Sunbolt (The Sunbolt Chronicles)

by Khanani, Intisar

“She called first to the birds, and a crow brought her a needle.”

  “Impossible,” Stormwind snaps. “No wild Promise can do that.”

  “She took the needle,” Val continues, unperturbed, “and cut herself. She used her own blood to break the enchantment that held me, a blood spell that had bound a woman’s soul within it.”

  “A blood spell,” Stormwind echoes. She gives me a long, measuring look, one that holds a certain amount of suspicion. I meet her gaze. Blood magic sounds rather dubious to me, too. But calling to a crow? That seems a wonderful thing. I wish I remembered how I did that.

  “We escaped the tower but were recaptured in the hills. Kol was there, and he and I fought. The girl had already been beaten by him. She lay on the ground hardly able to rise.” Val leans back, his violet eyes intent on Stormwind. “I had been starved for a year, and though I had breathed from the soldiers who chased us, I was hardly Kol’s equal. I began to lose. Just as I thought he would finish me, he was struck by a bolt of lightning.”

  She pales, and it takes her a moment to find her words. “What you are saying cannot be.”

  “Kol,” Val smiles, “turned to ash before my eyes. She burnt like a blazing star and breathed smoke and still coughs cinders.”

  “A wild Promise cannot … that is a working of the highest order.”

  “Perhaps,” Val suggests, “she is not wholly untrained. I agree that her survival was miraculous. I thought her dead at first, and you know that I can scent life in every creature.”

  “Rasheed Coldeye,” Stormwind mutters. She chews her bottom lip, her eyes roving over my features. “Your father trained you?”

  “A little, I think,” I say. Clearly Val believes it’s true, so I must have told him so at some point.

  “He did not take you as his apprentice?”

  I glance towards Val.

  “They hid her, taught her in secret,” he says for me.

  Stormwind looks back at me. “Your mother was also a mage.”

  “Yes. Hotaru Brokensword.”

  “How did she die?”

  I meet her gaze, bewildered, remembering the woman dressed in blue silks. Why would Stormwind suppose my mother dead? I take a breath, pushing farther into the dark corners of my mind, knowing that the answers are waiting there for me.

  And, suddenly, the memories blossom like flowers opening towards the sun. My father, lying pale and still on his bed, his eyes wide and staring, dead. My mother, her chest heaving in coughs that spatter blood on her kerchiefs, insisting that she and I travel to Karolene, seek help from a mage there. And, finally, Wilhelm Blackflame when I first met him, after my mother had gone to him and never returned. He looked at me as if I were a cursed thing, a piece of filth marring the perfection of his courtyard. His words ring in my ears as they did that first time, distant, hard. Hotaru Brokensword is dead. Do not come here again.

  In the silence while I remember, Val speaks, his words half-mocking, “Did your waters not show you?”

  “I did not look,” she says stiffly.

  “We went to Karolene to seek help,” I tell her finally. “After my father died. But my mother disappeared.”

  Stormwind stares at me, her lips parted slightly, for the first time neither suspicious nor aloof. Instead, she appears to be struggling against mounting horror. “Karolene? Why Karolene?”

  “My mother thought Master Blackflame would help her. He didn’t—or perhaps he did. I followed after her, once she didn’t return, and he told me she had died. But …”

  “But?” Stormwind asks, her voice sharp. Everything about her seems sharp, on edge.

  “But she’s still alive, and living in his home. I saw her.” I glance towards Val, wondering why the memory feels empty, like an image painted on a backdrop of lotus flowers and blue skies, a picture I might have seen somewhere. How much of me was burnt away with the spell I cast?

  “I see.” Stormwind drops her gaze to the tabletop. She breathes slowly, evenly, focused inward. After a moment, she looks back up and it is as if I had never mentioned seeing my mother. She says, “Your parents could not have taught you very much in secret. How did you make your lightning bolt?”

  I don’t recall my parents teaching me anything at all, but the spell—that I remember. “It wasn’t lightning. It was sunlight.”

  “The sun was still rising,” Val objects, then presses his lips together. He had not meant to contradict me, but he hasn’t really. He doesn’t know what I did when I killed Kol.

  “I gathered it from where it slept in every creature around me, in every thing that had ever been touched by a ray of sunlight.”

  “Gathered it,” Stormwind echoes. “But you didn’t know how to channel such power.”

  I shake my head uncertainly.

  “She has lost much of her memory, Mistress Stormwind,” Val says. It seems he has finally decided to trust her with the truth of how damaged I am. “She knows only pieces of her life before she made her casting.”

  Stormwind nods. “I expect it burnt its way right through her and took everything it touched. A fire requires fuel.”

  “I want to remember,” I say.

  Neither Stormwind nor Val answer me. Instead, Val rises from the table. “We will be pleased to stay with you these three days.”

  “Indeed.”

  “By the Laws of Old,” he begins. She looks at him, her expression so cold and sharp it might have cut glass. He smiles as he continues, “I offer any help I can while I am here. Have you any needs?”

  Val spends the bulk of that day and the next on the cottage roof, fixing broken shingles and cutting out rot. I climb up beside him, though he doesn’t let me do much beyond that. “Just sit,” he admonishes me. “She’ll give you work soon enough.”

  “But we’re leaving after tomorrow,” I point out on the second day when she still hasn’t given me any chores.

  “I am,” he says. “We breathers have a rather dark history when it comes to mages. I dare not stay beyond the three days.”

  “You’re not taking me with you,” I say slowly.

  “Not if Stormwind will keep you. She can train that Promise of yours.”

  “She wants to turn me over to the High Council.”

  Val hammers down a new shingle. I watch him, and it occurs to me that he is unexpectedly good at mending roofs. He sits back on his heel to look at the lake. Framed by the mountains rising around it, and unruffled by any wind, it looks like a mirror, perfectly reflecting the sky.

  Val tells me, “Stormwind respected your father. She’s now thinking about what he meant to do by keeping his own daughter’s Promise a secret. She’s looking into who you were and where you lived and what happened to you. She knows that your casting was of a higher order than many mages ever achieve. She will take you on as her student despite her misgivings. Here, in this valley, you can learn from her and will be safe from prying eyes.”

  He turns back to the roof. “Nail.”

  I hand him another nail. Five shingles later, as he peels off a splintering scrap of wood and studies the touch of rot beneath it, I ask him, “Where will you go?”

  “I have sworn allegiance to a prince of my people. I will return to serve him. He will want to hear what I have to tell of Kol.” Val smiles grimly.

  “What’s his name? I’ve never heard of a breather prince.” At least, not that I can remember. Which isn’t saying much at all.

  “Names have great power,” he says, his eyes catching mine. “I will tell you that he lives in the Amara Mountains.”

  I have no idea how far the Amaras may be. “Will you come back?” I ask.

  “I am a breather,” he says almost angrily.

  “So?”

  He sets his hammer down. “Do you remember how I looked at you in the tower room? What you feared?”

  I swallow. My memories of the tower have returned in patches, perhaps because they are the most recent ones I have. So I know what he means. “But you were starving then,” I say.<
br />
  “The more time I spend with you, the more I want to taste you.”

  “No,” I say, my voice soft with shock. His violet eyes do not waver. He reaches out a hand and brushes the back of my wrist, his touch as light as a butterfly’s wing.

  “I am sorry.”

  I back away from him, his words, sliding a little on the shingles. “You can’t. You’re my friend.”

  “Mages and breathers cannot be friends.”

  “I’m not a mage,” I cry. “You helped me. You brought me here. You kept me alive after I burnt myself. You can’t just toss all that to the wind. It means something, what you did for me.”

  “I was repaying my debt,” he says. “You freed me from my chains and killed my enemy when I could not.”

  “A debt,” I say in a strangled voice.

  “Yes,” he agrees quietly. I turn away from him and slither to the bottom of the roof, swinging down to the ground before he can see my tears. I don’t want Mistress Stormwind to see me either, so I make my way to the trees.

  He is the only person I know anymore, the only one who knows me—who knows the girl I was before I killed with a bolt of sunlight, and what I have become as I emerge from my ashes. And I am nothing more to him than a burden to be discharged. I feel as though Val has taken all the friendship he has shown me in the last weeks, all the quiet care and campfire conversations, and turned them into something hard and ugly. A debt. A thing to be repaid and forgotten. A bad taste in the back of his mouth.

  I find myself heaving great, racking sobs that stir up the last bits of ash in my lungs and coat my throat in soot. I cough and weep in the shade of the winter-bare trees until I feel emptied out once more, and then I lie on my side, listening to the whisper of air in my lungs, the chirping of birds, the thrumming whistle of the wind through the branches overhead.

  The ground is cold beneath me, a chill seeping through the clothes Mistress Stormwind gave me. She had pursed her lips at the soldiers’ layered tunics and pants I wore, and this morning she had provided me with a carefully mended skirt, a lady’s long tunic, and a sweater. I realize now that they were meaningful gifts. One does not gift a convict good clothes before sending her to the gallows.

  She will keep me on, and Val will leave without a backward glance. As much as I try, I cannot convince myself I am glad of it.

  Above me, the birds fall silent. I turn on my back and see Brigit Stormwind standing five paces away. She is wrapped in a faded blue cloak, her bone-white hair tied back severely. She doesn’t speak, but crosses the distance between us to sit beside me. I push myself up, wrapping my arms around my knees.

  “He speaks truth, your breather,” she says finally.

  “You were listening?” I ask, furious.

  She turns her hands over, her palms empty. “There is nothing of trust between mages and breathers. I had to be sure of him.” I bite my lip to keep from saying something that will give her reason to throw me out. “I know of only one instance in which a breather sought shelter from a mage by the Laws of Old.”

  “One?”

  “The breather was dying and wanted to pass on in peace; the mage granted her that.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your breather has trod on very uncertain ground, not only by letting you live but by offering you his protection—and by bringing you to me.”

  “He’s repaying his debt,” I say bitterly. “He said so.”

  “It is truth,” she agrees. “But not the whole truth.”

  I look at her warily.

  “He could have left you in the care of a village healer, with a pouch of coins to help you on your way. That would have cleared his debt. Instead, he spent the better part of two months nursing you himself and bringing you to someone who could train you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A breather does not help a Promise become a mage.”

  “He is a breather, and I am a Promise,” I say, irritated. “So apparently it happens.”

  She chuckles. It’s a warm, friendly sound that I wouldn’t have expected from her. “You are beginning to see. I would not let his words sadden me if I were you. He is, I think, just trying to remind himself of the danger of what he has done.”

  “I wouldn’t harm him,” I protest.

  “Not now. But mages are often called in to hunt down breathers.”

  “Maybe I won’t be that kind of mage,” I say. “And he isn’t a rogue. He fed on animals on our way here.”

  Brigit Stormwind smiles. “I believe your father wanted you to be a very different sort of mage from the type we usually train. He always had a … unique perspective on what we ask of our students.”

  “You knew him?” I cannot hide my excitement.

  “We were apprenticed together.”

  “But—” I hesitate. She arches an eyebrow. “You’re much older than he was.”

  “We were the same age. I was attacked by a breather once, and he took a portion of my youth from me.”

  That explains the way she had looked at Val when she first opened her door to us. I can’t help but ask, “What happened to the breather?”

  “Another mage killed him before he could finish me.”

  “Val’s not like that,” I say quickly. But she had heard his words as well as I; he’d said he wanted to breathe from me.

  “Not where you are concerned, it seems,” she agrees after a moment, surprising me. Had she not heard him? Or had she understood his words differently from me? I glance at her askance, but her expression is mild, thoughtful, telling me nothing.

  I turn my gaze back to the trees, searching for glints of the lake beyond them. “I keep thinking about my mother,” I tell her.

  Stormwind waits for me to go on.

  “I don’t remember very much. But she might need help and …” I pause, then rush through the rest of my words. “She’ll remember me. Maybe if I talk to her, I’ll remember, too.”

  “It would be a death wish, to want to return to Blackflame’s stronghold,” Stormwind observes.

  “Part of me feels dead anyhow,” I say quietly. I don’t know why I’m telling her this, except that I need to admit the words to myself, face the truth of them. “I don’t know who I am. I only have bits and pieces of what I was. How can I grow if I have no past, no roots?”

  Stormwind doesn’t answer at once. When she does, it’s with a measure of trepidation, as if she’s not at all sure that what she says is wise. “The waters of my lake are crystal clear, Hitomi. I will teach you to look into them.”

  “To speak with my mother?”

  “Yes.”

  I turn this possibility over in my mind once, twice, consider the angles. “What if she needs me?”

  “She is Hotaru Brokensword. What she needs is for you to survive and learn, not to seek her out and endanger yourself. There is no other help you can offer her that would serve her better.”

  I don’t answer. I suppose she knows my mother better than I do right now. The memory I have of my mother is placid and still, not one of danger or distress. I suppose my plans can wait until I’ve talked to her. Even if Stormwind is wrong, I can see that I’m not much use as I am.

  She still watches me, so I nod my head. She pushes herself to her feet, shaking out her cloak as if that has settled everything between us. Perhaps it has. “Come, then. There are chores aplenty, and I want to get out my books tonight. We should begin your training at once. You know how to read, I hope?”

  I follow her back down to the cottage, answering her questions as best I can as she tries to assess just where she must start her lessons. My first chore is to wash out the clothes I had worn. I draw water from the well and scrub them in a tub by the fire, listening to the faint tap of Val’s hammer overhead. It’s a comforting sound in its way, and I am glad he still has one day left with us.

  After I’ve wrung out the clothes and draped them by the fire to dry, there are the goats to milk. By the time I have gotten them into their pen for the night
—no small task since I haven’t a clue what I’m doing—it is nearly dinnertime. I trudge back to the house, my body aching, muscles I have not used in two months already protesting my afternoon’s work.

  I pause at the door of the cottage, surprised to hear voices coming from within. Val and Stormwind have barely exchanged a dozen sentences since their initial conversation. Even though Val has joined us each evening before the fireplace, both of them have directed their conversation to me, treating the other with careful distance. But now they’re together, in the cottage, having a full-blown discussion.

  I tilt my head, listening. The door has been left cracked open, and Val and Stormwind must not be far from it, for their voices are easily distinguishable.

  “You’ve heard of the Shadow League?” Val asks now.

  “Yes.” The word is flat, emotionless.

  “She was with them, helping a family escape Blackflame.”

  “I thought you were running from Lord Kol.” Stormwind’s voice remains cool.

  “Blackflame caught her, thinking she was the Ghost. When he realized she wasn’t who he wanted, he passed her on to Kol.”

  I close my eyes, trying to envision what he says. But I don’t recall helping any family, let alone hearing of a Shadow League.

  “Passed her from Karolene to Godan?” Stormwind asks.

  “You are a mage,” Val observes. “You know about portals. Blackflame opened one to Kol’s fortress. I watched them arrive from the tower window.”

  Stormwind digests this news in silence. I stay still, barely daring to breathe. Val has never mentioned a word of this to me. I want to hear as much as I can before he realizes I’m listening.

  “How do you know this when she doesn’t?” Stormwind asks abruptly.

  “Kol never knew when to stop talking. He told me her story when he brought her for me.” Val’s voice is tinged with contempt.

  “But you didn’t tell her.”

  I hear a faint creak of floorboards as Val shifts his weight. “If the details are wrong, they will reshape her memories. Maybe Kol didn’t know the truth. If she remembers, she remembers. For now, I want her here, not searching for who she was.” He sounds irritated, but I cannot tell if he is frustrated with me or himself.