Spark

by Anna Holmes

  “Masked woman?” I cut in, dropping my hand.

  She sets the jar down, half of the room dimly illuminated enough now that she can move to start lighting candles. “A swordsman? Woman? I think it was a woman. She came in through the balcony after the glass broke. I’m not sure she didn’t shatter it.”

  Bannon clenches his jaw, taking his shadowy self into a corner so that Caelin can finish lighting the room without his interference. “Why the hells would a sorceress like that need a sword?”

  I look his way. “Sorceress?”

  He throws me a glance, and for a moment I’m not sure if it’s disdain or worry I’m seeing. “She had some sort of barrier. Kept people from moving toward her. Everyone except Caelin. Don’t suppose you’d know anything about that sort of thing?”

  Caelin chides, “Riley. Let him rest.”

  Too late. I’m already turning it over in my head, albeit slowly, clumsily. “If it didn’t affect Caelin, that means it was some sort of compulsion. She’s not immune to magic in her surroundings.”

  Bannon nods. “Right, but if she could produce a compulsion—“

  “She wouldn’t likely fight with a weapon as well.” Most magicians I’ve heard of wouldn’t have room in their brains for both. Not like that. “Is it possible she wasn’t sustaining the effect? Something residual?”

  “Two dozen highly trained guards, Northshore. Stopped short.”

  No, she would need to focused on that. “And you’re sure she acted alone?”

  “No, I’m not,” he says, dark eyes fixed on me.

  Caelin finishes lighting every available lamp, then crosses between us. “All right,” she says lightly, coming to sit next to me. “There’ll be time for this later when you’re not bleeding from your head. And blue. Riley….”

  He keeps his gaze set on me a moment longer, then looks at her. “I should check on Tressa anyhow.” He pushes off from the wall and exits the room abruptly.

  Caelin reaches over to my bedside table for the pitcher of water. She edges a little closer, then draws back sharply. “What the hells—?” Caelin shifts to one side and pulls out a book from the mess of my covers. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Theory is boring,” I say with a little laugh.

  “Yeah, about that,” she starts, wetting a handkerchief.

  “Caelin.”

  She handily ignores my protests, moving in with the handkerchief. “I’m not going to have you…stifling yourself with unused magic. Not for them.”

  I take her hands, setting the cloth aside for a moment. Against her skin, mine looks sickly, vaguely virulently blue. It’s familiar. Uncomfortably so. I’ve never seen the shade on myself before, but my sister’s many illnesses made their mark on my brain. She never flushed quite this much, but any amount of blue on a person looks wrong. I shake my head a little and look up to Caelin’s flushed face. “It’s not for them.”

  “You’re telling me you like keeping all that talent choked down till it chokes you?”

  “No. Gods, no. But if it makes it easier on you—”

  “Don’t.” She glowers. “Don’t you decide what I need without asking.”

  “Caelin….” I sigh. She hadn’t been awake those first days after we silenced the Legion uprising. She hadn’t heard the arguments, the passions being flung around while I sat handcuffed. She has heard the arguing day in and day out since. Her advisors rub at her like a stiff pair of shoes that even a year since have yet to break in. “How could I add another sore spot? Not while there are still people who need feeding, towns that need rebuilding, trust still missing. You don’t need to argue about me any more than you already have, and Elyssia needs your advocacy elsewhere.”

  She deflates a little, her thumb moving over the webbing between my fingers. “That doesn’t mean I want you to—I need you too, you know.”

  I reach over with my sallow arm and pull her in weakly, pressing my lips to the top of her head. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “See that you don’t,” she says with a little laugh, picking up her cloth and starting to wipe away the blood. I wince with the sting of the water against the raw skin, and she bites her lip. “Please.”

  “All right, Your Persuasiveness. I'll delay shuffling off as long as I can. Maybe cast a few more spells in the meantime.”

  She laughs, patting my chest. Her light slowly brightens again, and something in my chest unknots a bit.

  I don’t think she knows that I carry that light with me, ration it carefully. It helps when the dreams jerk me awake despite the tyranny of my fatigue. She’s eschewed the comfort of her significantly larger bed and the reassurance that she won’t catch book corners in her soft spots, curled up next to me.

  And I take it with me when I wake to a gray morning, alone again. That’s not new, either.

  I’d always thought that being royalty would at least allow one the luxury of sleeping in, damned what anybody else thinks. It’s quite the opposite. Caelin is bound to what everyone else thinks, and by association, so am I. I limp my way through the halls, which, despite the constant flurry of activity, always seem to slow down when I pass by. I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to be presentable, Caelin’s bulky bandaging job still in place and my stubbornly plain clothes wrinkled. When I arrive at the training grounds, Bannon slides off his bench, crossbow in hand. “You have access to the staff, you know. In case you wanted to look like you didn’t sleep in a laundry heap.”

  I roll out my neck and try to peer past the rolling mist. I can barely see the dummies at the end of the courtyard, let alone be sure of my ability to hit them. “I’m a big boy, Bannon, and let’s be honest, I feel like shit and I’m about as excited to be here as you are. For once, let me look like it.”

  He lets out an exasperated cloud of air. Must be cold. I wouldn’t know. “You do understand that your comportment reflects on Caelin.”

  “I do,” I say, testing the flow of magic between my fingertips. Weak, as usual these days. “I am all too aware of it, and my extreme failure to reflect well last night. I was hoping you might spare me the lecture.”

  “You don’t know me, do you, Northshore.” He levels his crossbow, squints, and fires. The bolt disappears into the fog, and seconds later embeds itself in something with a solid thunk.

  “Good shot, I assume.” I unbutton my sleeves and roll them up, exposing the metal cuffs just above my elbows for him to unlock. “No, I don’t know you. A whole year past. Do you think it’s time we start working on that?”

  He rolls his eyes and obliges. “You’re not as funny as you think you are.”

  “One, yes, I am, and two, I wasn’t trying to be.” I breathe as the uncomfortable metal bands release with a click. The cuffs don't prohibit all casting, but only let enough energy through for small things. Lighting candles, the enchantment on Caelin’s ring. It’s like he’s taken his boot from my throat now, and for the briefest of seconds, I fantasize, as I always do, about using that wind back in me to liquefy those bloody cuffs. He tucks them away and looks at me skeptically. I shrug. “I get it. You don’t trust me. I think you’re an ass. Maybe we could, I don’t know, tone it down for Caelin’s sake?”

  “I’m not much of a liar.” He fits a new bolt to his crossbow and holds it ready as he always does during these training sessions.

  “Don’t you think she’s blisteringly aware of it?” I rub some stiffness from my shoulder. “You’re her oldest friend. I’m her…well, you know. She knows the both of us well enough to know we don’t like each other. I propose we stop rubbing it in.”

  Bannon sets his jaw. “What do you suggest?”

  I flex my fingers again, consider the fog, feel the magic moving in between its fine particles. “Easy. We shut up.”

  He snorts. “Is that easy for you?”

  “It should be, shouldn’t it?” I hold my hand out in the mist, watch its movements around my hand. “I am, as Thorn fell over himself to remind me, a magical anomaly. Shutting up should be n
o problem.” I lower my hand again. “How well do you know him?”

  “Only through Caelin.” He pauses. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious. He’s…busy.”

  “That’s your complaint. He’s busy.”

  “No, no. Just—you’re paranoid, right? Maybe you can appreciate this. I see him, pretty well constantly.”

  “He is the head of the department for which you work.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but it’s always—odd. It’s never in the hallways or in the library or the study. Sometimes I look up and he’s just standing in the back of my classes.”

  Bannon firms his grip on his crossbow. “You can’t imagine we’d just let you roam about unobserved.”

  “Oh, no, I am fully aware that I’m being watched.” I gesture to the crossbow. “Case in point. At first, I thought it was the same as you. Old allegiances, old wounds, that sort of thing. But you heard him last night. Talking about Legion evaluations like they don’t bother him at all, despite the extreme cultural hierarchy differences between casters in the Rosalian tradition.”

  “What is your point, Northshore?”

  “I’m not sure I have one,” I sigh. “He’s just odd. And yes, I know. I’m one to talk.” I lift my hand again and take in a hesitant breath. The magic pushes impatiently at my fingertips. I’m not sure what’s stopping me. “Just conversing, I suppose.”

  “I knew it,” he says with the faintest of smiles. “You can’t shut up, can you?”

  I laugh. “I guess not.” I close my hand into a fist, and the mist moves, slowly at first, then into a spiraling sphere of water that grows with every rotation. The air clears enough for me to see the line of dummies, the center man with a bolt sunk directly in the middle of his head. Point taken, Bannon. Point always taken.

  Chapter Four

  Caelin

  The cabinet chamber is the last place I want to be this morning. It was hard enough leaving Alain’s room after the events of the last evening. It’s worse to be standing here now arguing about them.

  And that is all we have been arguing about. For hours. Not the tariff negotiations I’d hoped to get to, not the parliamentary motions that have been sitting on our desks for weeks now. I lean my palms on the surface of my desk, slightly taller than the others. I suppose my ancestors were taller than I am. It rattles slightly where it’s bolted into the blue marble floor, the built-in inkwell bobbling a bit. We’ve been at this too long, if that’s a welcome distraction now. “Enough,” I say. “We’re fortunate that this masked woman seems to be a lone operator. We suffered no casualties. I will not be invoking the edicts of conscription.”

  General Harron Morris stares at me past the scar cutting across the right side of his face. I wasn’t there when he got that one—it was from some skirmish in Folgia—but the pair of us have shed enough blood together that I’d hoped sparring with words would be easier. So far, it isn’t. “No casualties? She arrived on the balcony and laid out the Prince Consort in the middle of your ball.”

  “We don’t know that she did,” Admiral Hawke interjects, squinting her steely eyes past her silver spectacles.

  “No, in fact, we know that she didn’t,” I put in. “The Prince Consort’s ailment was unfortunately timed and easily explained. Even if she had, however, I am not willing to break Elyssian tradition for a targeted attack.”

  Morris runs his hand over his spiky gray stubble. “Begging your pardon, Your Highness, but you’re incredibly cavalier about an intruder making her way into your castle.”

  “I’m no such thing. What I am, however, is unwilling to declare a war because of it.”

  “I’m not asking for—“

  I lean forward. “That is exactly what you are asking me for. Elyssia keeps no standing military.”

  “A position I have long since railed against.”

  “We know,” says Lord Jarven, looking utterly bored. Of all the people on this council, Jarven is my favorite. He’s only a few years older than I am, and he’s made it clear to Hawke, Moira Pollock, and Morris that he’s not interested in bluster. “We’ve heard the arguments.”

  “There would be no shortage of jobs. You train her people for combat.” He flings a meaty mitt in Pollock’s direction. “What’s the difference between that and adding more fighters?”

  Pollock scowls. “Guards are meant to stand guard. Soldiers kill.”

  “And bad ones dabble in each other’s professions,” I finish. “Elyssia is not at war. We have no need of soldiers.”

  “Like hells it isn’t,” Morris blares. “We’re occupied even now!”

  Jarven pinches the bridge of his nose. “Here we go.”

  “You want to know what I think? Toss those encampments you refuse to rout. You’ll find that woman there.”

  “Interesting, as Sergeant Nuthatch didn’t trace her back to one,” I say coldly. “And none of the watch guards stationed at all hours around those camps providing daily reports of activity in and around them mentioned any comings or goings last night. Or have you missed those reports?”

  Pollock’s eyebrows lift in warning. I know. I’m poking a bear with a particularly short stick. But I’ve stood here in boots I’ve yet to completely break in as everything from Alain’s illness to my firing of the man who refused to treat his illness has been talked into the ground, and now he wants to retread this terrain. “If those sores weren’t allowed to fester, we wouldn’t need reports,” he growls.

  “The sores are a symptom, not the disease,” I tell him flatly. “Legion sympathizers distrust this government, and frankly, I understand it. We’re making headway, Morris. More and more, people who threw their weight behind Rosalia are coming to stand behind us. What do you think would happen to that trust if I started tossing camps of increasingly hungry, increasingly desperate former Legion soldiers and slaughtering them because perhaps we might find one attacker there?”

  “I don’t see why we need them to trust,” he says, leveling his chin. “They weren’t behind us then? They’re no allies now.”

  My fingers clench the edges of my desk so tightly I might end up snapping it in half. “You can’t see why I don’t feel safe in disregarding the sentiments of somewhere near half my citizens.”

  He mutters, “You’d feel safer if you had a stronger force backing you up.”

  “I’d feel safer if I didn’t need it!” I shout, my voice bouncing back from the vaults of the stone ceiling above. “Given enough time, I won’t! Lord Jarven is correct. We’ve spent enough time today at each other’s throats. I will meet with you again on seventhday, by which time I expect that you, Admiral Hawke, will work with Captain Pollock on devising a plan to strengthen our ports without resurrecting an army. Jarven, please see to it that you allocate the proper resources to funding that strengthening, and you,” I snap, rounding on Morris, “will consider ways to speak more respectfully in meetings. To the matter of the court physician, Jarven, I’d like to see a list of appropriate candidates by tomorrow.”

  Jarven bows his head. “Begging your pardon, Your Highness,” he says deferentially, “but there is one matter on the docket today we haven’t discussed.”

  I am dangerously close to shouting at him to forget it, to leave it for later, but so far, he’s been the most compliant person in this room. “What is it?” I ask, trying not to sound too much like a cornered animal.

  “Prince Daryon has requested a formal answer to his proposal.”

  The two refusals I gave him last night weren’t enough? Gods, my head might explode. “And that,” I say sharply, “is something I won’t be discussing as a council, this day or any other. You are all dismissed.”

  Jarven scoops up his papers and holds out an arm ostensibly to politely allow Morris to leave first. It's really to get him to leave the room without staying behind to harangue me, but masterfully disguised as courtesy so Morris can’t refuse without looking like an incredible ass. Morris knows it, too. He grits his teeth and follows Pollock from the room.
I shoot Jarven a grateful glance. He replies with a small bow of his head, holding the door for the rest of the council and leaving me alone at last.

  I have never been a quiet person. Even on the rare occasions I find myself alone with a book, my fingers drum on the cover of their own accord. But right now, in this moment, I don’t think there’s anything more gods-sent than this silence in the cabinet room—just me and the high desks and the painted skies on the ceiling above. My shoulders unclench an inch at a time, and for the first time I can recall in a few hours, I exhale.

  It doesn’t last long. There’s a knock at the open door, and I pick up my weary head to tell whomever it is that whatever it is will have to wait. When I see Tressa in the doorway, however, I stop and smile a bit. “There you are.”

  “Here I am,” she says. She casts a glance over her shoulder, then enters the room and closes the door behind her. “Should I have interrupted sooner?”

  “Oh, I’d have loved you for it,” I groan, letting my head roll backwards.

  “Even with as much noise as I make, I’m not sure they’d have heard me come in.” Tressa winces, tapping a softly pointed earlobe. “I probably shouldn’t have overheard that, should I? Better ears than the average biped.”

  I wave her off. “Nothing I wouldn’t have complained to you about later anyhow.”

  “You held your own, if it helps any.”

  I rub at my neck. “I would rather not have to fight so hard to do my bloody job. We’re supposed to be on the same side.”

  Her arms swing, her bracers creaking. “Trust me. I get it.”

  “That…was insensitive of me, after last night.”

  Tressa shakes her head, laughing. “It’s fine, Caelin. I’ve dealt with people doing that….”

  “Your whole life?” I guess.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Well, it’s bullshit,” I say venomously.