Page 66

Ten Years Ago

Iljaria—the Prism Master’s house

The window to my father’s office is open again, the summer breeze blowing in, scented with salt water and honeysuckle.

I’m sitting in an overlarge chair, my feet not touching the ground, facing my father behind his desk.

I broke my shoulder in training a few hours ago, and it’s still knitting itself back together, tingling with the effects of my father’s power but no longer painful.

He says it won’t hurt when he locks away my magic, but I’m afraid he might be lying.

“I won’t—I won’t use it,” I plead, studying my chipped fingernails so I won’t have to meet my father’s piercing eyes. “I haven’t used it, all these months. You can trust me. I won’t betray us.”

“You will betray us in small ways, Brynja,” he tells me. “You aren’t even aware of it, perhaps, but you have used your magic, every single day since your training began.”

I bristle with anger, but my father holds up one hand to forestall me.

“Magic curls round you when you sleep, little one. You can’t help it, and you certainly can’t stop it.

Sometimes, when you’re hurrying home, or attempting a particularly difficult leap, you tell the earth to move for you, the bar to swing for you, the air to shift for you.

Not consciously, perhaps, but you still do it.

You breathe magic, Bryn. Nothing you can do will ever stop that. ”

I sag in the chair, because I know he’s right.

“It won’t hurt,” he says, returning to his original claim. “And it will be over quickly. But we must do it now. Are you ready, Brynja?”

I bite my lip to hold back the tears because I refuse to cry about this. I nod.

He gets up from his chair and comes over to mine. He stands behind me, gathering my mass of white curls and tying them up. The intimacy of this simple gesture startles me—my father has never even hugged me in all my life.

“Close your eyes.”

I do. Color swirls before me, sparks of magic. My father puts his hands on each of my temples, warm and astonishingly gentle, for all the power that seethes beneath his skin.

Suddenly there are needles boring into my skull, a thousand pricks of unbearable, glistering pain. Somewhere outside of myself I’m screaming, but inside my head all I know is magic, boiling and raging, swirling round me, drowning me in bronze and amethyst and cerulean.

It hurts, it hurts so much , and yet I have no voice, no being. I am trapped in a moment of time, and I think I will die here.

Then I am walking through a corridor made of magic, whorls of prismatic colors sparking in and out of existence. I have hands again, and I reach out to touch one of the whorls. It creeps into me, filling me with warmth and strength, easing some of the pain.

At the end of the corridor, I step into a small chamber that is seemingly made of stone. A window looks out into blackness, and in the center of the room, a figure crouches over a small worktable, where a single candle burns.

I go up to the figure and find that he is a man, or the ruin of one. His ears and nose have been hewn off, his eyes put out. He has no feet and no hands, but he pinches a hammer between the stumps of his arms, and with it he strikes a small chest.

Sparks fly off the hammer, and the candle flame dances in a breeze I do not feel. I wonder why the candle is there at all; the world is only darkness to him, no matter how much light there is.

I realize that the candle is for me.

“What are you making?” I ask.

He must still be able to hear through the wreckage of his ears. He lifts his maimed face to mine.

Look and see, he says into my mind, for his tongue is gone, too. He turns from the worktable to offer the chest to me while I openly stare at him, not quite believing all the stories I’ve heard, not quite believing that the Bronze Lord is here with me at all.

“What are you doing in my head?”

He gives a soundless laugh. Binding magic requires much power. He sets the chest on the table, nudges it open with the stump of his arm.

The chest is wholly empty.

It is for you, says the Bronze Lord in my mind. For your magic. Will you give it to me?

“I don’t want to.”

Then you would not have come here.

It is disconcerting to look at him, but I am not repulsed by him. His skin is a warm brown; his white hair hangs shining and straight past his shoulders. Once, I think, he must have been beautiful. Surely another of the First Ones could heal him. Restore him to what he once was.

“It is my father who wishes to bind my magic so that I can save our people.”

And what do you wish?

The candle flame wavers, and there’s a flash of light outside the window. “To make him proud,” I whisper. “To make him love me.” I hadn’t known this burned so fiercely in my heart until this moment. Sorrow and wanting grip me.

The Bronze Lord nods, and I find myself wondering what color his eyes were, before they were put out. Then you know what you must do.

“I know.” I shake and shake, and I think it odd that I have a body inside my own mind that can do any of those things. “Take my magic, then.”

He smiles, but there is no joy in it. His lips form a soundless word that sparks bright, and the chest lifts into the air, spinning slowly. A pair of long silver hooks appear in front of him, and I get the idea that he holds them with hands that no longer exist.

I am sorry, says the Bronze Lord.

The hooks stretch toward me, sinking into my temples.

For a moment I don’t feel anything.

Then, pain, brittle, burning. Colors burst behind my eyes, and I am dust, I am stars, I am nowhere, I am nothing, nothing.

The hooks pull and pull, tearing my magic out of me and piling it like glittering sand inside the chest. The pain goes on and on; the hooks take and take.

But the chest is never full.

I sink to my knees in that not-place, surrendering myself to the eternal torment of the Bronze Lord.

And then it’s over.

I lift my head to find the hooks on the floor, the chest filled, shut, locked. The Bronze Lord pinches it between the stumps of his arms.

This belongs to you, he says, the words resounding inside me solemn and sorrowful. You must hide it away yourself.

The room changes around me, taking the Bronze Lord with it, and I am alone in a stone cavern, the chest of magic heavy in my arms. The cavern is obviously ancient, filled with carved pillars and crumbling statues. It stretches on into infinity in every direction.

Dimly, I’m aware of the self that is outside of all this, screaming in my father’s office with his hands pressing against my temples. But here, in my mind, there is no pain. The chest grows so heavy I can barely hold it, and it burns my arms like it’s made of iron.

I shove it into a crack in the stone, near the statue of a young woman whose hands and feet, nose and ears, have all crumbled away in an eerie echo of the Bronze Lord.

I turn, shuddering, and find myself in my father’s office again, light streaming through the window, honeysuckle and saltwater wind tickling my nose.

My father draws his hands away, not meeting my eyes. I wonder if he feels guilty for lying to me. But I have nothing to say to him. Not now.

I slide from the chair, wiping tears from my eyes, realizing dimly that Brandr has been here this whole time, perched on a stool in the corner, watching us.

I run out onto the hills, away from the house, away from the sea.

I run and run, until I find a little hollow where wildflowers lie thick as a carpet, and a shiny green snake winds its way through the grass.

I sink down among the flowers and hug my knees to my chest, reaching and reaching for just an ounce of my magic.

But it isn’t there.

I am hollow.

Powerless.

I am not Iljaria anymore.

I am Brynja Sindri. A Skaandan acrobat.

I weep there bitterly, for hours. Because I didn’t know it would be like this. Didn’t know, didn’t know.

A week later, I leave for Skaanda.

My father doesn’t tell me goodbye.