ONE

So far, my story has been pretty much all about me.

For most of my life that was all I had—me. I was content enough, even if I often went to sleep hungry, and rarely in the same place for very long. I’d change clothing once a year, always something stolen off a drying line. Some discomfort was a fair trade for freedom.

But then I met Hlanan, and began learning things. Like, theft was bad. But the reward for this exasperating lesson was the gradual discovery of what it meant to have friends.

Then I discovered family.

Two families. Two very, very different families.

Now I had food to eat any time I wanted. I had a home, and a bed to call my own. I could bathe ten times a day if I liked. But I was not content, though I tried mightily to be. Unlike those old, hungry days, I was broken.

Before I go on with that, I’d better start with Hlanan, because this time, the…let’s call them adventures, ha ha, didn’t just happen to me.

Of course adventure has always happened to others, too, but one of the first lessons in learning how to have friends, and family, was the discovery that what I did affected others. Also, what happened to others mattered to me.

Especially to Hlanan, my first friend. Sweet, scholarly Hlanan, who tries to see the best in everyone, who can rock with silent laughter at unexpected times. Whose kisses—discovered not long before we parted—were as powerful as any of the magical talents I was born with.

Let me begin the day that he—Hlanan Vosaga, youngest of the Empress of Charas al Kherval’s four children—left his small bedchamber and went out into the hall, pausing when he saw two sealed scroll-notes and a letter sitting on the tray outside his room.

It was common for palace residents to leave scraps of paper scrolled for one another, but who would send a sealed letter on heavy paper, which had to be carried by hand, instead of through his magical notecase?

He opened the letter first. There, in a very formal, stylized script (probably, Hlanan guessed, from the hand of a scribe), someone requested Hlanan’s service. It was signed in a beautifully elaborate signature with four names—so elaborate he couldn’t make out any of the names.

What service? Scribe work, of course—had to be. Few knew of the other callings he’d tried and set aside. Brief, bleak humor sparked at the idea that the scribe who wrote this magnificent hand had to employ that skill to request another scribe for whoever wrote that incomprehensible signature. But not everyone from overseas knew any of the various languages found in the Charas al Kherval—at most they might have the basics of the common tongue, Elras.

As Hlanan laid aside the letter, he wondered who Four-Name was, and who would have recommended Hlanan. He wasn’t with the scribes now—he had been studying magic with the healers for the past year. But he’d served as a scribe off and on since he was a teen, and he still went around in his scribe robe because it was both comfortable and anonymous. No one paid any attention to scribes unless they needed one.

He set that letter down and glanced at the scrolled notes. The first was an invitation to the wedding of a fellow scribe student from ten years back, and the other’s dashing hand was instantly recognizable: Hlanan’s half-sister Thianra, writing a single line:

Remember you promised to take breakfast with me. Do not be late!

Hlanan breathed a laugh, knowing that there had to be a message twin to that in his notecase. And if for some reason he didn’t turn up, she’d deliver a third message in person, then drag him to the musicians’ wing by the back of his collar.

He glanced at his desk where his magical notecase lay. A pulse of duty prompted him to check it, but he turned away again. Who would write to him but his mother?

And what could she want but to express her disappointment, to scold, to list her logical, practical reasons—