Diomedes put his empty canteen back in his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and nodded. “Lead the way.”
“Now what? We just walk around until the pen gets warm?” Armannii asked after they had eaten dinner, which was a mixture of the produce from Forrest and Camile’s shop. They’d continued for a while but paused when Armannii emptied his canteen.
“It may be a good idea to stop somewhere and rest,” Diomedes said as he held back a yawn. “I’ve passed the point of being able to walk in a straight line, and we need to refill our water.” He held up his own empty canteen. They’d left the one they’d filled with powder in Ellayne’s room, but Diomedes wished they’d brought it with them, rinsed it of its magic dust, and filled it with water.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Blanndynne said, her face scrunching as she reached down and rubbed her ankles. “I can’t remember the last time I walked this much.”
“What, too busy flying?” Armannii joked, but his eyebrows lifted toward his hairline when she nodded. “Seriously? Why haven’t you been doing that?”
“It’s really hard. Drains energy like crazy, and I feel like I’ve been lacking that since I came out of the vessel.”
Diomedes tried to picture what Blanndynne would look like flying, but he could only imagine her in the air with wings like Tilly had had, and he doubted that was realistic.
“All right, well, since flying to some location isn’t an option, we could stop in a nearby town,” Armannii said, fixing his twisted vest.
“And if someone recognizes me?” Diomedes asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Luckily for us—though not so much for the people who lived there—the town was utterly destroyed by the war. Few, if any, people live there.” Armannii nodded toward the darkness around them. “Shall we?”
Diomedes put his empty canteen back in his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and nodded. “Lead the way.”
Calling the town destroyed had been an understatement. Very few of the buildings still stood, and none of them were completely intact. For the most part, there were just piles of rubble and wood sporadically spread throughout the trees.
Diomedes frowned, bending down to inspect a piece of a building using the light rune on the stone. He rubbed the pad of his finger against it, and when it came back covered in soot, he stood up and approached the nearest tree.
“How come the forest is still intact?” he asked, running his hand over the bark and checking for ashy residue. It came back clean.
“The dryads and nymphs have enchanted most of the forest with wards to protect from fire,” Armannii said, pausing in the middle of what must’ve been the main street.
“But these houses were clearly made from the same wood,” Diomedes argued. “Shouldn’t the buildings have been protected too?”
“Once a tree is cut down, it loses its protection, or that’s what my dryad friends tell me.” Armannii shrugged and gestured farther into town. “There are some better-looking places down there.”
With another glance at the pile of burnt wood at his feet, Diomedes followed Blanndynne and Armannii.
“Last time I stayed here, this was the best option,” Armannii said, stopping in front of a house that, unlike the others around it, still had all four supporting walls. The roof looked like it had collapsed on half the house though.
Diomedes raised an eyebrow but didn’t complain. It beat sleeping in the middle of the forest floor, and it would hopefully provide some protection from the wind, which had picked up when they entered the village. He wondered if it was because there weren’t as many trees or buildings to block the gusts.
They entered the building and froze when it creaked and groaned under their combined weight.
“Maybe wasn’t the wisest choice to choose one on stilts,” Diomedes pointed out as Armannii placed his bow against the wall ever so gently.
“It’s fine,” Armannii said, kneeling down next to his bag and pulling out his canteen. He held out his hand, and it took Diomedes a second to realize he was offering to take their canteens. “I’ll be back in a bit with some water, but don’t start a fire. There are worse things than getting caught by the royal guard, especially in a town like this.”
“What do you mean?” Blanndynne asked, checking over her shoulder. They’d closed the door behind them, but that didn’t stop her from staring at it.
“We’re in the middle of a war.” Armannii slung his quiver over his shoulder after readjusting his bow. “People are desperate. Desperate people do things they wouldn’t normally do.”
“Like?” Her voice went up an octave.
“Don’t worry about it,” Diomedes said, rolling his eyes. “We’ll be fine. He’s just trying to get a rise out of you.”
Blanndynne didn’t say anything else.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” Armannii said, giving Diomedes a two-finger salute before disappearing out the door.
“How long do you think it’ll take him?” Blanndynne asked, moving toward the back of the house. It had been a one-story house with two rooms, but the dividing wall between the two rooms had collapsed with the roof, so now it was one giant room with half the coverage.
He shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Blanndynne rubbed her hands together as if they were cold and then sat down against a wall. There was no furniture unless Diomedes counted the pile of splintered wood in the exposed part of the house. “He’s your best friend, isn’t he?”
Diomedes snorted, joining her on the floor. He picked up a metal nail and tapped it rhythmically on the wooden floorboards. Leaning his head down, Diomedes grinned. “He’s my only friend.”
“Oh? Lonely life being the prince of the largest country in the world, is it?”
“Something like that.”
“How’d you meet?”
Her question sparked a memory he hadn’t thought of in a while. “It’s been almost seven years. I was twenty-two years old, and I had—” He paused to chuckle, lowering his head as he scraped the tip of the nail into the wood, carving his initials into the floor. “I had gotten myself into a little bit of trouble.”
“Really? How in the world could that have happened?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm as she rolled her eyes.
“Against my better judgment, I went out riding late in the afternoon. Somehow, I don’t really remember how, I learned about an old tower in the Glass Fields north of Cyanthia that used to house a large collection of magical items. It was said to have been destroyed in the war. However, I was hoping to find some sort of remains.”
“Did you have a map?”
Diomedes shook his head, brushing strands of hair off his forehead. “No. And the Glass Fields went on much farther than I’d thought they would.”
Blanndynne shivered, and in a blink, a deep violet cloak appeared in her hands, which she wrapped over her shoulders. “The Glass Fields aren’t exactly the safest place to be at night. At least they weren’t when I was out of my vase last.”
“They still aren’t. Lightning strikes still happen without warning. But I wasn’t going to give up finding the tower, not when I found some of the markers I had heard about.”
“Markers?”
“The rainbow rock and the triad of lightning poles encased in glass. However, I should’ve started earlier in the day or gone some other time. I had seen the clouds in the sky. I knew what it meant. But I didn’t listen.” Diomedes shifted so he was sitting with one leg stretched out and the other tucked beneath him. “The first lightning strike of the electrical storm nearly blinded me. I remember the heat on my skin, and part of my cloak caught fire.”
The memory floated to the forefront of Diomedes’s mind. The ground had been littered with shards of glass, and Diomedes could still feel the sharp edges slice into him when his horse spooked and threw him. The lightning storm had begun. The dry heat mixed with the electrical charge of the graying clouds above had made every hair on his body stand on end.
“I knew I needed to seek shelter, but I hadn’t passed any villages, and the fields don’t offer much cover. I stayed as low as I could, running up and down the hills as lightning struck around me. I was terrified.”
“I’m impressed you survived.”
“That’s because Armannii found me. Well,” Diomedes said, a smirk on his face, “actually, I tripped over him.”
“What?”
He rolled his eyes, remembering the shock of tripping over something squishy. “He was lying on his back watching the storm from a valley in the fields. At first I thought he was dead, but then he sat up and grinned at me, asked me if I was enjoying the storm.” Diomedes pressed his lips together, remembering the confusion mixed with adrenaline that had kept him from forming any coherent sentences. “When he realized I wasn’t trying to risk my life to enjoy the lightning like he was, he got up and led me to an underground house.”
“Wait.” Blanndynne held up a hand, stopping Diomedes before he continued. “You’re saying he was lying in the middle of a deadly lightning storm for fun?”
Diomedes nodded. “I remember the entrance to the underground place. It was marked ceiling to floor with hundreds, maybe even thousands of runes. I had never seen them in person, only read about them in books my father keeps stashed in a secret area in his office. Armannii must’ve thought I was insane because I couldn’t stop staring. Being an elf, I suppose he didn’t need to think twice before walking through that hall. But I . . . I was mesmerized. I spent most of the storm asking him what each of them meant or did.”
“I’ve never been the best at runes if I’m honest. But there’s something pretty interesting about them.” Blanndynne glanced toward the door, frowning for a second, but her face was neutral when she looked back at him.
“There are times I wish I had at least a drop of magic in my blood so I could use rune magic,” Diomedes said, tracing the rune for fire in the dust on the floorboards. “But no.” He glared at the rune.
The wind whistled through the cracks in the building, contrasting with the heat Diomedes felt building in his stomach. If he could just prove to his father and the council that magic was good, they would end the war. He leaned his head back, closing his eyes.
Armannii’s face, younger in Diomedes’s memories, peered back at him, skeptical. The lightning storm had lasted two hours, and despite the incessant questions, Armannii hadn’t turned him back out to the deadly weather wearing at the land outside.
“You two became friends after that?” Blanndynne asked, her voice interrupting the memory playing on the inside of Diomedes’s eyelids.
“More or less. We switched between meeting at the castle and meeting outside. My father disapproves of him.” Diomedes wrinkled his nose. “Says he can’t be trusted. But the ironic part is I know when Armannii’s lying to me. My father, on the other hand . . .” His words faded out.
“Is your father . . .”
“Like Kylian? He’d disagree, but I say he may as well be. He and his councilmen are keeping Kylian’s war going after all.”
Blanndynne shifted, and when Diomedes opened his eyes, she had moved closer to him. It didn’t stop him from continuing his thought.
“He sees magic as a threat, says it leads to unruliness and a disregard for the law. But he doesn’t understand. People like you two don’t choose to have magic. You’re born with it. It’s a part of who you are.”
“I assume you’ve tried explaining all of this to him.”
Diomedes clenched his jaw. “Of course.”
“And?” she asked when he didn’t add anything else.
“And it’s like talking to a wall. A wall that gets angry that I don’t agree with him.”
“And your mother? What does she think?”
He bit the inside of his cheek. “No idea. She left when I was a child.”
“Oh,” Blanndynne said, her voice lowering. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course not. You were stuck in a vase for a century.” His words came out harsher than he had intended. He tried to fix his tone by explaining about the night his mother disappeared. “I waited by my window every night for four years. I wanted her to come back, especially when my father married that peasant.”
“Your half sister’s mother.”
He sighed again, nodding. “Ellayne’s mother was not from nobility. She was a peasant from a village somewhere here in the Black Forest. When my father was up against the sorceress, Evangeline helped.” Diomedes noticed the look of confusion on Blanndynne’s face when he mentioned the sorceress but decided to explain it after completing his current thought. “Apparently, my father and Ellayne’s mother got close during that time because after the sorceress was defeated in a final battle, my father married her. It was a disgrace, a smear on our family line.”
“And your sister?”
“Half sister.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, shaking his head. “I don’t know. She was my shadow when she was growing up. It was fun teaching her how to fight and sneak around the castle without getting caught. But when she began her tutoring—around the time I met Armannii—she started behaving more like a princess. Ellayne, well, she’s brilliant, smarter than she’ll ever give herself credit for. But she’s too much of a people pleaser. A peacekeeper, I guess. She wants my father and me to get along. In a lot of ways, she’s become like her mother. It gets under my skin.”
“How come?”
“Because she can sense the things wrong in our country, yet she’s content to sit back and watch the council and my father run it into the ground. She won’t enact change. Not when it might upset the ‘normal’ in her life. She needs to see that in order to make true, lasting peace, we need to turn the country on its head. Stop this war before there’s no country left for me to inherit.”
“And you think you’ll be able to do this by figuring out what happened all those years ago before the war started?”
“That’s the best we have so far. It’s either that or watch Phildeterre spiral into self-destruction.”
Blanndynne considered his words. “I have another question if you don’t mind me asking.”
Diomedes shrugged. “What else are we going to do? Figure out the secret of where Raylee’s body is?” He jutted his chin out towards the bag, which held the pen. “Ask your question.”
“Well, it’s clear that Kylian’s legacy is the war, and according to Armannii, his son is known for uniting the country. But what about your father? Does he have a legacy yet?”
It was an interesting question, one that made Diomedes chuckle darkly. “You mean besides not ending the war?” He paused, taking a deep breath. “He took down one of the biggest threats to the war, the sorceress I mentioned before. She had dark magic and was using it to gather an army to end the war. But my father, with the help of my stepmother, defeated her. To those who support the war, it was a great feat.”
“But not to you?”
Diomedes shook his head. “The reason my mother left was because she believed that magic isn’t evil. She left to help the sorceress. When the sorceress died, I guess—I don’t know what happened to her, but she never came back. Not that she could, what with Evangeline sitting on her throne.” Diomedes’s chest tightened, and it was painful when he took his next breath.
“And you?” Blanndynne asked.
“Me?”
“What’s your legacy?” Her words brought him back to her initial question, allowing him to relax bit by bit.
“Let’s hope it’s ending the war.”