I glance at Flint. His shock also seems to be wearing off, only unlike mine, it has been replaced by eagerness. While I feel drained by the news of our fate, my brother seems positively re-energized. There’s a glint in his eye, a new poise to his usual easy confidence.
Flint leans forward in his chair. ‘And the trials?’
‘They will test you beyond your limits,’ Grandmother says. ‘They will coax out every last shred of power.’
My stomach churns. I hadn’t even thought about the trials. I’m thinking about them now though, my mind reeling as I scrabble around for information, anything I might have retained – a line from a book, an old bedtime story of my mother’s.
I hear her voice in my head.
Did I ever tell you about the time I walked through fire?
‘Aunt Yvainne has told me of the last Choosing,’ Flint says. ‘Yet she also told me that mine would be different.’
Grandmother nods. ‘Your aunt is right. No Choosing is the same. I should know, I’ve lived through two, one of them my own.’ She pauses, as if lost in memory. ‘But every trial, whatever form it may take, is designed to target weakness. To trick you. Break you. Victory is hard-fought. Play to win, by all means. But make no mistake, the real game begins when the winners take their thrones.’
I feel her words pull me further and further away from the shore. They strike me, one after the other, as though she delivers each with an accompanying jab of her stick.
‘Your minds must be sharp, your judgements sure,’ says Grandmother. ‘For there is more than just the trials to contend with. Old magic still lurks within the Golden Palace.’
My eyes widen. I’ve heard stories about the ancient enchantments embedded deep within the golden bedrock of the Imperial Province.
‘I don’t ask that you win the Choosing, only that you uphold the honour of House Harglade, and keep yourselves safe. I will not always be there to protect you, and so you must help one another, lean on one another,’ Grandmother continues. ‘Today is the day your lives change forever. There is no going back, only forward. Do you understand?’
I open my mouth, and then close it again.
Forward.
I have always been looking forward, always thinking ahead. My life has been a countdown, sitting by the window, wishing the days away. I have dragged these seventeen years behind me, telling myself over and over that upon the eighteenth, I will be free. Free to leave this place. Free to invent a past and carve out a future.
Except now that future is receding before my eyes – because I am an Heir.
‘Grandmother,’ I whisper. ‘I – I can’t, Iwon’t–’
‘You can, Blaze, and you will.’
I shake my head. ‘I’ll withdraw. Someone else can take my place. I don’t want it.’
Flint stares at me like I’ve gone mad.
‘Heirs cannot refuse to attend the Choosing, Blaze,’ Grandmother says with a sigh. ‘You know this. To do so would be to turn one’s back on the Gods.’
That might be so, though if anything, it feels awfully like the Gods have turned their backs on me. I look down at my glowing brandmark. What’s their game here? Are they trying to humiliate me? It certainly feels that way. Why else would they brand me, the Storm Weaver, the most hated girl in all the realm, as an Heir?
There are four Heirs to vie for each of the four thrones. This means I will be pitted against three other Aquatori for Queen Hydra’s crown of golden waves. Of course, I don’t have the smallest chance of winning. Even after last night, even if I were somehow able to wield that ice again, my competitors will have years of training under their belts. How could I possibly hope to compete? By making itdrizzleon them? What a joke that would be. And how the Etheri will delight in discovering the truth about my rain, or rather, my lack of it. Yes, I will be first out of the running, shaming my family even more than I already have.
But this isn’t even the worst part.
The worst part is that whether they win or lose the crown, the Heirs are bound to it for life, granted high-ranking positions in their new sovereign’s court.
Aunt Hester is Aunt Yvainne’s seneschal, and before she died, my mother served as her adviser. Though she chose to raise Flint and me at our father’s ancestral home in Nemeth, she was often summoned to Fire Mountain. As for my father, he is the Ignitia High General. Or at least, he used to be before he was enveloped by an impenetrable haze of grief that has kept him shut away inside Bartell Manor for six long years.
It hits me then, like a kick in the chest. Even after I inevitably lose the Choosing, there is still no way out. I willnever travel to the Otherlands. I will never escape the land I almost destroyed and the people who wish me nothing but misery.
I willneverbe free.
Hope cracks like ice, splintering into nothing.
I have never felt smaller than I do in this moment.
