“I won’t leave this room until you get back,” I promised. “But you should go.”
He looked reluctant still, making me wonder again at the complicated dynamics I had glimpsed between him and his mother. He had always spoken of her with affection, so there must be real love between them on some level.
“Go!” I pushed him out of the doorway, and he relented with a final warning look, following the twins down the path toward the closest palace entrance.
I stayed in the door long enough to catch his backward glance in my direction before firmly shutting it behind me and turning the lock. The door that connected the room to Evermund’s suite had been permanently secured before I moved in, so there were no remaining entrances. Evermund had even asked a plants master to reinforce both of them for me, thinking I might be nervous about staying there alone after the attack and my sister’s disappearance. But his effort, though kind, had provided little in the way of reassurance. The battle had only made me confident that a determined mage could still access the room.
I didn’t feel fear, though. I collapsed onto the bed while I considered the unexpected thrill that shivered down my spine. After all these months of waiting and fearing, the raiders had come. If they had succeeded in abducting me, would they have taken me to Airlie? I couldn’t deny the thought had a small, furtive appeal. I had never been apart from my sister before, and her absence gaped inside me like a jagged hole.
I sat up abruptly, shaking off the thought. Airlie had always protected me, and now it was my turn to protect her. I needed to stay free and rescue her, not get myself captured as well. And the first step in that goal was locating the missing raider.
But two hours later I collapsed down again in defeat. No matter how much I concentrated, I could detect only the faintest wisps of a power that felt alien and wrong. Maybe there had never been a second mage at all. Maybe what I had felt had been some sort of object. It seemed impossible—inanimate objects didn’t hold or store power, although some could be manipulated by it. But I had already seen the impossible when the raiders used neutralizers—large, seed-like objects that could bind a person’s ability. Such a thing must somehow possess a power of its own, however unnatural that seemed.
I shivered at the thought of being so bound. Now that my ability had been activated, I could barely remember what life had been like without it. My memories of before seemed muffled—as if I had been missing a sense as central as sight or hearing. I had no desire to ever encounter a neutralizer again.
But if there was a powerful object hidden in the Guild grounds, I needed to find it. I couldn’t imagine where it might be, however. And if the raider had indeed been carrying something like a neutralizer, why hadn’t he used it?
I sighed, not moving from my comfortable position, sprawled on the bed. As always, I had more questions than answers. I regarded the ceiling of the room, ignoring the elegant furnishings around me. Had Airlie felt this weight of responsibility when she lay in this bed? Had she felt the heaviness of knowing others relied on her to keep them safe?
I wanted nothing more than to leave the Guild behind and go searching for my sister. But what good could I do her on my own when I had no leads on where she might be found? I had a better chance of eventually helping her by staying with Evermund—one of the most powerful mages alive and the only other person still actively trying to find her. He must have a sense of responsibility as strong as Airlie’s to continue the search for an apprentice who had only been under his tutelage a matter of weeks before disappearing completely.
And even if I had a lead, how could I abandon the Guild when I was the one monitoring for intruders? That raider could have been after Annora—or Gia or Nikolas. Or even Zeke. I couldn’t be certain I was the only target—it wouldn’t have been the first time the raiders tried to combine an abduction and assassination. And to make matters worse, the whole Guild believed Zeke was the one keeping them safe with his network of vines—despite his inability to teach any of the other plants mages how to replicate his supposed feat.
I had overheard Karielle and Bryce discussing the matter several weeks ago. Zeke’s trick of eavesdropping using a vine network had been developed by Tribe Nicabar, and from the sound of it, Master Augusta and her apprentices believed he was in trouble with his tribe for revealing their secret. They thought he was acting on instructions from his mother to withhold the information necessary to expand the trick to allow full surveillance.
Karielle had managed to connect to a nearby vine and use it to listen to sounds happening elsewhere on the vine’s network. But she was nowhere near being able to surveil the whole Guild. And while Master Augusta wasn’t overtly admitting any failure on her own part, her apprentices believed she’d had no more success than them. Of course, neither had Zeke in actuality, but he couldn’t tell any of them that.
The thought gave me pause. It must be hard to have your influencing mage and all your fellow apprentices believe you were intentionally misleading them. But Zeke was doing it for my sake, to keep my secret. And he had been protecting me when he revealed his tribe’s secret as well. Of course he had also been in danger, along with the twins, but I couldn’t help wondering uneasily if the reveal was behind some of the tension between him and his mother.
I worried at my bottom lip. How quickly everything had changed. I had gotten too used to the quiet months following the attack, and I’d let myself believe the raiders were no longer after me now that they had Airlie.
But now, just as Zeke’s mother arrived to disrupt everything, I discovered the raiders had merely been biding their time, waiting for the right opportunity to infiltrate the Guild. They must think me a formidable opponent if they believed it necessary to go to such lengths. They were wrong, though. With no experienced power mage to guide me, I was still a long way from unlocking the true potential of my ability.
A knock on the door sent me bolting upright. I hurried over to peer out the window, despite recognizing the feel of the presence outside. It was only her familiarity that had made me overlook her approach, but my last hour had left me sufficiently jumpy that I wasn’t taking any chances. As soon as I confirmed Gia was alone, I shook my head and opened the door.
“What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at the palace with your family? Evermund hasn’t returned yet, so the formalities must still be ongoing.”
She breezed into the room. “Nikolas stayed behind. He can represent us both.”
I looked at her doubtfully. “You’re the heir, not your brother. Somehow I suspect they want you.”
She shrugged, her expression turning mulish. “They agreed to give me two years as Apprentice Gia, and I’m holding them to it. I did my duty and greeted the new arrivals. They don’t need me for everything else.”
I hesitated, wondering if I should say something. But after a moment, I shrugged and let it go. Gia was usually friendly and approachable, despite her rank, but she had a tendency to clam up on this topic. Plus I disliked siding with Nikolas over Gia in anything, just on principle.
In the privacy of my mind, I couldn’t help agreeing with him on this matter, though. While I deeply appreciated Gia’s overtures of friendship toward me, it didn’t seem possible to just stop being a royal for two years without ramifications. What would happen when Gia one day took the throne, and the Guild was being run by Karielle and Bryce and the others? Would she regret pushing them to ignore her rank and treat her like one of them?