“Can you do magic?” Jasi had shown up to his chambers the day after he and Master Inghard had arrived in Gawic, a gaggle of ladies-in-waiting behind her. They had giggled when he answered the door, and again when she asked.
He had told her that he could, the words barely slipping out from beneath the anxiety of speaking to a member of the royal family—and worse than that, a girl.
“Then do some magic for us.” Her entourage had snickered again, and her head snapped over her shoulder to glare at them. The malice was drained from her face when she looked back at him.
“I-I can’t. Not today. It uh…it-it takes time.”
Jasi had spent a moment perplexed by the issue, but then had told him, “Fine. In that case, I’ll be back tomorrow at midday. You can show me then.”
“We’re supposed to go swimming tomorrow, Jasi.”
“I think the river will still be there the day after, Sarina.” There had been a venom that Ancin had never seen or heard before that dripped from the words. But, like before, it was there in one sentence and gone the next; she had turned to him and said, “I have better things to do tomorrow.”
And so he had spent that night laboring over a spell. It was a simple one, he knew that now, but back then it had taken hours to get right. When Jasi had turned up the next day—alone and without the other girls—she took him into the daffodil fields, beneath an old, knotted tree there, and watched with awe as his right hand, pressed against the parchment with the spell written on it, lit up a pure, white light, before fading almost instantly, the parchment burning away. She had asked him then, too, to explain how it worked. They spent the whole day there, under that tree, as Ancin spewed enormous amounts of misinformation about the Silent Tongue—the rumors and misconceptions of a young boy corrupting what little he actually knew. When the sun began to set, they returned to Gawic Keep, and he had slumped in his quarters, exhausted, and unable to stop grinning.
He felt no such joy after explaining it to her this time.
Instead, anxiety had brewed with each finished sentence, tempered only by the comfort of their shared reminiscence earlier. Part of it was that he was still that little boy—shaken by the prospect of speaking with the royal family, doubled now that she was queen. Part of it was that the years had been overly kind to her, and the woman before him, with a square face and narrow, umber eyes, was likely the most beautiful woman he’d seen in years. A not insignificant portion of it was the inescapable feeling of being slowly wrapped in something sinister. Most of it, though, slithered up from the fear of what she had called him here for, of what had driven Liamond to bring them up the Tower under shadow and through tunnels.
So when she finally asked, it felt like a relief more than anything.
That the request was absurd was its own problem, but Ancin took a moment to let the relief of knowing wash over him. He looked at Jasi. He had never been good at reading others’ emotions, but Jasi—the Jasi he remembered—had never been good at hiding them. As a boy he had known her to never want to hide them, reveling in her ability to use her favor or ire to maneuver the people around her. But, he supposed, the will of a thirteen-year-old girl was a different sort of power than the will of a queen, and one demanded more of a mask than the other. She had been unreadable for the entirety of their conversation. That, more than most things, had unsettled him. But then she spoke of the rumor, of her request, and a pure rage had crept out with the words.
He was certain that telling her that the request was beyond his doing would be bad for his health. But was it? A voice in the back of his mind pushed away the questions about Jasi or the rumors, or what it meant that the queen herself was questioning her own legitimacy, and instead focused on the spell. Could he cast it himself? It was a question he’d been asking himself for months, as Inghard’s condition worsened. The spell’s construction was complete. He knew what glyphs were needed and where, but Inghard was the only person who could review his work, and that had left the final leg of his research unchecked. If he was wrong…
“I can’t do it,” he said weakly, before he could stop himself.
Jasi arched a brow at him. “I’m sorry?”
He cleared his throat and tried again, cursing himself. “I um…I can’t cast the spell. It’s not ready.”
“I thought you said you had the right spell.” Her eyes seemed to run him through. Briefly, he wondered if it might have been better to let Liamond kill him on the road.
But she was right. He had said it. “I meant…we think we know what the right spell is. It hasn’t been tested. We need more time to complete our research before trying.”
She leaned forward and poured herself a new cup of wine. “How much time?”
“Well, I’d have to go back to Ergrove and talk to Master Inghard, but—”
“I appreciate your loyalty to the old man, Ancin, but enough with the games. Inghard is senile. That’s why I called for you and not for him. You’ve done most of the research. You said so yourself.”
An anger bubbled up in his chest. Ancin had suspected that she knew more than she was letting on. There had been a few choice words here and there in their discussion that led him to believe so, and when he realized he was right he’d been angry with her for a moment, and then angry with himself for not expecting it from the most powerful and well-connected woman in Erest. But that had been drowned out by the request. Only now did it begin to resurface, bolstered with a need to defend Inghard. Before he could stop himself, the words tried to carve a hole into her. “Don’t you dare speak of him in that way.”
For a moment, he was sure Jasi’s gaze would set him alight. That the sun itself would emerge from her center and melt the flesh from his blackened, charred bones. Just by looking at him, she made it hard to breathe. His stomach nearly burst with regret. And then…it seemed to melt away. Not entirely, but something in her softened. Her voice was almost comforting. “I meant no offense to Master Inghard. I remember him fondly. And I know what it is like to watch someone you care for wither away.” She paused, and Ancin couldn’t figure out if it was on purpose. “But the facts are the facts. He is not who he used to be. I need someone who is capable and in control of their faculties to complete this investigation. You are both.”
A long moment passed between the two of them. The windows in the drawing room were closed; they were on the top floor of the tower, where the wind would be uncomfortable, especially with the summer heat still on its way. But Kaewold was loud, and through the thin panes, faint shouts could be heard from the city below, punctuated every now and then with a hawk or gull’s call. Ancin listened quietly before lifting his wine to his lips and finishing it off. He leaned forward and poured himself another cup. “He’s not senile. It’s an affliction called Cassi’s Tears. It happens to augurs, especially older ones. They get to a point where they can’t tell the future from the present, here from there. They lose track of time and space.”
Jasi watched him drink. “I’m sorry to hear that.” She let him sit in peace for a short while longer before pressing the topic again. “You will test your spell here, on my issue. You will do it alone, and you will tell no one of what you’re doing.”
“And if I can’t? If the spell doesn’t work?”
“Then when my uncle’s army gets here—whichever one is undoubtedly spreading this rumor—I will either give him the throne and be married off to some foreign king to produce heirs for the rest of my life, or I will resist him and have my head become a permanent decoration in the throne room.”
Her reply had been quick and solid. As far as Ancin could tell, it wasn’t a threat, it was a statement of fact. He looked down at his cup and drank the rest of it in a single go. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and told her, “Fine. I’ll try. But I’ll need supplies.”
She furrowed her brows. Clearly, she wasn’t expecting to have to provide him with anything. “What kind of supplies?”
That’s a damned good question, he thought. “I’ll need access to your library, first of all. I brought books with me…” briefly, he was reminded of Inghard’s warnings, of how he insisted that he would need the books to help the queen. “...uh, I brought books with me, but they won’t be enough. I don’t know what you have in the Tower—I know your father refused to keep a Royal Voice, but I don’t know if that means he emptied all the Silent texts from the city.”
“No, I don’t think he did,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ll make sure you have access. What else?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “I’ll need a…a part of you.”
Jasi gave him a blank look. “A part of me?”
“A lock of hair, a vial of blood. An item of yours might work, something you hold dear, but it’d be less potent. And…” The anger he’d pulled out of her seemed to have subsided, but the hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he wondered how far he could push this before it came back. Carefully, he chose his words. “And I’ll need the same from either of your parents. Your father, really. Something from your mother might be…dormant.”
Again, Jasi gave him an unreadable look. She was otherwise completely still. It scared him almost as much as her wrath did. “You wish to defile my parents’ graves?”
His stomach did flip-flops. “I…the spell…it won’t work otherwise.”
She took a long sip of wine. “Tell me why.”
Ancin thought for a moment, wishing he hadn’t finished his second cup of wine so quickly. “When you make a decision, any decision, you make an…an echo. A ripple in time. Like touching a pool of water. The more people an action affects, the larger the ripple. The louder the echo, the larger the ripple, the further it travels through time, across space. That’s the first part. The second part is that spells require touch in order to be cast. The object you want to manipulate must be touched, same as the glyphs. When you want to know the outcome of a decision, you can listen for these echoes coming back through time, using a piece of whoever it was that made the decision to filter out the echoes of other people’s decisions.
“Master Inghard’s research has always been into listening for the echoes of decisions already made—tracing the…the ‘ripple of consequences’ back to their source to get a glimpse of something that happened in the past. But for it to work, you need a piece of the consequences—you, in this case—and part of the person who made the decision—your father.”
Jasi didn’t seem to need any time at all to take in the concepts. “But something a person owned would suffice?”
Stolen story; please report.
He shrugged. “It could. There’s…something. A connection of…some type of energy. It’s hard to explain, and no one’s been fully able to understand it. But if there’s something important to you, something that you carry with you everywhere you go, or something that you cherish a great deal, it…connects to you. Becomes a weak part of yourself. You can use that kind of item as a substitute for a piece of the self in a spell. Not well, though. Auguric visions can be hard to decipher as-is. The spell isn’t efficient enough, probably because we’ve replaced some glyph we don’t know about yet with a dozen other glyphs strung together to do the same thing. But using an item instead of part of a person makes it worse. Makes it harder to understand.”
That seemed to give her some pause. She sipped on her wine and looked over her shoulder, out the window behind her. A part of him longed to know what she was thinking. To know her as well as he used to. Another part of him screamed to run away. To get out of this mess, to avoid the pressure of Jasi’s enemies and demand that he cast the most complicated spell he’d ever worked on. Eventually, she turned back to look at him. “I’ll have Liamond provide you with a lock of my hair. But I won’t have you disturb either of my parents’ ashes. You’ll be provided with my father’s coming-of-age ring. I have it still, in my quarters.”
A hard task, made harder. But Jasi’s mask was slipping, ever so slightly. Beneath it, he could see a hint of pain. Her father and brother dead, her extended family plotting against her. And though the reliquary was secluded from the rest of civilization, he was sure the people weren’t happy about bowing before a female ruler. No wonder she had been so quick to push him about her authority. “How long will it take? To put the spell together.”
“Three days, maybe four. I’m lucky enough to have a talisman with a fair few of the required glyphs already written, but I’ll have to find references in my own books and the library before I can make copies. And that’s if I don’t make any mistakes.”
For the first time, she looked him in the eye, and let enough of her guard drop for him to see the exhaustion in her eyes. Her words were barely more than a whisper.
“Thank you, Ancin.”
He gave her a tight smile and a short nod. She stood up from the bench, the large sleeves of her emerald gown swaying as she did. He stood with her, and the two spent another moment in silence. “I’m sure lunch is over with by now, which means I have to attend court. The people of Erest await my rulings.” She turned to the hidden door and called for Liamond.
In an instant, the man was there, as tall and straight as a greatwood, though his knightly appeal suffered in the commoner’s clothing he’d put on. “Yes, your Majesty?”
“Please escort Speaker Ancin to his lodgings. Ensure that the room is paid for for the remainder of the week, and that the royal name is left out of it.” She paused for a moment, looking Ancin over. “And please refrain from harming Speaker Ancin any further, lest he endangers myself or other members of the royal family.”
The bruises on his back, dulled by the wine, suddenly flashed with a faint twinge of pain. Somehow, she’d pieced together that he was injured, and that Liamond had injured him. He shuddered at how easily she’d seen through him. Liamond didn’t seem to notice, or to care. Perhaps he thought Ancin had told her, or perhaps he knew her well enough to realize how capable she was. “Of course, ma’am. Might I speak with you in private briefly before we depart?”
A spark of concern lit her eyes, tempered immediately by whatever willpower she had kept her emotions hidden behind so far, and she addressed him. “Of course. Give us the room, Ancin?”
Ancin gave her a short bow. “At once, ma’am.” He moved towards the hidden doorway, feeling Jasi and Laimond’s eyes on his back as he went. When he finally emerged into the cool, bare passageway, took a deep breath. His hands began to shake. The task at hand was larger than any he’d been given before, and he wasn’t even sure it was something he could do. Writing a spell like this would take hours and a precision that he was all but certain was beyond him. Not everyone passed their trials—many silents mustered out and vanished into the countryside before becoming speakers. But even fewer speakers kept the position. Most, in time, realized they weren’t going anywhere with their studies, that becoming a master speaker wasn’t for them.
He thought again of tilling the fields on a farm in Cayhyrst. The imaginary farm seemed to call to him from across the kingdom. Duke Giles was here, in Kaewold. He was Jasi’s chancellor. Maybe Ancin could meet with him in private and convince the man to let him become a bondsman. The dream turned to sand and slid through his fingers as Liamond came up behind him, closing the hidden door. “Let’s go,” he said, hoisting his bag over his shoulder, and motioning to Ancin’s.
Ancin gathered the bag and lifted Inghard’s staff, following the knight down the grey stairwell.
-
Helmund’s Road was steep and long. It wound down from the tower into the upper city, and then through the inner gate, continuing its slope through the lower city, and even splitting in three to pass through each of the outer gates and into the outer city. But Ancin followed Liamond only into the lower city, walking past the large, stone shops and houses of wealthy shoemakers and goldsmiths and bankers and cloth merchants in the upper city, to where the buildings were wooden, sagging and leaning against one another with age.
There, the two were harassed almost constantly by merchants—hatmakers, food purveyors, pastrycooks, clothes menders, furniture menders; the mob of salesmen went on and on. Liamond fended them off viciously, cutting through them like enemy combatants without much of a second thought, but Ancin hardly seemed to notice them. Their cries and rhymes and poorly-played lute jingles washed over him and vanished, like they weren’t even there. He was tired, still. The previous night’s rest had barely been cold and painful and barely deserving of the term rest. What few hours of sleep he had under his belt were from the night before Liamond arrived. How many days ago was that? Ancin tried to count, but gave up. Jasi’s request had blurred the hours together, its presence in his mind a great raincloud, muddying whatever thoughts he might otherwise have.
He shifted the weight of his bag from one shoulder to the other, wishing Liamond had let them take the horses, but according to him, ‘There was reason to get to the castle quickly. There’s no reason for you to drink in a tavern quickly.’ He was a prick. Ancin’s back and legs were sore from the walk, his head spun, reeling from the day's events, and he still wasn’t sure where they were going. Just before he had mustered the will to ask, Liamond—seemingly unbothered by the physical activity—turned to him and pointed at a tavern, a yellow sign depicting two candles hung above the door frame.
“Here. This is where you’ll be staying.” Liamond didn’t slow down. He brushed his way past the tavern’s wine crier and entered.
Ancin followed slowly, tempted to take the sample the crier offered. Instead, he gave the boy a tight smile, and ducked through the low doorway, passing from the warm midday sun into a dimly-lit room filled with smoke, the smell of piss and ale, and the clattering of dice. The tavernkeeper behind the bar looked them both over. He was old, maybe in his late fifties, and as close to being shaped like a perfect circle as one could get.
“Take a seat, boys. Brona’ll come by for yer drinks.” His voice was raspy, clothed in a thick Pesorian accent.
“We’re here for lodgings,” Liamond told him. “My business partner’s just come from from the Crescent and needs a place to stay until we finish our negotiations.”
The innkeeper looked between the two of them, stopping to stare at Ancin as he wiped absently at an empty flagon. “And what kinda business are ya and yer partner in?”
The glyphs on the back of Ancin’s hand began to itch. He shoved it into his pocket and did his best to hide the glyphs on the staff with the cloak. Liamond took a moment to glare at Ancin before unclipping a coin purse from his belt. He pulled it open and dropped a handful of bolts, the narrow, silver rectangles clinking against each other. “The kind that makes money.”
The innkeeper pulled the bolts apart with his middle finger, looking them over in silence for a moment before saying, “That’s a good business. Got a room for ya upstairs. Seven and a half a night.”
Liamond took a small fistful of bolts from the bag and placed them on the bar, next to the rest. “He’ll be here for a week. Maybe longer. There’ll be more once this runs out if need be.”
He nodded, dragging the bolts into his hand. “I’ll get ya yer key.” The old man disappeared into a room behind the bar.
The knight turned to Ancin. “Not here for even a day and you’re already causing problems. I told her you’d be more trouble than you’re worth.”
Ancin stared him down, but knew that the sworn guard of the queen could cut him head to toe if he wanted. “She doesn’t seem to think so.”
Had he not just spent the afternoon in a room with Jasi, Ancin thought that Liamond’s glower might have shaken him. “When you inevitably fail her, I will personally send you to the next life.”
“That’s not very godly of you.”
“The gods want nothing to do with the likes of you.”
Someone in the back of the tavern shouted, either happy or furious with the outcome of a dice game. A barmaid slipped by the two of them, dripping ale of one kind or another onto the floor. The innkeeper returned, a thick iron key in hand. “For ya. Room’s all set, whenever ya need. I’ll be by for more payments at the end of the week.”
Ancin took the key from the old man, and tucked it away into his pocket. He adjusted the weight of his bag over his shoulder, and looked Liamond over one last time. “How can I contact her when I’m ready?”
An uncomfortable scowl shaped his lips. “Ask for me at the keep gate. And buy some fucking gloves before you do.” Liamond went to leave, but stopped himself before he had gone more than a few steps. He returned to Ancin in a huff, pulling from his pocket a small item wrapped in paper. “Here. This is from her. Do anything perverse with it, and I’ll slit your throat.”
He took the small package from Liamond, knowing as soon as he did that it was the lock of hair he had asked Jasi for.
“I’ll be by tomorrow with a pass to the library. In the meantime, keep your head down. Someone’s been watching us since we arrived.”
Ancin had no idea if it was true. Between his own issues and the inescapable stream of stimuli a city like Kaewold offered, he hadn’t been properly paying attention. He watched Liamond walk by him, out, into the street, and shrugged off the knight’s words. He was probably paranoid, in the same way he was miserably hostile to Ancin over not understanding the Silent Language. Ancin made his way through the tavern, pushing between patrons until he made it to the stairs. The ceiling was low, making the climb short, but his knees were tender from the hike down Helmund Street, and by the time he’d made it to his room—a bare, wooden chamber with just a wool bed on the left, a tiny wooden desk on the right, and a window overlooking the city at the far end—he collapsed into the bed and nearly fell asleep.
But he couldn’t sleep—not yet. Jasi had asked a lot of him, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that getting involved in a conspiracy to erode the legitimacy of the queen might put him in an unfortunate position. So he rummaged through his bags until he found the chemora crystal Master Inghard had given him, unfurling the layers of cloth he had wrapped it in for safekeeping. He placed it on the ground, gently, and knelt next to it, pulling the remainder of his books from the bag. He pulled a loose sheet of parchment from one, and flipped through the rest until he found what he was looking for. Slowly, carefully, and with painstaking diligence, Ancin copied the glyphs from his books onto the blank parchment. Each glyph was a piece of art in itself, a masterpiece whose replication needed to be perfectly precise to work.
Not for the first time, he cursed the First Speakers for their decadence. Surely, the glyphs could be simpler. But they weren’t, and so Ancin lost track of time as he copied each one slowly, meticulously drawing connection lines and glyph groupings from one cluster of glyphs to the next. He built the spell until the sun set, and continued afterwards for gods knew how long. By the time he had finished, the stars were high above. He placed, in one spot where he had made a circle with the glyphs, the crystal. Lines connected the spots where its own connecting glyphs were carved to the ones that Ancin had drawn. Then, he opened the small package Liamond had given him.
Three-inch-long strands of Jasi’s ash brown hair, seemingly black now that they were on their own, sat tied with a small string. She must have given it to Liamond during their conversation. Gently, he placed them in another empty spot in the spell—a symbol of the decision. Finally, he placed his own hand in the final empty spot, the glyphs there layered in concentric circles. He was a symbol of the decision himself, the limiting factor, and the origin point for the spell. It made for a complicated glyph cluster. Briefly, he muttered thanks to Master Inghard for saving him the hassle of redrawing the glyphs on the crystal. When he was done, he took a deep breath, and pressed his will into the spell.
His room in the inn fell away. It pulled itself apart, turning to sand and blowing away in an intangible wind. When it was gone, Ancin knelt in a black nothingness. Then, from beneath him, a battlefield grew out of the void. Swords sprouted upwards and mounds of bodies began to ebb and flow like waves. And then, grass spread across them like a mold. Flowers bloomed and sunlight abounded. His surroundings seemed to sway from life to death and back to life, clouds swirling overhead only to vanish into blue sky.
It ended abruptly. Reality shot back at him like daggers, forming around Ancin like a mirror un-fracturing itself. He collapsed to the ground, the spell drawing nearly all of what was left of his energy from him. Auguric visions were always vague. He had told Jasi as much just hours earlier. But never had he listened for echoes of the future—for the consequences of his own decisions—only to be so consumed by such incomprehensible imagery. Helping Jasi was important. He knew that for certain now. But would it bring him to ruin? Would it shower him in prosperity? Would it let him go home?
Between labored breaths, Ancin pulled himself up onto the bed. He missed his feather mattress in the reliquary. A question for tomorrow, he thought, before the world went dark and he receded into sleep.