Chapter 1 Esther #2
Some servants still left white blossoms beneath her mother’s portrait.
Quiet offerings. Unspoken grief. Queen Estella had been the kind of ruler people told stories about long after the storytellers themselves had died, graceful, empathetic, powerful without ever being cruel.
The kingdom flourished under her reign. People said gardens bloomed brighter when she walked through them, that children stopped crying when she bent down to their height.
Esther had no memories sharp enough to confirm any of it.
Just warmth.
And the soft shape of a smile she wasn’t sure she hadn’t invented.
The older nobles still compared Esther to her mother, though never in ways meant to comfort.
“Estella had perfect posture.”
“Estella mastered fire theory by age fourteen.”
“Estella would never set a tutor on fire, dear.”
Esther desperately wanted to resemble her mother, yet every time her magic flared uncontrollably, or panic choked her, she felt further from that ideal, as if she were a rough sketch of a masterpiece she could never replicate.
Sometimes she thought the palace missed her mother more than it loved her.
“Posture,” Lucy said, tapping her elbow. “Shoulders back. Chin up. Look expensive.” She mimicked the Baroness, throwing her shoulders back, hands on her hips, nose turned up. “You'll be in for one hell of a lecture if Baroness Levon sees you.”
“She's already here?” Esther groaned. She looked out the window at the pink sky. The sun had barely risen, and her etiquette lesson wasn’t until half past noon.
“For a while now. I had the joy of serving her tea in the guest lounge.”
“Why is she so early?” Esther exhaled, already anticipating Lucy’s response. She was surprised the Baroness hadn’t insisted on having a room in the palace, there was plenty to spare after her father cut the number of servants.
“Because she’s a cuckoo bird. Your lessons should’ve ended years ago, but she’s clinging to the hope that your father will notice her one day as long as she sticks around. You’re just a victim of her cause.” Lucy sighed dramatically.
Esther wasn’t sold on Lucy’s theory about the Baroness.
She had worked with Esther since she could barely walk and was said to be her mother’s close friend.
Yes, Esther was twenty-one and should have finished her lessons years ago.
And the Baroness was at the castle every day, all day.
But she never went out of her way to be in the king’s presence.
It was all very suspicious. Not cuckoo-bird suspicious, just weirdly suspicious.
They stopped at the door to the practice chamber. The wooden surface was carved with glowing runes, pulsing faintly like a heartbeat. They had been put there the first time Esther set a tutor on fire. The tutor quit the same day they started. It was hard to get a teacher after that.
Lucy handed her a biscuit wrapped in cloth, its buttery scent instantly grounding her. “Here, I snatched this from the kitchen. Sugar helps your spells behave.”
Esther took it, warmth seeping into her fingers. “If you weren’t my maid, I’d knight you.”
Lucy grinned. “If I were a knight, wait, am I a guy or a girl knight?”
“Why does it matter?”
“I need to know what equipment I’m working with!” she said, crossing her arms. “Anyway, semantics later. Try not to set any chairs loose this time. Basil can’t afford any more grays in his hair.”
Esther cringed at the memory. In the last lesson, she had accidentally brought an innocent chair to life while trying to heat some tea.
The chair ran away on all four of its animated legs, Basil still atop it.
It scurried like a weird spider and was eventually found in the barn, where the sheep ate it.
Such a tragedy: to bring life into something only for it to be immediately consumed by farm life.
Since then, Basil had been hunting for a rune sigil that could be added to the room to contain anything like that.
“No promises,” Esther muttered.
Lucy gave her a final, reassuring pat on the back before sprinting down the hall, her comfortable-looking shoes squeaking on the floor.
Esther exhaled and stepped inside the room, wishing she had the same luxury of comfortable shoes to help her endure the lessons.
The chamber smelled faintly of smoke and wet stone. Scorch marks decorated the floor like souvenirs from past disasters.
Magic hummed faintly beneath the tiles, like a heartbeat beneath stone. Esther had grown up surrounded by it, woven into the architecture, embroidered into banners, but understanding magic and controlling it were very different things.
Every mage was taught the same fundamentals:
Magic comes from emotion.
Runes give it shape.
Runespires keep it safe.
The first two rules Esther understood well enough; the third she found deeply insulting.
A runespire was meant to focus a mage’s power, jewelry inscribed with microscopic sigils capable of containing unruly spellwork: necklaces, earrings, bracelets, even anklets, if one lacked dignity.
The palace owned hundreds. And while they worked flawlessly on most people…
…Esther’s magic tended to ignore them.
Or melt them.
Or occasionally fling them across the room with enough force to crack a window.
Lucy once joked that Esther’s magic wasn’t fire, lightning, or heat, it was pure spite. Basil refused to confirm or deny.
Other kingdoms categorized magic differently. In Kraggmar, it was considered a sign of ancestral blessing. In elven lands, it was treated like a craft, something to refine as patiently as glassblowing.
But here in Valedara?
Magic was treated like a tool. And sometimes a weapon. And in Esther’s case, a liability.
Golden magic was rare. Revered. Feared.
But no one could explain why hers behaved like it had opinions.
Sir Basil was already there, looking as nervous as he always did before a lesson. His hair was brown, streaked with gray, and he dressed as if he’d been personally wronged by fashion. He had been with her since she was sixteen, and the exhaustion showed in the deep lines of his brow.
“Greetings, Sir Basil.” Esther curtsied.
“Enough with the formalities, Princess. Ready for another lesson in control?”
“That depends,” Esther said, dragging herself to the center of the room, slouching again now that Lucy was gone. Basil cared less about her posture than about surviving the lesson. “Are we measuring success by the number of fires or the size of the explosion?”
The faint charred scent from last week’s disaster still clung to the walls. Those pea-green curtains were ugly anyway, so Esther decided her magic had done everyone a favor by burning them.
He sighed. “Neither. Today we practice patience. Remember: magic mirrors your heart. Control that, and you’ll control your power.”
“Right, right. Control my heart. Easy. I’ll just bottle up twenty-one years of emotions. Problem solved.”
Esther twirled a strand of her too-perfect honey-blonde hair.
Her maids had put it in a half-up style, adorned with ruby hairpins that they claimed made her amber eyes ‘pop.’ She didn’t know what that meant.
She just sat there, as always, while the maids prattled on about their clothing choices to each other, excluding her. They never spoke to her directly.
“Let’s begin,” Basil said, pretending not to hear her. “We’ll start with drying this towel. Fire is just concentrated heat. So. Calm thoughts. Gentle heat. No explosions.”
He handed her the damp towel, which dripped faintly onto the rune circle she stood in, a precaution her first tutor had insisted upon when she was ten, though it had flooded the entire second wing of the castle. It took weeks to fix all the water damage.
Now, this room had so many runes encrusted in it that almost any disastrous lesson could be contained.
Almost. Their previous lesson had proven that no matter how protected a room was, there was always a way for Esther to dismantle it.
Esther carefully picked up the damp towel with two fingers, as if it were a deadly weapon. “Okay. Calm thoughts. Gentle heat. Minimal explosions.” She closed her eyes and pictured serenity: a still pond, a clear sky, a woman who didn’t want to scream into a pillow.
The towel twitched. Gold static sizzled. Steam curled up from the corners. Basil’s left eye started to twitch in sync.
“Steady,” he cautioned, taking a significant step back.
“I’m perfectly steady,” Esther lied.
The towel hissed.
Then, whoosh!
A jet of water shot forward, splattering Basil full in the chest. Luckily, it didn’t look boiling.
“Princess!” he sputtered, dripping, his robes clinging to him in a way that made him look like a drowned terrier. Not all men were attractive when wet, it seemed.
“In my defense, the towel is dry now,” Esther said sheepishly, holding it out to her mentor. She tried, and failed, to hide the twitch at the corners of her lips.
If only it had ended there, but no. The towel flopped from her hands and, of course, came to life.
“Bad towel! Stop that!”
It didn’t stop.
It slithered across the floor like a deformed snake and wrapped around Basil’s leg like an affectionate pet.
Basil pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered something about early retirement. Esther could have sworn she saw more hairs turning gray right before her eyes.
The door burst open. “I heard a splash!”
“And the loud one returns,” Basil groaned. “This isn’t good for my blood pressure.”
Lucy surveyed the chaos: the towel, the puddles, Basil’s soaked robes, and his twitching eye. “You drowned your tutor again, didn’t you?”
“It was an accident,” Esther said, her face flushed from holding back laughter.
Basil wiped his glasses. “Princess, please. I beg you, breathe before you bring something to life. How do you even manage to do such high-level magic by accident?”
Lucy grinned, leaning against the doorframe. “Progress! Last week we lost a chair.”
“Is that why you have a net prepared?” Basil asked, his voice full of exasperation.
“I’m always prepared!” Lucy puffed out her chest, proud of her vigilance. “Speaking of which, I brought the new book you wanted.” She pulled the rectangular, brown paper-wrapped item out of her apron pocket.
Esther’s eyes lit up. “You found it?”
Lucy smirked. “Straight from the underground steamy book club: Proper Etiquette for Improper Thoughts.”
Basil grimaced. “Lucy, no—”
“Lucy, yes,” she said, handing the book to Esther. “Don’t worry, Basil. It’s just about… dancing.”
Esther unwrapped the brown paper as if it were treasure. “Dancing sounds nice.”
Lucy winked. “Especially the horizontal kind.”
Basil choked. “Lucy!”
“What? It’s educational.”
Esther bit back a laugh. “Lucy, one day you’re going to get us both exiled.”
“Maybe,” Lucy said with a grin. “But first, it’s time for embroidery.”
Esther muttered curses as Lucy ushered her out. The smell of smoke and sugar trailed behind them.
Maybe, Esther thought, as she glanced back at the chaos, she could find a tower to hide in after all. She might even hire a dragon to burn it down.