Chapter 23
I had been asleep for three days, something I didn’t find out until the next day when I joined the morning kata. I’d lost three days…I didn’t know how to comprehend that. It made me think about my father and what it would be like when he woke up. And he would wake up. I refused to entertain any other scenario.
While I had been asleep, everyone else had been updated on the goings on at the palace and the various other missions. I was still in the dark, and I hated being left out. But now I was suspecting everyone around me and wondering if there was a traitor among us, and I didn’t know what or who to believe.
I didn’t go with the others to the hot spring after the morning training. Instead, I wandered to my old training room to just sit and think. I still didn’t really understand what was going on or why any of this was happening. Why had my father been poisoned? Why was I the next target?
‘Hey.’
I looked up to see Parisar standing in the doorway. He leaned against the frame casually, but he held himself in such a way that I knew he was anything but relaxed. He was wound as tight as I was, but he was going to great lengths to hide it from everyone. If I could sense his tenseness, then I was sure everyone else could too.
‘Hey,’ I replied.
He paused for a moment before stepping into the room and slowly doing a circuit of the small space. It had come to feel like my safe space, almost like my tower back in the castle. I thought having Parisar here would feel wrong or disrupt the atmosphere I had created, but it didn’t. It felt natural for him to be here.
I had to amend my earlier thought. While my suspicions about the others had grown, it was not the same for Parisar. If anything, he was probably the only one I trusted. Him and Breust. I couldn’t say why I’d chosen to trust Breust, maybe because he was the first one to see me as something more than just a helpless princess. He was the one to put a sword in my hand and give me a purpose. It may have been a wooden sword, but it was the step I’d needed to take when I’d felt like my world was falling down around me.
‘Is there something you wanted to say?’ I asked when Parisar continued to be silent.
He sighed, stopping his slow circumnavigation of the room, and turned to face me. ‘I am concerned about your mother,’ he replied.
‘My mother?’ I asked, both confused and concerned at the same time. ‘Why? What has happened?’
Parisar looked at me for a long time before answering. I stepped closer to him, my fists clenched at my sides. I wanted to shake him until he spoke.
‘She isn’t well,’ he said slowly. ‘She spends a lot of time consulting the mirror, and the rumours about her state of mind have gotten worse. Even her most stout supporters are starting to doubt her.’
‘What?’ I shook my head. ‘Why would she be consumed with the mirror? It doesn’t even work. It’s a relic that hasn’t predicted anything of value in a long time. Why would she be relying on it now?’
Parisar rolled his lips together as if he were contemplating what and how much to tell me.
‘Tell me,’ I insisted, stepping closer. ‘Tell me everything.’
Parisar’s shoulders slumped. ‘The mirror is more than you think,’ he replied. ‘It is the sole remaining magical item that works, and your family are the only ones who can use it. It comes from your mother’s side. Her ancestors were high magicians, and the magical line has continued to your mother and…to you.’
I shook my head slowly. ‘No,’ I whispered, disbelieving. ‘No. I don’t…I can’t…I…’
My knees collapsed under me, and I sank to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut.
Parisar knelt in front of me and took my hands in his.
‘Your mother didn’t tell you?’
I shook my head again. ‘The mirror was a curiosity,’ I replied in a daze. ‘It was a…a…a bit of fun that was never really right in what it predicted.’
Parisar sighed. ‘That’s what your mother wanted you to think. That’s what she wanted everyone to think. But I thought she may have told you the truth…especially with your birthday—’
‘My birthday?’ I asked, looking up at him. ‘What has my birthday got to do with this?’
‘I think your mother was expecting that when you turned eighteen your magic would manifest.’
‘What? I don’t understand. Magic? That is just a child’s fantasy. Magic doesn’t exist anymore.’
‘It is rare, but it does exist in pockets.’
‘Is that why someone wanted to kidnap me?’ I asked, sliding the puzzle pieces together. ‘For my non-existent magic?’
‘And for the mirror,’ Parisar confirmed.
‘That stupid mirror. What does it even do? Don’t tell me it does what the rumours say? It predicts who is the most beautiful in the land?’
Parisar shook his head. ‘It is a scrying mirror,’ he said.
I frowned. ‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘It’s a divination tool. It sees the future.’
I snorted and stood, dusting off my training pants. ‘That’s ridiculous. The mirror doesn’t tell the future.’
‘Have you ever looked into it?’
I started to shake my head and then stopped. I had, once. Mother had been furious with me when she found me in her room. The mirror was usually covered, and I’d been fascinated with it once upon a time. I’d snuck into her room to look at it.
‘I looked once,’ I said. ‘When I was small. But it didn’t show me anything.’
Parisar cocked an eyebrow. ‘Now, why don’t I believe you?’
I didn’t want to tell him what I’d seen. It was too frightening, and it had stopped me from ever looking into it ever again. Mother told me it was broken and that it didn’t work and whatever I’d seen was a lie. I’d grabbed onto that explanation with both hands because I hadn’t wanted to believe what I’d seen.
‘What did you see?’ Parisar asked gently.
‘Nothing,’ I protested, but I wasn’t convincing in my denial.
‘If you tell me, I can probably help,’ he said, his voice gentle. ‘You do know that a scrying mirror can only show you the most possible scenario, but that it can be changed? Life has so many branches, it is impossible to predict how someone will react or what path they will choose. The mirror only shows the most likely scenario for that particular point in time.’
I looked up at him. I wanted to believe him, just as I had wanted to believe my mother when she told me the mirror lied. But who wanted to admit to seeing their death?
‘What has my mother seen?’ I asked, changing the subject. ‘What does she know that has her being so obsessed with the stupid thing that the kingdom is rife with rumours about her?’ I was angry. I was scared. I wanted things to go back to the way they were.
Parisar searched my face for a long moment before he spoke. He spoke slowly, considering his words.
‘She has seen something to do with you,’ he admitted. ‘That was why she asked me to take you away. She had hoped that by removing you from the situation, it would change the outcome.’
‘But it hasn’t,’ I said, knowing already what it was my mother had seen. She had seen the same thing I had. She had seen me lying in a glass coffin. She had seen my death.
‘But if the mirror can only be used by my mother’s descendants, why are they trying to kill me?’
‘Maybe they don’t want to possess the mirror,’ Parisar said, his eyes on me, cataloguing my expression. ‘Maybe they want to destroy it.’
‘So destroy the stupid thing! I don’t care. I don’t want it.’
‘They can’t,’ he said. ‘Not as long as there is a living descendent.’
‘So why try to kill my father and not my mother?’
‘I think the poison was meant for your mother,’ Parisar said. ‘But I can’t prove it. Or maybe it was meant for both of them. I don’t know because I still don’t know what they want or who they are.’
‘What about everything else that is going on? What about the war that is brewing? How does all that fit in?’
‘No one knows where the threat is coming from, but it looks more and more like it is from Werifesteria.’
‘The kingdom behind the thorns?’ I asked. ‘They have been gone for a hundred years. What makes you think this has anything to do with them?’
‘The rumours about the thorns receding are true,’ Parisar said. ‘Perhaps they have been biding their time and have been preparing for the moment when they could attack, like you said before.’
‘But how does that have anything to do with me? With trying to get rid of me?’
Parisar looked away from me and sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I wish I did. Maybe if I knew, some of this would make sense, but at the moment, nothing does.’
I was surprised by his outburst. Parisar was always so controlled and confident. I didn’t like seeing him this way. It scared me even more to see him shaken. He couldn’t be shaken. I needed him to stay the solid rock he had always been.
‘Do you think someone in the camp is a spy?’ I whispered.
He stilled for a long minute before slowly turning back to face me. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. The look in his eyes and the minute inclination of his head told me everything I needed to know.
Parisar left me alone to contemplate everything he had revealed, and it felt like my entire life was a lie.
My mother had lied to me.
The earth beneath my feet rocked and rolled and nothing felt stable. Nothing felt safe.
I didn’t even know where to begin. How could I make sense of everything Parisar said? Even forgetting that he believed there was a spy amongst us, there was the whole magic thing to deal with. And not just that magic was real and not a dead thing of the past, but a real, powerful thing that was in me.
I was descended from a line of high magicians. Me?
I sniggered. Chortled. Giggled. Soon, I was laughing, but not with mirth. Hysteria was a more apt name for what I felt. The truth was too ridiculous to believe. It was too outrageous. People were actively trying to kill me because of something I hadn’t even believed to be real, or at least, I hadn’t believed to be real in my lifetime.
Our history books were filled with accounts of magic and magicians, but they had died out. They’d been hunted down in the end. The population rising up against the unfair power they wielded. Eventually they went into hiding, and magic was outlawed. No, not exactly outlawed, but it was definitely frowned upon. Anyone showing any magic aptitude had been shunned and exiled. Magical items were destroyed. Grimoires, potions, pouches of herbs, crystal amulets, staffs, wands, rods. These were all hunted down and ritually burned to rid the kingdom of their influence. Mother’s mirror had somehow survived the scourge and had become a curiosity. No one truly believed it had any power except…except now Parisar was saying it did.
And me. I was a magical relic too, apparently. If what he said was true, magic ran through my veins, although I had no idea what that meant. I’d never felt any different. I’d never performed any magic.
The thing I saw in the mirror didn’t count. That was the mirror, not me. I just saw what the mirror showed. I hadn’t performed any sort of spell to make it work.
How could I even believe what Parisar said? Where was his proof? Maybe the rumours about my mother becoming obsessed with the mirror were just part of a smear campaign to discredit her. Or maybe the stress and worry of me being gone and my father being unconscious was too much for her to bear, and she was breaking under the strain.
That had to be it.
That was far more believable than some tale about magic.
Magic had died out generations ago, and I refused to believe that I was somehow the missing link to bringing it back.
Okay, that’s not what Parisar said. I wasn’t the missing link to bringing it back, but I was the key to destroying the last piece of magic in the kingdom…if I believed what he said.
The resurfacing doubts gave me pause. I had begun to trust Parisar unconditionally. I’d come here—against my own will—and been forced to believe everything he had been telling me. Sure, my mother had sent that letter, but who’s to say that it hadn’t been faked? She could have written it under duress. He could have threatened her, or he could have had someone forge her writing. Both he and his father had ample access to the seal of both my mother and father. There was nothing to say they hadn’t had the seal copied or stolen it.
It all seemed too convenient.
Parisar had kidnapped me and slowly broken down my defences, convincing me he had done it for my own good. Even revealing he thought there was a spy amongst the group was designed to make me trust him more. To rely on him.
Had it all been a lie?
So why save me?
Twice, I had been saved from death. Why do that? Why save me if his plan was to kill me?
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. He wouldn’t have saved me if he’d wanted to kill me, which meant what? He wanted the mirror?
He wanted the mirror, and he needed me alive so I could use it for him.
I pushed up to my feet. That’s why he saved me. Perhaps the attempts on my life were for a greater good. Maybe I was supposed to die so that Parisar couldn’t get his hands on the mirror.
I paced, chewing on my fingernail. Would my mother sacrifice me like that? I didn’t think so, but then maybe she wasn’t the one instigating the threats. Maybe one of the ministers who knew about the mirror and knew about my connection to it thought it best to get rid of me before the mirror could be used against us.
I shook my head. It was all too fantastical. The plot seemed convoluted, and I seemed paranoid even to my own reckoning.
But the only way I would know the truth would be to speak to my mother. I needed to ask her what was going on. I needed to know if Parisar was speaking the truth or if it was some complicated ruse to snatch power from my family.
I needed to go home.
I had long ago given up hope of escaping but…but I was no longer watched like a prisoner. I was free to go wherever I liked without question.
A plan formed in my mind. I didn’t know which way was home, but I knew Parisar had maps. I’d seen them. He hadn’t hidden them from me, believing I was on his side.
Part of me wanted to run right now. I wanted to head into the woods and escape this place before anyone knew I was gone. But that was the old me. I had changed. I knew better now. I needed a plan. I needed supplies. I couldn’t just walk out of the compound without some preparation.
I knew what I had to do.
I wiped my face and shook my hair out, straightening my shoulders and taking a deep breath. It was time for me to take control of my situation. If I was going to be the next leader of this kingdom, then it was about time I started acting like one.