“All of the Children of Yargen are in your lineage.” Vi shook her head. “Ellene is like a sister to me, but I don’t think that’s close enough to count.”
“Perhaps it is.” Sehra shrugged, an action that seemed far too light-hearted for the seriousness of her words. “We know that while certain lineages have similar magic, magic is not in the blood. Two commons can give birth to a sorcerer. Why not two who have no relationship to Yargen giving birth to a Child of Yargen?”
“Because it’sneverhappened,” Vi challenged. It was bold. Sehra certainly knew the history of her land and people far better than Vi did. But Vi knew this much. She’d talked with Ellene about it to the point of circles countless times before. All swirling around questions like, why didn’t the Tower of Sorcerers in the South recognize the magic of Yargen? Or, what reallywasthe magic of Yargen?
“You are a special case,” Sehra agreed, as though such a simple explanation could put her concerns to rest. “But we always knew you would be. We planned for this.”
“We?” Vi repeated. “Who’s ‘we’?”
Sehra began to walk over to the far side of the room. “Your mother, father, and me.”
Everything went from not making sense to being downright impossible. “Let’s say I believe you, that I’m a Child of Yargen—which is an incredible amount to believe at face value, just as an aside. How would my mother know? Or my father? Or you? Why keep this information from me all this time?”
Sehra paused, looking back. Conflict was written over her face at what her next words should be. She placed a palm on the wall before her, and the wood folded like an accordion, revealing a small sunlit study Vi had never seen before and certainly had never known was there.
“Perhaps it would be best if I started at the beginning… Come.”
Vi didn’t want to. She wanted to stand and demand answers, order them as the Crown Princess if that’s what it took. Yet she couldn’t seem to find words. Her arms hung limply at her sides and her spark seemed dull and quiet, even without her forcing it to calm.
Her parents had known?
Was this insane belief what had kept her trapped in the North for so long? That question alone, the need for the truth, was ultimately what drove her to follow Sehra.
The study was narrow, similar to Vi’s own, wrapping around the circumference of the tree. Windows, no bigger than archer’s slits, let in the midday sun through a lattice of woodwork. It reflected off bookcases filled with scrolls and manuscripts alike. It sparked off motes of dust, as though magic filled the air itself.
“When I was a girl, younger than you, even, I was engaged to be wed to your father…”
Vi knew the story. Shaldan was the last nation to fall to the Empire’s armies, becoming the Solaris Empire’s “North.” Vi’s grandfather, the late Emperor Tiberius Solaris, sought to tie subservience with blood and engaged her father—Aldrik—to Sehra. But when the Mad King Victor murdered the Emperor and stole power, the engagement was called off. In its place was the wardship Vi had lived for the past seventeen years.
“… it was just before the uprising of the Mad King. When the last Emperor Solaris was still alive and I was engaged,” Sehra continued the story, nearing the end, “I was visited by a traveler.
“She possessed the magic of Yargen, unequivocally, and knew the words of the Goddess, drawing the future from them. She told me of the Emperor’s impending downfall, the violation of the caverns, and the rise of the Mad King. She also told me that Vhalla Yarl must wed Aldrik Solaris, for they would give birth to two children. One would bear his forefather’s position in the capital of the Empire. But the other, the first to be born, would be a girl, a Child of Yargen—a daughter imperative for the future of our world.”
This was insane.
It was more than insane.
“She… This visitor… you said she could see the future? She was a Firebearer?” Vi swallowed, staying focused even as dizziness spun the room.
“No. I saw in her the power of Yargen and it was a magic that was far beyond even mine. She used it to tap into Yargen’s plan for us all.” Sehra motioned to two small chairs seated on either side of a circular table at the end of the bookshelves in the far back of the room. “Sit, you look weak in the knees.”
“No,” Vi whispered. “I—I don’t want to move until I know the truth.”
“Which is what I’m telling you.”
That was not the truth she wanted to know. They were not the words Vi wanted to hear. The truth she was after was far more personal than prophecies or mysterious visitors.
“Is this why I have been kept in the North all this time? I was supposed to go home at fourteen. All those times it wasn’t the logistics of travel, the timing being wrong, or the plague. It was stalling because of something a traveler said to you?”
Sehra paused, shifting slightly to face Vi directly. She didn’t back away or hesitate. It would be admirable, if her words didn’t suddenly feel like they carried the weight of Vi’s collapsing world.
“Yes.”
She couldn’t breathe. The air in the room was gone. It was only the spark in her lungs, rattling around them. She would spit fire if she wasn’t careful.
“I wastrapped herefor seventeen years because of what some woman said?” Her voice was rising with her anger.
“She was not just ‘some woman,’ she was a Child of—”
