Chapter 20 The Taster #2
“You have had to perform for Lady Esmeraldis and her sewing group, a fate far more miserable than death."
“That is a fair point,” she concedes.
The new taster enters then, performs his task, and remains alive. Only after a long enough wait to satisfy Petunis am I finally allowed to touch the food in front of me.
I no longer want it. Still, I eat. That seems to please Aunt Petunis more than if I had made a speech about courage.
For a little while the room settles into something that resembles an ordinary meal, if an ordinary meal can be built over the fresh memory of a corpse.
Nyara speaks lightly of the theater in the capital, of old performers who still believe the audience only truly listens when winter presses people indoors, of the way Alarnan musicians insist the halls here carry sound differently from anywhere else in the Thronelands.
Petunis listens without looking as though she is, though now and then a question from her proves she has missed nothing.
I am finishing a second piece of bread when Petunis says, “You will come with me after this.”
The tone tells me it is not a suggestion.
“To the throne room?”
“Eventually.”
I set the bread down. “You enjoy speaking in pieces.”
“I enjoy seeing whether you can keep up.”
“Try me.”
She looks at me, her expression direct and measuring. “You are the queen heir,” she says.
The words should not strike as hard as they do. I knew what she implied yesterday. I understood enough from the way the room shifted around me, from the way men who had not looked twice at me a week ago could no longer stop looking. Still, hearing it spoken plainly is something else.
Nyara goes very still.
Petunis continues as though naming the weather. “This is your throne. I have simply been keeping it warm for you all these years.”
My fingers tighten around the edge of the table. “Why?"
“One does not usually answer that question with breakfast.”
“I asked it anyway.”
For the first time that morning, something like weariness touches her expression. “Because succession does not vanish because people make a mess of their lives,” she says.
I hear my own voice before I fully know I am going to speak. “What happened to my mother?”
Petunis does not look away. “She died.”
Obviously.
The bluntness of it lands like a boulder dropped into deep water. “And not here,” she adds. “She chose a man over Alarna, and she paid for it dearly. But the rules of succession still apply.”
The chamber feels colder. I think of all the absences I have carried without knowing their shape. All the stories never told. All the silences treated as if they were enough.
“The only one who truly knows what happened to your mother is Axar.” A pause. “And he is in Morrath.”
Morrath. The name was unfamiliar.
“Can you tell me more?”
“I can,” Petunis says. She reaches for the cloth beside her plate and folds it once with infuriating precision. “But I do not feel like it.”
Nyara nearly chokes on her tea.
“And Asharin, stop asking me questions about your mother. The dead have no use for your tears, Asharin. And the living even less. The living do not need tears for the dead. They need you to survive long enough to be worth mourning."
I stare at my aunt in disbelief. “There are more pressing matters to handle than the past,” Petunis continues, entirely unmoved. “Such as the future. You must learn to be queen and quickly. Then you must make a decision regarding the bond with the Thren—”
“I am not bonding with any Thren.”
The words come out sharper than I intend and yet not nearly as sharp as they feel.
Petunis pauses. “Alarna has no need to be bound to anyone or anything,” I say. “That is my final answer.”
Nyara lowers her gaze to her plate with such dedication that I know she is listening to every word.
Petunis leans back slightly in her chair. “You have a strong stance for someone who knows very little of our history or our current state.”
“I know enough.”
“Do you?"
She stares at me, the look on her face implying she knows more about me than she is saying. I wonder if she knows about Teorin, about his betrayal. About how hurt I am beneath it all.
“Make sure your judgment is not clouded by bias,” she says.
Heat rises at once beneath my skin. “You mean by loyalty?"
“I mean by anything that allows you to mistake instinct for strategy.”
A reply I would regret rises to the front of my mind, so instead I push back my chair and stand.
Petunis rises as well. “Good,” she says. “We are finished here.”
Nyara looks between us. “You are both going to the throne room like this?”
“Not all warfare uses blades,” Petunis says.
Nyara considers that. “Then I am very glad Lord Eskarin offered me a tour of the city instead.”
Petunis turns to her. “Enjoy your morning. Return before dusk. You will sing tonight.”
Nyara inclines her head with mock solemnity. “As commanded.”
I leave the chamber beside my aunt with the taste of tea and poison still lingering unpleasantly at the back of my throat.
The corridors beyond breakfast are colder than the room we left.
Servants flatten themselves against the walls as we pass.
Two guards fall in behind us without being summoned.
Petunis says nothing at first, and for several turns of the hallway I begin to think she means to let the conversation die there.
Then, without warning, she says, “Show me.”
I glance at her. “Show you what?”
She does not slow. “I want to see if you are worthy of a queen’s staff.” She inclines her head toward the one in her hand, its length catching the pale light as we move. “Your power.”
My steps falter for only a moment before I match her pace again. “Now?”
“Yes.”
We descend a narrow stair and emerge into a long gallery lined with tall windows, the snow beyond them casting a cold brightness across the floor.
Petunis lifts her hand as though the air itself belongs to her, and somewhere ahead of us a window opens without touch, the latch giving way as the frame swings inward and the winter air presses into the corridor.
“Close it.” There is no urgency in her voice, no expectation that I might fail, only the quiet certainty that I will try.
I reach for it. The power does not come the way it does when I am fighting.
It resists the first pull, slipping just beyond my grasp, and at first I feel nothing but the emptiness where it should be.
Then something answers, faint at first, rising beneath my ribs and threading its way into my hand.
I push, too quickly, and the force catches the window hard, driving it back into place with more strength than I intended.
The sound carries.
Petunis does not look at the window. She looks at me. “You strike when you should guide,” she says, and continues walking.
Another window stands open further down the gallery, the cold moving through it more quietly this time.
“Again,” she says.
I reach for the power more carefully now, allowing it to gather instead of forcing it forward. It comes more willingly, though still uneven, and when I press outward the movement is narrower, more deliberate. The window yields to it, closing without the violent snap from before.
Petunis inclines her head once, as though acknowledging a correction rather than a success. We turn into the next corridor, where a small carved object begins to shift from the edge of a table, drawn by an unseen pull that is not mine.
“Catch it before it breaks.”
I do not hesitate. The light answers faster this time, rising into my hand and extending outward, wrapping too tightly at first before I adjust, easing the pressure enough to lower it back into place without damage.
Petunis watches the movement of the power rather than the object itself. “You assume force will solve the problem,” she says. “It rarely does.”
“It usually has.”
“Because you wait until it is required,” she replies. Then, more quietly, “Lightcraft is control, not force. You are not pushing the world. You are deciding how it is allowed to move.”
We continue, her pace unbroken. The torches along the wall bend subtly as we pass, their flames drawn sideways by something I cannot see but can feel pressing through the space.
“Hold them.”
I reach again, not to push but to contain, letting the light move outward in a thin, controlled line that steadies the distortion and returns the flames to their natural rise. It strains, but it holds long enough to matter.
Petunis lowers her hand, releasing whatever influence she had set in motion. “It answers you,” she says. “Imperfectly. But it answers.”
I am unsure if I should be pleased or insulted, so I say nothing.
We approach the final stair, the great doors of the throne hall just beyond.
“For now,” she adds, “that will suffice.”
Her mouth does not quite smile, but I begin to understand that something in her is pleased.
We walk on.
At the next stair she stops so abruptly I nearly collide with her.
“Power is useless without judgment,” she says. “Judgment is useless without restraint. Restraint is useless without the will to act when action becomes necessary. You have much to learn in all three.”
I fold my arms. “You do not waste much time being encouraging.”
“Encouragement is for children learning to sit upright.”
“I am learning I may have preferred ignorance.”
“No,” she says. “You preferred freedom from consequence. That is not the same thing.”
I start to answer, then stop. She is already moving again.
“What exactly are you training me for?” I ask as I follow her down the last stretch toward the great doors of the throne hall. “A throne I did not know was mine? A court that wants me dead by breakfast? A bond I do not intend to make?"
“All of it,” she says.
The doors open before us. Morning has transformed the throne room. There is sheer, bright brilliance pouring down from the glass above. The floor gleams. The pillars rise like trees. At the far end of the hall the dais waits in perfect stillness, the throne at its center.
I stop at the threshold.
Petunis walks ahead as though the room belongs to neither reverence nor fear, only use. “Well,” she says, turning at the foot of the dais. “Are you coming?"
I climb the steps slowly.
The throne looks different from above. Less like an object. More like a fact.
Petunis gestures toward it. “Sit.”
I look at her. “You could try sounding less delighted by the possibility of humiliating me.”
“If I wished to humiliate you, the court would be present. Patience, my dear, the court will arrive soon and with it either your humiliation or success."
That, somehow, is reassurance.
I turn and lower myself onto the throne. It is colder than I expected. Heavier too, though perhaps that is only the room pressing differently around me once I am seated there. The arms of the chair curve beneath my hands. The hall stretches before me in straight, merciless lines.
I think I should feel changed at once.
Instead I feel seen. Seen by the room. By the palace. By every absence that built itself into this place long before I was born.
Petunis watches me without revealing anything.
Then, rather than remain standing below me, she steps to the side and takes the smaller seat beside the throne.
“You will be trained aggressively,” she says. “In judgment. In queenship. In power. In how to channel it, use it, conceal it, and turn it when others think they understand it better than you do.”
My hands remain on the carved arms of the throne.
Below us the room is empty.
It will not remain that way for long. Petunis looks out over the hall, as though measuring exactly how much of it will need to be torn apart and remade. This is my first time seeing the staff up close, and I am surprised that it is translucent, almost as though made of glass.
“You have much to learn,” she says.
I look out over the throne room, over the pale winter light and the long floor where blood had stained the stone the night before, and feel something inside me rise to meet the shape of it.
“I know,” I say.
Petunis inclines her head once.
“Good,” she replies.
And seated above the hall that should have been mine all along, with my aunt beside me and the doors of the palace beginning to open to the day, I understand at last that whatever I have been until now is already ending.