He barely seemed to notice the insult, instead taking a bite of the cake. His expression didn’t change as he ate it, and he didn’t say a thing, but he finished his slice before I did mine and watched me eat every last bite.
Then, as if he’d simply been waiting for me to finish, he reached into his pocket, withdrawing a folded letter with Illucia’s royal seal. He slid it across the table to me, but I didn’t take it.
“This,” he said, “is a letter to General Castel. She leads the army currently sitting on your border.”
A chill dripped slowly down the back of my neck, turning every muscle to ice. He continued, “In it are instructions to destroy your outposts for ten miles in every direction and to leave no survivors but one, who will be sent back here as proof that my order has been carried out.”
My breath slipped in and out quick as a wingbeat, my jaw aching from clenching it so tight.
“Say whatever you’d like to me, Princess. Snap and curse and insult until your throat is raw. But remember why I’m here. Remember there’s an army sitting on your border full of soldiers who have been trained to do one thing their entire life: kill.”
The word echoed with promise. He was playing with me, trying to make me feel powerless. It worked. The situation felt slippery, out of my control.
He left the letter on the table and stood. “We leave for Illucia the day after tomorrow,” he said and stalked back inside. His presence lingered, the space he’d occupied as solid as if he were still there.
I sent a servant to Caliza to convey the news of my imminent departure and Ericen’s threat. Then I ordered the letter burned. Only once every fragment had turned to ash did I go upstairs.
* * *
I couldn’t sleep. Ericen’s threat had followed me upstairs and draped itself across my shoulders, whispering promises of burning towers and bloodstained earth.
Tomorrow. I had tomorrow, and then we left for Illucia.
I knelt before my armoire, the egg cradled in my lap, my fingers skimming along the shell. Its soft humming gave me little comfort in the face of everything that stood before me.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow was my mother’s birthday. Or would have been. Now it was my last chance. There was no guarantee I could hatch the egg, so we couldn’t risk denying Razel. But if I could figure out a way to hatch it before I left, I wouldn’t be forced to leave tomorrow for Illucia, the spoils of a phantom war.
There had to be a way.
Tucking the egg away, I dressed in boots and a cloak before slipping out of my room. The hallways were quiet, the sona lamps burning low against the darkness. I plucked one carefully off the wall, holding it at arm’s length as I traced my way to the nearest stairway leading to the upper levels. Moonlight poured in through massive windows, illuminating the stairwell and revealing dust and cobwebs thick as my hair.
I stepped out two floors up. The stone walls were bare, the hallways empty. Any art and furniture had been relocated to the bottom floors or sold. My footsteps echoed in the unfilled space, trailing me like ghosts. A shiver trickled down my spine, and I held the sona lamp higher.
It felt strange being in the upper levels again, and I made a point of walking more softly. Making noise felt wrong, like any sound might shake more than dust free from the walls. So many memories slept in these halls. I half expected to see shimmerences, the spirits that dwell in forgotten places, floating in the air in wisps of silvery smoke.
The upstairs library was at the end of the corridor. Perhaps the downstairs one hadn’t had the books I’d needed because they wouldn’t have been moved down there. They’d have been left to gather dust in the hopes they could be forgotten.
I pushed open one tall oak door, the image of a crow carved into the wood. The sound echoed in the high-ceilinged library, and I paused in the doorway. Rows of half-empty shelves spread out before me like a sea of tombstones. Several long tables sat near the back of the room, only visible by the beams of moonlight trickling in from the tall, narrow windows.
I stepped forward, turning up the gas on my lamp, and began to search.
Nearly half an hour later, I had a sizeable stack of books set on one of the back tables, my sona lamp casting a warm orange glow across the page of a tome spread open before me. I’d searched for anything to do with the crows, focusing mainly on instructional texts. I’d even found several with chapters about hatching, but each of them skipped over the details of the actual process, and nothing hinted at why they hatched simultaneously.
Hours later, my eyes strained in the darkness, and a throbbing pain gathered behind one temple. Each useless book was like a nail in my coffin.
Sliding another failed book to the side, I reached for the last of my pile. It was thin, with a cover so worn that most of the title was illegible, only the wordMagicdecipherable on the faded leather. I’d expected it to be on the different types of crow abilities, but as I scanned the first page, I realized it wasn’t a book at all but a journal written in a large, looping scrawl.
“Little is understood about how magic truly worked for the Sellas before their disappearance,” I read quietly to myself. “But one aspect scholars agree on is the existence of magic lines, or hereditary magic. After thorough research, I believe these magic lines create a connection across generations, perhaps similar to the way a crow and a rider are linked. And like other traits vary among family, growing stronger or weaker along the line, so too can the magic line manifest differently, even among siblings.”
I read faster, skimming through the journal beneath the fading glow of my lamp. It was short and half-finished, consisting mostly of Sella lore and history the author used to support their claims. If they were right, this might explain why riders typically came from the same families over the course of generations. Maybe whatever it was the crow latched on to was passed down from parent to child.
Could the way to hatch the crows be related to these lines somehow?
Footsteps echoed outside the library. Frowning, I doused my lamp and moved behind a nearby bookcase. The footsteps grew louder, and a light appeared down the center hall between the shelves. I peered around the edge.
Ericen stood in the doorway, glancing from bookcase to bookcase as if trying to decide where to start. I cursed silently. He was everywhere; I couldn’t escape him. Surely, it would only be worse in Illucia. He was in my head, in my thoughts and my emotions. He’d burrowed underneath my skin with his vicious smiles and barbed, caustic words, and everywhere I went, there he was.
