Your King,

Theodore Ariti

Praise be to the memory of the Great Gods that you have found a wife worthy enough to kneel before. You were growing too old.

Here. Return in two days. Just as they are.

I snorted at the curt reply. Theodore chuckled as he looked over the note.

“She lives in the palace,” I said. “You should have said you’re ‘soon to take a wife.’ She’ll realize the wedding hasn’t happened yet and come after you with her stick.”

“The woman hasn’t left the basement in forty years.” He kissed my arm. “Besides, I meant you.”

“Oh.” My cheeks warmed. “What’s this mean?” I asked, my voice soft with overwhelm. “‘A wife worthy enough to kneel before’?”

“In Leucosia, a king or queen will kneel to their betrothed, and only their betrothed, as part of the binding ceremony.” His eyes were closed. He shrugged. “My father never did it. The hermitess must have remembered that, and stickler that she is, she’s likely trying to guilt me into honoring tradition.”

I remembered Nemea’s mountain the night I’d escaped. The howling wind, how terribly I shook, and Theodore dropping to his knees before me when I swore my oath of fealty to him. I set the book on the mattress, turned on my side, and swiped a lock of hair from his forehead. “You knelt for me.” The words were timid, laden with a question.

That dimple of his appeared and disappeared with a quick curve of his mouth. “And I’ll do it again later.”

I pushed weakly at his shoulder. “When we escaped Nemea’s.”

He opened his sleepy eyes, looked into mine, then closed them once more. “I’ve been besotted from the moment I saw you on that overlook in that ridiculous dress. It was easy to kneel.”

“You lie,” I said, breathless.

He shook his head, eyes still closed. He whispered through a crooked smile. “Besotted.” Theodore wrapped an arm around my waist, pulled me close. He gave me a long, slow kiss. Despite his heat, a chill crackled through me. He fell off to sleep, but I remained awake, my eyes on the bed’s canopy. Rohana’s decrepit voice ran through my head in a taunt.

You are a Goddess-queen.

Take what you want.

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Sleep never came. I lay at the edge of the bed, propped on the pillow so I could read by the faint light of a single taper. With drooping eyes, I scanned over Jesop’s exacting scrawl. It was page after monotonous page of lineages, and tales of the Great Gods from when they were new. Marriages, and deaths, and births, and I found myself cursing Jesop’s power of long memory and wishing it had been a gift for fine prose instead.

The sun was sneaking up slowly, brightening the sky beyond the window in a wash of steely gray. I wanted time to stop. I wanted to pore through these books in a blink and find precisely what I needed, but with each useless page turned, my hope dwindled. Even if I learned where Eusia was, even if the exact spell I needed was written out in stark black and white, it would not give me what I truly desired.

I closed the book and looked at Theodore. He slept on his back—full lips parted, brow smooth. The entire world was stacked against us, but my body, my heart, did not seem to care. I had spent the whole of my life wondering what it might feel like to truly belong somewhere, and now I was starting to know.

I picked up the next book. A little blue leather tome with browned paper and a crumbling spine. With renewed urgency, I flipped through the brittle pages, one after the next, until my eye caught on a section title:

THE FIRST MAGE.

The blanket slipped from my body as I sat up straighter. Knees pulled toward my chest, I gripped the book’s case tightly and read on with wide eyes.

Spell magic was born of malice and jealousy, but I cannot say that it does not have its uses. Its merits are many. It can heal, can divine, can locate the blood through the sea or land or air. In some cases, it can do what Gods’ power cannot. There are recorded events of ships surfacing from the deep with the aid of spell magic. Of bodies rising up from their graves. But my warning must be stated clearly:

For all that spell magic can give its user, it will take from them more than double.

The temperature in the room seemed to dip. The grotesque memory of the loose, marled skin hanging from beneath Rohana’s milky-white eyes lit my mind. I thought of her bluish teeth and useless body. It was magic that had remade her from maiden into monster.

When the First Mage began her spell work, it was rumored that she wished to overshadow her sister, the Great Goddess Ligea, who was given immeasurable Gods’ power at her birth. The Mage was given very little. Her mind, however, was shrewd. By spilling her own Siren blood, mixing concoctions, making sacrifices, and reciting well-worded prayer, she was able to make a new kind of power. One that her sister, the Great Goddess, did not master.

My heart clanged like an incessant noontide bell. The room was brightening. Theodore roused, but only just enough to scoot closer. He pressed his sleep-warm body against mine, gave a low hum, then draped a heavy arm over my middle. I adjusted the book around him and read on.

The first spell performed was one of goodwill. The Mage provided a prophecy for a woman who was increasing with child. She used a single drop of blood, a round of the mother’s fatty flesh, and a potion of seawater and smoking herbs. The mother wished to know the child’s future and fate, as she had been suffering from portentous dreams. The Mage predicted the babe would be a great seer. The Mage called the babe Rohana and saw that she would advise and protect the Leucosian archipelago for a great many years.

But at that time, the Mage did not yet know that her new magic was wholly unlike the power of the Great Gods. The magic used for spell work has a limit, and a price. With time, the Mage began to weaken, realizing too late that she needed to find a way to replenish what her magic took. It ate her body away, and what had once been robust and vital grew small and feeble.

The Mage’s magic had earned her certain acclaim. She was known throughout the realm, just as the Great Gods were. Some feared her, some were awed, and others cursed her, unwilling to trust a rare magic they could not understand. As her health declined, so did her ability to perform spells. When her notoriety dwindled too, a madness set in. She began to seek out past payment from those she had served, and while some chose to pay her out of fear, many did not. For the price was steep.

There is a strange account regarding the mother to whom the Mage had given a prophecy. Based on the account given by the young girl, Rohana, this is what I know:

The babe had grown into a child when the Mage came to her mother for past payment. By now, the Mage’s body was so used up that she’d hired herself companions to carry her across the archipelago. They took her to the northern shore of Varya, where the mother and Rohana lived. She entered their small home without invitation. She left two days later with her muscles renewed of their vigor. Her body was once again whole, her clouded eyes bright, and her skin taut once more. Rohana’s mother was not seen again.

From then, the Mage consecrated the Sacred Holms as the ritual site for Varya’s magic. She tied herself to the soil and sea on a little island there and was able to sustain herself, beaconing seekers of her power to come to her, and conserving her meager energy. So has every island’s Mage created a sacred ritual spot to sustain themselves and perform their craft.

“Bloody Gods.” I raced to the next page, needing more, but it only gave me rules and laws pertaining to the Mage Seers and their magic. A long list of the divine lineages sat on the page beside. Rohana’s hut rose to the front of my mind. Bones had littered the floor, human and animal alike. I thought of Theodore’s story of performing the ritual of transference. He had not been able to take his father’s body with him from her awful, rotting hut. I understood why now—it had been payment.