Kingdom of Ashes

by Rhiannon Thomas

  Aurora ran to the entrance hall, her hair still tangled from sleep, the rose clutched in her hand. One guard stood on duty. He stood to attention as she approached, but she was too unnerved for formalities. “Did anyone come in overnight?” Aurora said. “A woman? A stranger?”

  The guard frowned. “No, miss. No one unexpected.”

  But Celestine could bend reality, make people forget what they had seen. “Anything strange at all?” she said. “Any odd noises, anything?”

  “I can assure you, miss. There’s been nothing.”

  “Are you certain?” she said. “Maybe someone came in through another entrance, or—”

  “There are no other entrances,” the guard said. “I can promise you. You’re safe enough here.”

  “But—”

  “What’s the problem?” Aurora spun around. Finnegan strode toward her. He was frowning. “Jackson, our guest is supposed to be able to move freely.”

  “I know that, Your Highness,” the guard said with a bow. “She was asking me if I had seen anyone unusual overnight. As I told her, I’ve seen no one. Everything is in order.”

  “Then I’m certain everything is as you say.” He rested a hand on Aurora’s arm. “We won’t disturb you any longer.”

  He steered Aurora through the side door and into one of the studies. Once they were alone, he dropped his hand from her arm and turned to face her. “Aurora?” he said. “Care to explain what that was about? Why are you in your nightdress? Why are you holding a rose?”

  Aurora looked around the room, half expecting another hint of Celestine’s presence. The witch was watching her. She could be watching her now.

  “Aurora?”

  “Nothing,” she said. She took a steadying breath. “I just want to know how good the guards are here. If people can come and go as they please.”

  “Of course people can’t come and go as they please. We’re not going to let King John’s men saunter in here.”

  “But there must be other ways into the palace,” Aurora said. She began to pace, her limbs refusing to rest. “Servants’ entrances, secret passageways. I got in and out of the castle in Petrichor without anyone seeing me. There must be passages here, too.”

  “This palace isn’t as old as your castle. Trust me, we have all of the plans to it. There are no secret ways.” He watched her pace, frowning. “Did you see something? A threat?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Aurora.” He rested a hand on her shoulder, guiding her to a halt. “What happened?”

  She looked up at his face. She had told no one about Celestine, not a word about her presence or her threats, but if she was inside the palace, if she was here . . . Aurora had to tell someone. And Finnegan was insightful, for all his flaws. He could help her to know what to do. “Someone left this rose in my room.”

  “A rose?”

  “Yes. Someone left it on my pillow, while I was sleeping. There was a note wrapped around the stem. It just said soon.”

  Finnegan’s fingers tightened around her shoulder. “King John would never be so subtle. Ominous flora isn’t exactly his style.”

  “No,” Aurora said. “Not King John.” She glanced at the window. The sun was rising, casting orange light across the floor. “It’s Celestine.”

  “Celestine?” Finnegan’s eyes were wide. “The witch who cursed you?”

  “I know it sounds insane,” she said, “but I’ve seen her. She came to me, in the castle in Petrichor, and then on the streets of the city, before I escaped. She said . . .” The words seemed too dangerous to even speak aloud. “She said she wanted me to join her. She told me that was what I was meant to do.”

  “But you told her no?”

  “Of course I told her no. She said she would be watching me, but I didn’t think . . . I thought I’d be safe, across the ocean. But she’s here too. I’ve barely been here two days, and she’s already here.”

  “You think she’s going to attack you?”

  “No,” Aurora said. “I don’t know.” She raked her hand through her hair, her fingers catching on the knots. If Celestine wanted to attack her, she would have done it weeks ago. She’d had plenty of chances. “She’s playing with me. Trying to unsettle me. She wants me to choose to join her, but I don’t know—I don’t know why she would think that I would ever do that. What does she think is going to happen? Why would she think I would want to work with the woman who cursed me?”

  “What did she offer you?” Finnegan said. “If you joined her?”

  “Answers. Control over my magic. Revenge.”

  “Those sound rather persuasive to me.”

  “But she cursed me. How could she think I would join her?” Celestine must imagine a terrible future, if she thought Aurora would ever want to share her power.

  “Did she say what she wanted from you?”

  “Only hints. But I know she wanted magic. My magic. She didn’t seem . . . entirely whole.” She looked up at Finnegan, struggling to find the words. “She stole magic from me. From a cut in my cheek. I think she thinks I’m key to getting her power back. But I don’t know how. How can I have magic, when no one else does?”

  “Maybe because you slept,” Finnegan said. “Maybe you carried it with you.”

  “Yes,” Aurora said again. “Maybe.” That would explain Celestine’s obsession with her. But if that was the case, why would Celestine not take the magic she wanted now? Why would she play with subtle threats?

  “She’s trying to unsettle you,” Finnegan said. “You’re not going to do anything that you don’t want to.” He let go of her shoulder. “But you could take advantage of this,” he said. “She’ll know more about your magic than anyone. If you pretended to accept her offer, tricked information out of her—”

  “No,” Aurora said. She wouldn’t even consider it. “Celestine is dangerous. I don’t know what she would do.”

  “Maybe you should ask.”

  “No,” she said again. “I can’t trust her.”

  “But if you learn more about her, you might find out more about your magic. The curse. The dragons. She would know.”

  “Then I’ll research,” she said. “Everything that we can find on the last hundred years, everything on Celestine before I was cursed. All of it. I can get answers without asking her.” But it would be difficult to do so from across the sea. She would have to unpick secrets and rumors from over a century ago, while hundreds of miles away from where events had occurred. There might not be anything to find.

  She dragged a hand through her hair. “I’ll get dressed,” she said. “Then I’m going back to the library. Might as well start there.”

  “Do you want company, going back to your rooms?”

  “I can find my way.”

  “I thought you might be wary of being alone, considering what just happened. I can send a servant or a guard, if you like.”

  “Oh.” It was a thoughtful thing to say. “Thank you, but I’ll be fine.” Celestine wanted her to be afraid. Aurora could not show any weakness now.

  She returned to the deserted library as soon as she was dressed and climbed to the section on magic. There had to be some information there that could help.

  Several books did mention Celestine, but there was little information of use. The first reported appearance of Celestine was about twenty years before Aurora was born, and the last time anyone saw her was at the banquet when she pricked baby Aurora’s finger with a needle and cursed her to a near-eternal sleep. In between, she was known to live in her tower in the forest and make bargains with those who asked. Some books claimed she was vindictive, cursing the kingdom for her own pleasure, while others claimed she stayed out of affairs unless she was approached.

  One author said she had been unfairly blamed for the kingdom’s difficulties and the disappearance of magic, and Aurora almost threw the book to the ground. Whatever Celestine may or may not have done or been blamed for, she had cursed Aurora when sh
e was only a few days old. She had destroyed Aurora’s entire life. She wasn’t a victim of anything.

  “Aurora?”

  Finnegan stood in the middle of the library, neck craned to peer at the balconies. “Are you in here?”

  “Yes,” she said, standing up. “I’m here.”

  There was a thud as Finnegan dropped a huge pile of paper onto the library’s center table. The balcony shook. “What’s all that?” Aurora said, as she descended the stairs.

  “All the diplomatic records on Alyssinia I could find for the past hundred years, and a couple of decades before.” He heaved a second pile onto the table. “They won’t be as useful as Alyssinia’s own records, I’m sure, but there might be something in there. Better to go straight to the source.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Aurora said. “How did you get these?” She picked up the top page. It was a collection of notes and abbreviations, written in an almost illegible hand. The sheet below seemed to be a list of gifts exchanged after a diplomatic mission.

  “I walked into the archive and took them,” Finnegan said. “Advantage of being the prince.”

  She sat, pulling more pages toward her. There would be lots of useless information to sift through, lots of pointless minutae, but there had to be useful insight hidden in there too.

  But Celestine was barely mentioned, and neither was magic. One document dated ninety years ago questioned the value of Alyssinia as an ally, with their magical resources seemingly gone, and a far older paper commented on a drought that had been blamed “on some witch often accused of blighting the kingdom.” “Evidence, it seems, is lacking,” the ambassador had noted, “but the Alyssinians are a superstitious bunch.” Aurora and Finnegan arranged every mention of magic by date, trying to build some sort of timeline of its decline, but several hours’ work yielded few results. Celestine had been blamed for horrors, magic had faded away—nothing they had not already known.

  Finnegan held out a page to Aurora. “I think this one will interest you,” he said.

  It was a letter, dated two days after Aurora’s eighteenth birthday. The princess, it said, had fallen into a cursed sleep. The ambassador warned of potential instability to come, as the king hunted the witch responsible, and commented that those “superstitious Alyssinians” were searching desperately for any way to awaken her. It had been suggested that a prince’s kiss might be the cure—perhaps Vanhelm could find someone to send. Waking her would be a diplomatic coup.

  It was unsettling, to see her own plight described with such analytic detachment. Aurora lay the paper in its place in the timeline and reached for another one, trying to ignore the way her hand shook.

  Finnegan was watching her. She refused to look up at him again.

  “Why don’t we go out?” he said. “Take a break?”

  “We’ve got work to do,” she said. “There are so many more pages to read.”

  “And they’ll still be here when we get back.” He gently pried the next report from her hand. “We should clear our heads a bit.”

  She let out a breath. Her shoulders were tense, and her head throbbed slightly, but they needed to work quickly. They couldn’t just wander off now.

  “I need a break, at least,” Finnegan said. He stood. “Come on. I’ll show you more of the city.”

  She knew what he was doing. He had seen the tension in her shoulders, had seen how unsettled she was, by the letter, by Celestine’s rose, by everything that had occurred. There was something strangely considerate about the gesture, an attempt to distract her without insisting that she needed to rest.

  But going out would still be risky. “Nettle showed me some of it,” she said.

  “Oh, but Vanhelm is always changing,” he said. “Who knows if everything is still what it was yesterday?” He took her hand.

  “And King John’s spies?”

  “If they know you’re here, then they know you’re here. They won’t be able to do anything with me and my guards there too.”

  “Because you’re so imposing?”

  “Of course.”

  She did want to see the city. To escape the pressure, the need to understand her magic, to be as everybody hoped, for a few hours at least. Her responsibility would still be here when she returned. And there was a part of her that wanted to see where Finnegan would take her. To see his grin and hear his laugh without the pressures of courts and dragons around them.

  A small break could not hurt.

  “All right,” she said. “Show me your city.”

  TEN

  THE WIND BATTERED THEM AS THEY WALKED DOWN the street, flapping Aurora’s cloak and tangling her hair in front of her face.

  “It’ll settle down,” Finnegan said, shouting slightly to be heard. He grabbed Aurora’s hand, his palm warm after the bite of the wind. They headed north, a few guards trailing several feet behind them. The wind stung Aurora’s cheeks. She burrowed her chin under the fastening of her cloak.

  “So, traveler,” he said. “What would you like to do first?”

  “I thought you were going to show me Vanhelm,” she said. “So show me Vanhelm.”

  “I know just the place.”

  The crowds grew thicker. The preachers were out on the street corners again, shouting about the end of days to passersby, but few people even glanced at them. Finnegan’s guards vanished into the crowd. Some of the people they passed seemed to recognize Finnegan—one girl elbowed another so sharply that her friend nearly fell over—but nobody tried to stop them.

  They approached a square building, about ten floors high, with busts of different creatures lined up outside. A unicorn held its head midtoss, and a dragon bared its teeth near the door, nostrils flared.

  One boy was attempting to clamber up the unicorn’s spiked mane. He slipped, and his friends laughed.

  “What is this?” Aurora asked.

  “The museum,” Finnegan said. “I thought you’d fit in here.”

  She was so surprised that she laughed. She pushed him, and he ducked away, before jerking back to her side. “Actually, Finnegan, I do believe you’re the older one here. Maybe you belong in a museum.”

  “It’s true,” Finnegan said. “I’ll never be eighteen again. But I don’t remember last century.”

  She ignored him and headed for the museum’s front door. Once she was inside, she found that the museum wasn’t full of old relics and plaques about battles long ago, but art. From shards of pottery to lush paintings, half-crumbled stone statues and casts of bronze, every inch of space was filled with shape and color.

  “This isn’t a museum,” she said.

  “It’s an art museum. Didn’t you say you already knew all of your history? I didn’t want to bore you.”

  They wandered the halls, turning wherever their fancy took them. Aurora paused in front of one oil painting that took up a whole wall. A blond girl crouched in a forest, while a fairy fluttered above her outstretched hand. The girl seemed unsure whether to be enchanted or terrified by the magic before her. Aurora knew how she felt.

  Another painting somehow managed to be both dark and colorful, with purple fog twisting around a ruined tower. A girl stood in the center, a sword in hand, her face grim with defiance. Aurora rested her fingertips an inch from the paint, her breath in her throat.

  “This one,” she said. “It makes me think of a book I once read . . .”

  “The Dark Ones? Rosamund Frith?”

  “Yes! You’ve read it?”

  “Only ten times or so. This painting always makes me think of it. I wanted to buy it for the palace, but apparently, my mother doesn’t want us taking art away for our own personal use.”

  “That is such a good book. The bit in the tower? When all of her thoughts are coming true, so the more scared she gets, the scarier things become? I couldn’t sleep after that.”

  “I would have thought you’d be more of one for romances, Rora.”

  “There’s romance in The Dark Ones.”

  “Between t
he girl and a demon.”

  “It’s still romance, isn’t it?” She turned back to the painting, following the swirls of the paint with her eyes. “More realistic than true love and happily ever after.”

  “I suppose you would be the one to know.”

  She glanced at him, but he didn’t seem to be mocking her. “Come on,” she said. “I want to see the others.”

  Many of the paintings here had a fantastical twist. While all the pictures Aurora had ever seen in Alyssinia were portraits or landscapes, the ones here all felt like stories. The people in them seemed frozen in midaction, like everything would hurtle on the moment she looked away.

  Aurora stopped as they turned the corner and then hurried toward a small painting hung on the far wall, composed of soft blues and grays. A black-haired girl stood barefoot on a stony beach, the ocean crashing around her. Her feet were half-buried by the sand, and the foam left swirling patterns as it slipped back into the water. Her hair was tossed into the air, echoing the crash of the waves.

  “This one,” she said. “Do you know this story?”

  “I know lots of stories about the sea,” he said. “None that remind me of this, though.”

  “I only know one.” But as Aurora looked at the girl’s tangled hair, she felt certain that this was based on the one she knew.

  “Tell me.”

  Aurora resisted the urge to touch the foam on the canvas. “All right,” she said. “Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived by the ocean. Every day, she would walk out, right to the edge of the water, so that the tide rushed over her toes, and she would stand there until she sank into the sand.” It had all sounded mystical to Aurora as a child, locked in a tower with only the forest for company. She had not known what the ocean felt like, what sand really was, or how you could sink into it by standing there, but the image had always stuck with her. “Every day, the girl would wonder, What’s out there? And perhaps if she stood there long enough, she would be able to see. An answer would come to her. She returned to the shore every day for years, simply wondering, imagining what she might find.”