Shimmer and Burn Read online

  Leaning her palms against the table, she gives me a careful, painted smile. “Hello, Faris,” she says.

  “Where am I?” My voice comes out dry, cracked.

  “The most private room in the castle,” she replies, eyebrow arching. “Scream all you’d like; the walls have heard it before.”

  Blood. That’s what I smell beneath her perfume. Blood and fear and gasping final breaths. I’m in the torture chamber.

  Jolting upright, I roll off the table, wavering on my feet. Vertigo strikes and I back up to the wall, jostling rows of hanging chains and fraying ropes that dangle from hooks above my head. Twisting away from them, I land on my knees with a crack of bone, palms flat against a clammy floor. It’s a gesture of defeat in the fighting ring, and I close my eyes, woozy and disoriented.

  “You drugged me,” I accuse.

  “Necessary precaution,” says Alistair. “Some of these tunnels are mine alone, and on the off chance you can run a straight line out of here, I couldn’t risk you memorizing the way. Here.” He crouches in front of me, a cup of water in one hand. I draw back, but he persists and I finally accept. The water is warm and tastes like smoke, but I swallow it down in one gulp, fingers clutching the wooden cup, estimating its potential damage.

  Alistair pries it out of my hand with an apologetic smile.

  “I thought you said she could fight,” Bryn says, hands on her hips as she frowns down at me.

  Fear brines my mouth. Do they expect me to fight the princess? I’ve heard enough stories to know the wealthy have unusual appetites and money enough to whet them. A girl fighting royalty wouldn’t be the strangest thing they’ve paid to see.

  “Give her a minute,” Alistair says, irritated. “I had to guess the dosage based on her size, since you refused to help me—”

  “My father will overlook your experiments so long as they only involve you and your prisoners,” she interrupts. “You are not allowed to poke holes in his daughter’s arms. Nor drug her with homemade poisons in the interest of science.”

  “Not until we’re married,” Alistair says with a brittle, humorless smile. He slides an arm around me to help me stand, but I recoil from his touch. Fifty gold kronets, he promised, but at what cost? This is not a place meant for second chances.

  I shove him away with a pathetic, open-palmed gesture. He dutifully rocks back, expression inscrutable as his eyes flick from me to Bryn and back again.

  “I assume Pem warned you before he dragged you through the streets,” says Bryn. “You know why you’re here?”

  The room shifts and I close my eyes, begging it to stop. “A job,” I manage to croak. What drugs did he use? Now that the frost has melted from my blood, I feel like I’m on fire, burning from the inside out. Goose bumps stud my arms like a rash, itchy and tight. Swallowing back the taste of bile, I cut a dark look toward Alistair, laced with unspoken accusation. Gold, he promised. Freedom. My sister—

  My mother. “My mother,” I say, half question, half lingering surprise.

  “Was a thief,” says Bryn, pulling the conversation—the attention—back to her.

  “There’s no proof of that,” I say, with a savage twist in my stomach. “No one has ever found any of the gold they claimed she stole.”

  “On the contrary,” says Bryn, blinking at me, bemused. “Gold is exactly what they found, and plenty of it.”

  I stare back at her. For days after our house was burned, guards sifted through the ashes, and for years after, fortune hunters kicked through the charred brick and charcoal rubble left behind. Nothing of any worth was ever recovered, and there were nights when I would lie awake, convinced the gold had never even existed.

  Not that it stopped me from searching the ashes myself not that long ago, so desperate for money to save Cadence I had resorted to believing in legends.

  “Your mother was a transferent,” Bryn says. “Her crime was not in stealing gold but, rather, stealing magic.”

  I drag myself to my feet, weight braced against the table. “That’s impossible,” I say. “My mother was not a magician. Your father’s provost would have known.”

  “Mercer can only sense when someone uses magic,” Bryn says. “He can’t tell if an ability lies dormant. But whenever you transfer magic, some of it inevitably strays. Like the last drop of water you thought you drank.” She picks up the wooden cup Alistair had set on the table and upends it. A drop of water slides out and hits the floor. “Mercer never would have found her and you’d all be living happily ever after in some hovel somewhere, but your mother got greedy and she got caught.” She snorts. “They always do.”

  I shake my head, teeth clenched so tight my jaw aches. I’ve heard worse said of my mother—often from myself—but it annoys me the way Bryn tells the story as if she knows all the details.

  As if she knows more than I do.

  “It’s not unusual for a magician to have more than one ability,” Alistair cuts in. “Your mother was also a spellcaster. For two weeks after her arrest, everything she touched—everyone she touched—turned into gold.”

  Now I know they’re lying to me. Somebody, some guard or palace servant, would have carried that kind of story out of the palace and into the taverns years ago. Or maybe they did, which is how rumors of her crime began.

  “My father is not nearly so talented,” says Bryn, beginning to pace. Her skirts hiss across the floor behind her. “He wanted that spell, but removing something so complicated would have frayed its edge; it would have fallen apart in the process. It was your mother’s guarantee that he wouldn’t touch her. She was too valuable to kill.”

  I hate the way my stomach somersaults, the way my palms start to sweat; I hate that even now, my mother holds power over me. “Is she alive?”

  Uncomfortable silence follows my question, answer enough. Yet Alistair confirms it. “Perrote ordered her execution after discovering she had woven a caveat into her spell. The gold would only last a fortnight before it turned to ash.”

  Two weeks. The time of respite between my mother’s arrest and the time the guards returned with torches. So she sacrificed our family for what? For two weeks of playing wizard?

  “What was the point?” I ask darkly.

  “The point was that for two weeks,” says Bryn, “your mother had the perfect cover to transfer magic without the king questioning anything that might have spilled in the process.”

  Reaching into his pocket, Alistair removes a small vial, laying it on the table ahead of me. Ribbons of liquid fire strike against the glass and fragment into narrow threads, suspended in a glossy liquid the color of the winter sky.

  Magic.

  I stare at it, transfixed. “I don’t understand.”

  “The spell was a distraction,” Alistair says. “She intended to steal the magic and run, but when she got caught, she had to change plans.”

  “Run? Where?”

  “Avinea,” says Bryn.

  My mouth floods with saliva.

  “After the war, King Merlock abandoned the capital and went into hiding,” Bryn says, tugging at the rings that adorn her slender fingers. “The betrayal of his provosts made him bitter; murdering his brother made him weak. In retaliation, he cut every thread of magic left in the city. Some spells can be recycled, unknotted, and used again and again until the magic fades completely, but to cut a spell apart, it leaves the threads too frayed to do anything but rot. It’s—”

  “The plague,” I say with a chill.

  “The plague,” she agrees, glancing toward me. “They call it the Burn. It gets into the land and under your skin and . . .”

  And you die slowly, poisoned from the inside out, if you die at all. They say that not everyone does, and those who don’t become worse than any shadow creature King Perrote could create to scare us into obedience.

  They say there are monsters in Avinea.

  Bryn flattens her palms on the table, chewing the paint from her lower lip. “The rules of succession are absolute. Only one man
may be king and only the king can wield magic. So long as Merlock lives, his son, Prince Corbin, cannot inherit the crown. And without magic, he cannot stop the Burn from spreading.”

  “Prince Corbin?” I repeat, incredulous. “Merlock had a son? And he survived?”

  “Avinea survived,” she says impatiently. “But not for much longer. As it is, my father supported Corthen during the war. He’s not high on Avinea’s list of potential allies, nor would he ever willfully offer assistance to Merlock’s heir. Why waste the resources or sign any unnecessary treaties? Another twenty years and Avinea will truly be gone and my father can conquer it without opposition. It’s the perfect strategy: He declared war on Avinea the minute Merlock abandoned it and he’s been winning ever since.”

  I dig my fingers into the tabletop. “And my mother knew there was something out there?”

  The smile that creeps across Bryn’s face is infuriating: more secrets that she lords over me. “Someone might have told her as much,” she says. “The same someone who told her what tunnels to take when she ran. Who planned to run with her.”

  My father?

  No. The way they look at me, triumph and pity, denies my assumption. Alistair has the decency to look away as he lights another cigarette, and my stomach sinks: It wasn’t my father who knew the tunnels out of Brindaigel.

  It was his.

  Bryn plucks the vial from the table, turning it upside down and right side up again. “Clean magic would be worth a fortune to the wife of a tailor out there.”

  No. My mother embroidered dresses and grew flowers and had two daughters; she did not steal magic and she did not have lovers and she did not abandon us to the Brim in search of money.

  But then I remember the strange way she smelled the night she tried to kill me, like damp stone and stilted air. Like the tunnels.

  “You’re lying,” I say weakly. Was that how Alistair recognized me? Not because Thaelan described a girl with pale eyes, but because that girl looked like her mother?

  “What can I say, Faris?” Alistair exhales a plume of smoke over his shoulder. His tone is caustic but his expression is troubled. Haunted. “There’s just something about broken Lockes in our dungeon that makes our Pembrough blood run faster. He paid for it, if it makes you feel any better.” He inhales deeply. “We all did. Perrote guessed your mother had help getting into the castle, and it fueled his paranoia. It was the start of mandatory loyalty spells.”

  “Brindaigel can’t survive another twenty years hidden behind our borders like this,” says Bryn, scowling at him for straying off topic. She begins tapping the vial against the table. “We have no land, limited resources, and a swelling population that will need to be culled. My father plans to start in the Brim. Criminals and undesirables first, your sister included, followed by regulated births: only one child per couple. Any more will be thrown in the gorge or drowned in the shallows, parents’ choice. No exceptions.”

  I step back, horrified by how casually she speaks of her father’s intentions, as though it were no different than rotating the crops or raising taxes. “He can’t do that. He can’t just kill people to make room—”

  “Who’s going to stop him?” Bryn asks, eyes flashing. “He’s the king, and anyone with any real combat skill has a loyalty spell burnt above his heart. You think the Brim rats will fight back? Or women and children?” She scoffs. “Your mother was the first to run.”

  “Shut up.”

  “The Brim stagnated years ago,” Bryn continues. “Fewer mouths to feed would be a blessing to them. More jobs, more space, more—”

  “Shut up!” I slam my hand against the table. My voice carries to the rafters overhead and lingers as Bryn and Alistair both stare at me. We are not worthless, I want to scream; we are not expendable. No matter what my mother may have thought.

  Embarrassed by my outburst, I lower my eyes and temper my anger, tucking my stinging hand under my arm: This is not a fight I have any chance of winning; better to save my strength.

  The silence stretches into agony before Bryn finally speaks. “You’re going to finish what your mother started,” she says. “You’re going to be my vessel, Faris. You’ll carry that stolen magic to New Prevast as an incentive, a gift to Prince Corbin to ensure an alliance. Avinea needs magic, Brindaigel needs a new king, and you need fifty silver kronets to save your sister’s life. Everyone wins.”

  I stare her down. “I can’t carry magic. I’m not a transferent—”

  “Not a requirement.”

  I snap. “Then why do you need me?”

  “Because you have something to lose if you don’t come back,” she says.

  I shake my head, backing away from the table, hitting the wall and setting the chains rustling. “There are six heirs ahead of you for the throne—”

  “And nothing but good manners prevents a seventh heir from acting before the first one does,” she counters with an irritated sigh. “My brother Rowan is as isolationist as my father. I can’t risk Brindaigel’s future while I wait my turn.”

  “If you start a war, you’re fighting all of Brindaigel. You’ll have to kill your entire family to get to that crown.”

  “Which is why I need an army with no ties to my father,” she says. “War requires sacrifice, Faris, but it also brings rewards. If I am crowned queen, I will have the power to sever your sister’s enchantment. And I will have the means to offer you a comfortable future. Gold enough for both of you. Real gold,” she adds with a smirk.

  “If,” I repeat. “And if we fail, it’s my family that suffers. My sister will be sold, my father thrown into prison—”

  “And you’ll be tortured and killed,” she finishes, waving away my concerns with one hand. “Lucky for you, you know the executioner.”

  “The boy who calls himself a monster,” I say darkly.

  Alistair’s expression hardens as he crushes his cigarette out against the edge of the table. “It’s only the truth, Faris,” he says. “If you want lies, I can take you down to the shallows and kiss you beneath the stars and tell you everything will be perfect because the world is never cruel.”

  How dare he mock Thaelan. I lunge toward Alistair but the drugs are too thick in my blood, making me sluggish, unsteady. I crash into the table instead, and pain blooms across my hip. “I won’t do it.”

  Bryn snorts. “At what point were you ever offered a choice? This”—she gestures to the torture chamber—“is all formality. As far as I’m concerned, you agreed to help me the moment Pem told me your name.” Straightening, she looks to Alistair, who looks away, guilty. “Which is why the magic’s already inside you.”

  Six

  THIS IS HOW THE KING’S executioner kills. With homemade sedatives and stolen magic and a princess as twisted as him.

  A lifetime of warnings roll through my head with frightening percussion: infection, plague, the king’s speech every year on the Day of Excision. Magic was never meant for mortals, and it’ll start to clog in my veins until my blood stagnates, turns brackish. Until I die, or worse. Already I feel my blood shuddering, slowing; already I feel the phantom itch of poison spreading through my body.

  Ignoring the pain in my hip, I reach a side table lined with instruments, seizing a hook with a sharpened talon at its end. Grabbing Alistair around the neck, I yank him against me, the hook pressed above his heart. “Get it out of me,” I demand. “Right now!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Liar!”

  “He can’t,” Bryn says, arms folded, expression inscrutable. “He’s not a transferent.”

  “If you put it in me, you can take it out!”

  “I used a needle,” Alistair says, palms still out. He nods toward the scattered tools across the tabletop, where a silver and glass syringe sits adjacent to an empty vial. “It’s not in your blood; it’s just under the skin. But only dead magic can poison you, Faris, and this is clean, no spells attached. There’s no chance of it fraying or rotting apart inside you. I promise.”

 
; “Like I would believe anything you say.”

  “You don’t have to,” he says. “It’s fact.”

  Frustrated, I release Alistair, casting a disgusted glance to the hook before I throw it aside. Pressing my hands to my forehead, I back away until I hit the wall. Cold stone bleeds through my dress and I slide down, knees drawn to my chest. It’s too much; I can’t do this. My palms settle flat on the floor. Defeated.

  “Give us a moment,” says Bryn, watching me from under half-lidded eyes, her slender fingers tented against the table. Alistair hesitates, glancing to me before dutifully moving for a doorway on the opposite wall, half-hidden beneath a dingy tapestry. He disappears into a sitting room on the other side.

  Bryn crouches in front of me. Her skirts kick up, revealing layers of silk and lace petticoats, pale slippers studded with colored beads. Impractical, beautiful shoes that awaken a long-buried hunger for the dances I never had, the possibilities my mother stole from us when she stole from the king. “You can’t blame him,” she says with a bracing smile. “His mother died when he was young and his father was not the kind of man to teach delicacy.”

  “Who?”

  “Your majesty.”

  “The king?”

  “Your majesty,” she repeats, teeth clenched. “When you address me, address me like the daughter of a king, not like a Brim whore you’d leave in the morning. I mean Pem, not my father. Good god.” Rolling back her shoulders, she clutches her hands across her knees, spinning one of her rings in restless circles. “You weren’t my first choice,” she says, “but Pem wanted you to do this. Guilt, I imagine, or some other human frailty he pretends not to have. Given the circumstances, I saw no reason to deny him the request.” Her eyes rake over me, taking silent tally. “I feel confident in that decision.”

  Does she expect me to feel flattered?