angry, but also embarrassed and slightly ashamed of myself. Stronger than all these emotions, though, and growing so powerful I knew it would soon eclipse them, was my horror at the increasingly undeniable truth of what I was.

  “Many times, over the years,” said Yarrow.

  “But we couldn’t,” Linden said, earnest and irritatingly handsome in a fashionable black suit that contrasted with his wild hair and stubbly jawline. “Literally couldn’t tell you.”

  I had vague recollections of moments in the past when Yarrow or Linden would seem to choke on their words, or physically struggle to speak. I looked between them with dawning comprehension. “You mean you actually couldn’t tell me?”

  “Iyzabel cursed the knowledge sometime around your fifth birthday. Until today, it’s been physically impossible to communicate to anyone that they’re a sunchild.”

  I closed my eyes at the word. It was the first time anyone had spo
ken it since I entered the carriage. Almost against my will, I heard myself asking the question I most dreaded the answer to: “How can you be sure that’s what I am?”

  Something small and heavy landed in my lap, and my eyes flew open. Merrall was sitting back in her seat, and I realized she had tossed an ivory-handled mirror face-down onto the turquoise silk of my skirt.

  I gazed for a moment into her pitiless face, and then, fingers trembling, grasped the handle and lifted the mirror.

  9

  CHAPTER

  At first, I could only gape from the face in the glass to the hands gripping its ivory frame, because I recognized neither as my own.

  My translucent, light-starved skin had transformed. Like my arms, my face was now a ruddy sand color, and covered almost entirely in the same tiny brown dots, as though someone had stippled every inch of my skin with a miniscule paintbrush. Some of the dots were dark as tree bark, some light as toffee, some like pinpricks and some like ink blots, but they were everywhere: a few even dusted my lips and eyelids. My eyes, so recently an ordinary hazel, had become vivid and strange, mingling sea green with burnished bronze and seeming to burn in the lamplight.

  But that wasn’t all.

  If my auburn hair had been unusual against the brown and black shades of my classmates, it was nothing to what it had become. I now understood why the intricate coiffure had not held. My long, straight locks had metamorphosed into flickering waves that spiraled tightly in some places and fell loose in others, all mingling a thousand shades of red, copper, and gold, and giving the impression that the strands were on fire. I had never seen anything so vivid.

  I raised a shaking hand and watched it make contact with the wild strands: they felt soft, and also slightly coarse. My parents had always lamented my hair, so different from their own. I remembered my mother’s face in the ballroom, twisted with horror at the sight of me.

  Was this why?

  Hair like fire. Skin like a leopard. Childhood fairy tale and adolescent nightmare come to life.

  Sunchild.

  I replaced the mirror in my lap and swallowed the rising mound in my throat.

  “You’re not a monster, Siria,” said Linden quietly, and I squeezed my eyes shut again. “And neither am I. The things you learned about magic at Gildenbrook are distortions of the truth, not reality.”

  “And those dots are called freckles,” said Yarrow. “Caused by the sun.”

  The sun. I almost wanted to laugh. But I knew if I did, I would cry, and then I would probably never be able to stop. I had freckles from a sun I had never even seen, and my parents wanted me dead. Because . . . because I was a sunchild?

  All the fight drained out of me. “The Light was dangerous and destructive,” I recited dully. “Thank Her Highness the queen, the Darkness protects us now.”

  “And who do you think made that up?” Yarrow said sharply. “Who do you think spread all the horror stories about nymphs and mages, and especially sunchildren?”

  I gazed at his face, which swayed with the motion of the coach, but did not answer.

  “The Witch Queen who fears them above all else, Siria. The woman who has hunted them all her life because they’re a threat to her magic and her Darkness.”

  “But sunchildren are extinct,” I said wearily. “I can’t be one—she killed them all.”

  “Not all,” said Yarrow, and there was a deeper, quieter anger in his voice than I had ever heard before. “Though she damn near succeeded at complete genocide. Siria, why do you think Iyzabel knew you would change today? How do you think she knew the exact date and moment of your birth?”

  “Today isn’t my birthday,” I protested, and with the words came one last feeble thread of hope. Even if what Yarrow said was possible, I knew my parents were far too loyal to Iyzabel to keep a sunchild baby from her. And my birthday wasn’t for another two weeks. I sat up a little straighter. “Yarrow, today isn’t my birthday.”

  “But it is,” Yarrow said. “We know that for certain now. No other girl changed at the moment you did. The Witch Queen held her ball at the pinpoint of dawn—the exact time of your birth sixteen years ago today—in order to see you transform.”

  I stared hard into Yarrow’s face. “How do you know?”

  His nostrils flared as he sucked in a breath, but his eyes did not leave mine. “Because,” he said, “sixteen years ago today, this kingdom celebrated the birth of a special sunchild. And that child escaped the witch’s bloody purge because she had parents powerful and clever enough to protect her.”

  I gaped at Yarrow, my brain floundering like a fish on land. My parents had protected me? I felt a burst of joy—was that the reason they had always been so distant?—but it was quickly extinguished by the memory now burned into my mind, of my mother pointing me out in the ballroom. “Why? Why would they do that? They never really wanted me in the first place.” I heard the words fall off my tongue as though someone else had spoken them, yet I knew with sudden certainty they were true.

  Yarrow’s expression became a messy tangle of sorrow, anger, and determination. Across from me, Linden made a sudden movement, as though he wanted to reach out for me. Merrall sat with her arms and legs tightly folded, chewing on her lip.

  “Phipps and Milla Nightingale’s greatest secret,” said Yarrow, “is that they have no children. They stole you from an orphanage in Umbraz and then spent the next fifteen years weaving elaborate lies to make everyone believe you were theirs. Iyzabel was placing great public stock in the raising of daughters at that time, already starting to look for you, and Phipps came to believe a baby girl would improve their standing at court. But Milla was terrified of the risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth.”

  I paused to take this in. I knew I was missing something bigger, but all I could think of was the distant, aloof way my parents had treated me my whole life. “Why did they lose interest in me? Did I do something wrong?”

  He let out a breath that was half sigh, half groan. “I think they became afraid of how different you were, Weedy. Of your strange hair, your anxiety about the dark, your interest in the past. Whether they ever heard rumors of Iyzabel’s search, I don’t know, but I think in their very secret hearts they feared what you might be. To their slim credit, they never turned you in—though Iyzabel was keeping a close eye on you anyway.”

  My head was starting to feel wooly, and the tension from my creased brow was causing a new ache behind my forehead. It therefore took much longer than it should have for me to fully comprehend Yarrow’s disclosure. I dug my fingernails into the velvet-upholstered seat beneath me.

  “Then who . . . ?” I began, not sure how to finish the sentence.

  “The only sunchild left in Terra-Volat, Weedy,” said Yarrow, his voice growing stronger as he looked at me with fierce pride, “is not the child of two spineless courtiers who never deserved her. She is—you are—the youngest daughter of King Auben and Queen Elysia of Luminor.”

  10

  CHAPTER

  The carriage was turning to something insubstantial beneath me—cotton, perhaps, or mist. Luminor? Luminor was the kingdom of madness, of sun worship. How could my parents be the rulers Queen Iyzabel defeated to bring about peace in the kingdom?

  But Iyzabel had brought the Darkness, which I had dreaded my entire life. Whose word could I believe? Iyzabel’s or Yarrow’s? Until now, I would never have hesitated to say Yarrow, but this was the fourth time in under an hour that I had uncovered knowledge, long kept secret by Yarrow, with the power to change my entire life.

  Yet hadn’t I just heard Iyzabel’s voice calling for my death in her ballroom? It was hard to trust a person while they screamed for your blood.

  And King Auben and Queen Elysia had been dead for fifteen years. If they were really my parents, that meant I would never be loved by a mother or a father in the way I had always dreamed of . . .

  “The reason I have watched over you at Gildenbrook these last four years,” said Merrall unexpectedly from
across the carriage, “is not because you are some fine pet for the Imposter Queen. It is because you are the last sunchild in Terra-Volat, and the daughter of my king and queen, the true rulers of this kingdom.”

  “Do you see now?” Linden leaned toward me. “Do you understand why we wanted to take you away last night? Iyzabel wants you dead more than she’s ever wanted anything before.”

  “And,” the naiad added, “the Witch Queen has never yet failed to get something she wants.”

  I stared between the three of them for a long moment, all my anger and resentment building up like bracken clogging a bend in a river. Finally, it broke.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?” I bellowed, flinging the ivory mirror at Yarrow with all my strength. He flinched, but let it hit him in the shoulder. “All this information that changes everything I always thought was true—why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “Siria, we already explained,” began Linden. “Iyzabel cursed the—”

  I ripped off my mask and hurled that at Linden, though it only fluttered uselessly to the carriage floor. “So she cursed it!” I shouted. “Are you trying to tell me that in ten years you couldn’t think of a single way to communicate any of this, just because she cursed one Chasm-forsaken piece of the puzzle?”

  “Without endangering you, ourselves, and the entire mission?” Linden shot back, firing up. “No, actually, we couldn’t! Because in case you didn’t notice, we weren’t the only people you talked to during that time! Even if you’d believed any of it, would you have kept it to yourself? Would you have believed it after your Gildenbrook tutors taught you that nymphs were dangerous and mages were evil? You’ve been so obsessed with Phipps and Milla’s approval lately that you’ve barely made time for Yarrow and me! So don’t pretend—”

  At that moment a shout came from right outside the carriage, and the cabin lurched hard to the left, throwing Linden against the window and me into the carriage wall.

  “Yarrow,” Merrall said, alarmed. “Your enchantment . . .”