The Mage Heir

by Kathryn Sommerlot

  “Phehon,” he said as he squeezed his eyes shut.

  “What’s that?”

  “The Chaydese word for treason,” Tatsu replied. “I’m a traitor to the crown now.”

  He ran a hand through his hair as laughter bubbled up in his chest. “A traitor, most likely bastard-born, abandoned by my mother and fearfully isolated by my father, exploited by the queen I then betrayed to save the life of a man I hardly know.”

  “Prince,” Yudai corrected. “A prince you hardly know.”

  “Oh, of course that makes it all better,” Tatsu said.

  “It sometimes feels as if you forget that fact.”

  Tatsu snorted and pressed his fingers against his temples. “I sincerely doubt that you’d ever allow anyone to forget that.”

  He did feel slightly better, though, and the tension in his chest eased somewhat. He leaned back against one of the sweet-smelling trees, allowing his hair to get caught in the rough bark. Staring up at the stars twinkling between the leaves, it didn’t feel quite so bad. Each moment he was still breathing and still free, and the feeling of guilt slowly faded away into a low hum in his veins.

  “Well,” Yudai said. “It could be worse.”

  “That’s true,” Tatsu agreed. “Tomorrow morning, we could wake up to find you’ve drained this whole mountainside.”

  Yudai narrowed his eyes.

  “That’s not funny,” he said, but the lifting of his lips gave him away.

  “Go to sleep, Your Highness.”

  Yudai grumbled for quite some time while getting himself comfortable amidst the grass, and Tatsu just stared up at the moon, wondering if somewhere, somehow, his mother was doing the exact same thing.

  He woke up to a strange silence, the suspicious absence of humming insects and singing birds a warning sign on the forested mountain pathway. Senses on alert, Tatsu pushed himself up to take stock of their surroundings, but it took a second for his eyes to adjust.

  There were no birds up in the leaves above them. Over the closest ridge that led down the mountainside, however, he could hear a few jays in the middle of their morning serenades. The quiet seemed to be limited to their immediate area, and when he looked left over the remnants of the fire pit embers, Tatsu could see why.

  The outline of Yudai’s sleeping form was burned into the ground, resulting in an expansive human shadow filled with withered grass blades.

  As Tatsu stared, Yudai stirred awake and sat up with bits of the decayed turf clinging to his hair. He looked to both sides, and while his expression didn’t change as he absorbed the morning reality, his shoulders stiffened. When he looked at Tatsu, his gaze was very hard.

  “You said that when you found me in the castle, I was surrounded by black market toxins.”

  “That’s what Alesh said, yes,” Tatsu agreed.

  “And we need to decide on a destination before the oncoming season change decides for us.”

  Tatsu nodded, unable to follow.

  Yudai bent over and ripped up a handful of the dead grass, apparently unafraid of the lingering effects the siphon always seemed to leave behind. Clumps of dirt and scraggly roots crumpled out from between his fingers.

  “Then we go to get answers about what those poisons really did to me,” Yudai said, full of finality, with all the weight of a man expecting to get his way. “We’re going to Joesar.”

  Two

  Getting back across the mountains to the border of Joesar was no easy task. It took several days to backtrack away from Chayd’s territory and doubling over their own path significantly decreased both the edible vegetation and the wildlife. Tatsu spent an entire afternoon traveling up and away from the trade route they were following to get to the overgrown cliffs he could see from down below. He returned that night with two plump, well-fed pheasants and a jack hare in its light brown summer coat.

  He set about readying the animals, defeathering and skinning before carefully trimming off all the fat he could find with his knife. Yudai hovered nearby, somehow enraptured by the process.

  “You can use this for soup,” Tatsu said as he handed over the strips of fat and ignored the disgusted look that crossed Yudai’s face. “The fat will cause the meat to spoil faster, and we’ll need this to last.”

  “You’re assuming there won’t be much hunting when we get to Joesar.”

  Tatsu leaned into his work, slicing against the grain with precise, deliberate care. “Joesar is mostly desert, and we’ll be forced to travel at night, but the lack of food isn’t even the worst of our problems.”

  “You think we’ll die of thirst,” Yudai said. He sounded cross, but he dumped the fat strips into the cast iron cooking pot that Tatsu usually kept strapped to the bottom of his pack and swirled them around with the wooden ladle.

  “We don’t know where we’re going,” Tatsu told him. “I’ve never even seen a complete map of Joesar. Our best bet to finding information about the poisons is to head to the capital, but I don’t have the slightest clue which direction it’s in.”

  “Moswar.”

  Tatsu frowned, looking up from the growing pile of thin slices. “Is that a direction?”

  “The capital of Joesar is Moswar,” Yudai said. “I’ve never been, but I had to learn about the surrounding countries during my lessons. My father had closed Runon’s borders before I was born, though, so I never met any representatives in court.”

  “So you know the direction we should go?”

  Yudai’s face flushed a little. “Northwest. That’s all I can tell you, and I wish it could be more. If I was ever taught anything else about Joesar’s cities, it’s gone now.”

  It wasn’t much, but Tatsu tried to school his features into something he hoped would pass as optimistic. “Well, it’s better than nothing. At least we have a vague plan.”

  Yudai shot him a look that clearly said Tatsu hadn’t fooled him at all. He continued to stir the fat bits in the stew as Tatsu finished cutting up the strips to dry and keep as jerky.

  “I would have known more about these lands,” Yudai commented quietly, after Tatsu was done. “I would have been well-versed in the countries around my kingdom and their cities. I would have been taught more of their policies and customs as I grew into my time to rule.”

  “I know.”

  Yudai’s eyes locked on the pot of boiling soup, and Tatsu wondered if he was seeing something that Tatsu couldn’t. “I can’t stop thinking about it now, the life I should’ve had.”

  Then he laughed, the sound sardonic. He wiped a bit at his eyes with the back of his hand without bothering to disguise the action as anything else. When he met Tatsu’s gaze again, his eyes were shimmering.

  “This is stupid, isn’t it?” he said. “That I’m feeling this way now?”

  “No,” Tatsu replied, voice gentle. “When we first got you out, the only goal was survival. There was no room for anything else. It’s after survival is guaranteed that everything else catches up with you. You’re grieving.”

  Yudai barked out a laugh. “That’s a useful emotion.”

  “But necessary,” Tatsu said, and Yudai’s next look was long and shrewd.

  Neither of them spoke for a spell. Yudai didn’t look away during the silence, but Tatsu did, folding under the weight of the knowing gaze.

  “What about you?” Yudai asked, voice sharp.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Tatsu said to the slices of meat, but it was forced even to his own ears.

  “Survival is guaranteed now, right? Mostly, anyway. So what are you grieving?”

  Everything was the honest answer, but Tatsu couldn’t bear to let it fall from his tongue. There was too much pulling his heart down into his stomach—too much that tasted bitter and ashy in his mouth, coating the flesh all the way down his throat. With every breath, he mourned the loss and then felt silly for doing so in the same instant. The truth of it was that he was grieving absolutely everything, even things he’d never really known, and he couldn’t separate the str
ands from where they were tangled up.

  “The image of my father,” he finally settled on. “I thought I’d known who he was, but I was wrong. And now it feels like I’ve watched him die all over again.”

  Yudai didn’t offer any compassion in response. Instead, he said, “I know what you mean. Everything is different now.”

  “I wish I could say that it gets better…” Tatsu started, and Yudai cut him off with another harsh laugh.

  “Of course it doesn’t get better. You just have to deal with it. You learn to harden yourself against everything else.”

  Staring down at his hands, Tatsu wasn’t quite sure that was the right answer, but he kept it to himself. He already felt exposed enough; Yudai’s eyes seemed like they could pierce through his defenses at the best of times. Sitting by the crackling fire with the probing conversation strung between them, it felt like all his shields had fallen away.

  When Tatsu looked up again, Yudai was still staring at him, his expression seeking.

  “Well, this has been a very uplifting conversation,” Yudai said.

  Tatsu laughed, surprised at how genuine the action was. “I’ll try and tailor the rest of our interactions to bolster your spirits, then.”

  “Don’t,” Yudai said, with force. “Don’t you dare.”

  He looked uncomfortable when Tatsu raised both eyebrows across the flames at him. “You’re the only one who treats me like a normal person. It’s just… been a long time since anyone talked to me like an equal. Like I was something other than the prince or a magical prodigy.”

  “And?”

  “It’s nice,” Yudai huffed, and rolled his eyes. “Obviously.”

  The tension in the air was back, and it was heavier than before. Yudai had curled in around himself, looping his arms over his knees as if he could disappear into nothing more than a ball of skin and bones. Afraid that he would shatter the easy chemistry of their travels, Tatsu let the subject drop.

  “That soup should be almost done,” he pointed out. “Skim the foam off the top and divvy it up—we’ll need all the energy we can get once we hit the edge of the desert.”

  Within three days, Tatsu could see an expanse of rolling sand dunes over the cliffsides. They were an hour or two from the desert itself, and already the air had changed into something much drier and sharper. The old trade road they’d been walking didn’t veer off into Joesar, so they cut their own path through the wild overgrowth that clung to the side of the last mountain like barnacles on the underbelly of a ship. The land seemed to pull away from the desert, and the rocks that met the edge were smooth, beaten for years by the harsh, dry winds.

  As they grew nearer, Tatsu’s confidence wavered. He could get them northwest using the stars and the sun’s arc, but all they had was a vague heading. They didn’t know how long of a journey across the dunes it would be or what they’d encounter along the way. They were going in blind, and there were few worse things they could do in a new, foreign land.

  Tatsu thought about bringing up his worries to Yudai, but they’d woken up that morning to find the usual dead zone had expanded further than it usually did. It could mean only one thing: the siphon was growing in power.

  Yudai hadn’t said anything about it, other than a few too-casual jokes, but his face was pinched at the sides. His steps were more careful and his fingers more controlled. It was almost as if he were afraid to touch anything for fear of the siphon bursting free.

  Tatsu took the lead through the thick clusters of coniferous trees until, suddenly, the trees stopped, and there was only the pebble-strewn, uneven cliff leading them down. Bits of the sand crept nearer and nearer to the grass, which thinned out until it was nothing more than tufts of prickly blades. Free from the mountains, the stretch of blue sky seemed never-ending without any clouds, and that would work against them.

  Tatsu stopped moving before they reached the border so they could seek shelter beneath the last bits of the tree canopy.

  “Now we wait?” Yudai asked.

  “Now we wait for nightfall.”

  They settled in for the last hours of daylight, and Yudai’s eyes fluttered closed almost immediately. Tatsu, however, couldn’t get his heart to stop hammering so hard, so he took the chance to commit what he could of the desert to memory. It wouldn’t aid them much as there was little beyond the dunes stretching out in front of them. The sand wove up and down like gentle hills, and past that, Tatsu couldn’t see anything they could use as navigation. There were no mountains or trees, just the vast nothingness of the rolling Joesarian desert. Even guessing the time needed to cross the expanse was impossible.

  To their right, the Turend mountain range continued north to where it eventually met up with the Great Mountains of Runon. To their left, the peaks would slowly meet up with the Oldal Sea and the kingdom of Rad-em.

  There was only the tan of the desert sands stretched out in front of them, tinged orange beneath the setting sun.

  Tatsu waited until dusk to wake Yudai. Tatsu tried to look busy as Yudai stood and brushed bits of dirt off his pants, frowning down at the small ring of decayed undergrowth.

  “At least you won’t be able to drain much in the desert,” Tatsu said.

  “Small favors,” Yudai agreed, but didn’t seem cheered by the prospect.

  As the sun dipped below the undulating horizon line, they set off into the sands. The air shimmered for only a half hour or so before it rapidly dropped the lingering heat. It settled around Tatsu’s shoulders like a cold cloak, but it was no worse than it had been along the mountain paths. The dunes beneath them were harder to deal with—the sand shifted under their boots, too dry to stick together as they sank down into it. Each step was a heaving lift to forcibly remove their feet from the granules, and overhead, the moon rose as a perfect half-circle, unobscured by clouds.

  The desert itself was quiet, save for the breeze that rustled the sand in swirling arcs across the hills. Every once in a while, they would come across a part of the dunes where the land flattened and grew rockier, strewn with fist-sized stones that were battered and weathered from the elements. These patches were far easier to walk across, but what energy he saved in the journey, Tatsu redirected to intensify his own focus. It was in the flatter areas that he caught glimpses of the zig-zag paths left behind by the desert sidewinders. They likely hid in the shadows of the small rocks during the relentless sunny days and did their hunting at night. He hoped they were too big a target to entice the snakes, because he didn’t know how large they could grow out in the sands.

  He stopped them every few hours or so for water. Even at night, the desert’s dry heat made it easy to fall prey to dehydration, and Tatsu was acutely aware of their limited supply. He rationed it as best he could and pushed their pace as much as possible without exhausting both of them.

  Yudai didn’t seem impressed with the never-ending dunes.

  “What’s the point to having this much sand?” he grumbled, grunting as he lifted his leg high to step over and across a shifting ridge. “You can’t grow anything, and nothing shows up naturally.”

  “There has to be something, or else no humans would’ve settled here,” Tatsu said.

  “I don’t think there are any humans here,” Yudai pointed out. “We haven’t seen anything but sand for hours. It’s a barren wasteland.”

  “That’s not true,” Tatsu told him, as they paused for just enough water to wet their tongues. “There were several reedy plants at the last stop that likely grow fruit near the midpoint of summer, and I saw at least one lizard near the rocks that could be enough for a meal if cooked right. Besides, didn’t you see that desert hawk that’s been circling us on and off all day?”

  Yudai stared at him incredulously for a long beat before his face contorted in disbelief. “A few plants, a lizard, and a hawk? You’re arguing an ecosystem with that?”

  Tatsu shrugged. “I’m just saying, there’s likely more here than we realize, or else no one would ever have journeyed throug
h the sand.”

  Yudai sputtered out something incoherent, and Tatsu caught only snippets of words like “disturbed” and “reaching” before they started out again. At least Yudai’s grumbling provided decent background noise as Tatsu worked out their plan. The sun would be up soon; already, the sky was lightening behind them, where the last bits of the Turend Mountains could still be seen. The desert would be nearly impassable at the height of the day, and they needed to find somewhere to sleep. Unfortunately, Tatsu hadn’t seen any rock formations large enough to provide the shade they needed since they started out, and they had only an hour or two left.

  Dawn proved even hotter than he’d initially anticipated. Before the sun had even fully rose out of its slumber behind the horizon, the air began to swelter and haze. They stripped off their outer layers and wrapped them around their heads to shield their faces, but it didn’t seem to do enough to stave off the worst of it. The rolling sand beneath their boots only served to reflect the heat back up at them, catching them in an inescapable pocket of broiling oxygen, until the sweat was running down Tatsu’s face so much that swiping his tongue over his lips rewarded him with a burst of salt.

  “We have to stop,” Yudai moaned, wiping his hands under the white-black strands of hair and coming away with damp fingers. “We can’t keep up like this.”

  “Ten more minutes,” Tatsu said. “To the bottom of this ridge so we can set up the tent parallel to the wind.”

  It took several tries to secure his leather skin to the ground without trees to tie it around. He used his pack for one side, to pick it up off the sands, and the other he secured with their cooking pot and a bit of the kindling he carried. There wasn’t much space between the leather and the ground, but there was enough to catch the wind and allow it to flow through. The sand beneath the tent was too hot to lie on directly, so Tatsu spread out the sleeping roll and they both collapsed onto it. He stripped down as much as he dared, in case they needed to get up and moving quickly, but it wasn’t nearly enough. He lay staring at the underside of the leather. He could feel the sweat continuing to bead and roll across his forehead, likening him to a hare roasting inside cast iron.