Chapter Four
It was nearly sunset by the time Marin was able to pole her way to the southern gate.
She was not alone: the canals were packed with families fleeing Alyssium.
Ships, boats, gondolas, and skiffs clogged the waterways, slowing her down.
She didn’t know if they were imperial sympathizers or just people who didn’t want to be caught in the middle of a violent conflict, but it didn’t matter.
Everyone in the canals wanted the same thing: to leave.
She didn’t have a plan for what to do if the gateways were shut and they couldn’t.
She tried not to think about it—why would the guards seal the city?
—but by the time she maneuvered Silver through the crowd to the archway, her hands were slick with sweat and her heart was racing like a merhorse galloping through the waves, and she’d thought of at least eight different reasons why the guards might want to seal the city in the wake of the emperor’s murder.
In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she thought it would be a sensible precaution.
Luckily, it appeared that the guards were too preoccupied to be sensible.
She saw the archway up ahead, open and unwatched, and she poled faster. Beside her, the surface rippled as Perri swam, submerged enough to be invisible to the other boats, close enough that when it was her turn to pass through the arch into the open sea, she knew he was safely with her.
Raising her sails, Marin caught the wind and spurted away from the city. She wondered if the other crafts had a destination or if their only goal was away. She didn’t blame them. Certainly she had had enough of Alyssium.
Beside her, Perri breached and then crashed down, stretching to his fullest now that he could. He chirped at her and then craned his head to look back at the city.
She sang notes back at him as she twisted to glance behind her.
Even with only a little bit of distance, Alyssium looked beautiful and peaceful and not at all like a city that had just defenestrated its emperor and allowed two sorcerous blasts within its walls.
She felt sick, thinking of all the people who were going to suffer when the imperials enacted their retribution.
In the dying light, it glowed amber, a candle against the deepening blue.
“He’ll be safe,” Marin told Perri.
After leaving Rijes Velk and the Great Library, she’d tried to pole her way back to the conservatory to reinforce her “don’t leave the conservatory” directive, but the canals had been clogged with boats and skiffs and ships. She’d had to give up and go with the flow toward the gate.
She hoped Dax stayed oblivious within its walls.
His friends and the grandmasters will ensure he doesn’t leave.
They’d kept the news of the revolution from him, telling him it was only more of the same kind of protests; surely they’d keep him physically safe as well.
“He’ll be all right,” she reiterated, as much to herself as to Perri.
“The revolution won’t touch the conservatory, even if the violence spreads. He’ll be safe there.”
Given the distance from the palace in the west side of the city to the conservatory on the east side, as well as the sheer bulk of the edifice itself, it was the safest place in Alyssium for him to be.
Plus there was simply no reason for anyone to attack a music school and concert hall.
Far better to target the palace, the government buildings, and the guard barracks.
She wouldn’t want to be anywhere sorcerers lived and worked either, and that included the Great Library—it was packed with spellbooks, making it an obvious target to anyone who wanted power and control of the city.
Rijes Velk was correct to be concerned, and Marin hoped she’d done the right thing in letting the librarian stay.
She snorted at herself. What was I supposed to do? Kidnap her? It was enough that she was skirting the law by transporting a … statue? A criminal?
Exactly how much danger had Marin just put herself in?
She couldn’t afford to be targeted by imperial investigators, not when her parents were relying on her to repay the family’s debt. She still had three payments and less than a year to make them. It was going to be close enough as it was.
Marin drew the letter from Rijes out of her pocket and studied the seal.
It was a glob of red wax, imprinted with a stamp that depicted a stack of books.
It didn’t appear to have enchantments printed into it like some official documents did, but she couldn’t be certain just by looking at it.
She sang a cascade of notes to catch the sea serpent’s attention, then asked, “Perri, could you keep us on track?”
Singing back at her, he positioned himself beside Silver.
He couldn’t adjust the rudder or the lines—no hands—but he knew how to watch the sails for any sign of luffing and could nudge the hull to steer.
Perri was the one who’d figured out the technique after he noticed how badly she would drift off course while she slept.
In the beginning, she’d protested—he was her friend, not her crew, and he shouldn’t have to work while she slept.
He’d thought that was so ridiculous that he’d drenched her. She hadn’t argued since.
After checking to be sure no other boats were near enough to worry about a collision, Marin went down into the enchanted cabin.
She’d learned all sorts of valuable skills in that frantic, horrific time when she’d discovered her ex-fiancé, Iovar, was trying to sabotage her family business.
One skill was unsealing and resealing letters.
She went to her galley. She’d outfitted it with a tiny stove, a sink that produced fresh water (another enchanted gift from her parents that they could barely afford), and her favorite: a collection of spices from throughout the Crescent Islands Empire.
If it was an empire anymore.
She wondered briefly if the revolutionaries truly had a chance of winning. They had successfully assassinated the emperor, which had to be an important first step. But the imperials had the navy, as well as trained sorcerers. She thought again of the blasts she’d heard.
If the revolutionaries did win … A fresh chance for the people of the islands.
Think of it! There was so much good that they could do, if they had the opportunity.
There was so much that needed fixing—an end to the restrictive laws on magic use, relief from the onerous tariffs that benefited no one, help with the magic storms that plagued the outer islands.
She wondered if she dared hope for any of that.
She selected the sage and salt, spilled a little of each in the palm of her hand, and blew it over the wax seal as she said, “Liakis,” which a slightly disreputable ex-sorcerer had once told her meant “reveal” in the First Language.
The wax didn’t fizzle, which it would have if the seal had been enchanted. She selected a flat knife.
If the revolutionaries won, that simple little spell would no longer be a crime to cast. That alone would be an improvement.
Sitting on an array of pillows, Marin began the meticulous task of wiggling the blade under the seal. It wasn’t a particularly mysterious process, but it did require practice and patience. She had both.
In a few moments, she’d loosened it. She carefully unfolded the letter, then glanced at the wood statue before she read the elegant script.
At the top was a note addressed to the Head Gardener of Belde, Yarrow Verdane.
It referenced a letter he’d written, requesting assistance.
And then it followed with a cryptic sentence: I hope to provide a solution to multiple problems at once.
What was written beneath the note, though, wasn’t cryptic at all. It was a spell.
She’d glimpsed enough of them to recognize the format, even if she couldn’t read the ancient language, plus it was followed by what was obviously a list of spell ingredients.
Marin felt her stomach sink. While transporting a statue and delivering a letter weren’t crimes, casting a spell to reverse a legal ruling absolutely was.
Granted, the letter didn’t explicitly say that’s what the spell was designed to do, and Marin didn’t know how to read the language of spells, but what else could it be?
She marveled at the head librarian’s guts, first for smuggling out the statue and second for writing down a spell without knowing exactly who would read it and cast it.
Under Emperor Mevorin, the current (recently splatted) emperor, it was highly illegal for a nonapproved sorcerer to cast a spell, even a minor one like her simple reveal-enchantment cantrip.
Under his rule, the law had become more and more strict, with the list of “approved” sorcerers becoming narrower and narrower to include only university-trained and emperor-reviewed casters.
Before the last two years, Marin wouldn’t have cared if someone wanted to violate that ridiculous law in such a flagrant way.
In fact, she’d have cheered—it was an unnecessary and dangerous law that never should have been made.
She knew how much damage that restriction was causing in the outer islands, both with their harvests and with the rise of unpredictable and unchecked magic storms. But lately, she had a lot more to lose with her parents so dependent on her income.
So this letter, the statue, on top of the uncertainty of a revolution, was at best an unwanted mess and at worst a disaster.
It’s not my problem.
That realization felt like an intake of fresh sea air.
The letter wasn’t written to her. She had zero access to any of the ingredients on the list—half of them were plants she’d never even heard of, much less knew where to find—and Rijes had had no expectation that Marin would read the letter, much less act on it.
She had one job, and she’d been paid to do it. No one could fault her for that.