I reach forward to pull her back. “Yes, but you don’t want to touch it for too long, it can give you frostbite.”
Her hand steams. “I’ve always been careful.” She keeps staring at the door and I wonder if she is trying to see her reflection in the ice. The warped image doesn’t do its owner justice.
I wait a beat, then jump into action. It occurs to me she might not be able to open it. “Here, let me.” I cast the intricate spell, and the door breaks apart, allowing buttery light to flood in. My magic floats like lost fog.
“A white forte,” she says as if noting the weather. Maybe I gave myself away, but Kalyan is a white magic forte wizard too, so this shouldn’t blow my lie.
“Yes.”
A girl sitting on the stairs bounces to her feet as Jaya and I step over shards of ice. She is pretty in her own right, but she doesn’t have Jaya’s eyes, her rich dark skin, her cheekbones, hair that— Oh no, I’m staring again.
“This is my friend, Riya.”
I quickly bow and smile. She sizes me up and seems pleased to be doing so. She’s laughing at us, I realize. Well, at least me.
“Riya, this is Kalyan.”
“Oh.” She gives a little start. “I just thought…Never mind.”
She thought I was Jatin. Oh Gods. I should admit it. I’m being so ridiculous. I’m going to look like a fool, but I open my mouth anyway.
Jaya starts talking before I can say a word. “I—I did want to thank you for the other day. I realize most people black out when they burnout and it was nice to know if that had been me you wouldn’t have left me in the street.” She breathes as if blowing through a rehearsed speech.
“You’re…you’re welcome.”
She nods, turns, and unhitches her skyglider from her belt. “Come on, Riya, let’s go,” she says as she trudges down the stony path. I would have to yell for her to hear me now. I can’t force myself to do it.
Jaya has almost reached the stairs that stick out of the mountain when a voice interrupts my reverie. “Raja Jatin, is there anything I can do for you?” a well-shaven guard in vest armor asks from behind me.
I cross my arms and lean against the pillar that spouts from the entryway. The air up here is thin, but fresh and cool. The sky shimmers with wisps of pink, dusting the blue palace walls with a purple glow. “No, just enjoying the view.”
“Yes, me too, sir.” The guard smirks. I follow his gaze to Jaya walking down the path.
“Zitadloc,”I whisper, and point my white magic in his direction. It wisps up his leg and into his spine. The guard shudders. “Good Gods, man, decency.”
I don’t know what to do after an interaction like that, so I stumble to my father’s office, only to find it vacant. So I go back out to thepractice fields to watch and help Kalyan as he sprints with the multilayered shield around him. But my mind has been warped. If the girl was a distraction before, she’s become all I can think about now. What had Jaya and my father talked about for so long? What plan was being implemented without me?Good friends,she said. It hits a sore spot I thought had healed longago.
I wander back to Father’s office over the next few hours in between more training and a cold bath. He’s properly swamped, as any maharaja should be. And yet I have way too much time on my hands with nothing to do. It’s Hughes who comes for me in the end.
“Maharaja Naupure wants to see you.”
My head jerks from the spell book I was no longer reading. “I’ll be right there.”
Three minutes later, I’m standing in front of the man I’ve been trying to talk to for hours. While my head has been swarming all day, my father looks as if his has been swarming all month.
“There’s been a skirmish near the Naupure and Moolek border, in Warwick territory,” he says bluntly.
I stand straighter, completely focused for the first time in hours. That area has been in turmoil for years, but the look on my father’s face tells me I should be concerned. “How bad?”
His face doesn’t crumble; there’s just a tightening around his eyes. “Six dead so far. A couple of fields of crops plundered.” He throws his hand in the air. “All in the name of the four gods, I imagine.”
I nod and try to process what he’s told me. Six dead, not close to the worst I’ve heard, but it could get worse. There might be fighting at this very moment.
“Jatin, with you home, I’m not as worried about leaving the capital.”
I understand immediately. “I can do it.”
“There is a lot you already know, of course, and you now have the title of raja for authority.”
