“Would you care to sit first?”Sehra asked, motioning to the chair once more.
“Very well.” Vi finally acquiesced, crossing over and sinking into the plush chair. She rested her elbows on the armrests, watching Sehra as she went to skim the shelves, her many braids swaying back and forth between her shoulders. The gold beads woven throughout clinked together softly.
“First, you must learn about the world. Nothing will make sense about the power of Yargen until you do.” Sehra pulled a heavy tome from the shelf, set it on the table between them, and then started back to the shelves to retrieve something else.
Despite Vi’s outbursts, the Chieftain’s demeanor hadn’t changed. Vi had always thought Sehra was fond of her, given her calm and congenial nature around her. Now, after endangering Ellene, after all but yelling at her, Vi was beginning to think that Sehra’s tranquility was merely the woman’s fundamental nature. It was as though a veil was being lifted from her eyes and she was seeing the world as it truly had been all along.
She wondered if Sehra had ever felt any genuine fondness for her.
Likely not, Vi decided, still bitter. She was a means to an end for Sehra—whether that meant fulfilling her supposed destiny or seeing a sympathetic ruler sit the throne. Vi suspected that even her hunts were somehow a ploy for her to find her magic. For all she knew, Sehra’s traveler and the mysterious dark purple-haired man were in cahoots.
“I know a fair bit about the world,” Vi forced her voice to stay level. She would have no more outbursts. She couldn’t afford them. She was not a child and she needed her full mental faculties to think through her new situation logically.
“You do have an understanding ofthisworld—our small corner of it.” Sehra walked back over with a dusty scroll in hand. “Which, as you’ll see, is quite different fromtheworld.”
“What’re you—” Vi was cut short as she unrolled the scroll before her. “What is this?” she whispered.
“Aires. The world, as it’s known beyond our lands.”
Even her maps would betray her today, it seemed.
Before her was a world unlike anything Vi had ever seen. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing a person she’d never met before. There was the great crescent-shaped body of land that she’d always known as the Crescent Continent. But it had never appeared in any of the Empire’s maps as more than a speck creeping in on the northernmost tip of the Main Continent, so Vi had always been left to believe it was relatively insignificant.
Yet on this map, the Crescent Continent—Meru, as it was labeled—was over four times the size of the Main Continent.
It was so large that there was a smaller island nestled in its watery eye. The barrier isles—called the Shattered Isles on this map—were far more detailed and expansive than she’d ever seen them. Trailing up farther northwest was a large body of land, almost the size of the Main Continent. To the southeast was yetanothercontinent, with more islands surrounding it. More islands stretched out southwest from the Crescent Continent, or perhaps they were continents in their own right, with land in the bottom left corner only peeking on the map.
“Is this to scale?” she whispered. By her count, if it was, there were at least five continents, if the Main Continent was still even considered one.
“Roughly.” Sehra nodded; her tone had become more serious, heavy even. “Close enough for what you’re asking.”
Vi ran her fingers over the map, her eyes scanning the names and her nails brushing over the ink strokes that designated islands and mountains, forests and valleys, that she’d never known existed.
“The Dark Isle—Solaris?” That was how the Main Continent was marked. The man had said something about the Dark Isle as well. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“The Dark Isle is what the rest of the world calls us.”
How could a man from off the continent be communicating with her? Nothing was adding up and all Vi wanted to do was curl back up in her library where things made sense.
“I don’t understand… If this is real, why have I never seen it? Why have I never heard of it before?” Questions swirled in her mind, all beginning withwhy.
“Only those of royal blood, and the lords or ladies that oversee each of the Empire’s parts, know this truth. You would have found out eventually, before you took your throne, but it is now relevant to everything you must learn.”
“Not why haven’tIlearned of it…” Vi shook her head, trying to rephrase her question. “Why is this not taught to everyone? Why isn’t it common knowledge?”
“Many reasons, but two reign among them. The first is that Meru seeks to keep us cut off from the world. They govern trade and travel with an iron fist, and should any vessels from our lands stray too close to them without proper approval, they’re immediately sunk without question. Some say they even employ the pirates that terrorize the Shattered—Barrier—Isles.”
“And the other reason?” Vi barely glanced up from the map, already trying to memorize it.
Now that the initial shock, and irrational feelings of betrayal toward an inanimate object, had begun to fade, fascination was taking over. She needed a distraction, and her mood could rarely stay sour around a new map. Every curve of the cartographer’s brush left Vi wondering. Wondering what was there, what stories were out there to unfold… and why she felt like even though this was certainly the first time she’d learned of the greater world, she could already count every island in the Shattered Isles with her eyes closed.
“Power.” How many times in history had that been the reason for doing or not doing something? “As far as the people of the Solaris Empire know, the ‘Main Continent’ is the world—the only one that matters, at least. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that the Crescent Continent is filled with nothing but dangerous and barbaric peoples and things?”
“But it’s not… is it?” Vi whispered, her vision coming back to her of the queen draped in silks, and the courtyard that looked like it belonged in her dreamscape of the Southern castle, not on a land declared by the Empire to lack civilization. Of course there was more to it. Her father had set out to meet with their leaders about a cure. That didn’t seem like something he would do if the Crescent Continent was nothing more than roving bands of disorganized peoples.
“It’s not. As you can see, we are a very, very small portion of the world. But by giving the people of the Solaris Empire pride—pride in seeing themselves as the pinnacle of the world—they strive to fight harder, to follow the rules, and to oblige their Empire.”
“Doesn’t it seem… dishonest?” Vi frowned, looking up from the map. All her life she’d been complicit in the greatest lie of them all without even knowing it.
