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THREE PAIRS OF EYES watched with avid interest as Cyrele reached into her bag for the artifact. The vulnerability she felt at the scrutiny was inexplicable—the mirror wasn’t even truly hers, so why balk at revealing its secrets? Yet she still felt herself tensing at the prospect of activating the mirror before Aralath, before the sailors.
There was no stand to hold the artifact this time, so she had to hold it herself, using it like a wax tablet with the reflective surface facing the ground. How shocked the princes would be to see nothing but the muddy riverbank when they accessed the mirror. If they accessed the mirror.
The magic seeped from the artifact, unseen by its audience, sinking into the currents of the river and flowing downstream towards Kava. A moment passed, then another, and nothing happened. Uncertainty filled her as she considered how long she should wait. Was it too forward to let the magic reach Lesra Kar?
Working in her family’s workshop, she’d inscribed hundreds of guidance poems into commissioned items meant as gifts for family members, students, and subordinates. Words intended to teach or remind the recipients how to behave appropriately. One of the most popular was, ‘Reach, but do not overreach, for that way lies ruin.’ But yet another popular one was, ‘Your masters deserve your best efforts and with them you will rise.’
So which should she fear more? Overreaching or underreaching?
Then as the moments continued to stretch out, Cyrele began wondering what would happen if someone else detected the mirror’s magic before the princes did. The Maelstrom certainly could, but truly, who knew how many members of the royal family had this kind of power? Who knew what any of them would make of Cyrele’s use of the artifact?
What are you doing? Someone finally spoke into her mind, though she couldn’t know who.
Just then, Matiser’s physical voice came out of the artifact, his tone stern. Cyrele swiftly held the mirror up to face Aralath and the sailors, allowing him to see who he was talking to. Aralath responded to him in Kavan, her manner conciliatory as she kept her head tilted down in a slight bow.
“Elei Cyrele,” Matiser suddenly said. “You are there as well? Come forward.”
Awkwardly holding the mirror, Cyrele wondered how to comply without tossing the priceless item on the ground. One of the sailors—the one who’d wanted to declare Kamene lost to the wastelands—held out his hands and spoke. She might not have understood the words, but she did understand the gesture, and gratefully handed the mirror to him before reluctantly moving into the prince’s view.
“I’ve called for Avenah,” Matiser said upon seeing her. “He should hear this.”
But when Prince Avenah finally arrived, the man who’d wanted to confess everything could no longer contain himself—he began babbling in a pleading tone of voice, while his fellow sailor’s expression froze. It was indication enough that he’d begun sharing dangerous information with the princes. The only question was, how much did he share?
Well, isn’t this a complication to a neat little plan? A voice spoke into her mind, as Avenah glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.
Cyrele stiffened. She didn’t know what the sailor had told him, didn’t know what was safe to reveal and what wasn’t. Was that why he’d chosen to speak to her? To see if she would contradict the sailors? Cold fear rushed through her, as she realized that revealing less than the sailor did might doom her, but revealing more might doom him.
Never fear, Elei, Matiser’s voice came next, containing a hint of weariness—one that wasn’t present in his speaking voice. We can’t allow bandits to abduct princesses out of the barrens whenever they like. I will come to sort this out myself. You only need wait for my arrival and keep yourself safe.
He’s instructing the sailors to protect you until he arrives, Avenah added while Matiser spoke with the other Kavans. Matiser is right when he says you no longer have to worry. You did right by contacting us and we will handle the rest. Soon enough, you’ll be safely on your way to Lesra Kar once more, and this will all be like a nightmare—frightening, but also fleeting.
Was this Avenah’s attempt at comforting her? The very idea made her feel that something wasn’t right. She hadn’t found the prince to be particularly considerate in their previous interactions, so why start now? What did he want?
The answer, of course, was apparent. He wanted her to do nothing but wait for Matiser’s arrival. But what other action could she take that had him so worried? He didn’t imagine that one glyphwriter, working off whatever scraps of knowledge had been reclaimed after the Purge, could discover whatever secrets Aralath insisted they’d hidden in the wasteland? It seemed...implausible.
I understand, your highness, Cyrele readily agreed. No matter what happened next, she needed the princes to believe she would comply with their wishes. Thank you for concerning yourselves with our troubles.
The pleased smile that Avenah gave in response to her supposed obedience only disturbed her more.
#
AS SOON AS THE AUDIENCE with the princes was over, the sailor holding the mirror began berating his fellow, his tone of voice just shy of panic. His fellow sailor snapped back in an equally shaky tone. But their argument was pointless. What was done was done.
Aralath extracted the mirror from the sailors and presented it to Cyrele. “That did not go as well as I’d hoped,” she confessed.
“How much did the sailor tell them?” Cyrele asked.
“They know about the note and its contents, which is exactly the problem. They’re aware that all of us know about this temple in the barrens and the princess locked inside a vault filled with royal secrets. With luck, that alone might not be enough to doom us—but if the princess has seen the inside of the vault, Prince Matiser will find and kill her. He’ll likely claim she was already dead when he found her, which would make for a reasonable story...so long as no one knows about the note. But we do, and he knows we do, which makes us perilously close to witnesses.”
Was this what it felt like to stand in the path of a natural disaster? A volcano erupting to spread molten death around itself faster than she could run, a tsunami towering overhead in the seconds before it crashed over her...or, for that matter, a maelstrom sucking her underwater with a strength she couldn’t resist.
Her natural disaster was Matiser. A man who might as well have been a force of nature, coming with an inevitability she couldn’t deny and a power she couldn’t withstand.
Her throat closed up at the thought that it would all end like this. And no one would ever even know why this had happened to her. Even she wouldn’t know.
“Why are they doing this?” Cyrele couldn’t help asking, a desperate frustration welling up inside her at the injustice of it all. But as soon as the words left her mouth, she remembered that Aralath was still pretending to be a royal agent and wouldn’t criticize her supposed masters so easily. So Cyrele changed her question. “The people who wrote the note, I mean? Are they trying to create a diplomatic crisis between Kava and Viemis by goading the Kavan royals into killing a Viemian princess?”
Aralath shrugged. “Perhaps. But their motivations are less important than Prince Matiser’s are, since he’s the one most likely to kill us.”
“Is he truly going to kill us?” Cyrele couldn’t help asking.
She knew she was insignificant to the royals. She knew Aralath and the sailors, who understood what the Kavan princes were capable of far better than she did, feared for their lives. But it was still so hard to accept that she might die not because of her own actions or even her skills, but because she knew the contents of a message that she hadn’t even understood until Aralath explained it to her.
Aralath considered her for a moment. “I know what you’re thinking. Why am I afraid of the princes when I work for them?” It wasn’t what Cyrele was thinking, but it should have been. She needed to do a better job of acting like she believed Aralath’s story if she didn’t want a knife in the back. “I stay alive by recognizing when I’ve found information that the Karits already know, but wouldn’t trust their own spies with. This is that type of information.”
“So what can we do?” Cyrele asked.
“The correct question is, what can you do? You are a glyphwriter. For the four of us to stand even a chance of survival, the Princess Kamene must live. And for her to live, she must not be trapped inside that vault—as far as Prince Matiser can ever know, she must never have set foot inside the vault beneath the Temple of Lost Hope.”
“You think I can figure out how to open it before the prince arrives?” Cyrele exclaimed, daunted by such an ambitious task...but also more interested than she expected to be.
The pursuit of knowledge had brought her close enough to the greats of this world to upend her life, but now that she found herself with still more knowledge to pursue, secrets that those who held power over her would kill to protect—she felt as if she’d been offered a path out of her subservience. A chance to take her fate into her own hands. She might die for it, but judging by the sailors’ panic, she might die anyway. If this was the last choice she might ever get to make, then...
“I can try,” Cyrele told Aralath with more self-assurance than she’d felt in a long time, “but we don’t even know where this temple is.”
A tight smile spread across Aralath’s face, relief and worry mixing behind her eyes. It was the most honest expression Cyrele had ever seen from her. “We don’t, but whoever took the princess must have found a way to reach it, just as they must have had a way of taking down the Maelstrom’s barges. These things are not easily done, and I’m hoping they left behind some evidence of how they accomplished it. There are no guarantees, I fear, but it will take time for the prince to reach us. We have until then to figure out a way to save ourselves.”
The air felt heavy, as Cyrele considered her situation. The abductors must have had access to some type of power that allowed them to travel through the wasteland. Cyrele couldn’t imagine simply stepping into the Maelstrom’s storm unprotected—surely, it would do something horrible, like stripping the flesh off their bones or turning their skin to ash?
But however the abductors had traveled through the storm, it was clear that Aralath hoped Cyrele could replicate it with glyphwriting. It was possible that she didn’t have the knowledge to accomplish that. And yet, she had to try. She had to take this a chance to change the inevitable. Because she was so tired of not having choices.