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“A very old power.” Marquin pulled a chair close and settled onto it. “Few people know it exists, and of those who do, no one is exactly sure what it is. It is not like other mages’ powers we know, which belong wholly to the individual born to them. It is…”
“A being in its own right?” Clare suggested, her voice a bare whisper.
“We believe so.”
I know so.
“What does it want?”
“We don’t know. What we do know is that every time it surfaces, pieces of the world disappear. Twelve hundred years ago it was born into Illora, the Enchantress of Silence, and the continent of Thieren sank into the ocean. Three hundred years after that, Malryn the Weaver was born, and the Iron Keepings burned until they turned to ash. Two hundred years later marked Karnek the Destroyer’s birth and the Deserts of Sorel just…vanished, as if they had never been.
“Things were quiet for a very long time, after that. Until a hundred years ago, when we believe the power began trying to re-enter human form.”
“Trying?” And where did it go, when it wasn’t in human form?
Marquin stood, went to a barrel of scrolls and pulled one out, returning to unroll a map.
Clare stared at it in confusion. Her knowledge of geography was limited, but she knew the names of all the provinces in Faelhorn, and furthermore knew that they were the extent of the world, all clustered together on one continent and one island.
Looking at the map, she saw far more than one continent. A twinge of pain hit in the back of her skull and suddenly the scribblings on the map made sense, the Song always so willing to help her understand things when they were things it wanted her to understand.
She took her temporary ability to read and found the continent labeled Thieren, found the Iron Keepings and the Deserts of Sorel. But those were only three. There were easily over a dozen more landmasses, some of them quite large. Marquin pointed to a small cluster of islands labeled Alawi.
“These vanished when Alaric Tolvannen was twelve winters.”
Clare frowned. Marquin had said the power began trying to re-enter the world a century ago, yet the Alaric Tolvannen she had seen hardly looked more than forty. She filed the thought away, but didn’t interrupt Marquin as he continued.
“The event…unsettled him. He read everything he could find on the occurrences, linking the disappearances of past landmasses to Illora and Malryn and Karnek. He grew…paranoid. Because while the three of them each used the power they held in very different ways, they all had one thing in common: they deposed the rulers of their respective nations.
“Five years after the Alawi Islands disappeared there was a boy in the palace, a child of one of the servants, five years old. One day the king, Alaric’s father, flew into a rage and beat the boy’s father near to death. The boy healed him. Understand that what was done was well beyond the capabilities of even the best healers in the kingdom, and Alaric watched it happen. He was seventeen, by then.
“He killed the boy, and then he killed the boy’s father. That same day, the Ice Lands disappeared.” Marquin tapped to another place on the map. “Alaric asked his father to have all the children born that day put to death. The order was given, and carried out. When nothing else vanished, Alaric thought he had won. It wasn’t until he was leading the army to war in Malrai seven years later and razed a small village, the aftereffects of which caused the Hailaren Jungles to vanish, that he understood the power had simply not rebirthed itself within the bounds of his kingdom.
“That was the day the Jackal King was truly born, though he wasn’t king yet, not then. His father gave him command over all four of Faelhorn’s armies, and he strove to bring the world under his dominion. As you can see, he succeeded in destroying most of it. By the time Marie was born and the Gaelan Islands vanished, the only thing left outside of Faelhorn and the lands physically connected to it, was the Isle of Miradon. The Isle sank into the sea the day she died.”
Clare stared at the map. So many places, so many people, so much of the world, simply gone. It didn’t feel real to her. “Marie. What day did she die?” But she knew—of course she knew—what the answer would be.
It was Verol who answered. “The winter solstice, twenty-one years ago.”
“I was born in winter,” she said softly. She’d never known the exact year, much less the exact day. Only the season. She looked at Verol. “And you’ve been drawn to these people—people like me—your entire life?”
In that moment, Verol looked as haunted as any a person in Renault County. “Yes. I was always pulled to them too late. Until Marie. She was so little when we found her, barely a year old. Her parents died in the rebellion at Mila’s Province. I thought we could keep her hidden. With Fitz helping—I thought we had kept her hidden.” His hands tightened together. “About Fitz—you have to understand—it isn’t you he hates. He lost his family very young, and when Marie came to us—he saw her as a little sister.
“He wanted to protect her and I let him try to help. I put too much on him. He was too young. He blamed himself, when she died. Later, he blamed me. Once he finished his apprenticeship he left. He only returned a year ago, it’s why I never thought…” He trailed off, as if realizing what he shared was perhaps more personal than Fitz would have wanted relayed.
For her part, Clare was irritated to have the information. It was far easier to coexist in mutual dislike with a person when you didn’t understand why they were the way they were.
“So you thought you’d kept her hidden,” Clare prompted, when the silence dragged on.
Here, Marquin took up the thread of explanation. “The younger a person is, the less obvious it is what they contain. We think the power manifests as its bearer grows. Alaric seems to be able to find them once they’re four or five. We don’t know how you survived as long as you did, on your own.”
There was a question there, in the lilt of his voice, but she didn’t respond. It made sense to her now, why she had been chosen. She, a girl from Renault County, a place that on the surface belonged to Alaric, but in reality had its own king. A place Renault County rumor held that Alaric had tried to conquer, and failed.
The Song had chosen to be born into the world again in the one place that was safest for it, by virtue of its terrible danger.
She looked at the map again, at how much of the world had been lost. “There’s nothing left but the continent of Faelhorn. If he kills me, does the world end?” And was that what Alaric wanted? Surely, he had to have realized by now what he was doing with each death. Why would he risk the kingdom he’d fought so long to conquer?
“We don’t know.”
