“And if you don’t?” I ask, my heart in my throat.
“If I don’t, it passes on to my children and theirs . . . until it is finally done. Until the scrolls are returned to their rightful place. But I refuse to pass it down to my children. I will have no children.” His jaw is set and his eyes are stormy.
“You can’t abandon the vow?”
At that, a rueful smile. “A blood vow is deep magic. There is no escape from it. Not that I haven’t tried.”
Of course he has. I would. “Is that what you were doing in Baer Abbey that day?” It suddenly dawns on me that we’ve never spoken of the first time we met.
He nods. “I thought there might be a chance they were hidden there, that my father had missed something. And what were you doing at Baer that day?”
“Nothing, really. I was exploring, I guess.”
“Did the queen send you? Because I wasn’t even supposed to be there.”
“No. Queen Lilianna did not send me to Baer. The truth is, I didn’t mean to be there at all.” Yet something had pulled me to the ruined castle, something deep in the earth had led me there. The visions choose the seer; that is what my aunts taught me.
“So, you were out for a walk and just happened to end up there.”
“Pretty much, not that it matters now.” I don’t appreciate his skepticism, but the truth is, I did lie to him to get where I am right now. “What matters is what happens next.”
“Next is Montrice. We need to find a place to stay, and buy new clothes. If anyone asks, we’re brother and sister. Taverns are typically the best places to find information, particularly when you want to know who the criminals are. Or better yet, who the criminals work for.”
“And if this discovery leads all the way up to King Hansen?” I ask.
“Then he will be taken care of,” Cal says softly.
I feel chills, and am suddenly nauseous with fear. Cal will protect Renovia at all costs. There is nothing he will not do for his kingdom when the time comes. Without fear and without regret.
He is the Queen’s Assassin. And no one is safe from his blade.
EXCERPT FROM THE SCROLL OF OMIN, 1.2:
A Comprehensive History of Avantine
On the Origins of Omin of Oylahn
LONG AGO, WHEN ALL THE kingdoms of Avantine were one, the region of Renovia was a backwater, a swampland, a hopeless swath of fallow earth sparsely populated in most places and dominated by warring clans in others. The oldest child of the oldest child of the oldest family in the land was unlucky enough to lead the chaos, for however long they could until they were ousted—either by murder or fatigue—and replaced by the next oldest child in line, and so on. Clan leaders bribed or blackmailed the monarch in return for favor and to maintain control over their own territories.
However, Avantine’s new queen, Alphonia, only thirteen years old, wasn’t satisfied with the struggling realm she inherited, especially since surrounding kingdoms had begun taking advantage of Renovia’s weaknesses and invading its outlying communities.
Alphonia may have been a child, yet she was older than her sister had been when she was crowned at age ten but died soon after from consumption, and both were older at accession than their father had been before them, though he had lived to the ripe old age of twenty. And thirteen years, then as now, was old enough to know her own mind—and young enough not to know that maybe she really didn’t.
So Alphonia, at just the right age and station to insist on having things exactly as she wanted them, and fortunate enough to possess the right temperament for the task, called for the smartest, wisest, strongest, and wittiest to join her at court.
They arrived in droves: aristocrats, beggars, traders, thieves, alchemists, farmers, lutists, bakers, mapmakers, and all others you can imagine. From these the girl queen chose the best of the best of each, then gathered them together at a feast. She told the chosen that they were the founding members of the new court of Avantine, and gave them rooms in the castle.
Quite pleased with herself, she then called for women from each clan, and gathered them together for a feast of their own. She told them about her sister, whom she missed very much, and her parents, whom she barely knew at all, and asked them about their loved ones. No one had ever asked them this before, so they didn’t know what to say, because killing and being killed was the way it was and always would be.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” the girl queen said. “Instead of fighting one another and scrambling for the leftover odds and ends, we can band together and thrive.”
The clan mothers doubted the new queen, and went back to their lands, and back to the way things had always been.
Except one thing had changed. They couldn’t stop thinking about what the queen said. They had been introduced to the idea of something different, and there is no putting back an idea.
Meanwhile, Queen Alphonia had the best of the best at her disposal and not the faintest idea what to do with them after that.
“Our talents are wasted here,” they said. “If something doesn’t happen soon, we’re going home.”
The girl queen wasn’t sure what to do. It was her first official crisis as sovereign, and she had no one trustworthy to advise her.
She was ready to give up. But before Queen Alphonia could dismiss the best of the best from her palace, there was a booming knock on the castle door.
At the door stood the strangest, most beautiful being Alphonia had ever seen, a silver-haired mage with violet eyes, neither female nor male, but both, as all the most powerful mages are. They wore a long white tunic and an emerald gem around their neck.
“I am Omin of Oylahn,” the mage said. “I heard you called for the best.”
“I did,” said the queen. “But I’m afraid that time has passed.”
“No,” Omin said. “The time has not even begun, because the time was not right, and now that I am here, it is.”
And so it was that magic came to Avantine.
It is said that mages came from the Oylahn, a land beyond the Montrician Mountains, an impassable landscape no Avantinian had ever crossed; however, the girl queen never asked of Omin’s origins, or if she did, that knowledge was never recorded.
The women of the clans soon returned and agreed that they were tired of the way things were. Omin trained the group Alphonia had assembled and taught them the ways of Deia, which were already ancient even in the ancient time. As the years wore on, the Deian order served the kingdom well. The greatest scribes collected the wisdom of Omin and Alphonia and spent years handwriting the Sacred Texts of Deia, and the greatest artists illustrated them, and the greatest philosophers studied them, and the greatest teachers taught them, and the greatest students learned them.