Chapter Three
Cormal
Cormal constantly told himself that if he was patient, everything would get back to normal. He was not, by nature, a patient man, which perhaps explained why this strategy was going so poorly, and why he wanted to lob fireballs so often.
He knew that it seemed like a joke to some people, the hothead who could wield fire. He doubted they realized just how often he didn’t lob fireballs. Yes, they occasionally got the better of him, but all it took was a thought. It was easy, and it therefore took a lot of control to not do it.
Brannal had known. Cormal’s father had known.
Tramad had been outwardly austere and entirely under control.
Cormal had lived with Brannal since he was ten, and he’d come into his own fire only after Brannal had basically mastered his, after Cormal had heard about the accidental fire at the farm and everything that had happened when Brannal had first manifested his ability.
Brannal knew exactly what Cormal was talking about.
He’d figured out his own method of control, and maybe Cormal would have found a stronger one, would have managed something similar if he’d endured what Brannal had.
Who was to say? It wasn’t like they could ever speak about this now.
It wasn’t like Cormal would be Summus at all, if Brannal were here.
With no better ideas, he kept repeating his mantra that everything would get easier as time passed.
After all, it wasn’t like they’d asked for Brannal to become Summus. It wasn’t like that hadn’t been one of the hardest transitions ever. So many people had died.
No one had died here. They’d bound Perian to his estate, trusting that he would behave or that they would have to take action, and Brannal had chosen to go after him.
No one had wanted him to do that. (Cormal hadn’t wanted him to do that.) Brannal had chosen to go, and Cormal could only assume that Perian’s influence on the man would grow even stronger every day they were together.
He realized that his hands were clenched again, and he shook them out. He wasn’t thinking about that.
The point was, no one had died (with the exception of a fugitive criminal that Cormal could admit wasn’t a great loss, but he was supposed to be imprisoned), and it took people time to accept change.
They would get used to Cormal, and he would figure out some way to live up to the standards set by his father and by Brannal.
The good parts of their legacy, anyway. He would fix this.
And then he pushed open the door to his office and was drenched in water.
If the bucket falling and nearly hitting him in the head hadn’t given it away, the giggles would have.
This wasn’t the work of his Secundus or Tertius. Though both were capable of it, they had, thus far, only done so when he had a fireball in his hands.
No, this was a bigger problem.
He dripped all the way to the Queen, who agreed it really had to stop. She called the Princess before her and as had happened every time so far, was met with utter defiance.
“This is not appropriate behavior for a princess,” the Queen told her daughter.
Despite her short stature, Princess Larenia stood tall and proud, tension in every line of her body. She was wearing a beautiful blue dress, her hair done up in elaborate braids. She looked like a princess, even though she rarely troubled to act like one.
Bluntly, the Princess said, “Your behavior towards Perian wasn’t appropriate, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped you.”
The Queen’s lips compressed, and her voice was cool and stern. “You will stop this at once, Larenia.”
There was only one person that Cormal knew who would defy her when she sounded like that.
It seemed that Princess Larenia was following in his footsteps.
“Or what?” she demanded contemptuously. “You’ll shut me in my room? I’ve done that for years. You’ll banish me? Please do. Then I can finally leave.”
She spat the last word out and then turned on her heel and stalked out, her brother at her heel, still something of a shadow.
Prince Kinan had spent almost seven years able to be seen and heard only by his sister, unable to leave her side.
Although he was now visible, he was still intangible.
He continued to spend a lot of time with Princess Larenia, and Cormal couldn’t quite determine if it was habit, if he felt safest or more comfortable with her—or if he thought she needed protection.
Cormal suppressed a frustrated sigh.
“I will speak to her again,” the Queen told him. “Perhaps when you aren’t present, she will be more reasonable.”
Cormal rather doubted it, but he bowed anyway. “Thank you, my Queen.”
He sighed when he left, but what could she do? Princess Larenia was screaming defiance from the rooftop, and Cormal was probably lucky that she’d decided that silence was the best way to deal directly with him. Imagine if she told him how she really felt every time she saw him.
He wasn’t sure what he even wanted the Queen to do. The Princess appeared to have been pushed to the breaking point, and he realized now, in a way he hadn’t before Brannal left, that a breaking might not take the form they expected.
How could the Queen inhibit a child who’d been trapped in her bed more times than she had been free to be active for the last seven years? Since the Princess feared no punishment they could mete out against her, what was left?
There was one thing that he suspected she feared, and Cormal knew that if they threatened Perian, any hope of cordial relations between them would be gone forever, making it a weapon they couldn’t wield.
It was endlessly frustrating.
Brannal had occasionally expressed what a challenge the position of Summus could be: competing priorities, so many people, striving to protect the whole country…
Cormal had had no idea. He wasn’t sure if it was just because the castle was falling down around his ears or if Brannal had failed to explain the scope of the job. He’d thought he’d understood it as Secundus, but no, his comprehension had fallen well short.
Cormal went to check on the training again, where everyone told him—some in so many words—that everything was under control and they didn’t need his help.
Was it his imagination, or were they making it clear that on top of everything else, they really didn’t need someone who could only wield fire when that was the one element that no one else in the castle wielded?
Put Arvus and Molun in the room, and just like that, you had instructors who could help every Mage there control their elements.
But as always, Cormal was on his own. He was different. He had a temper, and it wasn’t like he was doing a great job these days of demonstrating that he had control over his element. This left him slinking off back down the corridor, feeling even more useless than usual.
The worst of it was, the more they looked at him like that, the less in control he felt. And he knew that. He knew that he was doing it to himself, that he was letting them get to him, and he was doing it anyway.
His hands were shaking.
“You know—”
He didn’t think, he just reacted, and a fireball went sailing through the air… and passed right through the man who’d spoken.
Cormal could actually feel the blood drain out of his face, making him sway on his feet even as he frantically pulled the fire back, shut it down, because he couldn’t set the corridor on fire, not when, if it had been anyone else who’d found him, he might even now be rushing them to the doctor.
“Cormal! Look at me this instant.”
His eyes snapped open at the stern command.
“Come with me.”
He might not have been visible to anyone except his sister since he was sixteen, but Prince Kinan’s voice and body were every inch the twenty-two-year-old he’d grown into when no one else had seen it.
And he’d definitely mastered the royal command.
Cormal followed him instinctively, trailing after those soundless footfalls, letting the man lead him wherever he wanted.
The dungeon, maybe? He was pretty sure that you wound up in the dungeon for attacking a member of the royal family.
He remembered the maelstrom of elements that Brannal had summoned when Cormal and the Queen pushed him too far. But he’d never unleashed it. He’d let it out, but he’d controlled it, had never let it harm anyone.
He stumbled a little when they hit grass, and then the Prince spoke again.
“Take off your boots.”
“What?”
“Take them off,” the Prince repeated sternly.
Cormal took off his boots.
“Now sit down and put your feet in the water.”
Cormal blinked. They were in the garden in the quadrangle, at the edge of one of the pools of water.
“Put my feet in the water?”
“Fire and water, do you need me to make it a royal order? Put your feet in the water now!”
Cormal sat down on the ledge surrounding the fountain and then swiveled around so he could put his feet in the water.
It was icy cold. He grimaced. It was… moderately better than being drenched in water, which was how Molun and Delana tended to react to his outbursts.
It was certainly harder to be in a fiery rage when you were staring at your submerged bare feet.
The Prince sat down beside him, still facing the garden, silent as always.
Cormal had mostly got over expecting the man to look the same way he had when they’d all thought he died at sixteen, but sometimes, it was still a surprise to see him as he was now.
He was as tall as Cormal, his chest broad, his waist slim, his thighs strong and solid.
He’d done all that growing when no one but his sister could see him.
When he didn’t have a tangible body. What had grown?
Nobody knew. The Prince could be seen and heard if he spoke now, but he still couldn’t interact with the world around him.
You couldn’t hear his footfalls, couldn’t hear the rustle of his clothing, couldn’t hear if he stomped or slapped his hand onto a table.