Light in the Darkness

by CJ Brightley

  The carriage rolled to a stop by the door to my parents’ house, and I felt a stab of panic. What if they had left? What if the Ruler had taken them to Central? What if they were visiting Grandfather Doss and Grandmother Rella?

  I stood up on quavering legs and forcing myself to walk to the door. I knocked firmly, even though my arms were shaking.

  The door opened, and Grandfather stood in front of me. For a moment, we stood staring at each other, frozen.

  Then he shouted with joy and flung his arms around me, yanking me into the house.

  “It’s Raneh!” he hollered loudly. “Raneh’s back!”

  There was a thunder of footsteps, and Mother and Father and some boy I didn’t know came running down the stairs.

  “You made it!” Mother gasped.

  “How did you get here?” Father asked.

  “Is Yaika with you?” the boy demanded.

  Grandmother emerged from the kitchen, with specks of orange sauce on the end of her right sleeve. Her face, which looked older and more creased than I remembered, broke into a smile. “Raneh,” she said, and came over to hug me. I embraced her back, but the boniness of her arms made me worry. She felt even more fragile than she looked. I had a feeling she hadn’t been eating properly.

  I hugged Mother, and then Father, and then looked around. “Where’s Hurik?” I asked.

  The unfamiliar boy looked at me like I was a total idiot. “Are you blind?” he asked.

  I did a double take and looked at him. He was tall, he was wearing a white tunic, and he was . . . skinny. “Hurik?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Who else?” he wanted to know, folding his arms.

  “But . . . but . . .” I fumbled for words. “But you’re skinny!”

  Hurik snorted. “Blame Grandmother for that. She said if we had to live on rations, I could get a smaller portion size than everyone else, since I had ‘enough stored to live on for awhile.’”

  “But . . . but . . .” I looked him up and down. There was something else that was bothering me. “Did you run out of dye or something?”

  Grandfather and Hurik both burst out laughing. Father got a sour look on his face.

  “Hurik took the oath of mathematics a year ago,” Mother said. “Without actually informing us that he was going to do it, mind you.”

  “Or anyone else, for that matter,” Father frowned. “He took the oath and then informed us at the dinner table. Who does that?”

  My mind reeled. Hurik was a mathematician? That explained why he was wearing mathematician white, but . . . really?

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Hurik pursued, tapping his foot impatiently. “Is Yaika with you? Where is she?”

  “I . . . I think she’s back in Central,” I said slowly. “She didn’t come with me.”

  “Too good for us?” Hurik asked, looking annoyed.

  “She hasn’t gone and gotten married without us, has she?” Mother asked anxiously.

  “You’d think she might have bothered to come back to visit,” Father growled.

  “It’s not like that,” I said, swallowing. “It’s not quite what you think. I . . . I have to explain something to you. We should sit down. It’s a long story.”

  I told them everything from the beginning. Mother’s eyes went wide when I told them about having magic, and Father looked like he wanted to hit something when I told them how the Ruler had reacted to finding out about it. Grandfather leaned forward with intense interest when I described the place where systems were created, and Hurik was delighted by the fact that the creator of status had been a mathematician. Only Grandmother listened silently, without asking questions or interrupting.

  Finally, I put my hands on my lap and looked at Grandmother. “What do you think?” I asked nervously.

  Grandmother let out a deep sigh. “I’m glad you’re safe. But the Ruler had a point. I don’t know how we’re going to survive to the next year. We’ve run out of almost everything, and our harvest this season was the worst I’ve ever seen. I can’t be overjoyed to hear that magic’s not coming back. I’m sorry.”

  There was silence for a moment, as my family members eyed each other uncomfortably. This seemed to be something they had talked about more than once.

  “I did think about that,” I said tentatively. “And I came up with a solution.”

  “What?” Grandmother asked bitterly. “Does your fire magically create more nutrients for the soil to grow things?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “But . . . well, I’ll show you. Come here.”

  I got up and gestured for them to follow me. We passed Hurik’s garden, which was filled with digger roots, and Yaika’s garden, which had been taken over by tonna berries.

  When we reached my garden, my heart skipped a beat, because the ornamentals had been dug up and replaced by food crops that had been harvested completely. Only frost blossoms were left, twinkling in the chilly air. They were one of the few food crops that could grow perfectly well through cold season.

  No filias, I thought, getting down on my hands and knees and digging through the middle patch, which was now covered in bulge tuber vines. Does that mean no groverweed?

  Just as I was starting to panic, my fingers brushed against a round seed. I breathed a sigh of relief and poked it, wondering how to activate it.

  The small seed squirmed and put forth a tiny shoot. Then it budded a tiny leaf, then another, then another. I sat back, watching my family. To me, ridiculously fast-growing groverweed was a typical sight. But to them, this would be a new thing.

  Mother was riveted. Father looked startled. Hurik and Grandfather were leaning forward in mild interest. Grandmother looked fierce and skeptical.

  “So your system lets you grow food faster?” she demanded.

  “Only this plant,” I said.

  “Is that plant edible?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Then what good does it do?” Grandmother asked, frustrated.

  “It grows very, very quickly,” I said.

  “And?”

  “And its roots grow very, very deep.”

  “In what way is that helpful?” Grandmother cried. “We need food, not weeds!”

  “How deep do its roots grow?” Mother asked slowly.

  “Very,” I said, grinning. “Agri favored shallow-root crops because it could modify them more easily. That’s part of the reason we have this problem. But these will grow in any weather, seek out nutrients from the deep, and bring those to the surface, where we need them.”

  My family watched as the plant put forth its first tiny flower bud. Even Grandmother seemed quietly reverent.

  Three petals peeked out from the tiny bud, which unfurled delicately. A pattern of orange whorls traced itself across the petals. The red-gold spiral lifted its head to the sun. And then it burst into flames.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “And they do that.”

  About a month later, I was working with Father to design a layout for a raised bed garden. We had figured out that the burnflowers also kept soil warmer, which made them ideal for keeping right beside crops to extend the growing season.

  Sort of.

  “Was it really necessary to make a plant that is constantly on fire?” Father groused, beating out the embers on one side of the box with a thick blanket.

  “Yes,” I said, capturing the ones on the other side in my hands. “That’s how they work.”

  “Next time, we are using stone for the walls, not wood,” Father informed me, his eyebrows twitching.

  “Hey, Father!” Hurik called from the house. “Where do we keep the burnflower seeds? Someone came to get some!”

  “Not again,” Father groaned, climbing up to his feet. “We’ve told them if they’ll just wait patiently, their groverweed will turn eventually.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, starting to get up.

  “Oh, no,” Father said, pointing at the raised bed. “You are going to get those flowers under control before they burn down
our entire experiment.”

  I bit my lip to keep from laughing and tapped one of the flowers sharply. It dropped several seeds into my hand.

  “Here,” I said, handing them up to him. “Now you don’t have to find the rest.”

  “Thank you,” Father said, and strode off towards the house.

  I frowned as I tried to figure out a way to twist the climbing clea stalks so that they wouldn’t be in danger of catching fire. It wasn’t easy. Climbing cleas tended to send out little tendrils to look for new supports to inch upward, so it wasn’t easy to convince them to stay away from another plant that stood taller and was within reach.

  I felt around for the branch cutters behind me, deciding that the best solution was to chop off any stalks that leaned the wrong way. The climbing cleas sure wouldn’t like it, but it was better to have a small harvest than a big one that got roasted prematurely.

  I heard footsteps pad through the dirt.

  “Hi,” I said distractedly, waving my hand behind me. “Can you pass me those branch cutters, please?”

  I held my hand out behind me, and the tool was placed in it.

  “Thanks,” I said, sticking my tongue between my teeth as I chopped off one stalk, then another, then another one.

  Somebody cleared their throat, sounding very annoyed. “Raneh. It’s me.”

  “Grandmother?” I asked vaguely, carefully nudging a burnflower away from a clump of digger leaves.

  “Do I look like Grandmother?!” the voice exclaimed.

  I brushed my hair out of my face and turned around. “Okay, who . . .”

  My voice trailed off as I saw someone in purple-and-blue-striped outer skirt folding her arms and watching me indignantly. A floppy purple hat hung off one ear, and filias dangled off of it. She was obviously two years older, but she looked like . . .

  “Yaika?” I asked dumbly.

  “Hi!” she beamed.

  “Is the Ruler here?” I gasped, looking around.

  Yaika scowled. “Is that all the welcome I’m getting? No, the Ruler is not here. I can go places by myself, thank you very much.”

  “But if you can get here all the way from Central, so can she,” I said, my heart beating faster. “That means I’m not safe here. That means . . .”

  “Oh, calm down,” Yaika sighed, nudging her hat as it slipped. “The Ruler has plenty to keep her busy. You’re not the most important person in the world, you know.”

  Um . . . I thought. Since I was the only person in the world who knew how to use the new system, I sort of thought I might be.

  “For your information, the Ruler is perfectly reasonable,” Yaika added. “When I pointed out that you could have attacked her and didn’t, and that you showed us a way to fix the caravans instead, she decided that as long as you don’t do anything aggressive, she’ll leave you be.”

  “Well, that’s . . . nice . . .” I said warily.

  What’s the catch? I thought.

  “She sent me down here to fetch the caravan that you left stranded,” Yaika told me. “You didn’t break it or anything, did you?”

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “Good.” Yaika looked relieved. “I had to come down on another Ruler’s Road, which meant three days in a caravan and then three days in a carriage. I’d hate to have to go back the same way.”

  “But it’s almost out of stinksap.”

  “Eh, they all burn through the stinksap quickly these days.” Yaika shrugged. “Don’t worry, I brought enough for the journey.”

  I looked at my younger sister, weirded out by how old she looked. She had to be fourteen now, but she looked fifteen, maybe sixteen, and her beauty had changed. Where before she had looked innocent and precious, like a fragile child that needed protecting, now she looked fierce and tough. Granted that the fragile facade had always been a lie, she’d still had some real innocence when I’d last seen her. Now even the pretense had been stripped away.

  Did that happen because of me? I wondered, swallowing.

  “Now, there is one other thing,” Yaika hedged. “I’m going to be here for awhile. You know, visiting my family. So you might as well, um, teach me all the secrets of that fire thing. You’re planning to teach people anyway, right?” she asked hopefully.

  I stared at her. She stared back at me, her eyes wide and innocent. It didn’t work nearly as well as it used to.

  “The Ruler asked you to do that, didn’t she,” I asked flatly.

  “It’s part of the deal,” Yaika sighed. “So she’ll leave you alone. But it’s a good deal, Raneh. You weren’t planning to keep the workings secret anyway, were you?”

  “No,” I said slowly. “But I was sort of planning to choose my students myself. I’d like to make sure they’re trustworthy and not likely to abuse it.”

  “So teach other people,” Yaika said, waving her hand. “I don’t care. But one of them has to be me.”

  “And then you’ll teach the Ruler.”

  “All the Ruler’s heirs, too, if that helps.”

  It didn’t. “I was planning to teach her everything as soon as I came out, you know,” I said, aggrieved. “And then she tried to kill me. Again!”

  “She didn’t trust you. You really can’t blame her for that. But look! You’re still alive, and so is she, and we can all let bygones be bygones! Right?”

  Yaika stared at me hopefully.

  The thought of doing anything to help the Ruler really grated on me. I’d done everything to be friendly and helpful, and she’d just been nasty. But then, what was the alternative? Start a conflict? Let it escalate into a war? That was absolutely not an option I could live with.

  “All right,” I sighed. “Bygones.”

  “Great! So!” Yaika flopped onto the ground beside me. “Show me the first thing about your system.”

  “The first thing?” I asked. I ran my finger through a burnflower. “That would be fireproofing.”

  “Okay, show me the second thing. That sounds boring.”

  I rolled my eyes, but I obliged. I took a hint of fire from the burnflower and held it over my hand. “That might be changing the temperature of the flame.” It flickered orange, then green, purple, yellow, blue, red, green, then back to yellow again.

  Yaika’s eyes lit up. She clapped her hands. Then she asked the strangest question I’d ever heard.

  “So, can I paint with it?”

  Afterword

  Thank you for reading The Keeper and the Rulership! It has a brand new sequel, The Fires of the Rulership. You can read about it, or check out my other books, on this website. You're also welcome to join my mailing list, and I'd love to have you! The Keeper and the Rulership will be the first of a series of interlinked standalone fantasy novels in the same world. I'm also the author of the Fairy Senses series, the Dragon Eggs series, and lots of other charming noblebright fantasy: something for every age level.

  Short Stories

  The Weeds within the Rulership

  Emily Martha Sorensen

  “Your parents said you were sick,” Jontan said to me, holding out a shabby bouquet through the doorway. His fingers clutched around the stems so tightly that they were bending. “I brought you some flowers.”

  I stared at him dispiritedly from my bed. I had been hiding in my room for two weeks, not staying here because I was still sick, although that was what I had told everybody. I’d had a fever for three weeks, so that had been a convenient excuse. But no. I didn’t want to see people because I was terrified they’d notice that I’d started growing magic.

  “Thanks, Jontan,” I said, trying to sound glad to see him. He was a friend, after all. “You can leave them on my dresser.”

  He tiptoed into my room, laid the wilting flowers across the top of the piece of furniture, and then leapt back to the doorway as if burned.

  I barely kept from rolling my eyes. “You’ve been in here before,” I told him.

  “It’s not proper without a chaperone now,” he insisted.

&nbs
p; Honestly. Jontan took the rules of propriety seriously, it seemed. We were both twelve years old, we’d just barely taken the oath of childhood, and it wasn’t even like he was courting me. If he started acting all formal now, it was going to drive me crazy.

  “Are you going to look at the flowers?” he asked anxiously.

  With a sigh of annoyance, because after all I was supposed to be sick, I angled myself out of bed and shuffled over to the dresser. The row of wilted flowers stared up at me.

  There were filias in it. Yech. They were such an ugly color, all purple-blue, and they meant “loyalty to the Rulership,” so using them was like showing off. Jontan loved the flowers, though, so he had probably included them just because he thought they were pretty. The rest were inna blossoms, which I’d forgotten the meaning of, and torron stalks, which meant “get well soon.”

  Jontan hovered in the doorway, as if waiting for me to say something.

  “Uh, thanks,” I said. “I hope I get well soon, too.”

  He kept on hovering.

  Oh no! What if he’d noticed some magic I’d used accidentally? Jontan was a stickler for the rules, and landowner use of magic was more than just a rule: it was a law. If I got caught, I could be killed.

  “Ohhh, I have a headache,” I moaned, saying the first thing that came to mind. “I have to be alone now. Can you leave me?”

  “Oh! Oh, sorry!” Jontan jumped back. “Can I . . . can I come back later?”

  “Sure,” I said. Of course he could come back later. Why was he even asking? His family’s land was right next to ours. We saw each other all the time.

  Jontan looked a mixture of scared and relieved, and hurriedly waved goodbye and scuttled down the hallway. I heard his feet pound on the way down the stairs.

  I shuffled back to bed and put the sheet over my head. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to see anyone else today. A spark of magic lurched out of my elbow and made the pillow underneath my head more thin and lumpy.