She gestured at one of the mage guards, and he broke away from us to jog toward the injured man. I watched him go, my bottom lip gripped between my teeth. How wonderful it must feel to know that you could bring healing and relief with the stroke of a pen.
I shook off the thought, looking back at the man still kneeling before us.
“You were following orders, and this situation is not of your making,” I said. “But it is not safe for you to work out here without a mage present. I assume you’re also staying at Bronton?”
The man nodded.
“Once your companion has been healed,” I continued, “you must assist him back there. By the time you arrive, we will have had the opportunity to talk with your mage. This situation will not happen again.”
The man swallowed but nodded, not voicing any protest.
“I will be passing back this way soon,” Layna said in a deceptively soft voice. “So you may be sure that I will follow up the instructions I give to this mage. And those instructions will make it clear that the blame rests solely on his shoulders.”
“Thank you, Captain, Sir.” The man clambered back to his feet and saluted, clearly still a soldier at heart.
Layna gestured a dismissal and attempted to herd me toward the carriage. I complied, softened by the reminder that she did care about these people. She just cared more about her job, which was protecting me—however unworthy of such protection I might be.
My parents had gone to great lengths to impress on the court that, power or not, I remained a representative and symbol of the crown. And when your mother was the most powerful mage in history—famous throughout Ardann, Kallorway, and the Empire—people tended to listen when she spoke. Maybe my lack of power wouldn’t have galled me quite so much if it wasn’t for the constant comparison with her. The one and only Spoken Mage.
When he was younger, Lucien, my older brother, had petulantly pointed out that he was a spoken mage as well. He had inherited my mother’s unique ability to access power through spoken compositions. But when I tartly reminded him that he was heir to the throne and should be content with that, he had fallen sheepishly silent. Perhaps he had remembered who he was complaining to.
I sighed as I reluctantly climbed back into the carriage. I had never blamed my brother for the occasional outburst. He and I each had our own burdens to bear, and we had no one else to safely vent with outside of each other and our younger brother, Stellan. Royalty weren’t permitted to whine about the burdens of their position to others.
In the privacy of the carriage, I rubbed a hand over my face, more tired than I had reason to be after the brief excitement. I needed to pull myself together before we reached Bronton. Layna was on the warpath, but we didn’t know how senior the mage in question might be. If he had spent many years in the Armed Forces, he might be inclined to look down on a captain of the Royal Guard.
He would not, however, look down on a princess of Ardann.
I sometimes thought my parents had put more effort into teaching me how to wield authority like a weapon than they had with my brothers. They rarely spoke of my deficiencies, but I could see how my lack had motivated so many of their actions.
The carriage rolled through the open gates of Bronton, the sounds of the bustling town filling my ears. Bronton had grown larger and more prosperous since the war ended, bursting at the seams of its sturdy walls. Once a center of war, it was now a center of trade, no longer surrounded by an Armed Forces tent city. When we were children, Lucien had often requested stories from the time our parents spent here in their youth. He had favored the tales of battle and cunning, while I preferred the ones of true love, promises exchanged, and a glittering Midwinter Ball.
Even then, I had sensed that I would never wield the sort of power required to triumph on a battlefield. If I wanted to make use of what birthright I possessed, I would have more luck in the politics of the ballroom.
The ability of a mageborn child to control power stabilized at age sixteen, so it was only in the months since my last birthday that my parents had been able to conduct a full range of private tests with me. But mages had early means of probing their children’s future strength. And my parents’ extensive testing had only confirmed the early indications—I was in every way like a sealed mage. I could safely write but not because I could control the power my writing released. I could safely put pen to paper because I could not access power at all.
I had avoided Lucien for a full two weeks after my parents finally gave up their efforts. But eventually I had relented. It wasn’t my brother’s fault he had inherited both our father’s ability to write compositions and our mother’s ability to speak them, while I had inherited neither.
With the ability to both write and speak compositions, Lucien’s power almost rivaled our mother’s. Mother was limited by her inability to prepare compositions in advance, an impediment that meant it was difficult for her to work complex compositions quickly. But she retained one skill my brother had not inherited.
A mage’s ability to compose was limited by their energy reserves. Accessing power burned energy—just as running or lifting heavy stones did—and if a mage poured too much energy into a composition, they could incapacitate themselves for days, or even die. To prevent this, mages rarely wrote open compositions that drew on their energy once released. Instead they limited their workings to the power they could store in the parchment at the time of crafting the composition. Mageborn trained for four years at the Royal Academy to increase their skill and stamina so they might maximize their natural limits for both strength and complexity in a working. And still some workings remained outside our grasp, their scope too great for any mage.
Mother, however, could use her power to access the energy of others, making her personal capacity almost limitless. It was the one skill my brother had not inherited. But even without it, he was incredibly powerful, having not only dual abilities but also the natural strength he inherited from both our parents.
He was the culmination of everyone’s expectations. Even my father’s older sister, now queen, had anticipated unprecedented power in the children of a royal prince and the Spoken Mage. So great was her certainty and her dedication to the crown that she had given up the possibility of a family of her own.
Queen Lucienne had made Ardann strong despite the tumult of great change and social upheaval brought about by the end of the war and the discovery of the sealing composition. And she had done it through unstinting sacrifice. She would not weaken Ardann by producing heirs to the throne who would be overshadowed in power by their cousins, her brother’s children. Instead, she had remained single, and when Lucien showed early signs of inheriting the strength of both his parents, she had promptly named him her heir.
Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if I had been born first, a universal disappointment. Perhaps it would not have been too late for her to marry still at that point. But then, perhaps I would not have been so powerless if my brother had not received both of my parents’ abilities before I ever arrived.
I stomped on the resentment before it could blossom in my mind. I only had to look to my aunt to know that a royal had no business wallowing in self-pity when her kingdom had need of her. And I was determined to prove myself as capable as her, even if I didn’t have access to power.
As the cobblestones of the town clattered under the wheels of the carriage, I allowed myself a single moment of disgruntlement. Did my sacrifice really have to involve spending four years among our enemies?