The throne room smelled of roses and steel. Each knight's guard amor sheen in the bright castle light with intimidation.
Sun speared in through high stained glass, painting the tiles in shards of red and blue. Courtiers lined the walls like lacquered dolls, all powder and whispers, their eyes skipping over me to fix on the man splayed across a throne the size of a carriage. He wore a fox ermine and a wide smile ran across his face the way a butcher wears an apron, stained and careless.
The King of Branker lounged, his fingers fidgeting a ring until the stone clicked against gold. "Slayer Vikra," he drawled, barely glancing at my companion. "And the great mage… Eriden." His gaze lingered, sliding instead of landing. "My infernal priests can sleep again. Thanks to you the wails have finally stopped. You've done your king an enormous kindness."
"No we didn't. We gave your late Queen her long awaited peace," I said, and even the courtiers' fans stilled.
Something mean flickered in his eyes and was gone. "Peace. Yes. So now you know who that banshee really is." He rolled his eyes with disgust. "A pity she was… unwell." He hacks a noogie and spits onto his side. A servant swiftly wipes it up with a rag and retreats towards the wall, behind the king. He flicked his ring; somewhere a steward coughed up a purse. "Take your coins, Slayer."
Vikra did not reach for it. His hand rested on his sword hilt, knuckles pale. "Your Majesty."
"Silence," the king said, and guards moved in like a tide.
Algren stood among them, helm tucked beneath his arm, jaw tight. Our eyes met for an instant; his unreadable, mine burning. And then he looked away as if I were a thing he had already written down.
The king leaned forward, smiling with all his teeth. "I have a more fitting reward in mind. Branker has been in mourning too long. The people need a symbol… a new queen who breathes life, who speaks to fire and wind, who can give them heirs that sing power." The smile curdled. "You will do nicely." He pointed one of his sausage fingers at me.
A cold went through me that Ether could not name. "Not interested." I replied.
He rose. The throne behind him seemed almost startled to be empty. "Then your slayer goes to the block at noon." He did not look at Vikra when he said it. He looked at me, as if I were already wearing a crown. "Choose quickly, girl. Your consent… or his head."
Vikra's sword came halfway free before six spears touched his ribs. Algren's voice was flat. "Don't, Eridan. It's a trap! To consent, means to bind in contract. You will be stuck her forever, catering to his every need, wants and desires."
Vikra's eyes found mine. No fear there, only a spark that said run if you can, and if you can't, bite.
I took a breath that tasted like roses gone brown. "We accept the coin," I said, voice steady. "And your hospitality for the night. Tomorrow… we will speak."
The king's smile returned. "Prudence. I admire that in a wife." He clapped twice. "Take the slayer to the tower. The girl to the white chamber. And if she tries anything funny, kill the slayer."
They dragged Vikra one way, me another. He didn't fight as the chains closed which terrified me more than if he had. When stone walls swallowed him, Ether coiled in my lungs like a question sharpened to a blade.
The white chamber had no corners, only curves. Everything gleamed white and gold. The floor, ceiling, bed frame was spotless; it felt like being buried in bone. A single door, framed in gold, was my only liberation out of this mess. I pressed my ear to the door. Outside, I heard guards shift, bored boots scuffing expensive stones.
I tried the obvious first. Air to pry hinges. Fire to soften bolts. Water to swell the wood around the lock. Each effort met meticulous engineering and the king's paranoia. I felt the lattice of the door…carbon latticed with iron, brass sprung to tension and hissed. A craftsman had built this to keep sorcerers in and assassins out. Clever.
"Fine," I whispered. "We'll be cleverer."
I waited for the night to take over, for less footsteps to be heard. And when the night stilled the halls, I leapt into action.
I exhaled until the room took my breath and waited at the edge of blackness. Then I reached not for the elements but for the hum beneath them. Ether met me like cold light, like the memory of winter knowing how to be spring.
"Pervade," I told it, and the door's atoms remembered each other too well.
Then I did the opposite.
"Unbind," I breathed.
Frost whirled across the metal as I pulled heat out of it faster than the molecules could complain. The iron cried with a brittle note only mages and anvils can hear, and the lock seized a frost bitten white. I kissed my palm, condensed a thin shell of water across the mechanism, and flashed it to ice so fast the air popped. I created an ice hammer and tapped.
The lock shattered like sugar.
A guard snorted on the other side of the door. "Did you hear…"
I pushed. The door swung in on and the two guards stared. One's mouth formed the neat O that men made when they realize they are about to become a story.
I force carbon-dioxide to encapsulate breathing space, and in no time, they pass out. I let wind catch the edges of my cloak and jumped, levitating high above in the tall hall.
The air held me like a patient god. I floated up ten body lengths, tucked, and drifted over their heads as they fumbled for horns.
I pressed myself into a rib of shadow near the ceiling and let the palace reveal its anatomy. The halls were a mouth of columns and balconies and far too many eyes. I breathed like a thief. Air made me weightless.
I needed noise elsewhere. "Sorry," I whispered to the hearths, and called water into the coals. Steam took the corridors like an army, thick, sudden, and hot. Fireplaces throughout the palace choked and belched. Smoke rolled and stratified, fog settling ankle-high over marble. Shouts rose. Someone rang a bell. Someone else shouted "Fire!" in the tone of a man fleeing.
I rode updrafts, drifted over stairwells, and melted locks with a kiss-and-shatter until my breath smelled like winter. The smoke from the damp hearth continued to grow into a thick fog inside the palace.
The tower steps were old and mean. The dungeon stink grew and the iron, mildew, old fear grew with it.
"Vikra," I called softly, when the stones told me I had come far enough.
"About time," came very dryly from beyond an iron door. "You bring the door a gift?"
"Just a new shape."
I pressed my ear to the door. Behind it, chains ticked against each other. The lock was crude; the hinges were not. Old iron is stubborn. New iron is proud. Either way, they prefer arguments to magic.
The rust on the hinges were reversed and the power of air gently pulled out the rod holding it all together. I tug on the bars on the door, and it popped the door right off its hinges.
I stepped into a cell that had more chain than room.
Vikra looked like a statue of himself, all bruised up, yet amused. "You look terrible," he said raggedly. "And very, very wonderful."
I shoved the fog from my eyes with a swipe of my hands. "Stand if you can."
"Commanding," he said. "I like it." He rose with a hiss, favoring one leg. I took the weight without thinking. The chains trailed him like bad habits until I sighed, disperse, and the links forgot they were ever one piece.
We were halfway down the spiral staircase when the net found us.
It came from nowhere, a weighted lattice dropping from the darkness, singing as it fell. I shoved air up on instinct; the mesh drank it and tightened, whisper-fine wire biting through cloak and skin. We hit the steps in a tangle, breath smashed out of us. Baying boots took the stairs two at a time.
Algren slowed at the edge of the tangle. His expression was what it had always been: the look of a man who wanted the world to add up. "I told you not to run," he said. Not gloating. Just tired.
"Tell the king," I rasped, "that if he wants a queen, he should marry a mirror."
Algren knocked me out with the hilt of this sword.
They hauled us like fish to the throne room. Our wrists tied behind our backs and our ankles tied together. Courtiers reassembled with astonishing speed when blood was promised. The king was already waiting, his robe was changed and his hair smug just like the grin on his face.
"Tsk," he said. "Children should not play with the dungeon doors."
"Let him go," I said. " and I will do as you demand."
"Tempting," he said, savoring it. "Kill the slayer. Bring me the mage."
Vikra laughed. The sound had no humor in it. "Make up your mind," he shouted at me without looking. "Pawn or avenger, Eridan?"
It's time for me to stop being careful.
The room tilted, the courtiers' painted faces blurring into watercolor. Atoms and molecules heard me and bent to my will. The king's mind was a maze lit by greed. I moved like a draft under a door… into his mind with Ether.
"Look at me," I commanded.
He did. His pupils widened, throneside blue swallowing greedy brown.
"Breathe."
He did. Slower and deeper. I shaped the air around my words and let Ether ride it, not into his lungs but through them. Air carries many things, in this world, it carries memory if told strongly enough.
"See," I whispered.
The room changed for everyone.
The hearth smoke began to clear into a screen, light beaming through the stained glass the way it had beamed for the banshee below. A beautiful display of the king's betrayal began to play.
Marble shone. Old blood glinted. The crown prince stood with a wooden sword during practice. A father stood behind him with a blade he did not deserve. The court gasped. The dead prince was in the room again. The king's face was still young, but meaner and twisted as he drove his steel through more than cloth.
A woman's scream shook plaster dust from angels. The queen ran and the crown he made her wear slid and fell and hit the floor with a sound that found the softest parts of people. The courtiers saw their reflections in old treachery and did not like them.
"Enough," the king rasped, but the Ether had him by the throat gently, and for once his breath answered to someone better.
I leaned forward, voice low. "You will let us go. Now."
His lips parted and trembled. "Guards, release them. I am letting them go, now." The Ether controlled his mind, bending his thoughts to my will while the smoke screen continued to replay the king murdering his own son, and the late queen cursing the palace, taking her own life and turning into the banshee to haunt the place.
Spears lowered in confusion. Algren's eyes went wild then narrow as a man who loved laws and rules watched one get rewritten. "Majesty…"
"Go," the king said again, louder, and the throng shivered. "They will return to Branker. They will… bring wonders. Water that runs in walls. Fire that rides lines. Light without flame." I twirl my fingers behind my back, showing him images of Earth and all of its scientific wonders.
Every eye swung back to me. I hadn't meant to promise anything. Ether had borrowed my mouth.
I did not flinch. "We will return," I said, breathing the vow into more than air. "We will bring science… a way to boil water for every kitchen, light that does not burn, pipes that carry rivers uphill."
"The people will love me," the king murmured, swaying. "For I will give them these things." His smile trembled. "I will be remembered."
"For the right reasons," I said, "If you let us go."
He nodded like a child. Guards parted as if a tide had forgotten its job. The net loosened and our hands and feet unbounded. Vikra's weight found my shoulder.
We backed away. Ether begged to be greedy and I let it one more time.
"See," I told the room again, not to the king this time, but to the city that pumped its blood in through these halls: scribes and servants, guards and silk, bakers' boys sent to stare.
The air unfurled new scenes in the fog, one after another: the banshee alone stuck inside the iron ring; the king crowning himself over silk that used to belong to her; the queen's hand slicing skin and oath with the same blade as she cursed every room he would ever sleep in. The truth took the room the way spring takes snow… patient, ruthless, inevitable.
By the time we reached the doors, no one barred them.
"Eriden," Vikra said as we limped through sunlight, "you just punched a kingdom."
"Not a kingdom," I said softly. "A lie."
Behind us, the palace did what palaces do when truth slips its leash: it tried to remain strong and standing, but it was going to fail.
The courtyard filled in a rush. Word travels faster than riders when the carrier is scandalous and justice braided together. Faces tipped up. Shouts became sentences, sentences into arguments, arguments into a decision. The palace gates were still open.
The first to step through were not soldiers. They were cooks with ladles, launderers with the strength of rivers in their wrists, scribes with ink on their fingers like blood. Then the guards came, some with pikes reversed, some with swords sheathed. Algren held his men at the threshold an extra heartbeat and then stepped back, jaw clamped, as if swallowing a prayer he did not know where to send.
We did not stay to watch a crown tremble to the foot of the castle. We did not need to. The sound of the people dividing themselves from the man who had named himself their king, will roll across the square like weather changing.
On the outer steps, we paused long enough to breathe like living things. Vikra adjusted the weight of his pack and then, unexpectedly, reached and cupped the back of my neck for a heartbeat. It was a warm, rough, grounding; exactly what I needed. "Don't fall apart," he said. "Not yet."
"I wasn't planning to."
"Good. Because I like you in one piece."
Something in my chest that had nothing to do with fire or air did something unscientific. "Likewise."
We moved through the garden. Down streets where shopkeepers stood with their mouths full of the future. Past a fountain whose water had never once run uphill and had no idea what was coming for it.
Outside the lower gate, I let the palace shrink to a smear and then a rumor. Ether curled around my ribs like a sleeping animal. When I closed my eyes, the queen's hand brushed my cheek again…not cold this time, not grief, only release.
"What did you promise them?" Vikra asked, when the road turned to dirt and the dirt turned to the memory of rain.
"Pipes," I said.
"Pipes?" He asked.
"Wires. Light. A different kind of power."
"I'm not sure what you're saying… but will you keep it?"
"Yes, but not just for Branker… but for this whole world and all those who need it."
He nodded, as if he had expected no other answer. After a while: "If they ask us to come back to help build it…"
"We'll go," I said. "On our terms, not this king's or any future kings."
He grinned at the road, at the stupid birds, at the stupid dawn that had no idea how complicated mornings could be. "Good."
Behind us, the city roared. Not quiet and not yet ordered. The sound called to mind not a crown falling, but a circle forming.
"Democracy," I said, testing the word in this air. It didn't know it yet but it would.
Vikra looked sideways at me. "A new monster?"
"A new math," I said, and laughed because my eyes were wet. "One that needs plumbing."
He barked a laugh that turned into a cough. We walked. Our shadows leaned long and then shortened as the day decided to be ordinary. It failed.
At the crest of a hill, I stopped and turned, because I am not good at being done with things. The palace glittered like a tooth. For a moment, if I squinted, I could imagine pipes slithering through its walls like arteries, wires humming, fountains washing away old blood with new water.
We faced forward again. Luther's village lay somewhere ahead, and beyond that, maps that still thought the world was a flat thing you could roll up and put away.
"Pawn or avenger?" Vikra asked, not mockery in it, just the old question made new.
I breathed in until the sky fit in my lungs. Ether shifted, gentle, as if it too were listening.
"Neither," I said. "Builder."
He nodded like a man agreeing to take the long road because it was the right one. "Then let's find a shovel."
We walked on, two shadows and a promise, while behind us a kingdom learned how to be more than a man, and ahead of us another village waited for a bell that would one day ring with light.