“You’re his loyal servant,” she snapped. “You’re just like him, like all of them, looking for power, looking to use me—”
“I am not like him!” Victor slammed his open palm on the desk and leaned forward. “I have watched that man use sorcerers as tools. I have seen him degrade our people for the power that flows through them. I have endured him taking my students and teachers to be nothing more than cutthroats! I have watched him take a library girl and turn her into a “wretch of death” for no other reason than it suited him best.”
For being a Waterrunner, fire was alive in Victor’s usually icy eyes.
“I have balanced protecting my Tower, my sorcerer kin, against his aims and not lost my head in the process. For if I die, there would be no shield for people like us.” Victor sighed, his shoulders slumping.
The minister knelt before her and rested a palm on her knee. She stiffened at the contact; it was part fatherly and part not—combined, it felt entirely wrong. “My dear girl, do you really think I’d let him have you again?”
“So what do you want?” Vhalla asked finally. “What are you risking everything for?”
“I want to protect people like us.” Victor met her eyes. “I want to fight for a world where sorcerers aren’t feared, but revered by Commons for our powers. Where no one would think to use us. Where a sorcerer would never have to hide.”
Vhalla searched his face for a trace of insincerity. Finding none, she asked, “What do you want with the axe?”
“I want to return it to the caverns and see that no one will be able to think of using it again.” Victor’s face was overcome by an intense severity. “Do you trust me on this?”
She ran her fingers over the saddlebag, searching for the buckle on the front, searching her heart for the answer. Did she trust him? If anything, out of everyone, Victor was the one person who’d only helped her at every turn. He healed her after her fall. He stood up for her in her trial. He trusted her with knowledge of the axe, with the task of bringing it to him safely and keeping it from the Emperor or the Knights of Jadar.
Vhalla unlatched the saddlebag as her answer. Victor stared intently as Vhalla produced the legendary crystal axe, Achel.
“ACHEL,” VICTOR BREATHED. “It’s here.”
Vhalla studied the minister’s face as the soft and unnatural glow of the crystal lit his brow. The man shifted his eyes to catch hers, and Vhalla did nothing to hide her study of his person. Victor’s lips curled into a conspiratorial smile.
“I want to know about the caverns.” Her research had only yielded splotchy patches of color. She wanted to paint the picture. She wanted to finally see what everyone else had been looking at all along.
“I bet you do.” Victor peeled himself away from her. He felt twice as tall, suddenly, as he loomed over her. “But first I need to know, what do you want?”
“What do I want?” she repeated, cautiously.
“I told you my dream. I told you the world I’m prepared to fight for. What do you want?”
Rather than speaking the first thing that came into her mind, Vhalla remained silent, introspective. She mulled over the question, letting it settle across her mind and stretch into the cracks where she’d pushed her hopes and dreams into—things that had been too dangerous for her to engage in while she had been property of the Empire.
“I want . . . I want a future again. I want peace. I want freedom. I want to be free of people trying to use me for my magic.”
“So we want the same thing.” Victor beamed. “I’m relieved to know we’re aligned in this.”
“What are we aligned in, exactly?” Vhalla settled back in her chair, watching as Victor rounded his desk to a workbench in the far corner.
“The world we want to strive for—a world where sorcerers aren’t used as tools, a time and place where we are revered and left to our own, rightful sovereignty.” Victor paused his motions. “Tea?”
“Sure,” Vhalla agreed cautiously. “How do you think we can get to your future? And what part does the axe play in it?”
“We will use it to make sure no one will be able to access the Crystal Caverns ever again.” Victor placed a steaming cup of tea on the desk before her.
“How?” Vhalla took the item in question from the saddlebag, placing it on the desk next to the steaming tea she sipped gingerly.
“How much do you already know about the Crystal Caverns?” Victor sat.
“Not nearly enough. The literature is disappointingly sparse.” Vhalla pondered all the books she’d managed to read about the caverns while working at Gianna’s. “I know the Knights of Jadar needed the axe—or, at least, they thought they did—to tap into the power of the caverns. I know they needed the axe even more than a Windwalker . . .” A thought suddenly hit her. “Wait, Victor. Am I truly the first Windwalker?”
The minister set his own cup of tea down thoughtfully. “The first to be known again. The first to return to the world as far as the general populous is concerned.”