“There’s no proof of that,” I say, with a savage twist in my stomach. “No one has ever found any of the gold they claimed she stole.”
“On the contrary,” says Bryn, blinking at me, bemused. “Gold is exactly what they found, and plenty of it.”
I stare back at her. For days after our house was burned, guards sifted through the ashes, and for years after, fortune hunters kicked through the charred brick and charcoal rubble left behind. Nothing of any worth was ever recovered, and there were nights when I would lie awake, convinced the gold had never even existed.
Not that it stopped me from searching the ashes myself not that long ago, so desperate for money to save Cadence I had resorted to believing in legends.
“Your mother was a transferent,” Bryn says. “Her crime was not in stealing gold but, rather, stealing magic.”
I drag myself to my feet, weight braced against the table. “That’s impossible,” I say. “My mother was not a magician. Your father’s provost would have known.”
“Mercer can only sense when someone uses magic,” Bryn says. “He can’t tell if an ability lies dormant. But whenever you transfer magic, some of it inevitably strays. Like the last drop of water you thought you drank.” She picks up the wooden cup Alistair had set on the table and upends it. A drop of water slides out and hits the floor. “Mercer never would have found her and you’d all be living happily ever after in some hovel somewhere, but your mother got greedy and she got caught.” She snorts. “They always do.”
I shake my head, teeth clenched so tight my jaw aches. I’ve heard worse said of my mother—often from myself—but it annoys me the way Bryn tells the story as if she knows all the details.
As if she knows more than I do.
“It’s not unusual for a magician to have more than one ability,” Alistair cuts in. “Your mother was also a spellcaster. For two weeks after her arrest, everything she touched—everyone she touched—turned into gold.”
Now I know they’re lying to me. Somebody, some guard or palace servant, would have carried that kind of story out of the palace and into the taverns years ago. Or maybe they did, which is how rumors of her crime began.
“My father is not nearly so talented,” says Bryn, beginning to pace. Her skirts hiss across the floor behind her. “He wanted that spell, but removing something so complicated would have frayed its edge; it would have fallen apart in the process. It was your mother’s guarantee that he wouldn’t touch her. She was too valuable to kill.”
I hate the way my stomach somersaults, the way my palms start to sweat; I hate that even now, my mother holds power over me. “Is she alive?”
Uncomfortable silence follows my question, answer enough. Yet Alistair confirms it. “Perrote ordered her execution after discovering she had woven a caveat into her spell. The gold would only last a fortnight before it turned to ash.”
Two weeks. The time of respite between my mother’s arrest and the time the guards returned with torches. So she sacrificed our family for what? For two weeks of playing wizard?
“What was the point?” I ask darkly.
“The point was that for two weeks,” says Bryn, “your mother had the perfect cover to transfer magic without the king questioning anything that might have spilled in the process.”
Reaching into his pocket, Alistair removes a small vial, laying it on the table ahead of me. Ribbons of liquid fire strike against the glass and fragment into narrow threads, suspended in a glossy liquid the color of the winter sky.
Magic.
I stare at it, transfixed. “I don’t understand.”
“The spell was a distraction,” Alistair says. “She intended to steal the magic and run, but when she got caught, she had to change plans.”
“Run? Where?”
“Avinea,” says Bryn.
My mouth floods with saliva.
“After the war, King Merlock abandoned the capital and went into hiding,” Bryn says, tugging at the rings that adorn her slender fingers. “The betrayal of his provosts made him bitter; murdering his brother made him weak. In retaliation, he cut every thread of magic left in the city. Some spells can be recycled, unknotted, and used again and again until the magic fades completely, but to cut a spell apart, it leaves the threads too frayed to do anything but rot. It’s—”
“The plague,” I say with a chill.
“The plague,” she agrees, glancing toward me. “They call it the Burn. It gets into the land and under your skin and . . .”
And you die slowly, poisoned from the inside out, if you die at all. They say that not everyone does, and those who don’t become worse than any shadow creature King Perrote could create to scare us into obedience.
They say there are monsters in Avinea.
Bryn flattens her palms on the table, chewing the paint from her lower lip. “The rules of succession are absolute. Only one man may be king and only the king can wield magic. So long as Merlock lives, his son, Prince Corbin, cannot inherit the crown. And without magic, he cannot stop the Burn from spreading.”
“Prince Corbin?” I repeat, incredulous. “Merlock had a son? And he survived?”
“Avinea survived,” she says impatiently. “But not for much longer. As it is, my father supported Corthen during the war. He’s not high on Avinea’s list of potential allies, nor would he ever willfully offer assistance to Merlock’s heir. Why waste the resources or sign any unnecessary treaties? Another twenty years and Avinea will truly be gone and my father can conquer it without opposition. It’s the perfect strategy: He declared war on Avinea the minute Merlock abandoned it and he’s been winning ever since.”
I dig my fingers into the tabletop. “And my mother knew there was something out there?”
The smile that creeps across Bryn’s face is infuriating: more secrets that she lords over me. “Someone might have told her as much,” she says. “The same someone who told her what tunnels to take when she ran. Who planned to run with her.”
My father?
No. The way they look at me, triumph and pity, denies my assumption. Alistair has the decency to look away as he lights another cigarette, and my stomach sinks: It wasn’t my father who knew the tunnels out of Brindaigel.
It was his.
Bryn plucks the vial from the table, turning it upside down and right side up again. “Clean magic would be worth a fortune to the wife of a tailor out there.”
No. My mother embroidered dresses and grew flowers and had two daughters; she did not steal magic and she did not have lovers and she did not abandon us to the Brim in search of money.
But then I remember the strange way she smelled the night she tried to kill me, like damp stone and stilted air. Like the tunnels.