The Mage Heir

by Kathryn Sommerlot

  “I’m alive?” Yudai asked, hoarse and cracking at the end. One of the mages moved forward with a small glass of water that Yudai gulped down in less time than Tatsu thought possible.

  “It would appear so,” Hysus replied.

  “Did it work?”

  “We will not know for sure until you are well enough to test it,” Hysus said.

  Yudai began trying to push himself up by his elbows, and Tatsu sprang forward to press a hand against his shoulder.

  “Not immediately,” Tatsu said as Yudai struggled against the pressure. “You’ve been out for almost a full day. You can’t—”

  “I’m not wasting any more time.” Yudai was shaking from the exertion of attempting to rise, and the tremors were so strong in his arms, they shook the whole cot.

  “We weren’t sure you’d ever wake up,” Tatsu said, quieter, which seemed to work. Yudai’s gaze flickered in his direction and his scowl softened somewhat. He stopped fighting so much, letting Tatsu help to reposition his weight.

  It took perhaps a full minute for Yudai to sit up and move his legs to dangle off the side of the mattress. He looked drained and exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes despite the rest he’d just awoken from, but still, he ran a shaky hand through his hair to un-mat it.

  “What should I do?” he asked Hysus, who had refolded his hands with a deliberate sort of care and was standing off to the side, watching shrewdly.

  “Reversing the siphon into your energy should have given you control over it,” Hysus said. “And it should have helped to crack the shields keeping you from your abilities.”

  “So I try to use my magic,” Yudai said in a way that was not a question. He didn’t wait for the answer before raising one shaking hand out in front of his body, and whatever it was that he was fighting down seemed to get stuck in his throat. His hand swayed erratically from side to side. Then he looked to Tatsu, sucked in a deep breath, and his arm stilled.

  “It does little good to delay,” Hysus said.

  Yudai’s tongue flicked out to dart over his lips, and then his fingers stretched wide as Tatsu’s ears popped. The sudden spark of the magic was swift, a smack against Tatsu’s back that threatened to knock the wind out of his lungs. The vortex of wind that appeared in Yudai’s palm was small but immensely powerful, tipping over one of the smaller tables at the side of the room and scattering several empty vials, which clattered to the floor. A second later, the manipulation of the energy vanished so quickly that the absence of it echoed.

  Ral made a happy little noise behind the row of mages, but Yudai’s torso seemed to collapse over onto itself.

  “I lost it,” he mumbled, staring down at his empty palm. “I couldn’t hold on to it.”

  “In order to access the full extent of your abilities, you will need to counter the shields preventing you from accessing your abilities at will,” Hysus said. “Without the blood that created it, we cannot completely erase the corruption of your magic: the siphon. The siphon must be satiated entirely to restore the balance.”

  Yudai looked down to his fingers as he slowly closed them once again. “You’re saying I need to use the siphon to break the rest of the shields. That I need to drain the person who put their blood as a code into… me.”

  “Yes. I believe that would satisfy the siphon and activate the remainder of your abilities.”

  “How would she have done this?” Yudai asked, his expression twisted into a grimace. “How could she have controlled the siphon through her blood without…”

  “I believe she mixed her blood into the toxins they fed you,” Hysus said.

  “Gods,” Alesh said, recoiling, standing behind Ral. She’d snuck in while Tatsu’s attention was elsewhere. “She fed him her own blood?”

  “It would have been the only way to ensure that the siphon reacted to her magic control when it was created,” Hysus replied, and then, looking at Yudai sharply, continued, “It also served the purpose of keeping you from fighting back once she robbed you of your abilities.”

  Yudai opened his mouth to say something but never got the chance. A young mage, dressed more in green than gray, came through the door in a whirlwind of frenetic motion and almost tripped over his own feet. He stumbled into the center of the room and then, as if remembering the protocol several moments too late, fell into a jerky half-bow.

  “High Priest, sir,” the mage began, “there is an urgent messenger from the capital. He was told to wait while Yu—the prince was unavailable, and they just said that he has woken.”

  “From the capital?” Hysus asked. “Then by all means, send him in.”

  The young mage complied without delay and nearly tumbled back out the doors, and a few seconds later, a Joesarian messenger appeared clad in white linen layers and knee-high, well-worn leather boots. He bowed with far more grace than the mage had and then pulled out a paper from a pocket on the inside of his tunic.

  “This letter arrived by hired courier a week ago in Moswar,” he said. “It was delivered to the High Council after your departure and was then sent out after you. I apologize for the delay but tracking your progress through the sands was made more difficult with the attack in the Rist dominion.”

  He passed the letter to Hysus, who looked down at the wax seal. His brow furrowed. “It bears the Runonian seal.”

  “It is for the prince,” the messenger said. “It has not been opened.”

  Still frowning, Hysus handed the folded parchment to Yudai, who took it gingerly. He looked at it for a long time, holding its corners with the tips of his fingers before he tugged the edges free from the wax.

  “‘A life for a life,’” he read and then looked up. “That’s all it says.”

  “It came with news, though not from the same man,” the messenger told him. “Reports have reached the Council’s ears from Runon that High Mage Nota has taken control through a coup.”

  He paused, taking a deep, audible breath before facing Yudai directly and squaring his shoulders. The sharpness of his posture, the lines on his face; they all blurred together into the figure of someone delivering the worst news he could think of, and Tatsu braced himself for what he knew was coming before the messenger had opened his mouth again.

  “The King of Runon is dead.”

  Everything within the chamber seemed to pause, with Yudai at the head, looking as if he scarcely dared to breathe. His expression was caught somewhere between disbelief and horror, his lips parting as if to gasp out an exclamation that was never fully summoned or formed. He stared at the messenger, and then at Hysus, and then back down to the letter in his hands, the gruesome meaning a dark, crushing revelation painted over his features. He sucked in a ragged lungful of air, already weak and forced to stare at his future head on.

  By the time his wide eyes met Tatsu’s again, Tatsu’s blood had chilled and frozen beneath his skin. The space between them, perhaps only a few steps, had become an impassable gorge, the twin to the basin outside the rocky slopes of the ruins and just as terrifyingly black and deep. The King of Runon was dead, and so was the man who had allowed his only son to be broken for his own gain. His blood heir stood at the apex of the receiving room and shook like a leaf in a storm, holding the crumbling parchment that forever altered his world.

  It had taken a long time for Tatsu to think of Yudai as a prince. He’d always been one, of course, but he’d been a victim first, and a bargaining tool second. After that, he’d simply been Yudai, with his bloodline binding cords invisibly tied around his wrists, out of sight and out of mind. The longer Tatsu stared at him, the heavier the realization that he was no longer looking at a prince at all.

  Tatsu wanted to reach for him and found that he couldn’t. His heart was hammering a desperate, mournful tempo that started in his gut and echoed through his fingertips.

  There was a soft gasp behind him, and Tatsu wasn’t sure what it was directed at until he noticed that his body was moving unbidden, sliding down to the ground until one knee smacked
against the stones. At the edge of his awareness, he barely registered the others in the room doing the same.

  Yudai’s expression had twisted into unhappy shock, and his eyes in the morning sunlight glinted with what might have been betrayal—a knife severing all the things he’d been feverishly clinging to.

  “Long live the king,” Tatsu whispered, and even with the louder echo of the others around him, the words still tasted like ash.

  Sixteen

  Yudai’s eyes on him were unbearably heavy for a long time, until the others in the room stood back up and Tatsu let his gaze drop to the floor.

  “Thank you,” Yudai said, and it took a moment for Tatsu realize that he was addressing the messenger still standing in front of the wooden door, “for bringing this message. You’re dismissed.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Tatsu saw the man bow and disappear from the receiving room.

  “Hysus, I thank you as well for reversing what you could,” Yudai continued. There was iron to his tone. It was commanding, the voice of a man who knew that others would obey, and it sounded so little like the Yudai that Tatsu had been with last night that it physically hurt.

  The certainty that he had felt so solid and warm within his core was gone. In its place was an empty space, the kind he only noticed after it’d been filled and was suddenly lacking. At that moment, it was fragile and still raw at the edges, expanding until it consumed everything inside him and replaced it with ice. It felt an awful lot like returning to his house in the woods had, after all the things he’d thought he’d known about his father had fallen apart, an absence that cut sharper than a knife and pulsed with anger in his heart.

  “I think that I need some time,” Yudai said, “to rest and gather my thoughts.”

  It was another dismissal, though far less direct. When Tatsu looked over to Hysus, he found that the mage seemed unaffected by the implications of it. Instead, he bowed, his long sleeves bunching and folding.

  “Your strength will return with time,” Hysus said. “Right now, your body is still trying to process the trauma it was exposed to.”

  “I need some time alone,” Yudai said.

  He stared down at the crumpled paper in his hand. It’d been a long time since Tatsu had been included in the command, so long that he had almost forgotten what it felt like. Hysus and the mages left immediately, Leil and Jotin on their heels, but Ral lingered a second longer with Alesh beside her.

  “Yudai scared,” Ral said, so quiet that Yudai almost couldn’t hear.

  There was the barest flicker of movement in Yudai’s eyes toward Ral’s direction, but he said nothing. He just sat back down on the cot they’d kept him on for the past day with his hands—and the message—resting in his lap. Bowed, he looked more tired than he ever had before, with the weight of the world heavy on his shoulders.

  “Come on.” Alesh tapped Ral’s forearm with one finger. “Let’s go. He wants to be alone.”

  The quick look Alesh sent Tatsu was enough for him to understand that he was meant to follow but doing so was difficult. Yudai wouldn’t look up, either at him or at anything else in the room, and Tatsu knew that falling to his knee had muddied everything that had transpired between them. Them, a singular, heavy sort of word that echoed through his tongue and was suddenly more memory than reality.

  “Tatsu,” Alesh prompted from the doorway.

  Tatsu could still feel the heat of Yudai pressed against him, could still hear the hitch in Yudai’s throat from when Tatsu had dragged his mouth across slightly parted lips. But there was nothing that remained of that memory in Yudai’s slumped form anymore, only the dipped chin of the man who would be king, destined to bear the crown alone.

  A man who had seen the throne torn away from his fingers and then returned through the actions of the same person it’d been stolen by.

  “Coming,” Tatsu called, or tried to, for the words came out far too low.

  Yudai didn’t look at him as Tatsu made his way out of the room.

  He didn’t call any of them back until nearly sundown after most of the day had slipped away into the hazy sun outside.

  “If you don’t mind, I need some time with my… friends,” Yudai said to Hysus, who had come with them after the summons. He was still seated on the side of the cot, but something in his posture had changed. He looked in control once more, having reined in his emotions. “We need to discuss our next move and act accordingly. Clearly, the situation has changed.”

  Hysus tilted his head to the side, clasped his hands behind his back, and then bowed forward slightly at the waist. “Your Majesty. Should you require anything else, you have but to ask.”

  He glided out the opposite door. There was a brief moment of charged silence, with Yudai’s too-straight posture a rigid line against the far walls. Then he sighed, shoulders slumping back down, and in that moment, he was himself again.

  “Gods,” he murmured and covered his face briefly with both hands before sliding his palms back across his head to smooth the errant hairs away, which did little to tame the unruly strands. “This has been a lot to take in.”

  “Your Majesty,” Jotin began, and Yudai’s head snapped back up, eyes flashing.

  “Don’t do that. That’s not… “

  He trailed off like he couldn’t find the right words.

  “You may not be crowned,” Jotin continued, gentler, with one hand slightly raised in front of him, “but the throne is rightfully yours, no matter who has stolen it in the meantime. Protocol should be followed.”

  Yudai’s hands paused at the sides of his head as he opened his mouth to object and then closed it again without saying anything. He shook his head. “Let’s just… focus on what we need to do. Nota has killed my father and taken over Runon.”

  “No one will oppose her?” Alesh asked.

  “No one can.” Yudai pursed his lips together. “There’s no one strong enough.”

  “Before you, there still wasn’t,” Alesh pointed out. As an afterthought, she added, “Your Majesty. So what was to keep the mages from rebelling all this time?”

  “Fear,” Leil said, voice low. “They always had something to lose.”

  All heads in the room turned towards her. She twisted her hands in front of her robes and dropped her eyes down to the floor.

  “There is a reason that mages are kept at the castle to be commanded by the king or queen,” Leil said. “There are records of where each mage came from: the family left behind. And there are always others within the ranks who would suffer. The retribution for a mage who even thinks of such a thing would be swift. The nobles would eliminate the mage’s remaining non-magic family and likely arrest the other mages who had allowed it to happen.”

  Her eyes darted up, found Tatsu, and then flickered to Yudai before lowering once more. “What Nota has done has ensured that everyone connected to her will die, and that all other mages within the kingdom are similarly punished. It will not just be her to suffer.”

  “She has nothing to lose, right?” Alesh asked. “Her family must be gone already for her to risk it.”

  Yudai’s gaze met Tatsu’s for one blistering moment. “I don’t think that’s an issue here.”

  “Then she had help,” Jotin said. “Within the nobles, she had support. If what you said is true, then someone has pledged to protect her.”

  “And the only way I can get control back over my magic is by draining her. Which means I have to go back to confront her.”

  “But you don’t have the power to actually win, Your Majesty,” Leil said.

  Ral, who had been silent and largely uninterested during the conversation, straightened to look at the group. “Yudai, careful. Bad power.”

  Yudai frowned, contemplating, and then looked to Tatsu. “So what do we do?”

  “I’ll go where you command, Your Majesty,” Tatsu said before lowering his head.

  Yudai stared at him, frozen, before turning to the small semi-circle of others with his mouth stretched i
nto a half-smile, half-grimace. “Would you give us a moment, please?”

  It took a few minutes for the others to leave, and Tatsu tried to ignore Alesh’s knowing look as she grabbed Ral’s hand and walked out the doorway, but eventually, it was just the two of them and the abyss that had opened up between them. Yudai threw his arms wide to either side.

  “What are you doing? What is this?”

  “I’ll do whatever you order,” Tatsu said.

  “That’s not what I’m asking for,” Yudai snapped. “That’s not what I want. Why are you treating me like this… like this person you don’t know?”

  Tatsu shook his head, keeping his eyes on the stones beneath their boots. “It’s your decision, and I’ll follow—”

  “Stop. You won’t even—why won’t you look at me?”

  Tatsu slowly raised his eyes, even though he knew what he would see. Yudai was sparking with anger and frustration, all coiled in the muscles he was barely keeping in place.

  “Why are you acting like nothing happened last night?” Yudai asked.

  “It can’t,” Tatsu whispered. His throat was dry and his tongue was thick, sticking to the roof of his mouth. “It’s different now.”

  “Nothing is different.”

  He moved forward, perhaps out of instinct, and Tatsu put a hand up to stop him while taking a step backwards.

  “You’re the rightful king,” Tatsu told him.

  “I’m still me!” Yudai cried, hands pushing up against his own chest. “I’m still the person I used to be!”

  “You’re not!” The weight of it was crushing, a burden Tatsu hadn’t been prepared to bear. He’d been a fool, a blind fool, for failing to see the end of the path he’d been walking. The eventual result had always been there, and he’d willfully turned away from its light. That realization was perhaps the most embarrassing of all—he’d walked straight into the ravine and only noticed it after he’d fallen over the side. “You’re not the same person. You’re a king now.”