Elsabet
Imagine you are light as a bird, flying free. Imagine you are soaring over Marivent, with its salt-white walls and its cliffs that fall away to the ocean below, black as the night above and fringed with lacy foam. Below you is a lighted garden, trees hung with lanterns like luminous fruit. As you pass over it, you see nobles below you, dressed in their finery, their gold and silk and satin that shines in the lamplight. How greatly you despise them. Gremont and Seven are no doubt down there, too, currying favor with royalty; you loathe them equally.
You rise, your magic finding purchase on the currents of the air, until you are at the window of the Palace library. Inside, the Prince is watching a red-haired girl read a book with the expression of a starving man staring at a plate of food. You want to stop and watch the scene, the girl in particular, but you have somewhere else you need to go. Tonight, the Palace is busy. Tonight is your best chance. You cannot waste it.
You soar upward, toward the gray spike of the North Tower. High up in the tower is a window, arched and narrow. You aim yourself toward it like an arrow.
In the dark and silent tower room, the King sits motionless, his gloved hands rigid and still on the arms of his chair. He has been this way for hours, days. He no longer eats or drinks. He stares fixedly into the darkness, his gaze never wavering, even when a dark figure appears at the window. Even when it creaks open on its hinges, and slips into the room.
She is all in black, though her face is bare, pale as a moon in the gloom. She seems thin and sharp as a black needle, her inky hair bound tightly at the back of her head. Beneath the thin skin of her chest, a dark stone gleams with a bright inner fire that seems to pulse like a heart. An Arkhe.
If the King recognizes it, or her, he gives no sign. He is motionless as she comes close. The pendant at her throat radiates light, illuminating the room, the King’s set face and shadowed eyes. “All my life,” says, coming a step closer, “I have wished to look upon the face of the man who nearly brought my country to ruin.”
The King does not respond. He is a statue, carved out of living flesh, barely breathing.
“What do you see when you look at me?” demands . “Do you see my mother? She remembers you well—a quiet boy scuttling through the great halls of the palace in Favár. Who would have thought that such an unprepossessing pilcza could destroy the source of all our power?” She brings a hand down, hard, upon the nearby desk, causing the astrolabe and other instruments of celestial divination to shudder. “Were you jealous? Did you realize your royal blood did not carry magic, as ours did? Did you wish to make House Aurelian special, as House Belmany is special? You must have thought you were so clever, fleeing with Fausten, he of little magic. As if he could protect you from our wrath, our vengeance. No. He never did that. He was always on our side, even under your very nose, giving you your potion. You were so desperate for it, he said, for it quieted the screaming in your head. The cry of the phoenix.”
The King’s hand moves, very slightly. In a flash, is at his side, peering at him. Had it been a trick of the light? His eyes are blank as ever.
“What did you think would happen?” she muses. “Spilling the lifeblood of magic itself? You destroyed a being whose whole nature is transformation. Did you not think that would change you? We never thought you would be such a fool as to have your own child. Did you truly never realize that the magic you stole runs in your blood now, and that you would pass it on to him? Your boy, your pretty Prince? Perhaps you understood, a little. Perhaps that is why you insisted he have a Királar. A Sword Catcher.”
lets her mind dwell briefly on the Prince, the one who is even now in the library nearby, the contents of his heart stamped on his face. She knows he will be hers, in the end, for that is part of the great plan: He might be mindless, enslaved by magic, but he will belong to her and she will do as she likes with him. The thought spreads warmth through her veins.
“The potion slowed your change,” she whispers now. Her mother had told her that Markus had been handsome in his youth, though she could see none of Conor’s looks in him. “But when it comes upon you—and it will—oh, we will lock you in a cage and sink it so deep in the ground, your screams will go forever unanswered. And as for your son, spoiled and unformed as he is, he is a seed of power—one that will be replanted in Malgasi soil. In me.” She grins, not caring now whether he knows she is there or not. “After that, we will have no more use for him. But he is a pretty thing; I will enjoy him before I discard him. And as for your city, of which you are so proud, it will become a second Favár. Clean, quiet, orderly, and under Belmany power.” She leans closer to the King, close enough that she thinks she can smell the bitterness of smoke. “All that you have will be taken from you. All that you love, destroyed.”
Slowly, so slowly, the King raises his heavy eyelids. And takes a step back. He is motionless again, but in his eyes, she sees fire—that same fire that blazes behind her own eyes when she uses the power of her Arkhe. More golden than any ordinary flame: a fire thought vanished from the world with the Sundering. More than that, behind him, she thinks she sees the shadow of wings, cast against the wall—
Her hand flies to the Source-Stone at her throat. It was filled long ago, when House Belmany had what seemed an infinity of magic to draw upon. It is now a pale shadow of that old power, but it is still more than most will ever have access to. If there is another Source-Stone in Dannemore, she does not know of it.
Sluggishly, it calls to the magic in her blood, and her blood answers. Over the years, it has grown weaker, but it is still enough. has been raised to one purpose: To reclaim the lost magic of her family. To recover their power. She gazes now at the King, at his burning eyes.
“When I see you again, you will be quite changed,” she says. “It will not be long now.”
She leaps for the window then, letting the magic of the stone buoy her into the air, letting it carry her through the night.