Spark

by Anna Holmes

  Her nose wrinkles and she opens her mouth, but her face falls and she reaches out to me. “You were about to tell me something.”

  “Elle is sick,” I say for the first time aloud. I hate the sound of the words, the terse finality that means I’ve acknowledged it. We hardly even said it at home, like speaking its name will worsen it. Like a curse. “She always has been. And my grandfather. I was starting to think that maybe I am too.”

  “So the supplement was medicine? And I fired the doctor,” Caelin blurts, her voice frantic as she starts to move to the edge of the bed. “Devils take me. I’ll find another—”

  I grasp her arm. “Caelin. I was wrong. This proves it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That wouldn’t have been redacted. They would have wanted every trainer, commanding officer, and bunkmate I came across to know about any potential…weaknesses. And anything that might combat them.”

  Caelin shifts again, this time away from the edge of the bed. As though she’s not sure she wants the answer, she asks, “What…would have been?”

  “Military secrets. Engineering notes, battle plans—” Devils take me, speaking some truths aloud really do feel like laying a curse. “Weapon schematics.”

  The blackness behind my eyelids grows darker, deeper, threatens to pull me in. I strain against it, the buzzing in my ears, the arrhythmic drubbing of my heart against my ribs. My leg sears, heat surging, swelling, searching for release. I tremble under the labor. The curse already has been laid. Trying to hold it in is what’ll kill me. “They built me,” I admit to myself, to Caelin, to the magic pounding through my veins that has never made sense. “And now they’re trying to recover me.”

  Caelin shifts on the bed. A rustle of fabric, a thump of metal on the floor, and a rollicking of the bed. She curls herself around me and tucks my head into the hollow of her throat. “Never,” she promises, her voice vibrating through me, filling the spaces in between my heartbeats. “Never.”

  I must have slept at some point last night. I barely feel like it, but at the same time, every time I shut my eyes, a nagging feeling pushes at my gut, burns its way up my throat, bumps around my head a few times before falling away to do it all again. I sit up and find a note in Caelin’s exuberant, looping hand on the bed where she had been.

  Gone to vigil. Back somewhere on the soon side. Don't go far.

  Love, C.

  Ah, gods, I’d forgotten the nearness of the anniversary of the day she lost her father. I swipe my damp hand across my forehead, pushing aside the mess of my hair. I’d at least wanted to see her off. I’m not sure what time it is or what the soon side is in her mind, but there’s something I should do before she returns. With all the grace of an inebriated fawn, I stumble my way out of bed, dress, and stagger downstairs to a place I’ve never voluntarily gone.

  Bannon looks me up and down from his impeccably organized desk. I make it a habit not to trust anyone without at least a little chaos on their desks, but desperate times and all that. “Northshore,” he says with a frown. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company? I thought given the state you were…,” he pauses, then pries his gaze off my shaking, clenched, blue hands, “are in, you’d give training a miss today.”

  I check behind me. No one in the hallway seems headed for his office. “Anyone else in here?”

  “No,” he answers warily. “Why?”

  I reach out with a hand behind me to magic the door closed. The energy jumps in the cavern of my chest, like I'm falling. Bannon jumps to his feet, already reaching for his crossbow. I turn my head, set my jaw, and hold out my wrists. “I’m turning myself in.”

  He freezes, his hand midway over his shoulder. “You what?”

  I struggle for air. “You were right. I am a Legion abomination and I need to be caged. Do you still have those cuffs?”

  Bannon stares, lowering his hand. “If this is one of your very clever jokes, I’m afraid it’s sailing right over my head.”

  I slam my hand onto his desk, blue veins bulging. “Do I look like I’m kidding around, Bannon? I am a danger to Caelin and potentially this country and if you don’t lock me away, I swear to gods I will make you.”

  He just regards me for a good few seconds, folding his arms. Somewhere in the room, a clock beats out a terse rhythm. Eventually, he rocks from his heels to his toes and back again and grunts. “You have my attention. Go on. Confess. Truthfully. I know the look of a martyr when I see one, and they bore me. What infraction is it? Don't forget, Caelin’s loosened the laws around treason.”

  I sputter for a few solid tocks, while Bannon just stands there, purplish eyebrow raised. I would accuse him of screwing with me, but nothing I’ve seen of him in these months gives me the impression he’s capable. Slowly, I say, “Thorn was right—you were right. My magic isn’t natural. The Legion put something in me. Something that either is or acts like cryst.”

  “Did you know?”

  “No—”

  “Then the wrongdoing is theirs.” He levels his gaze at me. “I serve the Queen, and her word is law. Her word is that Elyssia does not punish former Legion soldiers for crimes committed above their heads. Am I to believe you disagree?”

  “Of course I don’t.” I wrap an arm around my stomach, try to hold in my roiling guts. “But you know as well as I do where this is going. If it gets out that you know what’s been done…some here will want it for themselves as a countermeasure. And you told me yourself last night that Jori’s reappearance lacks the ring of coincidence.”

  “Both of these things are true.” He shakes his head. “But although I serve the Queen, I was her friend first, and while both of those are pressing…they won’t be her immediate concern. Whether or not you and I and anyone else wants them to be.”

  “Worrying over me doesn't make me less of a threat.”

  “We’re in complete agreement, Northshore. But locking you away doesn't solve it. If Thorn is right and the circumstances around your…assessment need to be scrutinized, whatever this enhancement is happened a length of time ago. And if it is cryst or behaves exactly like cryst, time is not your ally.”

  He’s right. A childhood spent on the edge of the sea mines drilled into us what happens when it’s improperly contained. It degrades to the point of complete uselessness, or it goes volatile, taking everything around with it. “Well, shit.”

  “It’s not every day that starting a new war isn’t the worst case scenario,” he agrees, edging out from behind his desk and holding the door open for me. “Don’t let it go to your head. I’ll fix you myself if I have to. We can deal with the probable war later.”

  Chapter Eight

  Caelin

  Morning, and the snow has turned to soggy slop, steaming in the weak sun. At times, I’m not sure if the fog is in my sights or my brain, but nonetheless, I wander the slushy cobbled path down to the Cathedral. After Alain finally shook his way to uneasy sleep last night, I rose and combed the books on his shelves. My father’s shelves before him. My father, whose interests were wide and ranging and utterly inscrutable at times, but always seemed to come back to alchemy and magic and esoteric trivia. If an answer to Alain’s puzzle exists, I reasoned, it would be on those shelves. If I could just find it and figure it out, I could take out whatever they put in him.

  I don’t know shit about alchemy.

  My father had always promised he’d show me when I was old enough. He never got to see me get old enough, and the unfairness of time has never been less lost on me than this morning, as I shamble my way to see him, a couple of his books still jammed in the crook of my arm.

  The Cathedral is silent save for the rushing of the water of the outer fountain walls and the tapping of my heels. I haven’t been back here since my coronation, the second one, during which I was legitimately crowned. It feels even more massive in its emptiness, and I hurry to the sanctuary in the very back behind the altar. Even the most devout likely think that the altar is the end of it. Behind th
e altar curtain is a knob, a small orb of tangled metal rosevines, one of the four locks at each of the four compass points of the royal city. One in the castle, one in the University’s library, one in the arboretum, and one here, all turnable only by my hand. Or any other members of the royal family, if there were any left. This was the only door I’d never tried, since I knew what was on the other side.

  Most tombs are dim. This one, even without the torches lining the stone walls, is anything but. The ceiling, unreachable glass in every color imaginable, throws the dawn around the room. Any corners it couldn’t reach on its own are illuminated by the wavering reflection of the water spilling from the crystal fountain at the center of the dome to form the cathedral walls. It sings against the glass, a choir of tremulous hums in every note, shimmering amongst the gold plaques set in the stone floor marking the cremains of my forebears.

  My father’s is easy to find. It’s shiniest. Newest. I stoop and brush my fingers against my aunts’ slightly dimmer names on my way. I barely remember them, but they too had been full of light like his. Not even the literal light of our birthright. The light of candor, in Aurelia’s case, of laughter in Geraldine’s. With a name like that, she’d often said, one had to have a sense of humor. And in Papa’s, there’d been the spark of the joy he found in learning. All sorts of it. Not just what he found in his books, but good stories he’d heard in the market, tidbits he picked up in his travels, pleasantries exchanged with other heads of state.

  I look down at his plaque with my puffy eyes, the letters of his name glinting in the sun. It’s too much, the weight of the crystalline song, the heft of the light, the corners of his books eating into my arm, the fruitless long night turning into this horrible day. I sag to my knees and let the books clatter to the marble. “Papa,” I whisper, pressing my forehead to the cold gold. “Help me. I don’t know what to do.”

  Of course, there’s no answer. There hasn’t been in eleven years. I talk to him all the same, just in case the priests are right and he’s somewhere listening. I lay on top of his name and let it pour out in ugly, pitched sobs, masked by the water against the glass and stone. All of it, the advisors I’d half inherited from him, the struggles I had so hoped we’d ended still raging in corners of his beloved country and in the body of the man he’d never get to meet, the fact that there is no one left to pick me up and promise to help set things right like he’d promised he always would.

  It all feels childish and selfish, to wail about my problems until my voice goes hoarse when it’s him in a little jar under this plaque and I still have air enough to cry. Even so, after carrying on, the guilt seems lighter, and I can think again of the songs he sang until I fell asleep, the afternoons in the sun in the garden, the exuberance he gave off any time he had something new to share.

  Behind me, there’s a shuffling of fabric, and I whirl, still dripping from the face. Professor Thorn slips down to sit beside me. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought I might find you here this morning and that you could probably use some company.”

  I set my hand to my chest and breathe out the jangling of my nerves. “You frightened me,” I laugh. “I thought it’s only us royals, dead or alive in here.”

  “Yes, well,” he says looking down at the plaque. “You did leave the door open, and Soren hated the pomp and formality of the crown. Am I unwelcome?”

  “No, of course not,” I say. “Papa would have liked to visit with his dearest friend.”

  “Ah, no,” he says with a little grin. “His dearest friend up until eighteen years and a week ago, for you supplanted me the second you cried your way into this world. And I couldn’t even bring myself to be cross about it, because his sheer…joy at every little thing you did was a beautiful mystery to me. I could have hoped for no more wonderful usurpation.”

  I laugh a little, but what really comes out is a fresh blubber. He reaches into a pocket and finds a handkerchief and holds it out to me. I blot at my face. “Does it ever stop…aching?”

  He looks down at my father’s name again, his smile falling a little, but not entirely disappearing, either. “No,” he answers frankly. “We only become used to it.”

  I look up, trying to will my eyes dry, following the pattern of the light in the water. “I don’t want to,” I say. “And at the same time, I wish I were.”

  The Professor looks at me, his head tilted to the side, his face screwed up in sympathy. It’s a look I usually hate, but I see the tears pushing at the corners of his eyes, and I know he’s been carrying this ache as long as I have. “I’m sorry, Linnie. I wish…” he shakes his head with a small sniffle, looking back to the gold plate in the floor. “Oh, but he’d hate this. Were he here, he’d tell us a story to make us laugh at his own expense.”

  I chuckle a little. “He would, wouldn’t he.”

  “I can’t bear to embarrass him as much as he would himself, but I do have a tale or two.”

  “Tell one,” I exhort.

  He does, and one turns into six, and I can’t help but feel that tombs should all be filled with laughter at least some of the time. We’re both still crying, but it’s easier.

  At length, the bells outside ring out seven, and he looks up distractedly. “Ah. Yes. As much as my students would love if I didn’t show up this morning, I should make a stab at being presentable. Will you be all right, my dear?”

  I nod, reaching his handkerchief out to him. “I think I’m just going to sit a moment longer.”

  He curls it into my hand again, patting my hand. “Shall I close the door behind me?”

  “Yes, please,” I say with a little laugh.

  The Professor places a kiss to my forehead and stands. “If you need anything at all, it’s yours. This day and any other.”

  “Thank you, Professor.”

  He gives me a little smile and disappears behind the door, and this time it clicks into place. Once I’m reasonably sure I’m actually alone, I blow my nose and shift off of my aching knees, looking around the room. The Professor was right. Papa would have preferred that I laugh in his honor. I don’t feel like I have it in me to laugh alone right now, but it doesn’t feel wrong to sit next to my father’s name and open one of his well-loved books and try to learn something.

  Try being operative. The sun is a little higher in the glass above the next time I look up, my brain thick with sleeplessness and post-crying haze and alchemical formulae. He and I were alike in many ways, but I’m starting to think a love of alchemy is not one of them, or maybe starting on the heels of a restless night sitting up alert every time Alain twitched is not an ideal way to foster it. I rub at my eyes and start to stand up.

  The door clicks. At first I think it’s the wind settling the open bones of the building, but when I turn to confirm, the porcelain doll from the ballroom smirks back at me. “You,” I snap. “How did you get in here?”

  The figure freezes in place, then turns. Just as before, she bolts, throwing the door shut behind her. I struggle with the ancient knob for a moment and at last emerge into the Cathedral in time to see her disappear around the corner into the nave. I secure the door so that she will be the last to disturb my ancestors today and take off.

  I want to know what she wants. I worry I already know what that is, given her timing. And above everything else, I want to know how the hells she opened that door. I know I heard the Professor shut it properly behind him. There is an obvious answer, but one that shouldn’t be, unless my family tree has more branches than I thought.

  I close distance fairly quickly. When she reaches the edges of the Cathedral, she glances back at me briefly, draws a pair of shortswords, and slashes herself a path through the frozen water forming the wall.

  It’s clever. I cover my face as the ice shards scrape my neck and snag my hair, which buys her a few more seconds of lead time. By now, there are people in the streets beginning their days, whom she uses as even more cover. I clench my teeth and dart between the townsfolk. At the periphery, guards start movi
ng in from the alleyways and their regular patrols once they see us.

  Good. She’s not getting away this time.

  I squeeze between a baker and a merchant’s cart headed to the port and am just about to reach out for the fraying edges of her gray cloak when figures in black appear at the edges of my vision. “No, no, no,” I start to say as Daryon plants himself firmly in my path.

  Predictably, he doesn’t listen. “Caelin, it is above time you—”

  Diplomacy be damned, I jostle past him to search the street. I spot guards moving through citizens, but damn it all, they’re moving toward me. On the other side of the wide cobblestone thoroughfare, Riley and Alain dash toward me too. “What happened?” Riley demands before they’ve even closed distance.

  “The masked—doll woman,” I yell back.

  He holds out a hand to slow Alain and gives a whistle. Immediately, the guards break off and he points, sending two of each in opposite directions and himself taking a third. Alain catches up to me, taking my hands in his just slightly too warm ones. “Are you all right?”

  I try to get my breathing to slow and the iron tang of my adrenaline to give me enough room in my mouth to ask, “Am I—are you all right?”

  “Yes, you,” he frets, reaching for my cheek, his fingers coming away red with blood. I guess I hadn’t managed to deflect all of the ice after all.

  “I,” Daryon rumbles, “have had enough! What sort of lawless country are you running, where every talk is interrupted by some criminal activity or another?”

  I can’t help it. I burst out laughing. “You meant that ironically, right?”