“I don’t care to sit around smoking cigars with bloated braggadocios. Politicking is one thing. Politics is another.”
He was right about the river kingdom. For as long as Mia could remember, Glasddirans had subsisted on their own meager wares: linen and wool, timber, salty meats, soft cheeses, and seemingly unlimited barrels of blackthorn wine, which she had always found rather watery. Glas Ddir had sunk into rawboned poverty, and nowhere was that more evident than in Killian Village.
“We should keep moving,” she said as they ducked out of the alley and hastened down another filthy avenue of cobblestones. They weren’t moving as fast as Mia would have liked. “You have to keep up.”
“I’m trying,” Quin huffed. “Turns out nearly dying is pretty exhausting.”
“So is saving your life. Turns out.”
A girl with a torn linen dress and large, hungry eyes staggered past. Was she coming from the brothels? She was much too young. Mia’s stomach tightened like a fist. She wished she had a pouch of silver coins to give the girl, or food, or gemstones from the castle—anything to deliver a dose of hope.
Quin shook his head. “I don’t go into the village often, but when I do, I am always reminded of the true cost of my father’s policies. I do what I can to help.”
Mia was surprised by the prince’s candor. In the library she’d called him coddled, when in fact he’d been out making mercy visits to impoverished Glasddirans. Her mother had done this, too; for years Wynna traveled to various alpine villages and river towns on the banks of the Natha River, even all the way to Killian Village, to administer medicine to people who were sick. What had Mia spent the last few years doing? Reading anatomy books in the rarified air of Ilwysion.
Mia cringed. She was the coddled one.
“Excuse me, miss?”
She whirled around to see a boy about Quin’s age, though his back had the stoop of an old man. He didn’t look Glasddiran; his dark freckles spilled like specks of ink across his cool bronze skin, and beneath his tangle of black hair, there was something fragile about him, a dull glaze in his thin silvery eyes. Though he addressed her as “miss,” his voice had the strains of nobility.
He nodded toward her and the prince. Mia felt Quin bristle beside her.
“Do you seek a place to stay?”
She wanted nothing more than to sleep in a warm bed. Her limbs were thick with fatigue. But if they stayed in the village, they would be discovered by the guards, or worse: the Hunters.
The boy read her hesitance correctly. “Nourishment, then. For your journey. I don’t have much to offer you, but I have this.” He held out a small loaf of bread and a pouch of snow plums. Mia noticed his right hand was missing two fingers.
“At what cost?” she said. For all she knew, the boy was one of the king’s spies, men stationed at village brothels to report suspicious activity. There were spies everywhere, hungry men desperate for the reward money Ronan offered for turning over any girl suspected of practicing magic.
“No cost, miss.” He paused. “You remind me of my sister, is all.”
Quin stared at the boy intently. “Where is your sister?”
“She’s gone. Taken.”
“By Gwyrach?”
“No, sir. By the king’s men.”
Mia’s stomach twisted yet again. She had heard talk of girls no older than twelve or thirteen being rounded up by Ronan’s guards and brought straight to Kaer Killian, bypassing the Circle of the Hunt. Some girls were deemed innocent and returned to their families. Some were never seen again.
She wanted to dismiss the rumors, but once, during her stay in the castle, she had seen a girl she’d known in Ilwysion, willowy and strong, with radiant olive skin and black hair so silky it fell like a sheet down her back. As a child, this girl had raced three boys up the mountain and won. But she was no longer a graceful, fleet-footed athlete. She was a living doll, heavily made up with skin greases, jewels, and feathers dipped in gold. She had been paraded through King Ronan’s court with other favorites from the village brothel, and when Mia saw her, she’d felt sick.
Yet another way in which Mia was privileged: as the daughter of Griffin Rose, she had been spared a similar fate.
“We have to go,” she said to Quin. They were already risking detection. If the boy recognized the prince, he would be all the more inclined to point the guards in the right direction.
“Please.” The boy took a step forward, and Mia noticed a hitch in his gait. He held out the provisions. “A gift.”
He was staring relentlessly at her arms. She wasn’t wearing gloves—she’d left them behind in the tunnels, she realized. The boy would report them for sure. Mia felt a wave of nausea: he should report her. She was a Gwyrach.
“We must go now,” she whispered fiercely in Quin’s ear.
As she turned to go, she saw the prince reach out to accept the food, his fingers lingering for an extra moment on the boy’s palm. If Quin were a woman, that touch would have cost him his hand.
“Be well, Your Grace,” the boy said softly as they slunk back into the shadows. So he had recognized Quin from the beginning.
Mia wondered how much they had just sacrificed for a bag of bread and plums.
Her mother’s journal had magic. That much was clear. Normal ink in normal books did not suddenly appear on the page. As she squinted at the elegant handwriting, she felt a squirm of discomfort. She’d spent the last three years singularly focused on expunging magic in all forms. Now, without warning, she had become a magical creature holding a magical book.
Did that mean her mother was magical, too?
“It’s hopeless.” Quin was panting, his cheeks ruddy from exertion. They’d made it to the outskirts of the village and were nearing the river. “The guards have horses. And dogs. My dogs, who know my scent. We have four legs between us, and shaky legs at that. Unless you can magic your way out of this”—he wiggled his fingers in the air—“we don’t stand a chance.”
The thing about the color flooding back into his cheeks was that all his usual surliness was flooding back, too.
“Magic,” she said, “is not a verb.”
Or maybe it was. She clearly had a patchy understanding of what magic was and wasn’t. It hit her all over again: she was a Gwyrach. Demon. Murderer.
Mia brushed the thought aside. She refocused her attention on the map.
Her mother had sketched the castle and Killian Village, but the landmasses to the west and south were conspicuously absent, blank space on a flaxen page. To the east she’d drawn the serpentine Natha River, with a mysterious crescent squiggle at the fork, and then the westernmost borders of the tall trees of Ilwysion. But the forest vanished long before it reached the Twisted Forest or the eastern coastline, where the Salted Sea connected the river kingdom to the islands of the fire kingdom. Almost as if Wynna had run out of ink.
So, Mia reasoned. If the ink had filled in to the east, they were right to be moving in that direction. She’d never been ruled by instinct—she wasn’t the impetuous sort—but this time, her instincts had proven correct.
She scoffed at her own flawed logic. She was staring at a fanciful map rendered in fanciful ink, attempting to read meaning into an inscription that, for all she knew, was nothing more than one of her mother’s riddles. The path will reveal itself to she who seeks it. All you seek will be revealed. Wynna had always had a poet’s love for syllogism and a jester’s sense of play.
Mia, on the other hand, had a habit of taking things too literally, something Domeniq du Zol liked to chide her for during their Hunter training sessions. “You take the world too seriously,” he often said.
“I take the world at its purported value,” Mia would correct him. “As anyone with common sense would do.”
She didn’t even have her beloved compass to help chart her path. This was not the Mia Rose she knew.