Throne of Flesh and Flame

The bells of Aurelis rang three times before dawn, and Elara knew, even half-asleep, that something had gone wrong with the world.

Three bells meant a death in the royal line. Two meant a marriage. One meant nothing at all, only the turning of the hour. She had grown up counting them the way other children counted sheep, and she lay in the dark now with her heart thudding out the rhythm before her mind had caught up to it. Three. Three, and no one had told her who.

She was dressed before Wren reached her door.

“You heard it too,” Wren said, letting herself in without knocking, as she had done since they were both small enough to hide from tutors under the same table. She carried a lamp in one hand and a comb in the other, as though a comb might be useful in a crisis. Her hair was still in its night plait, dark and loose at the ends, and there was a crease along one cheek from her pillow. “They’re saying it’s the king’s cousin. The one from Bel Ossa.”

“They always say it’s someone from Bel Ossa.” Elara reached for her overrobe, the plain grey one she wore when she wanted to move through the palace without being looked at twice, which was never especially well, given who she was. “It’s always someone from Bel Ossa until it turns out to be a cow.”

“That was one time.”

“It was memorable.”

Wren huffed something that was not quite a laugh, and set the lamp down, and came to finish the ties at Elara’s back that she had left crooked in the dark. Her fingers were quick and sure, the same fingers that could pick a lock or steady a spooked horse or, three nights past, had traced a slow line down the length of Elara’s spine until she had forgotten entirely what she had been talking about. Neither of them had mentioned that since. There had not, yet, been the right kind of quiet in which to mention it.

“It’s your birthday,” Wren said, to the ties, not to her.

“I’m aware.”

“Twenty-one today. That’s not a chicken kind of number.”

Elara turned, and Wren’s hands fell away, and for a moment the two of them simply looked at each other in the lamplight, the way they had looked at each other a hundred times before, except that this time there was something underneath it that had not used to be there. A question neither of them had asked yet. Elara had told herself, more than once, that she did not have room in her life for the answer, not with a crown she had never wanted hanging over her like a stormcloud that refused to break. She told herself that again now, and did not entirely believe it, and let it go because the bells had stopped and the corridor outside had begun to fill with footsteps.

“Come on,” she said. “Before my father decides I should hear it from someone stuffier than you.”

Her father did not tell her anything.

He was not, in the end, the one to tell her anything ever again, though she did not know that yet as she was marched through the East Hall in her crooked-tied robe with Wren half a pace behind her, past guards who would not meet her eyes and courtiers who bowed too low and too fast, the particular over-correction of people who did not know whether they were meant to be afraid.

King Aldous the Third, third of his name and the only father Elara had ever known, lay in a spreading dark stain on the floor of his own privy chamber, and the man standing over him with blood not his own drying black along his knuckles was Maldrec.

She had known Maldrec her whole life. He had taught her the names of the stars from the East Tower when she was seven, had corrected her Aldish grammar with more patience than her tutors, had stood behind her father’s throne for as long as she could remember, close enough to be trusted and far enough to be forgotten. Sorcerer to the crown. Advisor. A grey, watchful, careful man who smiled rarely and meant it less.

He was smiling now.

“Princess,” he said, and inclined his head, as though this were any other morning and she had simply interrupted his reading. “You’ve come earlier than I expected. I confess I hoped to have this tidied before you saw it.”

Wren’s hand found Elara’s wrist, hard, a warning, and Elara understood, distantly, underneath the roaring in her own ears, that she was meant to run. That whatever composure was keeping her upright was borrowed and would not last, and that a girl who had never held a blade in earnest had no business standing in a room with a man who had just proven what he was willing to do to a king who trusted him.

She did not run. She could not, yet, make her legs agree to it.

“Why,” she said, and her voice did not shake nearly as much as she expected it to.

“Because he was going to burn you,” Maldrec said, mildly, as though this explained everything, as though it were the most reasonable thing a man could say while standing over a corpse. “Not today. Not this year. But eventually, once he understood what you are, he would have called it heresy and burned you for the safety of his kingdom, and I have spent twenty-one years making certain that you would live long enough to become useful instead of ash.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You will.” He crossed the room slowly, unhurried, and she made herself hold still, made herself not flinch, because flinching in front of a man like this felt like a door left open. “Tonight, on the turning of your hour, the Flame in you wakes whether either of us wishes it or not. It has been sleeping since you were born, princess, coiled up small and patient inside you, waiting for the year your body was ready to hold it. I have watched for it every day of your life. I did not do this,” he tipped his head, fractionally, toward the body of the king, “because I enjoyed it. I did it because he would have moved against you the moment he understood what tonight will make of you, and I was not prepared to lose two decades of patience to his fear.”

“Move against me for what?”

Maldrec’s smile deepened, and it was, she thought, the worst thing she had ever seen on a human face, worse than the blood, worse than her father’s stillness, because it held something that looked almost like hunger.

“You are the Vessel of the Eternal Flame,” he said. “The prophecy your priests have been mangling in their sermons for three hundred years and never once understood. Tonight your body remembers what it was made to hold, and every man or woman fool enough to touch you afterwards will feel it. Kingdoms have burned for less than what is asleep in you, Elara. I intend to be standing beside you when you wake it properly, not opposing you, as he would have.”

“And if I don’t want to wake anything?”

“Then I am afraid,” Maldrec said, not unkindly, which was somehow worse than cruelty would have been, “that wanting was never part of the arrangement.”

They ran.

Wren knew the undercroft passages better than any guard, because she had spent half her childhood smuggling kitchen scraps to the palace cats through them, and she led Elara down through the dark with a certainty that Elara clung to as though it were a rope. Behind them, somewhere above, she could hear the first shouts of a household discovering that its king was dead and its sorcerer was calling himself regent.

“There,” Wren breathed, at the bottom of the last stair, where a low door let onto the kitchen gardens and the kitchen gardens let onto the wall, and the wall, if a person was desperate and reckless enough, let onto the world. “We can be over before anyone thinks to watch it.”

“Wren.”

“Don’t.” Wren’s hand tightened on hers, in the dark, warm and real and shaking only a little. “Don’t you dare thank me and don’t you dare apologise, we don’t have time for either, we have time to climb a wall and that’s all.”

Elara laughed, a short, cracked, entirely inappropriate sound, and Wren laughed too, and for one absurd moment in the dark beneath a dying king’s palace, with a usurper’s men beginning to search the halls above them, the two of them simply held onto each other and breathed.

It was there, in that stillness, with Wren’s pulse fast under her palm and her own heartbeat keeping some new, unfamiliar time, that Elara felt it. A warmth low in her chest, banked like a coal she had not known she was carrying, stirring for the first time in twenty-one years toward the one person in the world she had ever wanted to reach for without permission.

The turning of her hour had come early. Or perhaps, she would think much later, it had simply been waiting for exactly this, for fear and love in the same breath, for a hand she trusted closing round her own in the dark.

“Elara.” Wren’s voice had changed. “Elara, you’re warm. You’re too warm, why are you—”

“I don’t know,” Elara said, and it was true, and it was also the last entirely true thing she would say for some time, because the coal in her chest had stopped banking itself and had begun, very quietly, to catch.

Somewhere above them, she heard Maldrec’s voice carry down through the stone, calm and pleased and terribly close.

“Let her run,” he was saying, to someone. “Let her run as far as she likes. She will come back to me the moment she understands what she is. They always do, in the end. Fire remembers where it was born.”

Elara did not intend to prove him right. But as the warmth spread from her chest into her limbs, into the roots of her hair, into the hand still locked around Wren’s, she understood, with a clarity that frightened her more than the blood on Maldrec’s knuckles ever could, that whatever she was about to become, she was about to become it here, now, in the dark, with no one to teach her the shape of it.

She only hoped it would not undo the girl who was holding her hand.