Chapter 1
“Come on, Verene. Hurry up! This is our last chance.” Bryony urged me through the streets of Corrin, impatient with my sedate pace.
I gave her an amused look. “The shops aren’t going anywhere.”
“No.” She sighed. “We’re the ones going somewhere. Back to the Academy, and its awful, remote location.” She looked longingly at the wall on the other side of the wide street which mostly concealed my own kingdom’s Academy. “Why can’t the Kallorwegian Academy be in the capital like your Ardannian one?”
I grimaced. “Would you really want to be in such easy reach of the Kallorwegian court? I, for one, have no such desire.”
Bryony wrinkled her nose. “No, I suppose when you put it like that…”
The Kallorwegian court was poisonous, presided over by a cold, cruel king and full of deep rifts and divisions. It bore little resemblance to the court in Ardann which was ruled with the firm hand of my aunt, Queen Lucienne, a woman who had dedicated her life to ensuring peace and prosperity for her kingdom.
But I thrust thoughts of courts and politics aside. They inevitably led to thoughts of Darius, and not even weeks of separation had managed to calm my conflicted feelings about the Kallorwegian crown prince.
We passed the Academy and University, our attendant guards walking two in front and two behind, keeping a clear bubble of space around us despite the busy traffic. Bryony practically danced in her impatience as we passed the railings that separated the grand houses of various mage families from the road. Bryony had no interest in the green grass, fountains, or elegant buildings we could glimpse behind the fences. As an energy mage from the Sekali Empire, she had little need to worry about the power games played by the Ardannian great families.
I had found myself with less interest in them over the summer as well, my mind full of the darker politics of the Kallorwegian court. I picked up my speed, suddenly as eager as Bryony to be past this section of the city and through to the shops. I glanced over my shoulder at the palace behind us, its tall towers of white marble dominating the capital from its place atop the hill that housed Corrin. It had been home for most of my sixteen years, and yet my thoughts about our imminent return to the Academy had a feeling of homecoming about them. My heart was in as much turmoil as my mind these days.
When we reached the section of road where the large homes usually gave way to elegant storefronts featuring wares designed to catch the eye of passing mages, I stopped.
“What’s happening here?” I asked.
Captain Layna, who had been temporarily reassigned as my personal guard for the summer, stopped and looked back over her shoulder. She followed my gaze, her brow clearing when she saw I was looking at the construction to the side of the road.
“Who cares?” Bryony asked. “It’s just a building.” She threw a plaintive glance at the closest shop only a few steps further down the street.
“I can see that.” I eyed the red sandstone blocks that lay in neat piles ready for the actual construction to commence, their color giving a clue as to the future purpose of the site. “It’s some sort of public building. But why is it being built here?”
I looked inquiringly at Layna who shrugged, her focus flitting between me, the building crew and the street on my other side, her eyes alert for threats.
“I’m sorry, Your Highness, I haven’t heard anything about it.”
One of the royal guards behind me cleared his throat. “I believe it’s a new office for the management of sealed affairs, Your Highness.”
“Sealed affairs?” Bryony threw him a confused look before her face suddenly lightened. “Oh, you mean people who have had their power sealed. We don’t have special offices for that in the Empire.”
I grimaced slightly. I could imagine they would have no need for such special efforts in the Sekali Empire where every commonborn was sealed at age two. Here in Ardann, however, the sealed had become their own class of society—with a whole host of attendant complications. Allowing them access to reading and writing while keeping unsealed commonborns from having similar access was an ongoing struggle.
“But they already have an office.” I frowned. “Has something happened to the old one?”
The number of sealed commonborns hadn’t been expanding at a fast-enough rate to warrant a second office. In fact, one of the current complaints from the leading commonborn merchant families was that there was a shortage of mages completing sealing ceremonies. The crown might feel the lack of mages either failing the Academy or committing serious crimes to be a positive indication of the state of the kingdom, but those on the list to be sealed viewed the situation less favorably.
The commonborn guard who had spoken cleared his throat even more awkwardly than he had the first time. “I believe the current office in the lower city is still functioning, Your Highness. But certain interests requested the opening of a second building.”
Ah. His careful choice of words clued me in to the likely motivation for this particular project. Twenty years ago, a derelict building near the outer wall of the city had been demolished and replaced with an office for the sealed. But in the years since then, the sealed had established their place in our newly reformed society, and I could only imagine some of their more influential members must have been complaining about having to make the trek all the way down to the lower city.
“Well that explains that, then.” Bryony rolled her eyes, clearly still too focused on the shops to be interested in deciphering the layers of meaning behind his words. She gave me a pointed look. “Shopping? Remember?”
As I turned back to her, orange robes caught my eye, making me pause. Once the orange robes of creator mages would have dominated a scene like this, commonborn laborers scurrying around them only for the purpose of cleaning up debris and other such menial tasks deemed not worth the energy of mages. But I had already picked out the leaders of this team—two older, commonborn men, their wrists bare but for the elaborate pattern on their skin that marked them as sealed.
One of them held a small, intact scroll of parchment in his hand, clearly a composition that he was ready to work once his workers had the site prepared to his satisfaction. The other consulted a sheaf of parchments that I guessed contained plans for the new building. Had they prepared the plans in concert with a creator mage? Or had they drawn them up themselves, sending them off to a mage in some distant part of the kingdom and receiving them back along with all the necessary compositions for the work?
It wasn’t unusual for a creator mage to be in attendance for the actual moments of creation, especially for such a significant building, but something in the manner of the two I now spotted caught my attention. One was older, his hair entirely gray and his bearing stiff and confident. The other, by contrast, looked almost impossibly young and hunched in on himself, casting constant uncertain glances at the two sealed commonborns.
Instead of standing at the forefront of the scene, as I would have expected, they lurked to one side, almost out of sight. The older man pointed to something in the middle of the work site and said something to the younger man. His words were lost in the noise of the workers and the street beside us, but a faint look of frustration crossed his face at the answer he received.