by CJ Brightley
“Once she’s finished with her training and has free days,” the Ruler said. “She can ask whoever is assigned to that particular Road for the day to take her along as a guest. You can go back whenever you wish,” she added pointedly.
“Can Raneh come with me on my training trips?” Yaika asked in a small voice.
The Ruler hesitated. “I suppose that would be not a problem. But you won’t be judged as ready to go off on your own if you insist on taking a guest.”
Yaika nodded, looking greatly relieved.
“What about food?” I asked, acutely aware that we had missed breakfast, and it was now midday. There was a hearth in this room, but the fire was unlit, and there was no table to sit at. “Where do we eat?”
“Upstairs,” the Ruler said. “The second floor is the food preparation and eating area. Heirs keep all hours, so there is always food available. The top floor is mine. You are not to go there.”
“H-how do heir rankings work?” Yaika asked in a small voice.
“Lancen and I change those every month,” the Ruler said. “Our mathematicians factor in reports of behavior, how many signals are left on a Road the day after an heir had it, how much status they have personally brought in, and so forth, and make recommendations. We make any tweaks we feel are appropriate, then post the rankings next to the Road schedule. You’ll find both in the center of the food area. You are, of course, the lowest-ranked heir currently, being the newest.”
Yaika nodded. “Can I . . . can I go higher?”
The Ruler smiled. “Well, that’s up to you, isn’t it? We’ll see if you’ve outdone anyone above you next month.”
Yaika nodded vigorously, clenching her skirts even tighter.
Why do you even care? I thought. Why would it even matter, unless you planned on trying to be Ruler someday?
“Well, if that’s it,” the Ruler said, “I shall be going . . .”
“Is magic dying?” I blurted out.
The Ruler stopped and stared at me. Her eyes were piercing.
Yaika let out a moan of mortification.
“There are some things we don’t talk about,” the Ruler said. “That’s one of them.”
Then she was gone.
That night, after an exhausting day exploring the Heart, I lay awake in bed, feeling my arms and legs itch with unspent magic, until I heard my sister snoring. Then I snuck off of my mattress, froze as she murmured something in her sleep, and waited with bated breath to give an excuse about needing to use the chamber pot in the alcove at the back of the room.
But she merely shifted in her sleep, muttered something about Hurik ruining her dyeing, and subsided again.
So, breathing as silently as possible, I crept across the room and pushed the door open on its thankfully non-squeaky hinges. Then I headed out into the hallway.
It seemed to get dark later here in Central, so the corridor was still softly lit by twilight through the windows. Most of the light now came from flowers hanging in baskets from the ceiling, however. They were a luminescent plant I wasn’t really familiar with, some sort of moss with small white flowers that were barely noticeable in daylight. Nocturnal pollinating insects fluttered around the ceiling in droves, occasionally diving down and making me duck to avoid them.
I followed the first staircase I found down into the empty cavern underneath the building, the place where the roads of Central all converged. It was dark and my footsteps echoed, which made me jump at every perceived shuffle. But I could feel the smoothness of the road underneath my feet, and there was nothing to bump into, so it took only a moment to reach an open entryway and see my way outside into the gardens.
Out in the raised bed gardens, the pale light from the rising moon cast shadows everywhere. There were a few couples walking around holding hands, but nobody seemed to pay any attention to me. Cautiously, I reached out to the nearest row of filias and ran my finger along the base of their stems, searching for the tiniest sprout of groverweed. There was always something in a large bed of filias, and I knew I’d recognize one when I found it.
Nothing in the first wedge. Undeterred, I moved on to the next one. Wow, these things are really well-kept.
Then the next one.
Then the next one.
I was starting to sweat. Surely even the Ruler couldn’t manage to eliminate all groverweed from her gardens. Nobody could manage that. Desperate, I started poking the soil magically, hoping for some unsprouted seeds to slurp up.
Nothing.
I tried all the rest of the beds, but with a sinking heart that wasn’t surprised when I finally found nothing. As I finally pulled my hand out of the last bed, I stood there staring at the now-risen moon numbly.
I have to get rid of my magic somehow. But I’ve never learned how to do it without groverweed.
Perhaps I should have learned to do it some other way. Perhaps, during the cold season months, instead of collecting a few plants into pots and hiding them under my bed, I could have learned to use my magic in a way that wouldn’t get me caught right away.
But groverweed had always been there, and it had always been safe. Who knows? If I had tried experimenting, I might be dead already.
Still, nothing that I’d experienced had prepared me for this. Here I was in Central, under the same roof as the Ruler, in a place with no privacy, surrounded by her heirs.
And there was no groverweed.
23
The obvious thing to do would be to put my magic into other plants instead, right? Right.
Except it didn’t actually seem to make much difference. The other plants didn’t resist me putting magic into them, like filias did, but they didn’t soak it up eagerly, either. I tried the stokwings and the thayflowers and even the powderballs, which had sealed themselves into tight little orbs that didn’t poof out their seeds. All of those plants took magic if I made an effort, but I had to tell the magic to do something, and my effects were all over the place.
Two clumps of stokwings dropped their petals and ripened into their toxic fruit that humans couldn’t eat. One powderball grew so tall that it towered over the filias surrounding it, with stem thickening like a small tree. A tiny fringe of slipgrass in one corner multiplied and spread all over the bed, well past the shape it had been groomed into.
One thayflower got so hot that it burst into flames. I had to beat it out with my sleeves, and I was so terrified that somebody had seen it that I didn’t even notice that I had burned my forearms until later. Not badly, but they felt raw, like a sunburn.
I tried my best to fix the damage I was doing, but it took a lot of effort to rip out the telltale plants, and I was exhausted. Worse still, my reservoir of magic didn’t seem to have dipped in the least.
How is this possible? I thought in despair, holding up my sore hands and still feeling magic tingling all over them. With groverweed, it only took a few minutes. Were those plants really that much better at absorbing magic? If so, no wonder everyone hated them.
I couldn’t take it any longer. This wasn’t working. I was leaving a trail that was dangerously conspicuous, my forearms were stinging, and I had a headache and bleary eyes from not going to sleep. It had been hours, my magic wasn’t depleting, and the couples walking in the gardens were long since gone, but that didn’t mean another person might not come out here and see me.
So, itching all over with magic, I headed back to a dark entryway, tasting the grim taste of defeat.
“The north-northeast Road,” Yaika read, pointing to her name on the board. There was one of those strange carriage-wheel-like map things hung around a pillar in the middle of the food area. The board was made of squishwood, so it bent around the curved surface like a cloth would have. Yaika’s name was written on a small round disc and affixed next to another one near the top. “What does that mean?”
A tall girl with a dramatic hairstyle of looped braids and filias buds looked up from where she was examining the bottom of the board. “It means you’re going that way
,” she said, pointing in a direction that seemed vaguely opposite the Road we’d come from. “I’m going west-west-southwest.”
Yaika eyed her hairstyle with an envious air. “Can I wear filias, too?”
“Of course you can,” the girl said. “In fact, you should. Get whoever is training you to show you how to make the signature this morning.”
Yaika bobbed her head, her eyes sparkling.
I said nothing, keeping my hands tightly hidden inside the pockets of my fluffweave outer skirt, trying not to draw attention to myself. It was thick with blue stripes, uncomfortably warm and not a style I liked at all, but I had accepted it from my sister because I had already destroyed two beautiful yellow ones just by touching them, and I didn’t dare pick out any more for myself.
I’d had to hide them in the laundry pile and hope nobody noticed that the scorch marks on one and the shrunken back of the skirt of another. I hated, hated, hated how much magic I had surging through me this morning.
“It looks like you’re with Janfal,” the other heir said, reading the top of the board. “The sixty-eighth heir. He’s pretty good.”
“Which one are you?” Yaika asked.
“Anorra. Sixteenth.”
Wow, I thought. That’s pretty high up. I was pretty sure it was below twentieth.
“Uh huh . . .” Yaika said, rather uncertainly. Her eyes strayed over to the squishwood board on the other side of the pillar, and she sort of sidled over to examine it. A moment later, her eyes widened, and she popped back over.
“Oh!” she said. “That’s really high up! That’s impressive!”
Anorra, who had apparently been waiting for that reaction, looked amused. “You really ought to memorize all the words for the heir rankings, you know.”
Yaika nodded, swallowing in embarrassment.
We headed over to the food serving area, where I helped myself to a bowl of boiled bulge tubers and digger roots. Yaika got a tiny bit of every exotic dish I didn’t recognize.
My hand hovered over the candied nutwark blossoms, which were sweet and spicy and delicious, but I remembered the haj clove jelly I’d ruined back home. Bulge tubers were about as mild as you could wish, and I didn’t want to risk enhancing any flavors today. I sighed and left them alone.
Yaika was already snacking on her exotic new dishes while we sat down. She bit into a tiny purple seed pod and made a horrible face.
Seeing her expression, the other heirs at the table cracked up.
“You’re not supposed to eat the glimmercone pods,” one of the boys said. “They’re there to flavor the rest.”
Yaika’s nose scrunched up as she pulled what looked like chewed up purple wood pulp out of her mouth and slid it to the side of her plate.
“You’re the new heir, right?” a young man said. “What’s your name?”
“Yaika.” My sister straightened, looking much more confident than she had a moment before. “And this is my sister, Raneh.”
I hastily shoved a chunk of bulge tuber into my mouth and hoped that nobody would ask me any questions. I was focusing hard on trying not to let my magic escape. I didn’t want to have to concentrate on talking, too.
Fortunately, the conversation easily bypassed me, and I cut my digger roots into small pieces while my sister chatted with these total strangers like they were old friends.
“Hey, who’s that?” Yaika asked finally, pointing at the table at the end where the Ruler and her husband were sitting. There was a little girl who looked about seven eating with them.
“Oh, that’s Illiya,” the boy next to her said. He helped himself to a spoonful of thin, watery soup with pink flowers floating in it, a dish I wasn’t familiar with. “The eighty-sixth heir.”
“But I’m eighty-sixth heir,” Yaika protested.
“Oh. Right. Guess that would make her eighty-seventh.”
I brought a steaming bulge tuber chunk to my mouth, and found that it had suddenly gone ice cold. Of course.
“What does that mean?” Yaika asked. “Why is she so young?”
“Because she didn’t earn her place here, unlike the rest of us,” the boy said. “She’s always the lowest. That’s the Ruler’s daughter.”
“Ohhhh!” Yaika’s eyes widened as she stared at the little girl. “The Ruler’s children are also heirs?”
“Of course they are,” the boy said. “It’s not like a Ruler would adopt their children out to another family.”
“There was even a Ruler’s child once who became Ruler himself,” a woman said, across from us. “What, four generations ago?”
“Yeah, but I’m sure everybody always wondered if he’d actually earned it,” the boy said. “It must be tough to be a Ruler’s child and ambitious.”
I chewed disconsolately on my digger roots, finding one had gone grainy and another had gone slimy. I really hoped I’d find some groverweed soon.
“Ready to go?” the young man asked finally, pushing his empty plate aside and standing up. The chain of filias dangling from one sleeve made a rustling sound.
“U-uh, uh?” Yaika stammered.
“I’m Janfal,” he said, tucking his hair back behind his ears. “The one who’s training you today. I assumed that was why you sat here.”
“Oh. Right. Um.” Yaika hastily scrambled a few last bites of food in her mouth. She swallowed desperately. “Can my sister come with us?”
Janfal glanced over at me. “A chaperone isn’t actually necessary, you know,” he said. “The magicians can see everything that happens in the main compartments. They use it to make sure heirs aren’t slacking off.”
Yaika looked horribly embarrassed. “It’s . . . it’s not that, it’s just . . . she’s here for moral support . . .”
“You shouldn’t need support,” Janfal said. “You’re a Ruler’s heir. You should be able to stand on your own two feet.”
Yaika glanced from me to him, looking torn. “It’s just that . . . I mean . . .”
My only chance for finding groverweed was slipping away quickly. I didn’t really care about the Ruler’s Road, but I had to get out of Central. I was not spending the rest of the week like this, with magic bursting every which way. I stood up.
“I want to go,” I said. “I’ve never seen that part of the Rulership, and I’m interested in it. May I?”
Janfal sighed with exasperation, looking over at my sister.
“Fine,” he said. “Since it’s your first day. But she’d better not get in the way, or slow us down any. I don’t want my ranking to drop just because some guest I didn’t invite kept on dawdling.”
Thank you, I thought indignantly. Such hospitality.
Janfal led us out of the building and down to the relevant Ruler’s Road at a brisk pace, pausing only to strip a few filias off their stalks as we passed. He braided them into a wreath as we walked, and dropped it onto Yaika’s head on the way.
When we got there, I found there were already several magicians waiting for us.
“Turk,” Janfal said to one of the men. He nodded to a woman. “Elhan.”
“You know their names?” Yaika asked, looking amazed.
“You get to know the magicians you’ve been assigned to over and over again,” Janfal said. “At least, if you’re not a total snob.”
Yaika looked abashed.
From this end of the Ruler’s Road, it turned out the entrance was locked, and only the magicians had the key.
“Because the caravans can’t be replaced,” Janfal explained to Yaika, as we waited for the magicians to unlock it. “We can’t take the chance of somebody stealing one and stranding it. We can’t have people wandering into the Roads and getting run over when we depart in the morning, either.”
I shuddered, thinking about it. The handles for the entrance were up high, like they were for all the doors that led into the Ruler’s Road back home, presumably so that children couldn’t reach them and go in on their own. But still, children weren’t the only people who could do stupid things
, and the picture he had described was frightening.
Inside, the caravan was virtually identical to the one we had ridden up to Central. Yaika and Janfal sat in chairs next to the window, Janfal with his back towards the signals we’d be passing, Yaika with her face towards them. I sat down in a chair beside the square table in the middle, rubbing my eyes as my head throbbed and reminded me that I was still short on sleep.
The caravan lurched, and we were on our way. For a long time, there was nothing out the windows, and Yaika started looking antsy, shuffling in her seat.
“Does it always take this long between signals?” she asked, practically whining.
“Usually at the start,” Janfal said, looking undisturbed by this. “This close to Central, there are very few people between each Road. Wait till we get to the rim. Then there are signals that can take people weeks to leave.”
Yaika’s eyes popped open. “Weeks?” she squeaked.
“Yep,” Janfal said, looking amused at her reaction. “Of course, we don’t have weeks, so we take magicians. They can multiply the speed of carriages, just like caravans. We have small roads called byways out there. Basically intended for enhanced-speed carriages from a Ruler’s Road. Probably there aren’t any where you lived, but believe me, near the rim, they’re a necessity.”
“Blue!” Yaika cried, leaping up from her seat. “Blue blue!”
The caravan lurched to a halt, flinging her back into the seat of her chair. Yaika looked too excited to care.
“Did I do it right?” she asked breathlessly. “Did I notice it in time?”
“You forgot to pull the cord,” Janfal said, tapping a long cord that ran across the windowsill beside them. “The magicians aren’t watching for signals. That’s your job.”
Yaika looked shamefaced.
Taking care of a land purchase proved to be even more boring than sitting around in a caravan. Janfal asked the first people he ran into after exiting the Road which land was available for purchase, and they pointed him in the direction. Then he and Yaika spent about an hour interviewing random vassals in the neighborhood about who had owned the land, who the first heir was, and where they could find a mathematician who wasn’t affiliated with him.