by Anna Holmes
“You always were better at remembering that than I,” I answer with a little laugh.
“There is…something we could do,” she starts. “A stronger statement. It hasn’t been done in…several reigns, really. But I think it would be appropriate.”
“Oh,” I say dumbly. I don’t have words for much more than that. We’ve danced around marriage a bit now, but she’s suggesting sharing more than our lives. Her cheeks flush bright pink, refracting in vaguely orangish tones off the bronze cabin walls. I sort through my responses, try to find the one that sounds the least obnoxious. I don't think I succeed. At last, I tell her, “Caelin—I could never be regnant.”
“And why not? You have the experience. You know how it feels.”
I do. The trust people place in her. The fear it might be misplaced. The knowledge that people’s lives and livelihoods ride on her decisions, and the immense want to do what’s best for all of them. The fact that it’s impossible to do what’s best for all of them. The desire to try anyway. All of these were mine, and I wanted them. Desperately, I’d wanted them. Now….
Fran continues to click quietly, even after we're on the ground, gears embedded in the walls cranking around and winding up my silence into a lump in my throat. A silence that is more and more daunting to break. “Even—even if I were accepted, which I wouldn’t be, I am…afraid to plan for a future.”
“We’re going to find a way to help you,” she tells me.
“And if we don’t?”
“We will,” Caelin insists. “We have Gavroth and Kai and Elle, and if they need help, Professor Thorn and an entire college of alchemists. If I have to, I will go out and mine the damned cryst myself. You have a future. We’ll fight for it.”
I laugh a little. “You make me want one.”
She taps my chest with a gentle fist. “Stay in the fight with me, then.”
“Yeah.” I pause. “What…did we just decide?”
“That we’re not throwing any towels in?” she asks, confused.
“No—it sounded like you were asking if I wanted to—was that an official….”
“Oh—oh,” she says. “Blast me, I did sort of imply we’re going to….”
Laughter bursts from the center of my chest, propelled by a weird sort of relief. “That makes us even now, then.”
“You do want to, yeah? Get married?”
“Yes. I would like the opportunity to ask on purpose, if possible.” I glance down at the slightly shimmery scales left behind on the tops of my hands and my arms. “And…maybe not after a magical tantrum.”
“Fair enough.” She leans over and kisses me, and for a moment, the restless feeling of the magic darting around my veins eases. Maybe I just don't care about it under the circumstances. Caelin pulls back and beams, and I set my hand to her cheek and move in for another kiss, and another, and a few more after that. It’s been a while since there were no eyes on us, and the frantic rate at which we’re moving is a subconscious acknowledgment that that may not last long. On closer inspection, I don’t really care.
We’ve been lost in the act a good few minutes when Caelin pauses, her fingers still working in and out of my hair. She catches her breath and glances to the open hatch. “We probably shouldn’t let them get too far ahead.”
I lean on my forearm on the cushion, looking down at her. “I really hate it when you’re right.”
“Still?” She asks with a little grin.
I lean over and place a kiss into the hollow of her neck just under her ear. “About things like this? Permanently.”
Caelin places her hand to my chest, fingers toying with my shirt. “There’ll be time,” she promises softly. “You still owe me a dance.”
She makes me want one.
A Rosalian counterpart once complained that Elyssian naming conventions are too on the nose. The Shoulderswidth Valley is not an exception. Caelin attempts to brace me as we trudge through patches of early snow, but in places she winds up needing to squeeze on ahead of me and walk backwards to do so. I can’t imagine Tressa would have an easy time of it if she hadn’t volunteered to stay back to watch Jori.
The rock walls tower above us, throwing our footsteps back at us. I imagine that the crack between the two is larger than it seems, but from here thirty feet below, it’s amazing to me that snow made it all the way down here. “Good on Nuthatch for landing that thing down here,” Caelin comments. “Must be like trying to thread a needle with an airship.”
“The machine is a wonder,” I agree. “No cryst at all, so no difficulties over the ocean. I’ll say this for him—he knows how to leverage a connection.”
“It’s a Rosalian ship, isn’t it?”
“From fifty years ago. They all use cryst now, to my knowledge.”
“Irresponsible of them, given they don’t have any in their territories.”
“More like a hint at what they’re playing at,” I answer with a sigh. When I joined, I had thought it was a good thing. More nations uniting under the banner of choice. The people elect the proxies, the proxies elect the princes, the princes the kings and the kings the Archon, all is well in the world.
If that were the case, there wouldn't be so many dead. I wish I had seen that earlier. People killed and lives upended so people on a different continent can enjoy resources without paying for them. I did not realize that for other nations, there was no choice. Elyssia was taken in a bloodless coup, and the war seemed a result of people who couldn't abide change. Other countries suffered the war upfront. Change came whether they liked it or not.
Caelin purses her lips and carries on, still supporting my forearms on hers. It seems almost perfunctory these days, but I assure her, “There is a lot that I wish I’d known. It seems Nuthatch figured it out much quicker than I did.”
“Yes, well,” she says a little tautly. “He ran off with his tail between his legs and got people hurt for it. You stuck around to fix what could be fixed and ease what couldn’t.”
“He’s here now,” I offer.
Caelin still doesn’t seem mollified, but doesn’t argue. “You’re awfully quick to defend the man responsible for your current predicament.”
I shrug a shoulder briefly before wobbling back into her grasp. “He could have been me, if things were different.”
“You think so?”
“Gods know I followed more than a few arbitrary-seeming orders only to find out their real consequences later. They teach you that everything is in the service of the Legion, and the Legion is righteous and good, so therefore everything they ask must also be righteous and good.”
“You have never struck me as the unquestioning type.”
“I never have been. That’s why they save the egregious orders for after the easy requests. Then you have a history of evidence. They haven’t led you afoul yet, so clearly you’re overreacting, aren’t you? They string as many of us along that way as they can for as long as they can. The ones that are left after they burn the rest of us out are the Pells and my…mothers. And it starts all over again.”
My mouth goes a bit dry, and I miss a step. Caelin lunges to save my backside from landing in the slush. “All right?” she asks.
“Fine. Just fine.”
We continue on for a bit in silence. After a moment, she asks, “What…was she like? You never told me.”
I let my eyes wander along the rocky walls, seeking out the holes here and there, the only indication that the valley was once home to people. “Cold. Demanding. Not afraid to use magic to punish us.”
“She—what?”
“Oh, yes,” I answer, trying and failing to keep my bitterness from seeping out. “Caught lying? She’d force you to blurt out whatever you’re thinking. Fidgety? You’re stuck in your chair. Too loud in the house? Lose your voice. You’d be lucky if she just took it from you and didn’t replace it with animal sounds.”
She’s silent for a moment, her jaw clenched. “I think I’ve lost the right to complain about mine ever.”
I don’t know about that. I would assume being secretly stalked after fearing her dead for a year is fairly complaint-worthy. I don’t wind up getting to say so, however, as we seem to have caught up to the others. August’s copper head bobs just ahead of us. Caelin calls out, her greeting echoing in the corridor. Our companions stop from the back first. “How much further do we have to go?” she asks Nuthatch.
“Good news,” he says. “We’re a third of the way there.”
I sag without really meaning to. The Northern Shore doesn’t get much snow, and I never anticipated how much even a bit of it would bother my leg until last year. All of the constant correcting and rebalancing is three times the effort it would be on unfrozen ground. Caelin looks at me apologetically. "We can take a rest….”
To do so, I’d need to be able to sit in the middle of the air, and magic isn’t an option, so I don’t think that’s happening. Sheepishly, Nuthatch says, “I’m sorry I couldn’t get us closer. It was the only bit wide enough for Fran.”
Caelin frowns slightly. I tilt my head as if to say come on. He hardly had control over where he could land. She just nods briefly, and I say, “I’ll manage.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so optimistic. Shortly thereafter, every other step changes from mild discomfort to agony, and with every jolt the ground sends through my leg, the magic flares, too. “All right,” I pant, putting a hand against the wall and leaning heavily on it. “Perhaps I need a rest.”
“I’m sorry," Caelin says with a wince. “We should have brought Maribelle.”
“Honestly?” I huff. "There are parts I don’t think she’d fit through.”
Caelin looks down the path through the chasm. “I can see if it gets wide enough to sit down that way.”
Nuthatch examines his map. “It…doesn’t look like it. If you can hold out till the lake, we can make camp.”
I take a ragged breath and nod. Caelin holds out her hands, and we start on our way again through piles of snow that feel more like daggers jammed through the sole of my boot and traveling all the way to my hip. I stop noticing the odd windows and doors carved into the walls, stop even trying to figure out how much longer we have to go.
Some blurred amount of time later, August slips to the back of the group and looks at me inquisitively. “How does magic work, anyway?”
Gavroth turns his head over his shoulder. “Don’t bother the prince, boy.”
“It’s not—a bother,” I say with a winded laugh. I could use the distraction. “It is quite the large question, however.”
“All right,” August says thoughtfully. “Then why do some people have magic and some don’t?”
“Actually, all people have magic in them to some extent. It’s all around us. Everywhere in the world, but particularly on this island. What’s variable is people’s ability to channel the energy in the ether. Some can manipulate the magic in items that someone else has put there. Others intrinsically feel for the natural magical threads in elements and fuse them together to create completely new solutions. Innate casters use the ebb and flow of their emotions to cast defensive magic—the magic in them reacts to danger. Still others use the rhythm of spoken words to focus the magic in them into spells. And people like me basically just use sheer stubbornness to force things around them to shift."
“And those of us who can’t do any of that? Are we broken? Or left behind?”
“Not remotely.” I grimace through another step. “Caelin has no magic, and yet she has a natural way with a sword that she’s honed through practice. She is naturally outspoken to begin with, but she’s learned to wield words like weapons. Just because she’s not manipulating the ether doesn’t mean she’s not talented. Everyone starts with different proclivities.”
Elle folds her arms on top of Gavroth’s head and leans her chin on them. She’s heard this speech more than a few times. It’s gotten boring, or trite, or perhaps it was never very convincing, given how much our mother praised the magic in me and resented the lack of it in her. August thinks. “Oh. Like how Gav can’t sing.”
Gavroth clears his throat. “I can sing just fine, lad.”
August sighs. “He thinks he can sing.”
“Singing is a decent metaphor,” I agree. “Some are very capable and can do a wide range of things, which can widen with practice. Some can do it, but aren't going to win any contests. Some couldn’t pick a note out of the center of a well lit room if it were waving directly at them.”
Caelin smirks a little. “All right, now you're picking on me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Your Out-of-Tuneness.”
We fall quiet, back to the crunch of snow, back to the step-stab of my gait and trying not to start singing some curse words. August thinks for a moment. “Okay. So everyone has a bit of this ether stuff in them. Is it all the same amount?”
“No. Innate casters and spoken casters hold the most within themselves. Will casters trade it back and forth with the world at large.” Normally. When there aren’t cuffs cutting off the transfer back out. Hence the choking feeling. “And this is where non-casters have the advantage of us. Your bodies circulate the ether naturally. Ours require a certain amount of regulation. Too much casting and you exhaust yourself. Not enough and you build up excess, which frankly makes you feel like you’re going to explode. Sometimes literally.”
He winces. “I…like not exploding. So, if I have to fight a mage…?”
“Identify what sort of magic they’re using first. If it’s someone like me, try to get them to use it all up faster than they can regenerate it. You’re not going to need to worry about alchemists actively casting. Object casters are easily disarmed as long as you get their objects away from them. Stay well clear of innate casters, and should you ever find yourself confronted by a spoken caster…well, your only hope is to shut them up or hope they throw everything they have at you and miss.”
August pales a little, but recovers quickly enough. “Hey, look, it’s the lake!”
Sure enough, the crevasse walls part at last, and we can squeeze out into the open air. At last, I feel like my chest can expand freely, and I drop to an overturned log on the lakeshore to take the weight from my leg. Caelin places a kiss into my hair. “Well done, love.”
I try to capture a breath for more than a second or two to respond, but in the end, just nodding. She lets her hand linger on my shoulder for a moment. It doesn't feel nearly as warm as I know it should.
As my companions fall to setting up the camp, my eyes linger on the glow dancing on the surface of the water. It’s a whiter light than the omnipresent blue of my hometown, but there’s still something familiar here. The cryst’s song leaps in recognition, the pitch higher, more fervent than before. Something in me rises to meet it.
I clutch my arm around my gut, leaning forward on my downed log. There have been moments on this trudge that I think I may actually have discovered what being cold feels like. This is not one of them. I am warm, warm enough that the drops of freezing rain starting to scatter over us plop onto my skin and steam curls away. I’m worried. By the steam, by the harmonizing between whatever’s at the core of me and whatever’s lurking under the lake, and by the fact that despite everything, my heart is soaring in a way normally reserved for happier moments. I’m thrilled without my own permission, and I don’t want to be.
The sooner we get this sorted out, the better. I’m not sure I like what I’m becoming.
Chapter Eighteen
Caelin
Sleep takes Alain without much of a fight tonight, Elle curled up next to his splayed out body on the cushion in the bottom of our tent. Once they’re settled, I fold my cloak closer around myself and head back out to the lakeshore. I crane my neck up to track the quilted clouds. The sleet has stopped for now, thank goodness. In the quiet little half circle of tents from Fran’s hold, it’s easy to feel safe, but I'm still taking a watch anyhow.
The slush falling from the sky left the fire smoldering a littl
e. I prod it back to life with a fresh piece of wood and watch the sparks jump into the air and fade again. The air is quiet, save for the crackling of the firewood and the occasional lapping of the lake. Too late in the year for bugs and birds, I suppose, and no city’s worth of people still making noise around us. I smile a little to myself. In our first days together, Alain had once asked derisively if I minded camping, since there are no featherbeds and warm hearths in nature. I must have given some flippant answer—I can’t really remember—but the truth of it is, I’m as at home here as anywhere. The castle was home for the first years of my life and the most recent, but in the years between my home was Elyssia at large.
Before they let me join the fighting, I still traveled with the Resurgence. As a symbol, mostly, but helping where I could. I grew up with these mountains for my walls, the rich decay of the forest floor for a carpet, the ever-shifting skies for my roof. As long as I could get my bedroll positioned somewhere relatively rock-free, I was happy.
I take down the remains of my braid, comb through the resulting frizz with my fingers. A hint of moonlight peeks through the clouds, and for a minute, it’s easy enough to forget, watching it dance in the lines of the lake.
A snap of a twig behind me, and the spell is broken. I whirl and find myself face to face with August, who holds his hands up. “Sorry, sorry, sir. Sorry, not sir, you're not Legion…ugh. Just…sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I answer, slipping my hand back off the hilt of my sword. “Just glad it’s you and not…a whole bunch of other people, really. Can’t sleep?”
He shakes his head. “Thinking a lot.”
I pat the log next to me. “This is a good place for that.”
He hesitates, then drops his fairly newly lanky body down to the log. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. About the Archon. I thought it didn’t matter since the war was over, but when I met the others in the Coalition, they told me what the Legion is doing here and everywhere else, and suddenly it did matter.”