“Planning to kill me?” The hallway firelight catches my father’s face as he looks up with a bemused smile. “I didn’t expect a welcome home party, but betrayal by my own flesh and blood is a little much.”
My magic bursts into mist. “You’re…you’re home.”
“A few hours ago.” He steps toward me.
We perform a stumbling dance of “how should we greet?” before I place my fingers on my pulse and bow. It’s even more uncomfortable than when I came home, as if our relationship has regressed. Then again, I did almost murder him. I have found that always kills the mood and stiffens the air. Sadness touches his eyes as I rise from my respects and I yearn to withdraw the last five minutes and somehow fix our dysfunctional shuffle.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe when you want connection so desperately, people can see it.
He walks back to the desk and nods at the mountain of paperwork. “I forgot how messy you are.”
“Looking for something?”
“The twenty-first treaty actually.”
“I have it over here.” I pull out the bundle. “And in these drawers are the plans for the new school and updates on the water system. And here is the bill about the Untouched. It’s going to be bloody awful to pass, but it needs to happen.” I catch my father smiling. “There is some order to the chaos,” I try to say without sounding defensive and resentful. I can do this. For weeks I was the raja of Naupure and the Night of Belwar.
“I’d hoped so.” He crosses his arms and leans on the desk. “You wrote about all the bills and plans. But tell me, how are you getting on with Adraa?”
It’s the last thing I want to talk about. “It’s a slow development.”
“But no domestic abuse, right?”
I laugh roughly. “She hasn’t hit me.” But she has torn at my heart, almost died in front of me a few times, left me in the Underground alone wondering what the blood was going on. On second thought “slow development” doesn’t sound right. I might have gone backward.
“Since we are covering all the big things that happened in my absence, want to explain this?” He holds up the poster with my masked face plastered on it. It looks nothing like me thanks to Adraa’s black magic spell, but of course there’s no denying it to him.
“You wanted me to be a part of it.”
“You two have gone far beyond gathering information.”
“Yeah, that’s mainly Adraa. The night I met her she had the intention of ambushing a dozen Vencrin by herself.”
He sighs. “I’m guessing you won’t stop, even if I ask.”
“You want me tonothelp her?”
He shakes his head and runs his hands through his thinning hair. Do I do that? Sometimes I catch myself trying to define our similarities or habits. And most of the time I come away with nothing.
“You are my only heir, Jatin. Three times, my brother reminded me his son, your cousin, has taken the ceremony over a year ago. They will find any way to dethrone you. Your death would make it beyond easy to disrupt Naupure’s entire future.”
“It might have started by helping Adraa, but now it’s about helping everyone. Do you realize what these Vencrin are capable of? I want this. For once in my life I feel like a normal wizard who can make a difference.”
He stares at me for a long moment. “You’re a lot like her.”
“Adraa?”
“No, your mother.” He scans the big map on the wall and clutches his wedding bangle. “She didn’t want the throne either. All the power-hungry people in this world and my family simply wants a normal life.” His eyes jerk to me. “But that will make you a great maharaja, I think.”
The mention of my mother not only stings, it scorches. It’s as if my father only brings my mother up to unravel me. He doesn’t speak of her. I learned not to ask. And now he thinks he can compliment me into submission. To blood with that. “I’m not stopping.”
He sees something in my eyes. We face each other in silence. Whoever breaks first…
“At least tell me what you’ve discovered,” he finally says.
I sigh, the tension of our silence unwinding slightly. “We’ve traced it. It goes from East District warehouses to Pier Sixteen. But we haven’t found any evidence that it’s Moolek stealing the firelight. And, more importantly, we haven’t found out why it’s being stolen. Adraa and I think it may just be to tarnish the Belwar name. Prove how unstable it is in the market so that Untouched resort back to candles and thus Moolek’s ghee.”
“Maybe.” My father rubs his chin. “But you have no concrete proof yet?”
