Light in the Darkness

by CJ Brightley

  Despite my trying very hard to flirt with Caes one humiliating breakfast, neither he nor Jinny ever talked to me. As the days passed, the Ruler and her heirs wandered around our whole land, scrutinizing everything they saw and occasionally asking our vassals questions. During meals, they sometimes spoke with Mother, Father, and Yaika, and pretty much ignored Grandfather, Grandmother, and me.

  Being ignored had its advantages. Because I didn’t dare drain my magic in the mornings or afternoons, only nighttime, I had far more than I was used to while awake, and sometimes it escaped. A clump of greennuts ripened right above my head and tumbled out of the tree. The seams of a cushion I was sewing fell apart. The haj clove jelly I put out at dinner somehow became inedibly spicy. (The Ruler’s husband ate it anyway.)

  Overall, I was extremely cheerful when the Ruler announced they would be leaving the next morning.

  Yaika was inconsolable.

  Her eyes were red-rimmed with dark circles under them when we went down the stairs to bid farewell that morning. Since the Ruler hadn’t said much in days, much less given our family a drop of status, I had a feeling she saw this visit as a failure.

  The Ruler spoke the formal words of leavetaking to my parents, who bowed and made the formal response. My hands tingled, and I could hardly wait to visit my groverweed. I bobbed my head at Alyss, Caes, and Jinny, bowed low to the Ruler and her husband, and anxiously waited for them to leave. Their magicians were already waiting in the three carriages, with ridiculous quantities of luggage.

  Yaika’s face was devastated as they turned to her last.

  “Y-you are most welcome to return, Ruler,” she stammered. “We w-would be very honored to have you here again.”

  Please don’t, I thought.

  “There would be little point to it,” the Ruler answered.

  Yaika’s lower lip trembled. She looked like she was trying not to burst into tears.

  Thank you, I thought.

  “But you could come with us,” the Ruler said.

  My mind froze. For a moment, I couldn’t comprehend it.

  Yaika stared at the Ruler with wide eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “She means what she said when we first came. We came to evaluate you,” the Ruler’s husband said indifferently. He glanced over at the others.

  Alyss looked bored. Caes smirked. Jinny scowled.

  The Ruler smiled at Yaika. “How would you like to become a Ruler’s heir?”

  21

  Uproar rose around us.

  “What?” Mother gasped. “You can’t be serious!”

  “Our daughter’s not up for adoption!” Father shouted.

  “W-would I have time to think about it?” Yaika said.

  “A few minutes,” the Ruler answered.

  “A few minutes?” Father cried. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I don’t want heirs who can’t make important decisions quickly,” the Ruler said coolly.

  “R-Ruler,” Mother stammered. “I don’t know where you got the impression that we would be okay with this —”

  “It’s not your decision,” the Ruler’s husband said. “It’s hers.”

  “Grandfather and Grandmother should be here,” I said. No one seemed to hear me.

  “Do you really think I could handle it?” Yaika asked, wide-eyed.

  “I wouldn’t have extended the invitation if I didn’t,” the Ruler said.

  “Absolutely not!” Father shouted.

  “You can always visit, you know,” Alyss said. “Or they can move with you to Central.” She waved a hand carelessly over at us. “My parents did.”

  “Yaika’s only twelve years old,” Mother protested. “You can’t seriously be suggesting she is old enough for —”

  “You were fourteen when you were adopted by your parents’ landowners, weren’t you?” the Ruler asked, looking at Father.

  He sputtered. “That’s — that’s an entirely different thing!”

  Besides, it was fifteen, I thought.

  “What if I didn’t like it?” Yaika asked Caes.

  “Then you’d get married,” he shrugged. “Or theoretically, you could even be adopted back into your old family, or into an entirely different one, if you were desperate to quit.”

  “Do you like it?” Yaika asked Jinny.

  “I like it better when the Ruler doesn’t pick new heirs to compete with me,” Jinny said bitterly.

  “Really?” Alyss said. “You really said that? You’re going to go down in the heir rankings next month.”

  Jinny glowered.

  “Ultimately, it’s your decision,” the Ruler broke in. An aura of impatience hung over her. “Now, time’s up. Which do you pick?”

  We all looked at Yaika. She swallowed, quailing.

  “I . . . I guess I accept,” she said in a small voice.

  The Ruler smiled.

  “Yaika!” Mother cried.

  “No, she doesn’t!” Father barked out.

  “Did you two seriously not realize this was what ‘evaluation’ meant?” Alyss said under her breath. “My parents figured it out the first day. Morons.”

  The Ruler’s husband frowned, and I wondered wildly whether Alyss would go down in the heir rankings next month. Not that I would ever know if she did.

  But Yaika will! I wanted to laugh hysterically. This was insane.

  “Well, that’s that,” the Ruler said. “Do you know the formalities?”

  Yaika shook her head.

  “The oath of adoption is simple,” Caes said. “Repeat after me. ‘I, Yaika of the Freshgrown family . . .’”

  “I, Yaika of the Freshgrown family . . .” she whispered.

  “‘. . . do hereby renounce my ties of status to the Freshgrown family . . .’”

  “. . . do hereby renounce my ties of status to the Freshgrown family . . .”

  “‘. . . and agree to be bound to the Filias family instead.’”

  “. . . and agree to be bound to the Filias family instead.”

  I felt my status rise in my ears, like a pressurized hum.

  “I, Anced of the Filias family, accept Yaika of the Freshgrown family to be my heir,” the Ruler said. She glanced over at her husband.

  “I, Lancen of the Filias family, likewise accept Yaika of the Freshgrown family to be my heir,” he said.

  I felt something crack within me. My vocal cords felt frozen. I heard Mother cry out. Yaika’s status swirled above us and started swelling. The status of the Ruler and her husband and heirs whooshed into it, and then settled between all of them equally.

  No, I thought numbly, feeling tears prick at the edge of my eyes. No way.

  “Your choice now,” the Ruler said, turning to my parents. “Will you come with us to Central? Or not?”

  Mother looked speechless. Father looked stunned. Finally, he shook his head, jerkily.

  “We have responsibilities here,” he said, his voice rough. “We can’t just abandon him — them.”

  Hurik, I thought, shaking. We still hadn’t told the Ruler he existed. And there was no way we could leave without him.

  Yaika’s lower lip trembled. “Grandfather and Grandmother, then —”

  “Immediate family only,” the Ruler said.

  Yaika looked like she was about to burst into tears. I felt a sudden, blinding hot anger. So I did something rash.

  “I’ll go with her,” I snapped.

  Everyone turned to look at me. Alyss raised her eyebrows. That just made me angrier.

  “That’s allowed, isn’t it?” I asked aggressively. “I can go with my sister?”

  “It’s a little unusual to take a sibling without parents,” the Ruler said slowly. “But certainly.”

  I felt vindicated. I felt victorious.

  Yaika’s eyes filled with relief. “Thank —”

  “Let’s get to the carriages, then,” the Ruler said brusquely. “You can have a few minutes to say goodbye to your family.”

  “What’s the hurry?” I snar
led. “Let her take as long as she needs! After all, this is —”

  The Ruler spun around and blasted a piece of status off me.

  I gasped and clutched my throat. So this was what it was like to have your status destroyed. It felt like concentrated hatred. It was much, much worse than having it taken.

  “You do not speak back to me,” the Ruler said sharply. “You do not question my decisions. I have been a guest in your home. Now you will be a guest in mine. Do you understand?”

  I nodded, trembling.

  “Good.” The Ruler flicked a gaze at my parents. “You have done a good job raising your younger child. You also seem to be competent landowners. As such, I will reward you.”

  My parents’ status glowed and burbled. Tendrils sprayed out in each direction, budding into leaflike spikes. Those burst into blobs, then settled into a normal nebulous mass clinging around them. My parents’ status now burned brighter than I’d ever seen it. Tentatively, I took a step closer to them, and a share of it slurped into me.

  Mother didn’t seem to have noticed; she just watched Yaika with tears in her eyes. Father looked offended, glaring at the Ruler with pure loathing.

  Yaika’s lower lip trembled. “I — I’ll come back,” she said, looking at Mother. “I promise I’ll still visit. This isn’t so different than me getting married in a few years, anyway . . . is it?”

  Oh, yes, it is, I thought. You’re rejecting them. But I held my tongue, because I didn’t want to spend our last few minutes together fighting.

  Besides, Father had done almost the same thing to his parents. If I said anything condemnatory, it would hurt him even more than Yaika. And Yaika I could apologize to tomorrow. Father, I wouldn’t be able to.

  “Oh, Yaika,” Mother sobbed, running forward and throwing her arms around my sister. “Promise you’ll visit us soon! And don’t . . . don’t get married without inviting us. Okay?”

  Yaika started crying, too. They clutched each other, bawling.

  Uncomfortable, I looked at Father. He looked as discomfited by the tearfest as I felt. “I’m sorry I’m going, too,” I said, swallowing. “I know that will make everything harder . . .”

  “No,” he said gruffly, tugging at his waist-sash. “Yaika needs someone to look after her. Thank you.”

  “I promise we’ll visit soon,” I said.

  “I’m sure you’ll try,” he said under his breath. “I’m not sure how easy it will be.”

  Tears rose in my eyes. I clutched Father, who stroked my hair as if I were a child all over again. We stayed that way, all four of us, until the Ruler cleared her throat.

  “Time’s up,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  I was so numbed by the enormity of what I had agreed to that I didn’t even try to protest as the Ruler shuffled us into the third carriage, next to Caes and three magicians. Yaika seemed unusually silent and docile, too.

  As I watched our house, my home since I was five years old, recede into the distance, a feeling of unreality settled over me.

  Grandmother and Grandfather weren’t even awake, was all I kept thinking.

  I’d seen the Ruler’s Road before, of course. We were one of the families lucky enough to live extremely close to one — if you could call it lucky. Past Jontan’s land, across the roads of three more neighbors, and there it was, between the boundary of the Breakleaf and Childhome families’ lands. There was a tunnel underneath it so that people could get past, but otherwise, it stretched across the horizon, perfectly straight and massive and unchanging.

  The one thing that marred the surface of the tall-as-house walls was the long series of handholds, one for each family’s land it passed through, which were used to pull open the doorways. Caes took hold of one of them now, tugging it to the side so that it pushed back slightly and slid into the smooth rockface beside it.

  “Come on,” he said. “The caravan’s waiting.”

  Feeling shy, I stepped forward with Yaika, following him in. The walls were bare of colors, showing only the sleek black of the inner rockface. I remembered the last time I had been here, putting up white cloths with Mother when there was a terrible fever two cold seasons ago. The black inner walls were strange, making any fabric you spread against them cling without fastenings. You had to be careful not to brush your sleeves against them, as it was rather hard to pull fabric down again.

  The caravan was shocking. I had always thought they’d look like giant carriages, or . . . or something. But this monstrosity was big as a house, and longer than two houses put together. It was made of shiny metal, scrubbed clean from rust in a few places, and it glinted in the sunlight. I flinched, shielding my eyes from one particularly bright spot.

  Behind me, Caes pulled the door shut. I jumped.

  You never, ever shut the door when you’re inside a Ruler’s Road! I wanted to yell at him. Don’t you know the first thing about safety? An open door is warning that there’s someone inside and the caravan has to stop before it squashes them!

  But the caravan of this Road was right in front of me, not charging past in some unknown place. I shivered, my eyes adjusting to the dim glow from slits near the ceiling that was the only light in the tunnel now. He’d had to shut the door, of course. This wasn’t the same as the normal rules of safety. But that didn’t make it any less terrifying.

  “That’s where the magicians go up,” Caes said to Yaika, pointing to a steep flight of stairs at one end of the massive machine. “There’s an engine on each end. We’ll use that one to take us back to Central. The other would propel us rimward.”

  “Is that how we get in?” Yaika asked, looking at the staircase nervously.

  “No, no,” Caes laughed. “This way. Come on.”

  I followed the two of them to the middle of the caravan. Glancing back behind me, two of the magicians were collapsing the carriage we had ridden in, and were inserting it into a slot near the bottom of the caravan. The third was following us, for some reason.

  “Now, these stairs are ours,” Caes said to Yaika.

  I spun around and examined a series of steps, very shallow, with handrails on either end and a slow spiral upward. It would take forever to climb, but it looked much safer. I wondered if it had been built to accommodate people wearing impractical clothing.

  The magician and I followed Caes and Yaika up the very long spiral. I kept glancing back behind me, looking at the magician, until curiosity finally got the better of me.

  “Why are you going up with us?” I asked.

  “Safety,” he said. “Somebody has to make sure all the guests are aboard.”

  Oh. That made sense.

  Yaika reached the top of the stairs, and Caes opened the door for her. I followed them into a surprisingly spartan sitting room.

  There was a giant table in the middle, surrounded by soft chairs with armrests. I tried to pull one back to sit in it, but found that it had been nailed into the floor. I tried another one, and found the same thing was true of all of them. When I glanced down at the table legs, those looked nailed down, too.

  Odd, I thought, perplexed.

  I glanced over at the heirs, but they didn’t look to be in the mood to answer any questions. Alyss was flipping through a book, and Jinny was rummaging through a cupboard on the other end of the room.

  The magician disappeared into a room next to the entrance, then he came back. “Okay,” he said. “Everyone’s here. Ruler and her husband are in that room. Heir, heir, heir. New heir.” He pointed at Yaika. “New heir’s guest.” He pointed at me. “Should there be anyone else?”

  “Nope,” Alyss said. “That’s it.”

  “I’ll let them know we can start the engine, then,” he said, ducking out the room. The door clicked shut behind him.

  “There’s a chamber pot in there,” Caes said to Yaika, pointing to a door at the back of the room. “Those cupboards by the stairs are for books, a few games, and snacks. You won’t usually get to use the entertainment unless you’re a guest, but the snacks
are always good. You’ll normally be sitting near a window.”

  Jinny emerged from the cupboard she was rummaging through with a dry yellow fruit I had never seen. She chomped into it and sat in a chair next to the left window, facing Alyss.

  “Because of signals, right?” Yaika asked. “The colors people post in the Road. I’ll have to be watching for them.”

  “Yes,” Caes said. “Exactly. Sit here.”

  Yaika sat obediently in the chair under the right window that faced forward. Caes sat in the other one, which faced her.

  A small ding! came from the ceiling.

  I felt a tingling in my left foot, and I lifted it up, puzzled. Then I felt it in my right foot. For a moment, I was afraid I’d leaked magic in some crazy way, but then I noticed Alyss’s book was bouncing up and down. Oh, I thought. The floor is vibrating.

  Well, it was still distinctly unpleasant. I tried to sit down in one of the chairs by the table, but that was even worse. So I stood up again.

  “You’ll want to be sitting down,” Alyss said, flipping a page. “Trust me.”

  Unbelievably, she seemed to be able to read while the ground was shaking.

  “You’ll really want to sit down,” Alyss said to me again.

  With a rising sense of trepidation, I turned to obey. Then wham! My spine slammed into the back of the chair, and I felt like someone was trying to press an iron against me, squeezing me flat. I could barely breathe.

  Pressure . . . easing . . .

  “What was that?” I gasped, trying to catch my breath.

  “It happens every time we speed up,” Alyss said. “The mathematicians can explain why. I can’t. But it happens when we slow down, too. You’ll hear the same warning.”

  “Bad . . . so uncomfortable . . .” I whimpered, rubbing my back.

  “Aren’t you glad you sat down?” Alyss said mildly.

  I looked over at my sister, who also seemed to be recovering. But her eyes were fastened to the window, and the blur of colors we passed. Red . . . blue . . . red red red blue blue blue white yellow red blue redblue redblueredblueredbluepurple . . .

  “Shouldn’t we do something about those?” Yaika asked with wide eyes, turning to Caes.