The Mage Heir

by Kathryn Sommerlot

  They remained in Yudai’s childhood chambers, and once the castle servants got wind of it, they cleaned and readied the tower with earnest. No one seemed willing to ask Yudai to move instead into the old king’s rooms, so every night, the twisting staircase up to the top floor was lit with dancing torches, two palace guards standing watch at the thin opening where the corridor met the top of the stairwell.

  True to his word, Yudai called Iharu and the former members of his father’s council into a meeting only to dismiss half of them, and the command sparked a flurry of angry meetings that never failed to devolve into Runonian shouting matches. Tatsu understood Yudai’s reluctance to retain counsel who had either advocated for his involuntary use or passively allowed it, but the atmosphere in the smaller side rooms used for the council gatherings was nearing an unbearable level. Seated around the well-worn tables, none of the remaining advisors were pleased with Tatsu’s constant inclusion, and they had no problem making their feelings obvious.

  Yudai’s control over the court was unraveling further with each heated argument, and Tatsu wasn’t sure which part infuriated the nobles the most: that Yudai was pushing for better treatment of the mages or that Yudai, a man half their age they must all have remembered from his bratty days, was holding the crown at all. And from Yudai’s frantic kisses at night, fingers clawing at Tatsu’s clothes like a man possessed, the tension was wearing him equally raw.

  After only a week, Tatsu began finding reasons to be absent from the meetings. He didn’t understand Runonian, nor ruling politics in general, and his presence was only fanning the flames. He spent some time back in the stables with the royal mounts, hardy draft horses adept at dealing with the sharp elevation climbs that surrounded Runon’s capital. The other hours he got himself lost in the castle’s hallways and corridors until he knew the layout by heart. After Yudai’s return, activity in the palace picked up again with a high number of comings and goings, but most of the time, it still felt stifling and wrong. Tatsu longed for the green canopy of his woods; the stone ceilings of the castle were a crushing prison in comparison.

  Yudai tracked him down loitering near the kitchens after a particularly long day of meetings that, judging by Yudai’s face, didn’t go well at all.

  “I have something for you.” Yudai slid his hand into the leather pouch at his waist. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get it—the nobles weren’t happy with the decision and took some convincing.”

  He held out a small silver key that glinted in his palm. Tatsu took it gingerly, unable to calm his racing heart.

  “You don’t want me staying with you any longer?” he asked, which seemed unlikely, as such a wish would please the advisors rather than enrage them further.

  “What? No!” Yudai balked. “It’s the key to Nota’s chambers. No one is sure what to do with everything there, but I wanted you to be the first to go through her things.”

  A wave of startled gratitude swept hot through Tatsu’s veins.

  “Thank you,” he said and cradled the key nearer to his chest, fingers curling tightly around the metal ridges. “I—I appreciate it.”

  Yudai went quiet.

  “What will you do with all her things after I go through them?” Tatsu asked.

  “Burn them,” Yudai replied, voice sharp. His eyes flashed. “I want nothing of hers in this castle anymore.”

  He fell silent and then huffed a low laugh. “Except you, of course.”

  The attempted joke only turned Tatsu’s mouth down.

  “Where are her rooms?” he asked.

  “Off the main hallway in the back annex. I figured you’d want to go immediately?”

  “If it’s such a big issue with the nobles, I should get it over with as soon as I can,” Tatsu said.

  Yudai’s expression softened into something of a gentle fondness. “Take all the time you need. I’ll see you tonight once you’ve finished.”

  After he left, Tatsu unfolded his fingers from around the key, which had left the pink imprint of the outline in his flesh. Part of him wished he could put off the task, and the other craved its completion. Seeing his mother’s things seemed the final step in letting go of all the imagined things she could have been and ultimately wasn’t.

  The room was right where Yudai said it would be, the second door in the small hallway. The key slid into the lock with a click of finality, and Tatsu sneezed from the dust that flew up as a result of opening up the space again.

  It was much smaller than Yudai’s chambers, with only a single square room jutting off from the narrow entryway barely large enough for Tatsu’s shoulders to fit in. He pushed through the dust cloud to make his way inside and found tables piled with books and journals, and bookshelves over-crammed with glass bottles and scribbled notes on ripped pieces of parchment. Whatever he thought he’d sense, it didn’t exist—there were no signs or signals that this had been his mother’s room, and nothing jumped out at him as a sign of her personality.

  Momentarily overwhelmed, Tatsu sat down hard on the low straw mattress, the iron frame squeaking in protest beneath his weight.

  Closest to the bed, on a small circular table littered with droplets long-dried candle wax, was a small leather journal thinner than the volumes stacked on the wider tables. Tatsu reached for it without thinking and found pages of Runonian characters, the swoops and strokes meaningless to him. From the look of it, it seemed to be Nota’s journal, but without the language abilities, it wouldn’t do him any good. The only clue he had were the thin numbers at the top of each page: date stamps.

  If she’d kept a journal regularly, and flipping through the pages showed several months of consistent musings, then the habit was probably a practiced one. It was possible that she’d been in the routine for years—

  —possibly as far back as Tatsu’s birth.

  He tore through the books on the tables, but even after what felt like hours, he failed to find a single one that was done in the same journal style. Nota’s book collection was old spell books and precisely lettered texts, and none of them were in the same hand that her own notes were. Even going through all the loose parchment revealed nothing, and finally, Tatsu sat back on the grime-covered floor tiles, looping his arms around his knees and trying to swallow down his bitter disappointment.

  Nota must have been paranoid that any notes about her past would come back to haunt her and gotten rid of the evidence in case the worst happened.

  Tatsu wasn’t sure how long he spent on the floor, but his knees were aching by the time he finally pushed back up onto his feet. It was only then that he noticed the underside of the nearest table was thick and low, far too long to be a single slab of wood atop the legs. He pressed his fingers to the bottom of the structure to check that it was the same all the way across, and then rapped his knuckles against it, which echoed. The box beneath the tabletop was hollow.

  With reckless abandon, he grabbed all the books piled on top and threw them to the ground until he was staring down at worn boards. There didn’t seem to be any seams or creases to mark a hideaway, but when he pulled at both sides, the tabletop came away with surprising ease.

  There, nestled in between the boards, was a cache of hand-bound journals.

  As he combed through them, there seemed to be no order to their location, and Tatsu had to go through seven before he found the year he was looking for. He sat back on his heels as he thumbed the pages, stopping mere days before what his father had always said was his birthday. The actual date came and went in the journal, but a week later, there was an abrupt skip—four days were unrecorded—and then the daily note-taking picked up again.

  Tatsu took a deep breath. The skip had to be a result of his birth and Nota’s physical state following it, but he couldn’t read the characters to be sure of it. Still, it felt meaningful, and he closed the journal while running his fingers slowly over to the smooth cover. Somewhere in those pages was a hint that, at one point, his mother might have loved him.

  He rest
ocked the books on the table but didn’t bother to put everything back in place. If his instincts about the court were right, they would probably tear through the room searching for notes about the king and his murder. They wouldn’t care if the books remained in the same haphazard order they had originally been in. The journal Tatsu slipped into the innermost pocket of his shirt, hoping that the top layers disguised the strange bulge of it, and then he left Nota’s rooms knowing he’d never go back.

  After he locked the door once more, he turned and started, almost dropping the silver key when he saw the mage standing only a few paces away. It was the same young woman from the receiving chamber a week earlier, and she looked just as nervous as she had in front of Yudai and the court. The silver circlet on her forehead shimmered in the torch light.

  “I’m sorry,” she said when Tatsu pressed his hand against his chest, heart racing. “I didn’t… mean to scare you.”

  The clipped ends to her words and the flat tone of the long vowels betrayed her lack of practice in Common. Tatsu had grown so used to Yudai’s nearly flawless accent that he had forgotten that many in Runon weren’t educated as highly. That the mage would seek him out despite the language stumbling felt ominous.

  “Is everything all right?” Tatsu asked.

  “No, um—the nobles,” she stammered. “They are talking about a cousin.”

  “A cousin?” Tatsu’s mind flew wildly around the implications. Did he have more family in Runon that he didn’t know about?

  “For the throne,” she continued. She wrung her hands together.

  Tatsu’s stomach dropped. “For the crown. To replace Yudai, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “And they have the power to do this?”

  Her silence was confirmation. Yudai had barely held the title for a week, and already the court wanted to overthrow him. The earlier they did it, the less consequences there would be for the unsteady country. Yudai had been held captive for years, perhaps assumed out of reach forever, and he was an unknown entity to the nobles scrambling to keep their influence. Of course a known cousin would be both easier to control and less likely to buck the status quo.

  “They say he is too weak,” she said.

  “And you’re telling me because…?”

  “You are,” she said.

  “I don’t understand. I’m what? I’m…” Tatsu trailed off, recognition dawning. He swallowed hard. “I’m his weakness.”

  His head slid down to his palms, but even the offered darkness didn’t help the twisting inside.

  “I’m the reason they want him gone,” Tatsu said, mostly to himself despite the woman standing in front of him. “I’m the blood kin of the woman who threatened to strip their power and killed the king, and I’m an outsider. I’m everything they fear, and I have Yudai’s favor.”

  Again, the mage didn’t answer. Tatsu raised his head again to look at her and tried to ignore the sympathy visible on her features.

  “Why warn me?” he asked.

  “The king cares about mages.” Her eyes darted across the floor as she refused to make eye contact. “The court doesn’t.”

  Yudai’s decision to fight for better treatment of the mages was fueled mostly out of a sense of responsibility to Tatsu and Alesh rather than his own feelings on the matter, and Tatsu knew Yudai well enough to recognize it. If Yudai needed to crumble on something, then the mage issue would be one of the first things to go. The young mage had come to find him because she was desperate not to lose the only advocate she had, and Tatsu’s gut knotted even tighter.

  “Thank you,” he said, though his tongue was thick and seemed to stick to the roof of his mouth when he tried to get the words out. “Thank you for coming to tell me.”

  She gave him one last look before darting around the nearest corner and scurrying down the hallway, leaving him alone in front of his mother’s rooms. Tatsu turned to stare at the closed door behind him. He pressed two fingers against the journal held snug within his shirt, but it wasn’t until he’d made it back to Yudai’s chambers in the turret that he knew what he had to do.

  Yudai wasn’t asleep but was seated on the floor in front of the low table going through stacks of parchment that Tatsu couldn’t hope to read. He looked up when the door opened, the light from the fire hearth illuminating his smile in faint orange.

  “I wasn’t sure how long you’d be,” Yudai said and shuffled a few of the papers away. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  The truth was, Tatsu hadn’t known what he was looking for, and he’d gotten far more than he’d wanted. He thought about taking the journal out to show Yudai but decided not to. Somehow, sharing his mother’s words with the man she’d abused felt wrong. He turned to shrug his shirt off and kept the leather out of sight, slipping it beneath the layers as he folded them and lay them on the iron-footed dressing table.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” Yudai said. A second later, his warmth pressed against Tatsu’s back and his arms slipped around Tatsu’s waist. “Was it hard to see all of her past?”

  “No.” It wasn’t a lie. “It just made me think about things.”

  “Don’t think too hard on it. You aren’t your mother, and you aren’t bound to carry her sins.”

  Yudai kissed the back of Tatsu’s neck gently, like a feather skipping along his skin. “Come to bed. Things are always worse at night.”

  But lying in the darkness and staring up at the black of the ceiling shadows, Tatsu’s mind was heavy with guilt. Yudai was going to lose if the nobles overthrew him, magic or no. He had the power but not the desire to beat the court into accepting his rule, and he’d lose his crown because of the softness that remained in his heart. Nota had taken the throne through force and fury, and the nobles were not going to forget it anytime soon. Yudai had been gone from court for too long to be a symbol that the advisors could control, and the last thing they wanted was another loose cannon making the decisions.

  Their fear was Tatsu, the man the king listened to above all others, the outsider and the traitor’s son. Tatsu shivered despite the heat of the hearth and the comforting warmth of the body lying next to him.

  His presence in Runon was the noose around Yudai’s neck.

  The next morning, as the castle servants prepared the iron tub with hot water, Tatsu worked through collecting his things in the room, slowly but methodically, trying not to arouse suspicion. There was so little that he owned in the chambers that it didn’t take much time. His bow and quiver were the last of it, both propped against the far wall, and Tatsu stared at the taut string for a long time as he packed his mother’s journal and the remnants of his possessions into his shoulder pack.

  Pressure was building up in his chest and pushing against his sternum.

  He’d thought perhaps that he’d get more time to ready himself, but Yudai was too shrewd to let Tatsu’s actions go unnoticed. As Tatsu was tugging the drawstring closed, Yudai rounded the bed to stand in front of him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Go and wash first,” Tatsu tried, “and after that, we can—”

  “What are you talking about?” Yudai’s face tightened as his gaze moved between Tatsu’s full pack and Tatsu himself, wearing the cured layers he’d left his father’s cottage in. “You’re—you’re leaving.”

  “Yudai…”

  Yudai’s head whipped to the two servants trying to blend in with the room near the tub and the painted partition screen. “Get out.”

  They scampered out of the room and the door slammed shut behind them.

  “You shouldn’t yell at them like that,” Tatsu said.

  “You’re leaving,” Yudai repeated, ignoring everything else. His body tensed, preparing for a fight, a cornered fox baring its sharp teeth. “Where are you going?”

  Tatsu couldn’t answer, even though the word home was on the tip of his tongue, a lost and foreign concept he didn’t think he’d be able to feel again.

  “Are you coming
back?” Yudai continued, and his voice held the tight-edge of fraying patience that a temper barely held in check displayed.

  “No,” Tatsu whispered.

  Yudai recoiled as if he’d been slapped. He sucked in a deep breath, ragged even to Tatsu’s ears, and pressed a hand against his chest like he could stop the onslaught of what was coming next.

  “You’re not coming back,” he said to himself as he stared down at the floor tiles. “You’re leaving me.”

  “I’m not leaving you. I’m leaving this.”

  Yudai’s chin jerked up. “It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? This is me—this is who I am and who I was born to be.”

  “And you need to be able to be this person,” Tatsu said. “Me being here is ruining your chances of controlling the court.”

  “You can’t leave.” Yudai’s face crumpled. “Tatsu, without you, this all means nothing. Without you, this is all meaningless.”

  He stumbled forward with fingers outstretched, catching hold of Tatsu’s shirt.

  “Please don’t,” he pleaded. “I need you, Tatsu, please.”

  Tatsu curled his fingers around Yudai’s, which were balled so tightly around the linen, they were pressing hard creases into the fabric. His heart was pounding so loud he could barely hear anything else over the drum of it, and the pressure in his stomach was expanding, his body struggling to painfully accommodate it.

  “You promised,” Yudai said. “You promised that you wouldn’t give me this if I couldn’t keep it.”

  Tatsu had, and that was why it physically ached to open his mouth and say, “I can’t stay here with you.”

  Yudai stared at him for a long moment, dark eyes wide, and then abruptly shoved Tatsu away with so much strength that Tatsu tumbled backwards into the wall. Yudai’s expression hardened as his lips curled away from his teeth.

  “Then go,” he demanded. “Go and leave me! Go run away to your woods the same way your father did.”

  “Yudai,” Tatsu said, but Yudai was beyond reach.