by C. L. Polk
I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I kept silent as Severin led the way.
We passed cells decorated with carpets, silk quilts, feather pillows, and even paintings, paid for with bribes. Money was no object when it came to the comfort of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Royal Knights. They glared through the bars at me, puzzled at my royal escort. I nodded acknowledgment and followed Prince Severin to the peak.
My father’s cell had braziers for heat, a comfortable bed, a small dining table, books on shelves, and a window. A portrait of me at sixteen hung on the wall just over his bed. The window was little more than an arrow slit, but a plump gray messenger dove perched on the windowsill, pecking at millet.
Father had always liked birds, and the affection was mutual. I knew many of them from walking with him, learning their names along with the exports, imports, industries, and laws of Aeland—all the things I had to know so I could become Chancellor after him. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Father wasn’t supposed to be a traitor. He wasn’t supposed to be a monster.
I wasn’t supposed to hate him, but I did.
The Prince opened the cell himself, holding it open for me. I stepped inside the copper-barred cell, and he closed it. Locked it. And then walked away, taking the key with him.
I was alone with the last person I wanted to see.
* * *
Father rose unsteadily to his feet. “Grace.”
He coughed, great wracking whoops that should have knocked him back into his chair, but he stayed on his feet. Still so tall, even as the cancer eating his body made him thin, his skin pale, a little blue around the lips.
I reached for the coughing tonic and unscrewed it before I knew what I was doing. He drank straight from the bottle, held in a trembling hand.
“Thank you.”
I didn’t want his thanks. I shouldn’t have come with Severin. I should have made a scene. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
He leaned on his cane, knuckles white with his grip. “You have one chance with this storm, Grace. Do you really want to tackle it alone?”
“You couldn’t help me even if you were free.” He didn’t have the strength to channel into a working. He was too weak to direct the power of the Circle and tame this storm. He would die if he tried.
“Fight the wind by diluting it. You can’t force it to slow. Force it to spread. Spread it as wide as you can. Hundreds of miles. It’s your best chance.”
He had no idea. The storm probably plagued him, but he didn’t dare exert his talent to see the scope of it for himself. It was already hundreds of miles wide. We’d have to spread it all the way across the coast, north and south. “That would work better if we had more reach.”
Father leaned on his silver-headed cane, moving to a padded chair next to a table covered in paper. “You’re right. But you can’t stop it, so don’t even try. How is Christopher?”
“Miles still breathes. No thanks to you.”
He gave me a sad look. “Do you think I wanted to kill my own son?”
I folded my arms in front of me. “I’m sure you were just doing what you had to do. How do I signal that the visit is over?”
Father’s lips thinned the way they always did when I’d exasperated him with stubbornness, or an unwillingness to see what he believed to be reality. “He was going to destroy Aeland’s power. And now he has. Look at what he’s done, Grace. Look at the harm he’s done to innocents.”
I made a disbelieving noise. “How can you sit there and speak of innocence to me? You knew exactly what powered aether. You and Grandpa Miles worked together to make this happen. And you never breathed a word.”
“We had to stop using coal.” Father pulled his chair out, and slowly lowered himself into it. “You don’t know what it was doing to the weather, how it was changing the atmosphere, how smoke hung over Kingston like soup. Gas wasn’t any better. We needed an alternative.”
“So you picked souls?”
Father picked up a glass teacup and sipped. He was ignoring my outburst, the way he had when I was a child taken wholly by anger or excitement or despair. “They were just energy,” Father said. “Just energy, going to waste. That’s all magic is. Your personal power. We have an excess and the ability to use it according to our will, but unburdened from the task of powering a body, even an ordinary soul has amazing power.”
“It wasn’t yours to use!”
Father set the half-empty teacup on its saucer. “Do you think the Amaranthines don’t use souls for their own ends? They were right there the moment you broke the aether network and played into their hands.”
That wasn’t how it happened! “They were looking for Tristan.”
“And why was he here?”
I clamped my mouth shut and watched the dove on the windowsill. The days of telling Father everything were over. We weren’t a team. Not anymore.
Father gave me a patient look. “He was looking for those souls, Grace. The Amaranthines wanted them badly enough to break the compact of Menas the Just.”
“You speak of a Maker, Father? I thought you didn’t believe in the gods.”
He shrugged. “The Age of Miracles is long over. No one had been touched by the Makers or the Deathless. We have no new stories of them since the Abandonment. What was there to believe in?”
“The Amaranthines are real. The Solace is real. We turned away from them—”
His fist struck the table. “They turned away from us.”
Tea sloshed from the cup, over the rim of the saucer, and onto the Star, unfolded to show a picture of me and the Amaranthines on the front page.
The guardians wore glamors that made them appear human—unbearably gorgeous, but mortal all the same. But the camera, having no mind to fool, captured them exactly as they were: unearthly and beautiful with their huge eyes and high-bridged noses, mounted on antlered steeds called heera that had looked like horses to the naked eye.
Grand Duchess Aife held the center of the shot, looking the camera dead in the eye with a calm smile, the wind playing in her golden curls. Beside her hovered dark-skinned, black-clad Ysonde, the secretary who went everywhere with her. Tea spilled across Aldis’s scowl, and Tristan’s hand pressed heavy on Aldis’s shoulder.
Father’s journal lay to the left, his pen capped across a page half-filled with notes. Father had taken note of news every day, from the front page to the shortest column, sometimes even from the tiny print in the classified ads. He was taking notes now. What good would they do him, rotting here in prison?
“They turned away from us,” Father said. “They left us without their miracles or their mischief. Even if they were real, why honor a god who has abandoned you? I will not. I owe them nothing.”
“You owe the souls you imprisoned in the network to be consumed and destroyed. That’s beyond horrific, Father. There isn’t a word for what you’ve done. And what of your own soul, now that you’ll go to the Solace you denied to thousands?”
“I can’t say. But I deny them. Now and hereafter. But to you, I apologize.”
I lost my tongue. I stared, slack-jawed.
Father didn’t bow his head or touch his heart. Just the admission was more ground than he ever gave. “I kept the truth about aether a secret from you. I knew what you’d think of it. I wanted to find a substitute power source. A way to supplement our growing needs. But then Stanley found a solution and pushed the Laneeri War.”
“Blasted evil reason to fight a war.” It was unspeakable. How could he have done it? How could he have done any of it?
“Don’t be hostile, Grace. You have a terrible task ahead.”
“Thanks to Sir Percy botching the spell-web, I’ll be chasing storms all winter.”
Father shook his head. “It’s not just controlling the weather. The Invisibles are a mess without the experience and skill of the First Ring. Aeland needs its power back. The people are shocked, but soon they’ll be looking for someone to blame. These are dangerous winds to handle al
one. But you can ride them, Grace. You can turn the wind to your own use.”
“All I have to do is obey your every word. All I have to do is trust you.” I had always trusted Father. He knew so much and saw so far—he was the one who’d taught me to explore the implications, to delve for the underlying motives. He had a way of making everything come right in the end.
Well, not this. I stepped back. This tearful reunion wasn’t for his apologies, after all. “I don’t need your help, Father. And you don’t deserve my trust.”
He sighed. “If you change your mind, I’m right here.”
“How do I leave?”
“There’s a bell-pull behind you.”
I rang it twice before Severin came to let me out.
* * *
Severin waited until I took his arm and strode past the Laneeri as if the cells were empty, but he glanced at me with worry. “You have to understand what’s at stake here, Grace.”
Everything was at stake. His future, mine, everyone’s—between the storm headed for the coast and the judgment Aife would deliver to us after observing our country for fourteen days, we were on the edge of a very tall cliff and edging closer still. Naturally, he would turn to Sir Christopher Hensley for guidance. Who wouldn’t?
Me. “You can’t trust my father, Severin. You can’t. He’s the reason we’re in this mess. And he never, never does anything without the guarantee that he’ll benefit.”
Severin sighed. “I know you’re angry with him. And you have reason. But he loves Aeland. He swore to serve it. And he’s ready to give everything to remedy what the Royal Knights and Grandfather Nicholas did.”
“Everything?” I barely held back an indelicate, skeptical noise.
“He’ll go to the gallows, if that’s what it takes. And it might.”
“And you believe him.”
“He made a terrible mistake,” Severin said. “One I don’t even have words for. But he wants to make it right. He wept, Grace. He tried to hold it back, but he broke when I told him that Christopher the Younger still lived.”
“He tried to kill Miles. I was there. I know what he did.”
“He told me,” Severin said. “He repents everything.”
The skeptical noise huffed from my lips. “He didn’t seem repentant to me.”
“I think it’s different, for you.” Severin stroked my hand, soothing. “He spent his whole life with you looking up to him. He was strong. He knew everything, guided you in everything. He couldn’t stop being strong for you.”
Father had always been that. Always strong. Always wise. Always clever, inventive, insightful—and he had taught all that to me, while never breathing a word of secrets I had to learn if I was to succeed him. What if he had wanted a different way to power aether, as he said? It would be just like him to never let me know that he had faltered. To never let me see anything but strength and certainty.
I dashed the thought away. I was trying to understand him. I was trying to find a way to forgive him, and I could never do that, never. But one thing bothered me nearly as much as the headache that heralded the cyclonic blizzard headed our way. “Why did you take me to him before the Queen?”
“He wanted to see you.”
And he obeyed my father’s wishes rather than his mother’s? I didn’t have to grope around for a reason. Almost anyone would have done the same. Father had a reputation as one of the finest minds in Aeland, with an ability to see to the heart of a matter and a knack for sussing out the weakness in an opponent.
Only Miles had ever defied what Father had planned for him. He had dealt Father’s reputation a blow, giving his rivals something to sneer about. Father had done his best to drag my brother back to his place, but Miles wouldn’t bend, wouldn’t break.
Father had tried to kill him in order to preserve the nation’s most horrible secret. I wouldn’t ever forget that. I would never forgive him. “Please be careful, Severin. Father always finds a way to get what he wants, in the end.”
“Then that’s all to the good,” Severin said. “Your father wants safety for Aeland. If he always gets what he wants, then we’re halfway there.”
I stretched my face into a smile. “As you say.”
My father did want safety for Aeland. Naturally, he wanted that. But there was more. I knew it, even if Severin didn’t.
The Prince guided me along the complex route through Kingsgrave to the long breezeway connecting the old castle to the “new” palace, built two hundred years ago. Stone floors gave way to golden, waxed wood; the air warmed as we made our way up stairs and along carpeted hallways to the Queen’s private office.
Cold winter light poured through the circular window in the wall behind a tall, upholstered purple chair behind a wide desk. Queen Constantina rested in that chair, clad in a cleanly tailored violet wool suit, fingers tapping on the desk as she tilted her head.
“You’re three minutes late.”
Three minutes late. Severin had lied to her in order to take me to my father first. I didn’t let my thoughts cross my face. My knee touched the floor. I bent my head, hand over my heart, and waited.
“Rise. We know why you have come,” Queen Constantina said. “A number of our other prisoners have warned us of the storm brewing in the Cauldron to the west. But you left the protection of Grand Duchess Aife of the Solace to bring me the news of this storm, risking your own neck with the news a full day before the others mentioned it. What did you hope to gain, Dame Grace?”
I returned to my feet. Severin moved away from me to lean on the Queen’s desk, perched by her side.
“Your Majesty. It’s worse than anything I’ve ever seen. I fear the Circle didn’t quite manage to power the spell to gentle the Cauldron on Frostnight.”
She paged through a stack of letters on good paper, their envelopes weighted by wax seals. I saw the teal of the Blakes, the deep muddy brown of the Pelfreys, caught a glimpse of dark green that could have been the Sibleys. All of them from the new leaders of the Hundred Families, trying to be the first to warn the monarch of the danger only her Invisibles could guard against. “You would have been the one to shape that spell, if Sir Percy hadn’t succeeded with his vote.”
If she wanted to blame him, that was fine by me. I folded my hands in front of me and quit peering at her correspondence. “Yes, ma’am, though I can’t say if that would have changed our fortunes.”
“They tell me you have power to match your height, girl. Is it true?”
I nodded. “It’s true. But even if Sir Percy had succeeded, this storm would have torn it apart. It’s too powerful.”
Crown Prince Severin touched the Queen’s shoulder. “It’s as I said, Mother. They couldn’t all be lying. Dame Grace was brave to give herself up like this, and she says the same as the rest.”
“I don’t know if we can stop it,” I confessed. “And without the power of the First Ring…”
Queen Constantina gave me and her son a scowl. “And you would have me free them after I called for their arrest?”
I shook my head as Severin shifted his weight off his mother’s desk. “No, ma’am.”
“Obviously you can’t,” Severin said. “But you can free Grace, establish her innocence, and she can Call the storm to calm. She can help us.”
“There’s more,” I said. “Do you recall the ritual you witnessed at Frostnight, the one where my brother and I were ousted?”
“Nothing makes me wish for a book more fervently than the Frostnight Ritual,” Queen Constantina said. “Tradition demands my presence, but it bores me to tears. But I remember your expulsion, girl. What of it?”
“We had come to warn you about an attack on your person,” I said. “My brother was attempting to unravel the mysterious condition some of his patients suffered—patients who had served in the Laneeri War—”
“Yes, yes,” Queen Constantina waved it aside. “Skip to the point.”
“It was a spell. Necromancy,” I said. “Most of the veterans were car
rying a spirit of a Laneeri soldier they had killed by their own hand. There would have been a thousand of them present when you accepted the formal surrender of the Laneeri delegation. That would have been more than enough to overcome the rest and—”
“Reenact the Revenge of Lucus,” the Queen said. “And you told the First Ring this.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her jaw squared as she swallowed. “And they didn’t believe you. As a result, no one told me. It is only sheer luck that caused me to postpone the surrender after the lights went out.”
“We neutralized the threat, ma’am. Miles tapped into the power of the aether network and used it to dispossess the veterans. Then we destroyed it, to keep it from consuming any more Aelander souls—”
“Enough.” The Queen silenced me with a gesture. “The Laneeri. I want them executed for this.”
Severin leaned on the desk again, balancing his weight on one spread-fingered hand. His nails gleamed with a recent buffing. “Mother, one of the Amaranthines is particularly solicitous of the well-being of the Laneeri delegation.”
“Which one?” the Queen demanded.
“Sir Aldis Hunter,” Severin said.
The Queen gusted out a sigh. “The unreasonable one.”
“Yes.”
“Blast it.”
I stuck my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Queen Constantina the First, cursing? She picked up a handmade wooden pen, its grain shaded by purple dye and then lacquered to a high shine. “We’ll need irrefutable proof that they committed this atrocity. Do you understand me? It must be undeniable.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.” That pen pointed at me now, as the Queen gave me a wry look. “I’m about to run you ragged, girl. Are you ready?”
I touched my chest, just over my heart. “I am.”
The Queen lifted the pen as if it were a scepter. “You are hereby granted the Voice of the Invisibles. I assign you to the post of Chancellor. You are to advise me in matters public and unseen.”
Warmth suffused my skin. I stood up taller. She had given it to me. I’d thought I would have to wheedle and beg, but all it took was her word. “Yes, ma’am.”