by Becky Allen
“Lucky timing?” Elan repeated.
“A bad way to describe it,” Lenni said. “There was nothing lucky about the drought, it cost too many lives…but the ranks of the Order have swollen like the channels. Without it, I don’t know if we’d ever have enough people to strike, but now…now we can, and we can win.”
“If I can figure out this cursed knife,” Jae said.
“I’m sure you will,” Lenni said. “And once your people are freed, there will be even greater numbers against the Highest. We’ll win, all of us together. We can lead the Closest against the Avowed who’ve abused them, and rebuild the whole world. Move forward, finally.”
Elan glanced down at the text, not sure what to say to that—and the word “forward” jumped out at him, even with the strange lettering. He examined it, concentrating, trying to make sense of the wispy words and garbled sentences.
Closest Janna,
You are too much like our ancestors. You claim you look forward, but you have never thought of the consequences. Remember the Rise. Our ancestors believed they were gifting us with a paradise and cursed us instead. Your gift could well do the same.
I don’t naysay your plan because it’s impossible. I know you too well, friend. You believe you can craft this Well; I am certain you can. You are more clever with magic than any Closest I have known. But this is folly.
If we must raise this much magic, let us undo our ancestors’ mistakes, not make mistakes of our own. Our descendants will thank us for that.
I cannot help you, and I will not influence my friends toward a cause I believe is folly.
By my hand,
Serra Pallara
Elan sat back and reread it all. Serra Pallara and Janna Eshara had been friends, that was clear, but they had disagreed about the Well. This was the letter where Serra had refused to join the Wellspring Bloodlines, a decision that would lead her grandson to join against those mages, to seize the Well. But Serra had believed the Well was a mistake from the beginning.
That was madness. Without the Well, the world was nothing and would never survive another drought. Surely Serra must have seen that. But whatever their ancestors had done must have been more terrifying than drought. Elan couldn’t imagine what that could be, and he had never heard of anything called the Rise—he couldn’t even be sure he was translating it correctly.
Someone knocked on the door and entered a moment later. A young man, twitchy, who pushed down the hood of his robe and revealed bruises on his face and neck—he’d been in a fight recently. And since he bowed to Lenni and then Jae, that fight was probably the vow ceremony.
“Lenni, I saw this in Danardae, I came as fast as I could,” he said in a rush as he pulled a sheet of paper from his robe. He offered it to Lenni, whose expression went grim. She set it down where Elan could read it. He did so aloud, for Jae’s benefit.
“The traitorous rebel girl calling herself Jae Aredann is commanded to turn herself in to Highest Lord Elthis Danardae by dawn, two days from now.” He paused for a heavy breath, realizing what this notice was—a threat. “For every day she does not surrender, a hundred Closest will be led into the Danardae gardens and executed for her crimes.
“Then there’s…there’s information about a reward, if anyone knows anything about her…you,” Elan finished. “Jae…”
“A hundred Closest,” Jae repeated. “Every day. Because I—”
“Jae,” Elan said again, but his throat felt almost too tight to talk. The Closest his father would kill were innocent and wouldn’t even be able to resist—or to protest, beg for their lives. But Jae couldn’t turn herself in, not when her magic was their only chance at freedom.
“We won’t let it happen,” Lenni said.
“I won’t,” Jae said. “Because I’m going to destroy this cursed knife first. And then…then I won’t turn myself in. But I will go looking for Elthis. And when I find him…”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. Elan bowed his head, wondering if his father had any idea what he’d just unleashed. Jae had promised Tal that she’d have mercy on her enemies—but if her enemies had no mercy for her people, if the Highest really killed any Closest just to harass Jae, she wouldn’t hesitate to strike them down, and she wouldn’t regret it after.
The noise of the drinkhouse faded to the background as Jae stared at the knife. It was just as cold, and just as powerful, as it had been when she’d first grasped it—despite the fact that she was certain the Curse was bound with fire. The problem was that fire was the one element she couldn’t touch, and she had no idea how to get started breaking the Curse without it.
It also kept gnawing at her that she had no idea what had caused her magic to suddenly vanish on the island, leaving her dizzy and defenseless. The knife had been the most powerful object she could sense, though, and she knew just how vast and awful the Curse was. It was entirely possible the knife itself had done it somehow, its magic clashing with hers, and it winning out as stronger.
Not that she’d confessed that fear to Elan or Lenni. She’d told them about what had happened, yes, because they needed to know that—in case Lenni knew something about it, or Elan found anything about it in the texts he was translating. But saying that she worried it was somehow linked to the Curse seemed like it would lend the whole notion credence.
She’d never lied in her life. Saying it, even if she wasn’t sure, would make it feel too true. She couldn’t afford it.
“What elements can you sense in it?” Lenni asked.
Jae looked up at her in silent irritation. She wasn’t compelled to answer anymore, so she didn’t.
Finally Lenni rolled her eyes. “I don’t think we have time for pleasantries, Jae. I can’t help you if I don’t know what you can sense.”
That stung a little but was probably true. Jae glanced over at Elan, who looked up from his papers. He gave her a tiny, apologetic shrug, and for a moment she missed being on the road with him. It had been just the two of them for weeks, and Elan almost never forgot and asked her questions. He liked to chatter, but he didn’t really expect her to answer. And he always seemed to be able to sense when she couldn’t take it, and though he fidgeted, he’d fall quiet.
The city was never quiet.
“It’s fire, mostly,” Jae said. “Which I can’t touch. But it’s got air bound into it—which I can touch, but it’s my weakest element. It doesn’t hurt, precisely, but it…buzzes.”
“I’m surprised you can’t touch all four,” Lenni said. “The stronger the mage, the more elements she can use—and you must be a hundred times stronger than the other mage in the Order.”
“I don’t think it’s really my magic,” Jae said. “It should belong to all the Closest. Taesann sort of…stole everyone’s magic when he hid it away.”
“Hmm,” Elan said, tapping a finger against his papers. “It must still be rooted in your abilities, then, if you can’t use all four elements. And fire may have been the weakest point for a lot of the Wellspring mages—they were focused on water and land. Lenni, does your other mage have an affinity for fire?”
“Yes, but she’s weak,” Lenni said. “And she doesn’t know any more about magic than I do—I had to teach her. She wouldn’t be any help at all.”
Which meant Jae was on her own, and it was time to get to work. “All right. I’m going to try now. I need to concentrate.”
She was sitting cross-legged on the bare floor, rather than a cushion—sometimes other-vision was disorienting, and she didn’t want to sway and fall. The knife lay on the tiled floor in front of her, and as she brought herself into other-vision it was blinding. She had to look away, to concentrate on the steady glow of the earth beneath them and in the walls, the pockets of water and how it floated in the air outside, ready to rain yet again. The bright, twisting energy of people, everywhere.
Then back to the knife.
She brushed a mental hand against it, felt the thrum of the Curse in the base of her skull, a
nd yanked herself back so hard she did jolt physically. It had felt like the very first stages of the Curse, its lightest touch—when an order had been given but she hadn’t yet begun to obey. Or when someone had asked her a question but she hadn’t yet answered. It wasn’t even painful, more of a tingle, a reminder that it would become painful if she didn’t obey quickly.
“What happened?” Lenni asked.
“Nothing. And don’t ask me questions. I need to concentrate.”
Lenni didn’t respond, and Jae didn’t open her eyes to see how Lenni had reacted. She just braced herself and used her magic to reach for the knife again. This time she knew what to expect, and it wasn’t awful. Not like it had been when she’d still been cursed. The thrum didn’t grow stronger, transforming into a pounding pain. It stayed just as it was, something trying to reach Jae, but from outside instead of within.
She took a breath, then another. If the sensation continued like this, she would be fine. Even if it got worse—she’d lived with the Curse for seventeen years. She could handle pain. Pain would be worth it, if it led to breaking the Curse once and for all.
Now that she’d adjusted, she tried to find the individual energies within the knife. Oddly, it was the knife itself—the physical blade—that was so cold to her mental touch. It was the magic that burned, as if it was a real, physical flame, one she could pass her fingers through and feel the heat but not grab or change. If she tried for too long, it really did burn, a pain that was as physical as mental.
Trying to manipulate the fire energy wouldn’t do her any good. She grabbed for the air instead, felt its strange jangling buzz, as if she were covered in a full hive’s worth of bees. The harder she tugged at it, trying to loosen one of the strands of magic, the more it buzzed under her skin, until finally it was so much that her teeth began chattering and she had to clench her jaw shut.
Slowly, she adjusted to it. It was annoying, distracting, but she could work past it.
The knife held all its magic tightly bound together. Usually, Jae could reach out and grab any energy she could sense, pull it into herself, and make it do her bidding. She could manipulate earth without a thought, and water nearly as easily. But this didn’t come to her. She tried to pull at it, to draw the air’s energy away from the knife and into herself, but the knife sucked it right back. It was stronger than she was—and powered, she realized, almost the same way the Well had been.
But where the Well had pulled energy from the blood of the mages who’d built it—and now their descendants, the Closest—this pulled it from the Highest and Avowed. That was what the vow ceremony really did: their pledge turned the very air into a binding, linking them all together, strengthening the Curse within this knife.
Maybe she couldn’t undo the fire or the air, but she was powerful, and as she’d told Lenni, she had the power of all the Closest. That had to be worth something, and she had at least one more way to attack before she was out of ideas.
She’d never seen anything like the material that made up the knife before, but it was some kind of stone, cold and foreign though it was. That meant it was earth, somewhere underneath the Curse. She couldn’t break the binding directly, but if she broke the knife itself, that would do just as well.
The binding energy wrapped around the knife, encasing it, with no cracks she could pull apart. Instead, she had to push through it, as if she was trying to trample her way through a dune with sand shifting under her feet, searching for the familiar feeling of the earth. The binding energy resisted, but as long as she didn’t try to break it, she could slowly push through it. It just needed patience and perseverance. While Jae wasn’t precisely patient, she was stubborn.
She found it eventually, the steady glow that she knew so well, but when she reached for it, it was cold, tainted, not like any earth energy she’d felt before. She grabbed for it, curling her mental fingers around it—
Something awful slammed into her mind and threw her back, knocking her over, noise exploding like a thunderclap around her, dissipating into people shouting. The feeling was gone just as suddenly as it had been there, leaving only a shadow behind, a sense in her mind of something ancient and terrible, twisted and unnatural. Not purely painful the way the Curse was, but—but wrong.
“Jae!”
Jae opened her eyes and found the room in disarray: every tile had been knocked off the walls, and the ones on the floor had shattered and been thrown outward from the knife. Lenni had scrambled backward, covered in dust and cut in a few places from the fallen tiles. Elan was in the same shape but moving toward Jae, shedding fallen tiles as he went.
Jae stared, eyes wide. “I…I didn’t do that.” She looked down at the knife. The chaos circled out from it, as if it had been trying to throw her and everything else away from it. But it hadn’t changed at all, except the disturbed tiles under it were singed black.
“You did something,” Elan said. “We’d best get out of here. I don’t know how far that blast went, but…”
Judging by the yells downstairs, it had affected at least the whole drinkhouse. Jae grabbed the knife and her bag but had a hard time forcing herself to move. She wanted to curl up and close her eyes, exhausted after using so much magic. But they had to go.
Elan took her hand, and Lenni had them out the door without even taking the time to dab the blood from her face. They scrambled down a back staircase and out into an alley. People were coming out from the buildings around, shouting and confused, and it would have been so easy to get lost in the crowd. Elan’s hand closed around her wrist and he pulled her after Lenni, escaping from that side street into another, and another, all the way into another section of town where buildings were larger, lower, and darker. Lenni hustled them through an alley and into the back of one of the buildings. She pushed them into a small, dark room, with noise coming from nearby. Jae heaved a breath, and Elan helped her down onto a cushion.
“This is Osann’s place,” Lenni said. “His workers are all out there. I’ll slip out and let him know we’re here, but first, Jae, what happened?”
“Whatever was at the heart of the knife’s energy was powerful and ancient,” Jae said. “I was trying to shatter the blade, but there’s something strange about it. It’s earth energy, but different, changed, I don’t know how. It’s very old and very…wrong.”
“I don’t understand,” Lenni said.
Jae shook her head again, helpless. She didn’t know how to explain it, just that it felt like someone had taken the energy of a stone and tried to turn it into something else. It was unnatural.
“I wish we knew more about what happened before the Well,” Elan said. “You said the knife is from even before Janna’s time, and some of the papers I was reading…Something bad happened, I think maybe a long time before Janna. Serra Pallara’s letter said their ancestors had made some kind of massive mistake with their magic—she called it the Rise, if that means anything to you.”
“I wish it did,” Jae said, but it didn’t sound familiar at all, not even from the flashes of memories she had of Janna and Taesann. “I don’t know what else to do. The Curse is more powerful than I am, I couldn’t even touch it through fire or air, and…and when I tried to reach the earth in the knife…”
“You probably shouldn’t do that again,” Elan said. “At least, not without giving us some warning.”
“I’ll try the air again,” Jae decided, though she was so drained already she felt like she could barely move. But she needed to break the Curse within two days, before Elthis’s deadline.
“Sleep first,” Elan told her. “You look like you’re going to collapse, and you can’t do magic when you’re that tired.”
“Is that so?” Lenni asked him.
He nodded. “She was totally drained in the desert after a day or so—maybe that’s what happened to your magic on the island, Jae.”
“Maybe…,” she said, but what happened on the island had felt different. This felt like the desert—her other-vision was blurry
, hard to make sense of, and she couldn’t manipulate any of the energy she saw. But she could see it, and she knew that once she’d had some rest she’d be able to use the energy again. On the island, it had been as if other-vision had just blinked out of existence.
“Are you sure Osann won’t mind us staying here?” Elan asked.
“I’m sure,” Lenni said. “This is one of our safe houses, but we’re stuck in this room until the rest of his workers leave. I’m sure he can sneak us some lunch, though.”
“And this gives you time to rest,” Elan said.
Jae nodded and slid forward off the cushion. She pulled off her robe and lay down on it, her head on the sitting cushion. Lenni slipped out of the room, leaving her and Elan alone. She shut her eyes, and sleep came almost immediately.
As Jae slept, Elan rifled through the collection of papers Lenni had given him. They were all copies—she said in some cases, the originals had been destroyed; for others, they were kept safe, hidden somewhere. She’d had a random collection with her and that was what he had now. It was mostly letters to and from Janna Eshara, akin to the first one he’d translated.
He examined the first one closely. There were a few lines written in mage script, crammed into the edge of the page. Those few notes said Copied 20 years after the War and Unknown reference—disaster? A few other scattered notes explained where the original had been torn or faded and was unable to be copied over—that text was missing entirely.
Slowly, Elan began to translate what he could, writing it down on another sheet.
I do not want cause another Rise, but I will not be ruled by fear. The other Closest keep trying to have it both ways. They say this is natural. They say it will end. But they also say to remember the Rise.
Father gave me the knife to remind me of what great works can do. But if the Rise was so wrong, why can’t they admit it caused this drought? That this isn’t natural? This land was a paradise when our ancestors came to it, but it gets drier and drier every year. We’ve lost so much land already, and the rivers have slowed to a trickle. We used to have lakes; now we can only call them oases.