5. Prospective Seconde Mancella Amaryllis Cliff
5
P ROSPECTIVE S ECONDE M ANCELLA A MARYLLIS C LIFF
|13 DAYS UNTIL THE ASSURANCE|
I’m so busy mentally eviscerating that floppy-haired servant that I don’t realize where I’m stomping off to until I’ve already arrived, and then I stop in place, surprised.
It’s been a long time since I sought refuge in the east library.
My fingers, already reaching for the doorknob, now flex in irritation. That boy must have really gotten under my skin if this is where I ended up. And while that’s perfectly understandable when one takes into account how condescending, presumptuous, and infuriatingly smug he was, it still annoys me. I don’t get this upset often.
In the absence of my own pacing and huffing, the halls around me are silent. It makes my exaggerated anger feel silly. I should just go to bed.
But I slept all day and I’m not tired anymore.
Besides, I’m already here.
I turn the knob and step into the room, the shadow of every bookshelf, armchair, and table stretching toward me. I know they’re just fleeing the moonlight streaming through the giant Palladian window on the far wall, but it feels like they’re reaching out to greet me, to welcome me back into an old, familiar space.
When I was younger, my parents used to fight a lot. They don’t now, not since the Broken Citadel gave my father the power to freeze the words in my mother’s throat. But when I was a kid, their arguing always scared me, and I didn’t want to be alone when it was happening. At first I’d search out Mara, but she somehow seemed to know when a fight was coming, and she’d make herself scarce for the whole day.
So I went to my cousin Alect instead.
He was older than me by about eight years and he practically lived in this library, so he was easy to find. Day or night, rain or shine, he’d be here. He wanted to know everything about everything, so he devoured the books shelf by shelf, like their words were a banquet and he was insatiable.
He never turned me away when I showed up. Never asked why I was there. In fact, he kept a pile of blankets stashed in the window seat specifically for me. He’d set me up in an armchair by the fire all cozy and snug, ignoring my continued insistence that I wasn’t a bit tired and certainly wouldn’t fall asleep. Then he’d go back to studying, but he’d read and think out loud.
I recognize now that he was just trying to get my mind off whatever was worrying me, but it worked. To me, there was nothing more comforting than snuggling into those blankets and listening to him tell me about other realms, other people, other ideas.
I’d wake up surprised, unsure when exactly I’d fallen asleep, panicked that I might have missed the end of a story.
But he’d still be there, still studying. Without even glancing up, he’d ring for a servant to bring me breakfast and he’d start reading aloud again.
Without him here, the space feels empty and uncared for. The stately shelves are dusty and untouched. And without his voice or the rustle of turning pages, everything feels so quiet.
When I reach the window, I lift the cushioned bench beneath it. The hinges squeak, but the blankets are still there, right where Alect left them nearly a decade ago. I pull them out and wrap them around me, inhaling the faint scent of yellowed pages and ginger tea, Alect’s drink of choice.
Then I settle down in the frame of the window, fix my eyes on the dark expanse of grass below it, and wait.
When Alect grew older, his father would take him along on official trips, introducing him to the other Primes and their lands. And when he got back, I’d come running in, and he’d be waiting for me with a story and a trinket, both specifically curated to make me happy. Heat rocks from Prime Tibits in the Jungle Realm, who could warm them anywhere on the scale from “pleasantly sun-soaked” to “melt your bones” (with mine being closer to the former). Rope sculptures from Prime Artro in the Swamp Realm, who could shoot ropes out of his fingers and then move them however he liked (although Father wouldn’t let me keep those, in case Artro ever bade them to strangle me).
But by far my favorite present was the starsprout. He told me he found it somewhere in the mountains, and when he first presented it to me it looked like nothing more than a pot of grass. I pretended to be pleased, but secretly I was disappointed. He could tell, but instead of being angry, he only laughed. That night, he didn’t set me up with blankets and pillows. He plopped me down by the window and told me to watch the plant, no matter how late it got.
With the stubborn diligence of a child trying to impress someone older, I did. As he read to me, I stared at that plant like it might disappear if I dared even blink.
And then, a few hours past midnight, my vigil paid off. Two snow-white flowers unfurled in the pot in front of me, their petals pointed like little stars. I cried out, interrupting Alect’s recitation of the line of ascension in the Swamp Realm.
He grinned and snapped his book shut. Then he blew out the candles, joined me by the window, and told me to hold the flowers up to the night sky. I did, barely breathing, and when the petals caught the moonlight they began to glow, glimmering softly in the darkness. It felt like I held real starlight in the palms of my hands.
My eyes mist at the memory, and I panic, rubbing the moisture away and then blinking at the lawn, afraid that I’ve missed what I’m waiting for. But the lawn is still dark, and I slump back into my blankets.
After the Broken Citadel, my father told me I’d never see Alect again, although it was quite a bit longer before he told me why.
At first, I refused to believe that the cousin I knew would abandon me, or that anything could have happened to someone so constantly prepared. I spent months checking for letters from him and scouring the library for any messages he might have left behind. But nothing ever turned up.
The day that I finally accepted he was gone, I planted the starsprout in the middle of our lawn.
And it felt like digging a grave.
It felt like burying a body.
It felt like the funeral we’d been forbidden to hold.
Of course, my father was enraged when he saw it. To him it was a blemish right on his front lawn. He yanked the flower from the ground in one fist and tossed it into the incinerator. I watched the smoke rise with silent tears, and it felt like losing Alect all over again.
But the starsprout must have dropped some seeds because the next night, two little stars blinked open in the night.
I kept them a secret, and it took my father a few days to notice on his own. By then, wind had dispersed the seedlings to every corner of our lawn, until handfuls were popping up all over. Tiny rebels. Despite my father specifically assigning someone to pull them up by the root every morning before dawn, somehow the plant still spread, and a few would always spring up again the next night.
So every now and then, on days when everything feels like too much, I wait for them, half afraid that this time he’ll finally have gotten them all.
I lean forward, pressing my face against the window so hard that my nose is uncomfortably flattened. I wait for what feels like hours. I wait until the fear that they are really gone this time feels not only real, but overwhelming.
Then, finally, there’s a pinprick of light in the middle of the field. One tiny starsprout, yawning and stretching its angular petals toward the moon. Though the night is cloudy, the starsprout somehow finds just enough moonlight to catch and reflect back, creating its own little corner of brightness in the gloom.
For a moment a warm smile flits across my lips.
But the next moment it flickers away.
Because I know that each and every happy little star will be ripped from the earth by sunrise. And what’s the point of hope if it never makes it through the night? Better not to have it at all, knowing that it will be plucked up and burned.
That’s what the boy in the kitchen didn’t get. Why strive to fix things when failure is inevitable? It’s not that I don’t want to try, but surviving alone takes so much effort. How can I find it in me to fight even harder when my head’s barely above water as it is?
I grip my legs so hard that my nails dig into my knees.
Nothing in your life is going to change unless you change it , the boy had said.
But what does he know of the life I’ve lived? What does he know about anything?
My skin squirms with anger, my creatures restless and fuming, but below me the flowers continue to glow softly, sweetly oblivious to their scheduled destruction.
Suddenly, it’s all too much.
I push myself away from the window and wrap the blanket around my shoulders like a cloak, rushing out of the room.
Five minutes later, I’m on my knees in the dirt, hacking away with a spade I stole from the gardener’s shed. I’m making a mess, and I know it, but when I plunge my fingers into the ground and cup a single glimmering bloom between my palms, it feels worth it.
I’ll save this one.
It’s a start.
And later, once I’ve planted the shrub in a saucepan from the kitchen, once I’ve watered it and washed the evidence off my hands…
I sit down to draft a letter.
Just to think about what I might say if I did decide to fight.
Most of the servants sleep in communal barracks on the back of the grounds, but the temporary hires we took on for the Assurance preparations were only given bedrolls and a section of floor in the cellars. It isn’t too hard to figure out where they put Marc.
When I find him, he’s curled on his side, back shoved up against a shelf full of jams, smothered by a heavy woolen blanket.
In sleep, he looks much younger. Instead of a tight smirk or a bland, careful smile, his face is relaxed and unfortified, and instead of falling in his face, his choppy hair is sticking out at all angles around his head. It’s kinda cute, actually, and for a second I almost lose my nerve as I think about how incredibly inappropriate it is for me to be seeing him like this. But then I remember that he was inappropriate first, and that he’s an infuriating, treasonous miscreant who is not cute at all and I feel better.
I don’t know how best to wake him, though. Touching him in any way seems far too intimate, and I didn’t think to bring a stick to poke him with. Eventually I summon a pair of beetles on his face hoping the feeling of them creeping across his skin will be enough to rouse him. But then one of them heads for his nose and I panic and dismiss them immediately.
Before I can come up with a new plan, his rust-colored eyes shoot open and latch onto mine, so suddenly that my breath catches in my throat.
For a second, neither of us moves. I watch emotions flit through his gaze as he puzzles over where he is and what exactly I’m doing there with him. Then, slowly, without breaking eye contact, he sits up. The muscles of his shoulders contract, and the blanket falls enough to reveal that he’s shirtless.
Shirtless at minimum .
I ignore the blush creeping up my neck and raise a finger to my lips, gesturing at the other sleeping bodies around us. In return, he narrows his eyes, a clear question in his expression.
I hold up a folded-over note between two fingers, until his eyes finally leave mine to focus on it. Then I chuck it at his face and flee, too embarrassed to stick around while he reads it.
It doesn’t say much. Just:
Roof of the Lonely Tower. Sunrise. See you there.
He’s late, but I expected that. It’s hard to find the entrance to this tower. I picked it because I wanted to make him sweat a little bit, but now I’m regretting it because the waiting is making me anxious.
The Lonely Tower is set apart from the rest of the castle, which is how it got its name, but it’s also one of the tallest buildings on the grounds. As I walk along the parapet, brushing the rough stone edges with my fingertips, it feels like I can see the entire world.
In one direction, the whole of the Cliff Realm is speckled against the rocky bluffs, looking like it might slide into the forests below at any moment. Beyond that lie miles and miles of multicolored trees, ones we stole from the Forest Realm a decade ago.
I don’t remember much of the war, but I do remember standing here with Alect, watching my grandfather’s glass trees burst up among the scarlet oaks, only to have Prime Gore’s black explosions rip them apart. At six, I was too young and too far away to understand the scale of the death I was witnessing, but old enough and close enough for it to make me feel uneasy.
“Why are they fighting?” I’d asked Alect.
At fourteen, he had just hit a growth spurt. He was leaning over the high part of the battlement, gangly arms folded over the edge, and I was sticking my head through the lower notches reserved for archers, hands primly propped beneath my chin. He looked down at me as though unsure how to answer.
“Grandfather didn’t feel comfortable living near a Prime with such powerful magic,” he explained. “He was afraid Prime Gore would try to invade and that we wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves. So he’s beating the Forest Realm back from our borders.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, shaking my head. “He didn’t want war, so he started a war?” Adults were so strange.
“He thought it was better to attack when he was prepared than to be attacked when he wasn’t,” Alect said. “But I think it would have been better to avoid war altogether. Don’t you?”
I nodded solemnly, glad that at least Alect seemed to understand.
But then we just continued to stand there and watch, two children unable to do anything to stop the bloodshed.
We won that war, almost obliterating the Forest Realm in the process, but victory came at a cost.
Two years in, my grandfather got caught in one of the explosions. He died shortly after, and my father took the throne, but his new power wasn’t well suited to war. He could dominate and control a single person, maybe even two or three. But not an army.
So he used his power in a different way, conscripting nearly every able citizen we had, overwhelming the opposition with sheer numbers and finally bringing the war to an end. He didn’t seem to care that the citizens he sent to their deaths were the very same ones the war was supposed to protect. Then Alect disappeared, Mara and I made our own trip to the Citadel, and life has been different ever since.
When I look at the forest now, all I can feel is grief.
I turn away, but the view on the other side gives me no comfort, either. Breathtaking mountains with snowcapped peaks, the former home of the Mountain Realm. And smeared in the sky above them is the slime-green magic that once killed every single soul who lived there, along with the populations of five more realms beyond it: Desert, Valley, Island, Moors, and Canyon.
Graveyards. In every direction. Death and desolation, no matter which way you turn.
I want better.
I’m older now, older even than Alect was then, and I’m supposed to be named the second most powerful person in this realm in a couple of weeks. Yet I feel completely powerless. Here in the middle of the vast world, I can’t help but feel incredibly small.
Nothing in your life is going to change unless you change it . The boy’s words come to me again, like a gnat in my ear.
As I consider them, a flock of birds crests the cliff to the west of me, soaring and circling over my head. I wish I could join them. I wish the things that hold me down could simply fall away. I wish I could feel less… limited. So I focus on a different thing the boy said.
It’s healthy to let things out sometimes .
Despite my resistance in the moment, there was something about the way he said those words that made me want to listen to him. The way his voice was warm, but deep, like embers, with a teasing quality to it that reminds me of the way a dying fire tends to spark, sending dancing lights into the air to distract from how low it burns.
Letting the words rumble in my chest, I release my own flock of birds. A carrier pigeon, three ravens, an owl, and a hawk all sitting on the ledge blinking at me as I blink at them.
“Fly,” I tell them.
But they don’t follow my commands. They only reflect what I’m feeling. If I feel like I can’t fly, like I’m grounded and trapped, then that’s how they will act.
“ FLY! ” I scream.
And as though a giant gust of wind has caught them, they all burst away from me in a flurry of wings, spinning up and up and up until it feels like they might fly directly into the sun.
“You’re not going to attack me with those, are you?”
I whip around, knowing who said the words. The smoldering embers in his voice gave him away.
My heart is racing like I’ve been caught doing something I shouldn’t, and I have to remind myself that I’m the one who is supposed to have the upper hand here.
“Perhaps I should,” I say, leaning back against the parapet. “You are late.”
I mean it as a joke, but his eyes get serious and he nods gravely. “I apologize,” he says. “For that and also for… earlier. I was out of line. It won’t happen again.”
Imitating one of the bland smiles he gave me last night, I tilt my head. “Can you be more specific?”
His eyes probe my expression, like he’s searching for the answer in the set of my mouth or the edges of my eyes. It makes me feel uncomfortable, like his gaze is chipping away at my very skin, and I don’t even know what might be underneath it.
“I… shouldn’t have talked to you like that?” he says finally. And I’m immediately gratified by how unsure he sounds.
I shake my head and turn away from him, my hands braced on either side of me as my gaze returns to the birds. They’re still soaring, and the sight gives me strength. “That’s not what I want you to apologize for,” I tell him.
He comes closer. “Then… what?” he asks, and though I don’t look, I can feel the warmth of his body beside me, making me wonder just how close he’s standing. For a moment, the hair on my arm stands up, like there’s an electric charge in the air. But then in the next moment, a sudden gale steals the sensation away.
“For not telling me your real name, as a start,” I say.
He stills, and so does the air. Even my birds are motionless, their wings outstretched but not flapping.
“What makes you think I didn’t?” he asks, a slight edge to his voice.
Which means I’m right. I feel a rush of satisfaction that makes my skin prickle.
“Because,” I tell him. “We keep extensive records of our citizens in the library, and I looked you up, Marc Hillcrest. You’re supposed to have blond hair.” I look meaningfully at his ashy brown mop.
“Hair can change colors,” he counters.
“And green eyes,” I continue, lowering my gaze to irises the color of rust. I mean only to glance at them pointedly, but once our gazes lock, his doesn’t release me. And I realize that his eyes are more vivid than mere rust. They’re more like angry sunsets and rebellious autumn leaves. Like the same smoldering flames that color his voice. Beautiful, brilliant things. But also things that herald destruction.
He searches my face in a way that makes me feel exposed, even though I’m the one exposing him. My stomach flutters under his scrutiny, but I refuse to look away first.
“Records can be wrong,” he says. And the embers are stronger in his voice now, burning dangerously low.
It gives me goose bumps.
“But they aren’t in this case,” I whisper. “Are they?”
My hawk’s screech pierces the air, and the boy flinches. In spite of myself I’m pleased that I’ve unnerved him. When he breaks eye contact first, I feel another rush of satisfaction, even as a part of me feels disappointed. He turns his back to the wall separating us from a sheer drop and leans against it, his elbows just over the edge.
The same smile from yesterday slips over his features, like a mask against the world. Something about the way it deepens his dimple, arches his brow, and doesn’t quite reach his eyes gives me the impression that he’s much older than he looks at first. Or at least that he’s been through too much for his age.
“All right,” he says, tone challenging. “You got me. So what are you going to do about it?”
The same question he asked last night, but a completely different context. Another breeze lifts my hair, making the strands tickle my face as though his challenge has charged the very air around us.
“That depends,” I say.
“On?”
“On your reason for lying. And whether it’s a good one.”
His eyes flare slightly in surprise and he sweeps his eyes over my face again, always studying.
“What kind of reason would you consider a good one?” he asks.
“Why don’t you tell me the true one and I’ll let you know if it qualifies?” I shoot back.
He pushes off the wall and walks away from me, and at first I think he’s just going to abandon the conversation entirely and my flare of anger causes my birds to dive-bomb. But just before they get in clawing distance, he passes the staircase leading back inside and settles on the opposite side of the parapet, arms crossed under his chin.
“Have you ever been to the Academy?” he asks.
This confuses me enough that my birds pull up short and flap around awkwardly, unsure of which way to fly.
“No,” I admit.
He raises one shoulder in a shrug, like that was exactly the answer he was expecting, and I feel a spike of annoyance. He must think so little of me. I want to rip that obscuring smile off his face and see the expression he’d make if he were actually honest. What would it be?
Why do I even care?
I shake my head. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to get a rise out of me today. I’m growing more familiar with his barbed way of speaking, and I refuse to snap back. I want answers, and I mean to get them. Neither his grin nor his condescending shrugs will distract me from that goal.
Because if I’m really going to do what I think I might, then I need to know who I’m doing it with.
I touch the edge of the envelope in my pocket.
Then I cross the tower and reclaim my spot next to him, looking down at the Academy’s thatched roof. Noticing for the first time that it’s rotten in the middle, mold creeping toward the edges.
Based on his question, I’m guessing this boy attended there once, living and learning beneath that rot-speckled roof.
“So tell me about it,” I say.