Page 40 of The Shattered King

I took a few steps into the salon, marveling at a gilded frame around a large oil-painted portrait of the king, when I heard voices to my left.

Assuming that to be the bedroom, I followed them, the carpet muffling my footfalls.

The hallway was not well lit, making me second-guess myself, and then I realized an upcoming protrusion in the wall was not stone but a shoulder.

“There is no point in it,” a woman’s voice whispered forcefully, angrily.

“There is if you’ve chosen to hide it,” retorted a man.

“It is not as you think, I—” And then, louder, “What are you doing here?”

I immediately recognized the queen’s condescending tone at full volume, and the owner of the shoulder turned to look at me—Prince Adrinn.

My mind buzzed like a hive with their faces pinned to their words, turning them over and trying to sort out the riddle. Outwardly, I explained, “I’ve been summoned to heal His Majesty the king.”

Casting a hard glare at her stepson, Queen Winvrin whisked toward me, forcing me to back up to allow her room. She crossed the salon to the hall opposite the one I had taken. “Here, and quickly. You should not be away from my son.”

Prince Adrinn stepped into the salon, his arms folded loosely across his chest, watching me like a snake might watch a mouse.

Turning my back to him, I took the hallway and entered the largest bedroom I had ever beheld.

Three men stood guard there, two with red cinctures and one with green, and the king lay propped up on his bed, looking very ill.

He did not sweat, but his face had a notable pallor to it.

His wedding pendant lay atop his shirt, though it had fallen to his shoulder.

I’d never beheld a larger pendant—a gold rhombus inset with a ruby the size of a robin’s egg.

When he coughed, I reached for the handkerchief in my pocket, but he did not cough up blood like his son did, and it proved unneeded.

“Your Majesty.” I curtsied. “My name is Nym Tallowax; we’ve met briefly before. You sent for me?”

He weakly waved me forward. “Show me what it is you do for my son, healer. I am ready to end this.”

I did, touching his clammy skin and falling into his lumis.

One might think the king of Cansere would have a remarkable lumis, but if anything whispered of equality among men, it was lumie.

King Grejor’s was not any more magnificent than my own, or Brien’s, or Lonnie’s.

His I could best describe as an anthill made of the finest beads, constantly renewing itself like a fountain of sand, or perhaps like the volcanoes I’d heard travelers talk of.

The hill was larger than me, but in a lumis I did not have the same limitations as in reality, and I floated up on magic to inspect it.

His illness was not fatal; he hardly had any death lines to speak of.

There was a cluster of something dark and ugly in the hill’s spout, stopping some of the beads’ movement.

I reached in, grasped it, and pulled it free, then willed it to disintegrate in my hand.

It fell harmlessly into the pile, mixing in with like, and I shifted back to the present.

King Grejor stood immediately; I backstepped to avoid him running into me.

He was much taller than I’d realized, standing easily at six and a half feet.

He breathed deeply and nodded. “Wonderful.” He strode from the room, but before departing, told one of the guards, “Talk to my steward and see that she is rewarded.”

The offer pleased me, though as that same guard escorted me out, my mind still tangled in the opposite hallway. The queen and the heir had left, but their hushed words stuck to me. They had been arguing. The queen was hiding something, and the eldest prince did not like it.

But I could not, for the life of me, conclude what it meant.

The winter ball took place on my birthday.

I did not tell anyone this, even Lonnie, namely because preparations for the feast had made her scarce.

However, my reward from the king came that morning: a basket with apples and a type of imported fruit round as a ball and bright orange, along with a bottle of wine.

Such a thing would fetch a hefty price in Fount, and I enjoyed one of the orange fruits with my breakfast, savoring every tart, juicy bite.

Already this proved a better birthday than I was used to having, though I wished desperately I could share the basket with Brien, Lissel, Dan, Colt, Heath, Pren, and Terrence.

I wish I could see their wide eyes as I sliced the apples.

Pren would take the seeds and hope to grow her own trees; Terrence would surely find something to craft with the peels from the orange fruit. And Brien would—

“Brien would not be with us,” I whispered, the glee of the fancy drying and cracking.

“ He might be, ” Ursa offered. “ He might have already come home, and you simply haven’t received word yet. ”

I spent most of the day dowsing into Renn, ensuring everything was as fit as could be for the ball that night, because his mother expected him to dance, and he hated to disappoint her. As I finished his maintenance earlier than I’d expected, I decided to work more on my theories.

If I could re-form Renn solely with magic, I could speed up his healing process. It would be like giving a new arm to an amputee.

My lips parted at the thought. Amputees. I could heal a mangled arm, but I could not reattach an amputated one. Had the soldier skewered by the portcullis had his leg severed, I could heal the stump, but not reattach the leg. The part of his lumis representing his leg would be missing.

If I figured out how to do this, I wondered if the magic would stretch so far as to give an amputee a new limb.

Refocusing myself, I cupped my hands together and summoned magic, carefully forming it into a sphere. The metaphor of clay on a potter’s wheel came to mind again.

“It’s so ... messy.” Ursa’s lip curled as she watched the potter trickle water onto the gray clay. His foot pumped a pedal at the wheel’s base, keeping it turning.

I marveled, reaching out to touch the stuff, but my mother pulled me back. “We’re just watching, Nym,” she chided.

I’d never seen a pot made from scratch before. I wanted to sink my fingers into the muddy clay. But I watched as the potter pushed his hands into the mound, slowly forming a rounded base and long neck.

“It’s just like your picture!” I announced. My mother’s drawing of a vase rested on a nearby table.

She smiled. “Margaret will be so happy to have a replacement, don’t you think?”

Brien had not been allowed to come to the potter’s shop. He was home with Father, punishment for breaking our neighbor’s vase.

The potter formed a mouth with his fingers. Lightly touched up the sides before stopping the wheel. Then, with a taut wire, he sliced the vase from the wheel and carefully set it on a shelf.

The memory had me thinking. The vase had to become separate from the wheel on which it had been formed. It had to stand on its own.

I was the potter, and the magic was the clay. So how could I tie it off from me and give it to Renn?

I grew the glimmering globe of magic a little more, then twisted my hands, imagining myself cutting it off—no, tying it off—from my palms, almost like twisting a paper around a taffy. When I pulled back, the orb remained, floating right where I had been holding it.

A laugh scraped up my throat. I did it.

I marveled at my creation, but after about a minute, its structure began to fail, and it rippled away, leaving no trace. Still, I had come a little farther, and that meant something. I just needed more time to sort it all out.

I slipped out of Renn’s lumis, leaving him an hour to prepare.

He put on his Truline attire, the outfit made for his birthday.

I understood why the tailor was so renowned; the cloth fit Renn precisely, maybe even a little snuggly, as he’d continued his exercise and training regimens.

He did not have the larger bone structure of his brother, and I could not decide how he looked like his sister, though their noses were similar, and their temperaments, if Renn was in a good mood.

Otherwise Renn was rather quick to anger, like me, while the angriest I’d ever seen the princess was when she was shouting at Prince Adrinn during his brief scuffle with Renn.

Renn came out and looked in the small mirror on the salon wall as he fastened a broad white cincture around his hips. “My mother wants me to cut my hair.”

“Don’t,” I blurted.

He glanced back at me. His blond hair had the slightest wave to it and fell over his forehead, tendrils of it into his eyes. Cut shorter around his ears, then longer again down his neck. He’d always had beautiful hair. I was glad only women upheld the fashion of straightening theirs.

“A trim, surely,” I amended, fixing my eyes on his hair and not his face. “But it will have to wait until after the party.”

I felt him smile at me. “You’d best get ready, too, shadow.”

I too put on the same dress I wore to Renn’s birthday celebration, the pale-green fabric soft and supple.

It was the finest dress of my acquaintance, even more so than my handsewn wedding gown, which I had burned four years ago.

I carefully worked a comb through my hair so the curls wouldn’t frizz; even if I wanted to straighten it, it would take me hours, which was time I refused to donate to such a pointless, tedious task.

I had no pins for it, so it was a braid or down.

I wore it down, a blanket against the chill.

The agate necklace bulged awkwardly beneath my bodice, so I pulled it free.

It didn’t match the colors of the gown, but I hardly cared.

I was only a shadow at this event, and a shadow I would remain.

I met him in the hallway, his gaze dropping to the necklace and warming. “Nym, you look—”