Give her a hand with what?
When I don’t move, she twists around and waves at me to follow. “Come on. I need you to help me move this.”
Something about this feels off, but I scramble across the room anyway, and with Mama crouched below me, we push her wardrobe over just enough to reveal a tiny hole in the wood floor.
I think I’m beginning to grasp what’s going on here.
“This is between you and me. Nobody else is to know about this, not even your stepfather. Understand?”
“But we’re so close,” I reply, my voice dripping sarcasm.
Mama gives me a withering look, then hooks a finger through the hole and lifts the board from the floor. Setting it aside, she reaches elbow-deep into the opening and pulls out a metal box about the size of a book, with crusty orange rust forming along the edges. She fits the board back in place. The box pressed protectively against her chest, Mama pushes to her feet and crosses to her always meticulously made little bed. There, she takes a seat on the worn blue duvet. “Sit,” she says, patting the open space beside her.
I settle in next to her, curiosity overriding my nerves for the moment. She flips the lid on the box and reaches inside. I’m expecting her to pull out some money, maybe a small, spelled gem or two. Instead, she takes out a gold bracelet festooned with at least a dozen tiny purple sythra gems.
“You can’t be serious,” I say, eyeing the pretty purple stones. “This has to be worth a small fortune.”
“Hush.” She wraps the bracelet around my wrist, checking the length, then snatches up a tiny pair of needle-nose pliers from her nightstand and sets to work, removing gold links to make it fit my tiny wrist. “I don’t want to hear a single argument from you. You’re my only daughter, going to a dangerous place withoutme. It makes me feel better to know you’ll have some protection, alright?”
I nod. There’s no point in arguing, and if I’m being honest, it makes me feel a little better, too. I can’t access spectral magic the way my mother and other magi can, but I can use sythra gems already charged with magic, like any other fae. At least being half-human didn’t rob me of that ability.
“The cost of sythra has gone up a lot lately,” she says, “and with this being as last minute as it is, I wasn’t able to purchase any larger gems, so you’ll have to use multiple stones if you want to heal anything larger than a few cuts and bruises. Ah, there we go.” She drops the last golden link into her lap and holds the bracelet out as if inspecting it. “Give me your hand.” I extend my arm out to her, and she wraps the bracelet around my wrist and fits the clasp.
I finger the gems, each stone emitting a buzz, like tiny beehives, that tickles my skin.
“One down. One to go.” She gives me a brief smile, then plucks another bracelet, this one platinum, from the box and gets to work on it. There’s a large red gem surrounded by two pink and two yellow stones. The pink ones are for protection—BORING—but the others are much more exciting. “Are these for what I think they’re for?” I ask, excited to try out some illusion and fire spells.
“No,” she answers dryly, as though she didn’t just destroy my dreams of fireballs and giant snakes chasing Leodin through the forest. “They are for emergencies only.”
“Awww.”
“Don’t you ‘aww’ me. I had to pay a magi from Dom Nymn a fortune for these.” She taps a yellow gem with a long fingernail. “I expect them to be returned to me when you getback. And this”—she points to the red gem, somehow reading my thoughts before they’re even fully formed—“is for survival only, not to light a hearth fire because you’re too lazy to search for matches.”
I fold my arms across my chest and pout. “You really enjoy ruining my fun, don’t you?”
She doesn’t even deign that worthy of a response, simply rolls her eyes.
I drop my hands back into my lap and sigh. “He’s lost his mind, right?” I say, finally giving voice to the thought that plagued me all night.
She shakes her head, eyes still on her work. “He’s not insane. He’s desperate. Our palace informants have all gone silent, so he’s going into this completely blind.” Her eyes flick up to mine, then back to her work. “He needs someone he can trust to watch and listen where he can’t. The problem is, any one of our people could be in the queen’s pocket, and we wouldn’t know it, but we can say with certainty you aren’t one of them. I just don’t like the idea of you being put in danger, especially when you’re so far away.”
“But I don’t know anything about espionage or politics,” I say. “Even if I manage to listen in on other’s conversations, I doubt I’d be able to tell what information is important and what isn’t.”
“You’ll do just fine.”
I give her a pointed look that says, “I’m not so sure.”
Mama sets down her tool and meets my eyes. “You’re young and a female, which means you won’t be viewed as a threat—males in power tend to assume young females have nothing better to do with their time than chase boys and buy pretty dresses.”
I raise a brow.
“It’s true,” she continues. “No one would expect you to have enough brains in your head to keep up an intelligent conversation, let alone be fluent in four languages.”
“Five,” I correct her.
“Five?” She wrinkles her nose as she does the math. “You know the provincial languages and ancient Cardemian. What am I missing?”
“Ümbrian.”
