The Heart Forger

by Rin Chupeco

  I was sure my face burned, and my embarrassment made Kalen even more formal, more awkward in his attempts to soothe me. “It came as a surprise to all of us. Princess Inessa is furious at both Kance and King Telemaine, though she can’t appear so in public.”

  “She has no reason to be!” I exclaimed despite myself. “It isn’t fair that Prince Kance should have to shoulder her anger for his father’s…”

  I trailed off. Kalen was smiling, a rarity. “Kance could declare war on an innocent village and you’d find a way to defend him still, wouldn’t you?”

  “Their engagement shouldn’t begin with a misunderstanding,” I mumbled. I tried to stand, but Kalen placed both his hands on my shoulders—gently but with enough pressure to keep me where I was. “I said I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not.” He sounded annoyed again, more like the Kalen I knew. “Stop being so stubborn. Rely on others more often.”

  Anger burst from my lips. “But I can’t! Do you know what it’s like to have no control over who people think you are? To be feared and hated, even when you protect them, help them? To be deemed unimportant by your friends, the very people you look up to? It isn’t fair!”

  There was a pause before the Deathseeker responded. “You’re right,” he said, and his voice made me look at him more closely. “It isn’t fair at all. But you live with it and accept it. There isn’t much use to complain when there is little you can do.” Kalen set his jaw.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “A few seconds ago, you told me to rely on other people, to not be so stubborn.”

  He sighed. “The official engagement ceremony will take place in a week. King Telemaine has temporarily released the Duke of Holsrath so he can attend both the official betrothal and the wedding.”

  “The Duke of Holsrath? But…” The king’s brother had been languishing in prison for years. Arrested after an attempted uprising against his own sibling, his noble blood had spared him from the gallows but not from life imprisonment.

  And Kalen was his son.

  “Blood ties are stronger than treason.” Kalen laughed bitterly. “Perhaps King Telemaine wishes to reconcile with his brother despite all he’s done. Whatever the reason, my father shall be present for the betrothal, whatever the rumors may say.”

  “What rumors?”

  “They’re not important.”

  “Kalen!”

  He glared but gave in. “People have been talking. They think the duke still plots to take the throne. That I insinuated myself with the royal family to gain the influence needed for his reprieve.”

  I understood and was ashamed. Kalen had been judged far longer than I had. To be a traitor’s son was hard enough; to be believed a traitor yourself, despite dedicating your life to serving the very people who despise you, was even worse. I had been an object of derision for more than two years. Kalen had been subjected to it since childhood.

  “I’m sorry.” I was horrified by my lack of empathy, at having dismissed his personal experiences for my own. “All my talk about being hated—I had no right to say that to you.”

  “People need someone to hate. And it’s easier to see that in others than to find it in themselves. I should know,” Kalen added in a strangely calm voice. “I’ve hated my father nearly all my life.”

  “Was he cruel?” I asked hesitantly, then cursed myself. “I apologize. You don’t need to answer that.”

  “Three apologies in one day? That’s promising.” Then, before I could argue, he continued. “No, he was always kind, as warm as a father could be. My mother’s death changed him. It was a daeva assault, the same attack that killed Khalad and Kance’s mother.” Kalen smiled grimly. “It made us all blood brothers of a sort. Three months after they died, my father rebelled against the crown. He and the king had been on good terms till then. He was barely an adult when Vanor died and Telemaine assumed the throne, and he had never once expressed any desire to take power. He bade me good-bye one day and then went missing for months. The next time I saw him, he was in chains.

  “The king felt sorry for me and took me in—first as Kance’s companion and then as his bodyguard. And when I learned I could channel runes, it almost felt like a blessing. It gave me purpose, a better chance to protect the royal family. The people’s hatred didn’t matter after that.”

  “That’s not true at all!” I said hotly. “They don’t hate you. The soldiers have nothing but the highest regard for you, including Commander Lode! You are well liked, and I have never heard you spoken of with contempt. If there are those who refuse to acknowledge your loyalty, then—then they aren’t worth a second thought anyway!”

  Kalen stared back at me, startled, and it occurred to me that in my zeal, I was leaning far too close to him, which he noticed as I did. A stray thought passed through my head: If he smiled as much as Kance, he could be just as appealing. I reared back, coloring, and tried to think of something offensive to say to make up for the ludicrousness of what I didn’t. “If—if they find your ugly face offensive though, then that’s a different matter entirely.”

  It was obviously an untrue statement and a poor comeback at that, and he started laughing, which made it worse. He really is as good-looking as Prince Kance when he laughed. “I was trying to make you feel better. When had our situations become reversed?”

  I racked my brain for a better repartee, but he bopped me lightly on my head before I could get anything out. “That is enough practice for today. I expect you to be well rested for tomorrow’s spar—even if I have little faith there will be much improvement.”

  I glowered at him as he stood. He ignored my glare, more concerned with choosing his words carefully. “Kance and I are as close as two brothers can be. We have both known Princess Inessa since we were children, but he never told me if he thinks of her as someone more than a friend. I also know that he considers you one of his closest and most trusted confidantes. While he has never been one to voice his feelings aloud, I suspect his decision for a more personal approach in ruling the kingdom was motivated by his desire to see you safe. I don’t know if that helps.”

  I had to smile. “Thank you, Kalen.”

  “You’re welcome. It’s good to see Kance take his duties as the crown prince seriously, although I now have you to blame for the additional responsibilities he assigned me—including the training of someone who cannot be trained.”

  “You’re horrible!” My protest was loud in the empty field, but he only laughed again and walked on.

  “I knew of Tea’s infatuation with the prince from the moment we met,” Lord Kalen said quietly, watching as the asha moved down the rows of injured. “My knowledge of it has commanded every meeting, every conversation with her since. I suppose I was disposed to dislike her long before we had ever been properly introduced.”

  The men no longer shrunk from the asha’s touch. When Lady Tea moved to assist them, they relaxed, submitting to her treatment. More people had been brought in, this time civilians who had been caught in the crossfire. They cried out at the sight of the aeshma, who made a strange rumbling noise and laid down on the ground with its head tucked between its paws, the picture of docility if not for the terrible spikes along its form.

  “But why?” I asked. Throughout the asha’s telling of her own story, the Deathseeker had been silent, content to listen with few objections. Of his own life he had said very little, and save for his earlier proposal to his lover—to abandon this enterprise and flee—I knew little of his thoughts during this mad invasion. That he spoke to me now with little prompting was encouraging.

  “The oracle told me so.” He smirked at the shock on my face. “Deathseekers are just as much spellbinders as asha, though we do not train in their refined arts. We are slaves to many of the customs of the Willows and also present ourselves to the oracle after ending our own novitiates. I wa
s never one to believe in her myself.”

  “But what did the oracle tell you?”

  The bone witch stood and murmured something to Princess Yansheo, who still stared with terror at the aeshma. From the window, I could see smoke rising from the fields outside the city, a testament to the previous battle. Below us, the rest of the daeva were at attention. Bored, the taurvi and the savul yowled and nuzzled and swiped mischievously at each other like lion cubs at play. The nanghait stood proudly; to my horror, I see more visages creep out from underneath the sags and folds above its neck so it could scan more of the horizon. From above, I could hear the song of the azi as it circled the city.

  “The oracle told me that she would kill the prince.”

  I gasped.

  He smiled again. “At least, that was what I thought. My first instinct was to reject her predictions. Magic and runes can be explained. But to my way of thinking, prophecy falls under the realm of con artists and charlatans. My duty was to protect the prince, and to my eyes, Tea was as much a threat as any other.”

  “Her predictions were wrong then?” I asked.

  A small child, too young to understand the danger, approached the aeshma. The spiked daeva turned and regarded the child thoughtfully. It sniffed the boy’s fingers and rumbled, a monstrous giggle. The child laughed along with it. His hand stroked at the furred face.

  His mother turned and cried out in alarm. Immediately, the child abandoned its play, dashing back to her. The aeshma whined and drew its head down, bereft of companionship.

  “No. The oracle was right. Only my interpretation of the words was inaccurate. The oracle bade me to be vigilant, for the next Dark asha to come to Kion would bring about the death of the person she loved. For many years, I assumed the prophetess referred to the prince.” He raised an eyebrow. “Funny, isn’t it, how that turned out?”

  9

  You would think after the exhaustion that came with Scrying, I would have been deterred from using it. Fox thought I was insane. “You can’t expect this will get better,” he said as I pored through the pages of the book.

  “It barely fazes Aenah. I can train till I get to that point too.” If the Faceless thought I could become a powerful spellbinder, that was her one message I was willing to believe. “Here, listen to this.” I waved the book in my brother’s face. “It talks about a Veiling rune.”

  “That makes as much sense to me as Drychtan.”

  “If done right, it can stop anyone from accessing your thoughts and prevent them from using Compulsion on you.”

  That got his attention. “What do you need for it?”

  My fingers ran down the page, tracing the rune inscribed in dark red ink, trying to commit the complicated pattern to memory. “After the invocation, I am to formulate an image in my mind like a shield.”

  “A shield?”

  “Or a door, it says. Anything that best represents shutting yourself away from the rest of the world. I don’t know if it would affect any bonded familiars.”

  “Can’t hurt to try. How long does this spell last?”

  “For as long as you hold the shield in place. It requires some conscious effort at first, but the book says that with enough practice, you can learn to keep those defenses in place even when asleep.” I wove the rune in the air and found the image of a closed door worked better for me. I could sense Fox’s touch drifting over my mind, carefully testing for weaknesses. “I can’t sense anything from you,” he reported.

  “Really?” I asked. In that moment, I lost my concentration, and his presence once more flowed easily into mine. “This is harder than it looks,” I complained.

  “You think it’ll work on me?” Fox asked.

  I obliged, weaving the rune around him this time. I probed cautiously into his head but encountered an unbreakable barrier separating our thoughts. I tried pushing forward to no avail.

  “I guess it works with familiars too.” I felt the door he was holding in place shift but remain strong. “It would be a good way to keep you and your three-headed pet out of my head for a change.”

  “Can you sense him?”

  “Just around the edges. It gives me some mild discomfort, like shoes that are getting a little too tight.”

  “How are you not distracted enough to let go of your wall?”

  Fox grinned. “Might have something to do with being dead. You’re not too prone to stray thoughts, and it’s easier to concern yourself with the bigger picture. It’s always been easy for me to compartmentalize.”

  “You would have made a fairly good Deathseeker, Fox.”

  “Perish the thought. Let’s see how long I can hold this up. Any other rune we can take a stab at?”

  We tried the Heartshare rune next, to little effect. “Only for spellbinders, I suppose,” Fox conceded. “Or for the living anyway. What’s next?”

  I cleared my throat, trying not to act too excited. “Well, there was this one spell I’ve been meaning to talk to you about…”

  He glared at me. “We agreed you wouldn’t snoop without me around.”

  “I made no promises about reading them.” I placed the book on his lap. “See for yourself.”

  “You know I don’t understand half the gobbledygook in this.”

  “This one’s straightforward enough.”

  I was impressed. His face turned pale as he read, but he never once let the shield in his head lapse. Finally, he looked up. “What does this mean, Tea?”

  “Exactly what you think it means.” It was one of the most complicated runes I’d ever seen, a tangle of crisscrossed lines and convoluted angles that made it resemble a thornbush run amok or a spiderweb caught in an inkblot.

  While other runes were spelled out in diminutive cursive, this was sprawled across the page in heavy block letters, as if the writer himself was aware of its importance.

  Resurrecting Rune, it said. A rune capable of bringing familiars back from the dead in the truest way possible.

  I didn’t care if the rune had twenty times the complexity of Yadoshan architecture, if I were worth my salt as a bone witch, I was going to learn that spell, whatever it took.

  Fox shared neither my enthusiasm nor my excitement. He read the page again with furrowed eyebrows and a clenched jaw. “This is too dangerous, Tea.”

  “The chance of it succeeding is worth the potential risk.”

  “No, it isn’t!” He stabbed at the page with one finger. “Have you read what this requires?”

  I knew. I had spent many hours that morning staring at the page, as if looking long enough could make the task easier on my conscience. Distill the juices of the First Harvest into a familiar’s heart to take back what death had decreed. Beware, for the First Harvest is poison and kills all it touches, asha and familiar, save for those who possess the black. Reap its fruit and suffer death.

  “We can ask Khalad to help. It’s possible that—”

  “It says it kills everyone who tries to take it, Tea! It’s implying that whoever uses it would require their own life as a sacrifice!”

  “Well, we don’t know what a First Harvest is yet. I’ve been looking everywhere, but there’s been no mention of it in the books here. But like I said, I’m sure we can find a loophole—”

  Fox slammed his hand on the table with enough force that the wood splintered. “Don’t play semantics with me, Tea! Willing or not, you’re asking someone to die, and I know exactly who you’re volunteering. You are under no circumstances allowed to risk your life for me, Tea. Do you understand?”

  “I wasn’t…” That was a lie, and he knew it. But the Veiling barrier slipped, and I sensed a hodgepodge of his emotions: shock, worry, determination, anger—more anger than I had ever felt from him. And fear—crippling fear, which I had never felt from him so keenly.

  Impulsively, I reached over and hugged his middle. “I won’
t. I promise. It’s not like we’re pressed for time or that you’re in any danger. Hey, I’m protecting you too, right? I can’t do that if I’m dead.”

  There was a pause. Fox’s fist unclenched slowly, and he sighed but returned my hug. “Remember that, brat. You know I’d be lost without you.”

  • • •

  I was a fast learner and soon committed most of the runes to memory. For six days, we practiced; when we weren’t testing the extent of the book’s magic, I was fast asleep. But the more I experimented, the less exhaustion I felt.

  Eventually, we learned to prolong the effects of the Veiling rune, finding it easier to enforce the same shield in our minds instead of creating our own individual barriers. It became a game of sorts, figuring out how long we could maintain it and which of us could do so the longest. Sometimes, I felt the azi’s presence, though it showed only curiosity at our magic.

  There was no way we could use the Puppet rune on actual corpses, so we made do with rat bones instead. I knotted the threads of magic together like the book instructed, commanded the rats to run from one corner of the room to the next, and let go. We watched as the skeletal rodents scuttled on their own without any further influence on my end.

  The Illusion rune was more complicated. After I learned to bend the spell around an object instead of pouring magic into its essence, I was able to successfully hide it from view. I tried it on Fox.

  “I don’t feel any different,” his disembodied voice reported. “Although it’s disconcerting to see that I have no reflection in the mirror.”

  “Stop moving around or you’ll be invisible forever.” The spell was a little too good. It took me a dozen tries to draw it right, and I got it just as Fox was beginning to worry.

  “The next time we practice this,” he growled as he finally came into view, “we’re going to use a blasted potted plant instead.”

  We couldn’t practice the Dominion and Strangle runes given their implications, but I studied them regardless. I also found myself going back to the lightsglass and shadowglass spells, though I knew we couldn’t—shouldn’t—do anything with them. The same held true with the Resurrection rune. “We need to find another way, Tea,” Fox said curtly, and that was that.