Page 39 of Blood of the Sands

Ibit my tongue to hide the grimace that always threatened to overtake my face at the taste of lyra tea. Still, the muscles in my brow contracted involuntarily, creating an expression that I imagined looked something like polite constipation.

Thankfully, the queen didn’t notice, taking a hearty sip from her own cup, completely unperturbed as she read over the scroll in front of her. I hoped it was more information from Oren. We hadn’t heard from him in a while, and I itched for more news of Clan Katal—of the Viper. Now that I knew I was to face him in the Trials, he loomed in my mind as a dark and imposing figure.

As monstrous as he felt in my consciousness as I trained, unyielding and inhuman, even more disturbing was the way he appeared in the dark of night. In my dreams, he was unmasked. Calm. In his last nighttime visit, we had sat before a fire as I hummed a familiar tune, as if he wasn’t the enemy who haunted most of my waking moments. Resist as I might, my nocturnal self relaxed in his presence, and I woke suddenly worrying if this was a trap to lure me in, like a coiled snake playing at being dead.

I swatted the idea away. They were just dreams, not visions sent by the Viper himself. Nothing more than my unconscious mind connecting my memory of his face with my underlying anxiety of facing him in the Trials.

“Is the tea still helping you contain your magic?” the queen asked.

I nodded, although ‘contain’ wasn’t the word I would use. After drinking the tea, it was as if a wet blanket had been thrown over my magic, the pit of my stomach feeling dampened and slightly empty. At those times, I could approach the well of power, tiptoeing around in my mind as I stacked mental stones around it.

Every time I rode Daiti in the desert or sparred with Aderyn—or woke from a dream of the Viper—I would come back to myself and find my barrier decimated, carefully placed rocks blown aside as if they were blades of arrowgrass.

So contained? No. Muted? Perhaps.

“I’m glad,” the queen continued, ignorant to my mental conundrum. “Because I have a favor to ask.”

“Anything,” I answered automatically.

The queen chuckled. “Never promise a royal a favor before you know what it is.”

“Royals aren’t common on this side of the mountains. I know little of them,” I admitted.

“And I know more of them than I would like, although it still isn’t very much,” Queen Ginevra said. “That is part of the favor I want to ask you, though.”

I cocked my head in curiosity.

“Next week, two ambassadors will be visiting from Viltov and Doran. I’m throwing a bit of a party to welcome them, and I would like you to come.”

My mind whirled with questions, but at the forefront was “me?”

After all, my manners still paled in comparison to the queen’s and even Aderyn’s. I was new to the city, and of no particular political influence beyond the queen’s sympathy for my magic.

“You,” Queen Ginevra repeated, unperturbed. “The ambassadors are coming in part because of the Trials. Given that they happen only once every twenty years, and they are one of the few times members of all clans are present in the city, they plan to stay for the competition. Given that your victorious emergence from the Trials is a particular interest of mine”—she picked her words with all the poised precision of a born diplomat—“I thought your presence might be appropriate.”

I considered her in silence as my brain tried to sort through the political machinations of the queen’s mind. I knew little of foreigners—very few clansmen of the Ballan Desert knew anything of those from beyond the mountains. While we knew the mountains that bordered three sides of the desert and the sea on the far edge were not the edges of the world, the clans had little contact with anything beyond those boundaries.

Occasionally, members of Clan Padra—who were good at making things from weapons to glass jewelry made from firing the sand that infiltrated every area of our lives—would travel to Kelvadan. Here, goods could be sold to traders from other countries who were bold enough to cross the mountains. Kelvadan kept the clans from having to interface with outsiders who would not be able to locate the clans in the desert as they roamed around between unknowable locations.

Rumor had it that sailors from Viltov had once taken a boat from their country around the mountains to the coast where the desert met the sea, hoping to bypass Kelvadan and deal with the clans directly. But the desert was vast, and with none of them from a clan with her favor, they had likely perished before they even found fresh water.

“Why would foreigners be interested in the Champion of the Trials?” I asked. After all, the Champion of the Desert would be of little concern to those who lived beyond its reaches.

“Because I mean to ask for their help.”

I drew back sharply, my small metal chair tipping back onto two legs. A lord of one of the clans would be too proud to ask another—especially one not from the Ballan Desert—for aid. “Their help?”

“They have armies, bigger than anything one city could muster,” Queen Ginevra explained, although her polished demeanor failed to fully hide the hint of disapproval in her voice. “Their countries are vast, and their soldiers could aid us if war comes to Kelvadan. Even if they could just pledge us increased food so we are not dependent on hunting and farming the area around the city in the case that Clan Katal lays siege.”

Her reasoning was sound, but doubt still gnawed at me. Inviting foreigners into the desert seemed like a violation of her magic. I preferred not to think about what would happen when—if—the Viper defeated me in the Trials. Similar to survival in the wilderness, it didn’t help to focus on what would happen to you when water ran out and hunger became too much. You simply had to focus on finding supplies.

A queen, however, had to be ready for any contingency.

“What would you like me to do?” I asked.

“The desert’s power runs strong in you, and you will be an asset to Kelvadan’s riders. Give them confidence that our city can emerge victorious and that they will not be pledging their soldiers to die for a hopeless cause.”

Her confidence gnawed at me, and the magic in my belly stirred, asleep but still uncontained. This was a job for a prince or princess of Kelvadan—somebody with more control and practice, who had spent far more time among dignitaries or people in general than I had. But the queen had asked me, and I owed her my life, so I nodded.