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“Do you know someone named Alexius?” the king asked after silence fell between them for a time.
“No. Who is that?”
“I visited Lucia yesterday for a few moments after your mother left her side. She murmured the name in her sleep.”
Magnus’s shoulders stiffened. Lucia had spoken in her sleep? “Did she say anything else?”
“No, only the name.”
He wracked his mind, but came up blank. “I don’t know anyone named Alexius.”
“Perhaps it’s a boy she was enamored with back in Limeros.”
“Perhaps.” His mouth was suddenly dry. He reached for the nearly empty pitcher of water on the bedside table and poured himself what was left. He’d never heard of an Alexius before. And now this boy resided in Lucia’s dreams? A ribbon of jealousy twisted within him.
“She’ll wake soon,” said the king.
“How can you sound so certain?”
“Because it’s her destiny to help me reach my destiny.”
There was something in the way the king said this, an absolute confidence that resonated like an echo in a canyon. “Who told you this?”
The king’s dark gaze flicked to Magnus, sweeping the length of him as if assessing his son’s worth. “Her name is Melenia.”
“Let me guess. Your mysterious new advisor.”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me, Father, will I ever meet this Melenia?”
“Perhaps one day. For now, it’s impossible.”
“Why?”
The king again hesitated before replying. “Because I see her only in my dreams.”
Magnus blinked. Surely he had misheard. “I don’t understand.”
“Melenia is a Watcher, one with great knowledge about the Kindred and how to go about finding them. She is over four thousand years old but blessed with eternal youth and incredible beauty.”
“Your new advisor is a beautiful four-thousand-year-old Watcher who visits you in your dreams.” The words were heavy in his mouth.
“Yes.” The king smiled at this, as if recognizing the absurdity of what he claimed. “Melenia has confirmed for me that Lucia is the key to finding the Kindred and harnessing its power. That before this, before she existed, it was simply not possible to find it. That’s why no one has ever succeeded in such a quest.”
This was one of those moments that Magnus had come to recognize. A test. The king was giving him a test. How he responded to something so fantastical would set the tone for the immediate future.
Would he assume his father mad for making such statements? Believing such things? Would he be unable to hold himself back from laughing?
Once he would have, earning the king’s wrath and perhaps another scar.
No more.
His entire life, he’d denied the existence of such a thing as magic, but Lucia had proved to him it was true. It was real. Elementia, according the books he’d recently read here in the Auranian palace library, tied back to the immortal Watchers. And Watchers, so legend told, could sometimes visit mortals in their dreams.
Magnus knew his father was dangerous, vengeful, and remorseless. However, there was one thing the king was not.
He was not stupid enough to believe in imaginary things that served no true purpose.
