CHAPTER 9: TRUST EXERCISES

  The next morning felt different.

  The porridge was the same gloopy stuff it had always been. The bread was the same coarse heel, hacked in half and laid between them on the table. The tower kitchen was just as draughty, just as stingy with the light from its narrow slit of a window.

  But steam curled from the chipped cups in their hands, and the scent was not plain hot water.

  “Tea,” Irena said, blinking down into the pale brown surface as if it might be an illusion. “Real tea.”

  Lira, already on her second careful sip, dipped her head. “Yes, Your Highness.”

  Irena looked up.

  The halfling’s hair was still a little mussed from sleep, the waves not yet tamed into their daytime braid. There were faint shadows under her eyes, but they were shallower than they had been on other mornings. She wore the plain, mended dress she favoured for chores, apron already on. Her expression hovered somewhere between shy and quietly pleased.

  “How?” Irena asked. “We didn’t have any.”

  Lira smoothed a thumb along the rim of her cup. “I have been pestering Ser Ralfus on his deliveries,” she said. “He grumbled about supply lists and allocations and how the baron didn’t sign off on luxuries for ‘inconveniences on hillsides.’” Her mouth quirked. “But I told him he wouldn’t like to be stuck with someone who hadn’t had a decent cup of tea in weeks. And I might have mentioned that even the dragon gets better food than we do.”

  “You extorted tea on my behalf by comparing me unfavourably to the dragon,” Irena said slowly.

  Lira’s cheeks coloured. “Only a little, Your Highness.”

  Irena’s lips twitched. “Thank you,” she said.

  This thanks landed differently than others had. There was no brittle edge to it, no sense that she was performing courtesies taught by tutors. She simply meant it.

  Lira glanced up. Their eyes met for a heartbeat. A small, startled smile came into being on Lira’s face. Irena felt something in her chest shift, as if the previous night had left a new piece behind and the morning had begun fitting it into place. Neither of them mentioned waking to find themselves tangled together on Lira’s narrow pallet, or the way they had both frozen for a mortified second before coming apart and pretending to be exceptionally interested in starting the day.

  They ate in mostly companionable silence, punctuated by the soft clink of spoons on bowls and the occasional murmur when Lira topped up her cup from the battered kettle with a care that spoke of how precious the leaves were. Every so often, they glanced up at precisely the same time. Each meeting of eyes produced the same quick, awkward half-smile, the same unnecessary fuss with a spoon or a crumb, and then the moment would pass.

  The porridge was still terrible. The tea was weak. But that breakfast was the best meal Irena had had in months.

  Later, in the entrance hall, she set out to prove that magic could do more than fill a room with music.

  She cleared away the ink-and-paper chaos of the full Song ritual and started again with intent. She dragged a rough table from across the room and shoved it next to her favoured seated position. Notes already carpeted its surface: her own crabbed script filled page after page, arrows linking phrases, columns labelled in neat capitals.

  CONJURATION.

  LEVITATION.

  GLIMMER.

  ANIMATION.

  Under LEVITATION, she had copied the portion of the scroll she believed had done the work of lightening and suspending the instruments in the original spell. Her annotations crowded copies of the original script: modern equivalents for archaic phrasing, small sketches of the corresponding gestures, sharp little exclamation marks where a connection had finally clicked into place.

  On the floor before her, she built a miniature circle. Only a handful of sigil-bearing sheets lay pinned to the stone. It was arrayed so she could have a better look at what might have caused the levitation.

  Irena stood at the edge of the small circle and stared down at it the way she had once stared at a stubborn clause in a treaty.

  “Very well then,” she muttered under her breath. “Once more.”

  Irena stepped inside that circle. She wouldn’t bother to speak the entire, unwieldy ritual this time. She only needed the relevant sections. The levitation portion was stripped, teased apart, and prepared in a way that made sense to her.

  She drew a breath, closed her eyes, and began.

  The recitation was familiar but tightened up, a melody pulled from a larger piece and played by a single musician. Her hands moved with it, gestures smaller and sharper than the broad sweeps she had used for the Song. She narrowed her focus, traced the lifting line and nothing else. Up! Up! Up!

  The sigils at her feet pulsed with a faint, low thrumming that matched the cadence of her voice. Air dragged around her shoulders and in the hollows of her elbows. The low hum resonated in her bones. The tower leaned in, listening.

  “Per chordam ascendens, pondus solve et tolle;

  By the ascending chord, loose the weight and lift it.

  “sta suspensus in aere, donec vox mea cadat.”

  Stay suspended in the air, until my voice falls.

  As she reached the end of the invocation, she felt the world around her shift.

  During the full ritual, she had registered a strange folding sensation in her mind only in passing, overwhelmed as she was by the dizzying arrival of music and light. Now she felt it clearly. The pattern she was shaping outside herself curled inward, becoming a weighty, almost physical thing. The lines of word and gesture she had traced through the air seemed to knot together behind her eyes, condensing into a single, intricate shape that threatened to explode outwards against the inside of her skull.

  It did not behave like memory. Memory lay flat and passive, a page she could turn. This felt loaded. As if she could hold it, walk away with it, and release it later with one motion. Her breath hitched. Realisation widened her eyes. She did not release it at once. She held it, startled, for an aching second, and felt it tug at the edges of her other thoughts, bright and uncomfortable, demanding somewhere to go.

  An empty clay cup waited on the table.

  Irena turned her eyes, fixed her gaze on it, and loosed the shape with a clipped version of the final phrase and a downward twitch of her fingers.

  “Sta Suspensus!”

  The spell shot out of her like an arrow.

  The cup recoiled. Its base scraped against the rough wood. It rocked, slid toward the table’s edge, toppled off, and struck the floor with a hollow clatter before rolling lopsidedly to a stop. The heaviness in her head snapped away, leaving behind a strange ringing absence, like the quiet after a bell-stroke.

  Irena stared at the cup in awe. Then she exhaled, close to laughter.

  “All right,” she said softly. “Better than nothing, at least.”

  She repeated the exercise, refining her control of the strange sensation. Loading the pattern, holding it for a moment longer, aiming at different objects. A bit of broken brick. A candlestick holder. A spoon. Each target jerked, slid, or bounced a few inches before gravity reclaimed it. Each time, the force gathered in her mind and discharged, like a muscle tensing and releasing.

  By the time she turned her attention to the chair, she knew three things: The spell could sit in her head for at least a while, if she could concentrate. She could choose where to aim it. And she seemed to get exactly one use before she had to go through the whole ritual again.

  She would have to think about the implications of that later. For now, she had a chair to bully.

  The chair floated, if one were being generous.

  It hovered a hand-span above the floor, tilted slightly on one back leg, its front edge listing as if an invisible giant had picked it up with careless fingers. Irena’s hands moved in small, constant corrections, palms shifting as if feeling out an invisible web of forces and trying to tug them back into alignment.

  Sweat prickled at the nape of her neck. Her shoulders burned. The portion of her mind holding the spell ached with dull strain.

  “Rotate,” she muttered through gritted teeth. “No. Not that much. You stubborn thing—”

  The chair swung further, nearly tipped, and forced her to react. She snapped her fingers, pulled hard on the shape in her thoughts, and felt it obey with a faint protesting shudder.

  The chair steadied.

  Irena released the breath she’d been holding and lowered the poor piece of furniture until all four legs met the stone again with a soft, blessedly even clunk.

  “Thank you,” she said to it, as if it had any say in the matter.

  A rustle came from the doorway.

  “Your Highness?”

  Irena turned.

  Lira stood just inside the hall, rag in one hand, the other gripping the doorframe. Her eyes had gone very wide.

  “How long have you been there?” Irena asked.

  Lira worried the corner of the rag between her fingers. “Long enough to know I should say ‘only just now’ so I don’t interrupt,” she said. “Even if that isn’t quite true.”

  Heat rose in Irena’s cheeks. “You could have introduced yourself.”

  “I didn’t want to make you drop anything.” Lira’s gaze flicked to the chair, then back. “Or hurt yourself.”

  “That is not how this works,” Irena said automatically, and then her mind offered the inconvenient correction that it absolutely could work that way if she made a mistake. “Not yet, in any case.”

  Lira took a few steps closer, drawn forward despite herself.

  “You made it float,” she said, awe and a little fear in her voice. “Like in the stories.”

  “It listed to one side,” Irena said. “ And it took far too long for me to get it straight.”

  “It was still…” Lira searched. “Wonderful.”

  She sounded as if she truly meant it. Irena looked at her.

  Lira’s face was still flushed from chores. Sweat shone faintly at her temples. Loose strands of hair had escaped her braid and stuck to her cheek. She was looking at Irena with the same expression she’d had under the floating instruments: open, luminous, unguarded.

  “Do you trust me?” The question escaped Irena before she could second-guess it.

  Lira blinked.

  Lira had several answers available; Irena imagined: You’re my princess. I have to. With some things, yes. With other things, no. The sensible answer, given smoking sigils, collapsing floorboards, and Irena’s recent experiments, would have been a polite refusal.

  Irena thought of standing in the circle with Lira the night before, laughing under music and glimmer. Of stepping down to Lira’s room in the dark instead of pretending not to hear her.

  Lira swallowed. “I do,” she said quietly.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The words hung between them, too large for the hall.

  Irena swallowed as well. “Good,” she said. “Then help me test something particularly foolish.”

  The shape of the spell slotted into place behind Irena’s eyes with less resistance, as if her mind had begun to expect it. She stood a few paces from Lira, hands at her sides, and spoke the levitation lines again. At her insistence, Lira stood before the circle, arms held rigid at her sides, toes straight.

  “If you feel anything odd,” Irena said, “tell me.”

  “What counts as odd?” Lira asked. “Because this is all rather odd.”

  “Helpful as ever,” Irena muttered, and reached the point where the pattern folded tight and bright behind her eyes.

  She held it. The knot of potential tugged towards everything nearby: at her hands, at Lira, at the objects in the room. It demanded direction.

  Irena gave it one.

  She opened her eyes, fixed them on Lira, and released the spell with a controlled exhale and an upward pull of her palms.

  “Sta Suspensus!”

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then Lira’s feet left the floor. Jerked upward, as if the world had slipped out from under her by a finger’s width. Her skirts fluttered. The hem swayed as she rose a hand-span, then another. Her toes stretched for stone and found only air.

  Her eyes went enormous.

  “Your High—” The words jumped in pitch as gravity shifted. “Oh! Oh, saints—”

  “Stop flailing,” Irena snapped. “You are making this more difficult.”

  “I am not flailing,” Lira squeaked, arms locked to her sides, fists white-knuckled. “I am— reacting in a perfectly reasonable manner—”

  The more she talked, the more she tried to hold herself rigid, the more her small movements shifted Lira’s balance, and Irena felt the invisible fulcrum lurch in response. The point she tried to hold in the air slid away from her grasp. The spell strained.

  Sweat broke out along Irena’s spine. The internal shape of the magic tugged sharply this way and that, threads unravelling at the edges and threatening to slip her control. She could feel it unravelling at the edges, threads of power rebelling and wanting to go every which way.

  “Stop,” Irena ordered. “Breathe.”

  To her credit, Lira obeyed. She shut her eyes and drew in air through her nose, then exhaled in a tight, frightened huff. Her shoulders loosened a fraction. The wobble in the magic eased.

  “Better,” Irena managed.

  It still took all of Irena’s concentration to keep Lira hanging there, suspended at a height just above her own head. She had to account for every twitch of muscle. She moved her hands in minute corrections, as if she could physically cup Lira through the air.

  “This is mad,” Lira said, voice somewhere between a half-laugh and a sob. “This is mad.”

  “Correct,” Irena ground out. Her arms were beginning to shake, whether from effort or nerves she wasn’t sure. The spell in her thoughts swayed like a candle guttering in a draught. “And temporary. We are coming down now.”

  “‘We’?” Lira squeaked.

  The spell snapped. There was no time to manage an elegant descent. One moment Lira hung in the air like a reluctant puppet; the next, gravity returned without ceremony.

  Irena was already moving. The instant she felt the magic slip, she lunged forward, arms up.

  Lira dropped into her.

  The impact knocked the breath from both of them. Irena staggered, boots sliding on stone, and instinct clamped her arms around Lira’s waist to keep them upright.

  They rocked, found their balance, and stopped.

  Lira’s feet barely brushed the floor. Her weight still rested against Irena. One hand had landed on Irena’s shoulder; the other fist twisted in the front of Irena’s dress. Irena’s arms banded around her, one hand at the small of her back, the other spanning nearly from spine to shoulder-blade.

  Chest to chest. Noses a breath apart. For a moment, the tower, the wards, the dragon, the baron, the entire world fell away. Irena felt Lira’s heart hammer against her. Her own pulse thundered in her ears. Lira’s breath warmed Irena’s mouth, quick and shallow. In the hall’s dimness, Lira’s eyes looked impossibly dark and wide.

  Something drew Irena in. Simultaneously, something else, trained from childhood to look away, cracked.

  They both tilted a fraction, pulled by the same small, treacherous gravity. Lips drifting closer by instinct…

  Then their minds realised what their mouths were doing, and sense returned.

  Lira jerked away, cheeks blazing, hands dropping as if she had held hot coals, and found her footing. “You could have dropped me!” she blurted out.

  The sting in her words was more fear than anger, but Irena felt it all the same. Irena let her arms fall. Her own face felt as if someone had held it over a brazier.

  “You were wriggling,” she said, because her mouth decided to aim for annoyed instead of mortified. “It is more difficult than it looks to keep you level when you attempt to crawl away.”

  “I wasn’t— I was just—” Lira gestured helplessly at where the floor had failed to be, moments before. “It’s a long way down, Your Highness!”

  “I am aware,” Irena said. Her fingers still tingled from the fading trace of the spell. “That is why I caught you.”

  They stood in deeply embarrassed silence and glared at each other as if offence might cover what had almost happened. Neither of them mentioned the way they had both leaned in.

  The tension eventually broke under its own weight.

  Lira’s shoulders slumped. “Thank you,” she said, in a much smaller voice. “For catching me.”

  “You told me that you trusted me,” Irena replied. The words softened despite herself. “I would rather not make you a liar.”

  That earned her the ghost of a smile.

  They both looked away at the same time.

  “Come,” Irena said after a moment, clearing her throat. “I want to show you something. It is less dangerous than what we have just done, I promise.”

  “That is not a high bar,” Lira muttered, but she followed when Irena reached for her hand.

  The climb up the tower stairs had become familiar enough that Irena could count steps by feel. The first tight curve, the second. The next landing. The little scuff in the stone where she always misplaced her foot. The slight change in light as they went higher.

  At the highest level the stair served, the ceiling opened.

  The tower’s central shaft extended above them. The stairs ended one floor shy of the false roof. Where Irena’s room and the library offered windows and mountain views, this level drew the eye inward, up into the space overhead.

  The oculus sat in the ceiling, an unblinking eye waiting for them.

  The broad circular opening cut through stone and revealed a glimpse of the level above: the underside of a floor, the hint of a balcony ringed with a simple railing, the curve of a wall. From here, the opening offered a tantalising invitation beyond their reach.

  Lira craned her neck and squinted up. “I don’t like how high that looks.”

  “You do not like anything involving heights unless it includes a shelf and a stool,” Irena said. “Which is reasonable, but it will not get us up there.”

  She stepped closer to the oculus and studied it.

  She had stood here before and puzzled at it. The archmage who built this place adored structure and symbolism. Nothing in the tower existed by accident. Rooms had evidently changed in purpose over time, but each was designed and planned out. Wards matched their marks. Even the spiral of the stairs favoured the defender’s right arm against invasion, and hampered the ascending party with the wall.

  It made no sense to have a level so clearly meant to be reached and leave no way up.

  “There are secrets up there,” Irena said.

  Lira glanced at her. “You’re certain?”

  “I would be astonished if there were not,” Irena replied. “The baron’s men would not have gone to the trouble of finding a ladder and bringing it in here, balancing it over this dangerous drop, just on the mere hope of loot. They took only what they could steal easily.” Her mouth tightened. “They always have.”

  Lira made a small sound of agreement.

  “So,” Irena went on, mind already ticking ahead, “we may conclude that the archwizard did not intend for that level to be reached by ordinary means. Stairs. Ladders. Those sorts of things. Otherwise, there would be a place for them, and there are no rings, or hooks, or niches that I can see.”

  “Instead,” Lira said slowly, “you are thinking of… not so sensible solutions.”

  “That depends on your definition of sensible,” Irena said. “You are lighter than I am. I can lift you a short way without dropping you… immediately. With practice, I can lift you farther, up through that opening. You could secure a rope. I could climb after you.”

  Lira looked from the oculus to the long, empty shaft and back again. The drop ran all the way down to the entrance hall, past landings, past doorways, to a hard stone floor. Colour drained from her face.

  “It is a very long fall, Your Highness,” she said quietly,

  “It is,” Irena said. She didn’t pretend otherwise.

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “I have much to say,” Irena said, sharper now. “No matter how steep the fall, it does not change our circumstances. The baron will not release us. Father—” She swallowed the word. “The King will not change his mind. The dragon does not favour us. The wards answer only to those sun-discs and prayers we do not possess. If answers exist in this tower, they are not down here.” She nodded upward. “They are likely above us. And I would take that risk rather than rot away here, until someone decides I am no longer worth feeding.”

  Lira absorbed that in silence. “I don’t want to fall,” she said at last.

  “I do not want you to fall either,” Irena replied, reluctantly pulling her gaze away from the oculus with effort and looking down the shaft. “We start at ground level with a rope. No great heights. No spells. I will not ask you to do anything I am unwilling to do myself.”

  Lira exhaled slowly. “Practise I can do,” she said. “Practise is fine…”

  “Good,” Irena said. “Then come help me find the rope and tie the knots before wizard-madness convinces me to hurl myself at the ceiling.”

  Lira gave a strangled little laugh despite herself. “That’s not funny!”

  “... It is a little funny,” Irena said, and, when Lira huffed, she allowed herself a smile.

  They rigged the rope from a beam on the first landing above the entrance hall.

  A rusted metal hook still sat embedded in the timber and had once held a chandelier or banner, judging by the position. Lira tested the beam by leaning over the edge, shaking it with both hands, and adding a small bounce. The wood held.

  “Good enough,” she said. “Pass me the rope.”

  The tower had provided it as part of its anonymous inheritance: coiled in a dusty corner, smelling of mould and old hemp. Lira had cleaned it as best she could, cut away frayed sections, and left a length they both agreed would hold. She looped it twice around the beam and tied a series of knots with swift, efficient certainty. There was something magnetic about watching her hands work.

  “You are sure that will hold?” Irena asked as she lingered to one side.

  “Yes, Your Highness.”

  “And you do not want my help?”

  “No, Your Highness.”

  “Because you do not trust my knot-work?”

  “Because I like being alive,” Lira said, then caught herself and added hastily, “And because you have clever hands, but not practice with knots. Which is normal for a princess. I don’t mean to—”

  “It is an astute observation,” Irena said dryly. “You may relax.”

  Lira relaxed by a fraction. She gave the rope one last hard tug and grunted in satisfaction when the beam didn’t so much as creak. Then she tossed the free end down into the hall.

  It swung gently, the end just brushing the flagstones.

  “Right,” Lira said. “I’ll go first.”

  They both stepped down into the hall. Irena moved back to give her room.

  Lira wiped her palms on her apron, then gripped the rope with both hands and planted her bare feet at its base. She pulled herself up with an economical, practiced motion: hands hauling, legs clamping, then pushing, body working in a neat rhythm. It was not elegant, but it worked, and Irena watched closely.

  She rose steadily, hand over hand, until she reached the landing’s edge. She hooked a leg over the stone, paused to catch her breath, then slid back down the rope, using her feet and one hand as a brake. After a few moments, Lira landed with a little hop, cheeks flushed, breathing fast, hair working itself loose from its tie.

  “See?” she said, half-grinning. “Not so bad.”

  Irena folded her arms. “Well, you certainly made it look easy,” she said, staring at the rope as if it had personally offended her. “Surely it is not so difficult…”

  Lira’s grin faltered.

  Irena had ridden side-saddle under the supervision of grooms and etiquette tutors. She had learned to perform intricate ballroom dances without stepping on anyone’s feet. She had trained the subtle muscle control required to wear formal gowns without tripping. None of that turned out to be useful now.

  She gripped the rope overhead. The fibres scraped roughly against her palms. She drew a breath and pulled. Her arms protested at once.

  She managed to lift herself a little. Her boots scrabbled against the rope for purchase and found none. She tried to bring her legs up to wrap them, as she’d seen Lira do. The rope swung away from her, leaving her unable to do anything as she tightened her grip, muscles burning.

  She managed to strain her biceps before her hands opened of their own accord. The rope slid through her fingers. She dropped, landing awkwardly and stumbling before falling onto her backside with more noise than grace.

  She sat there breathing hard and staring at her reddening palms.

  Lira made a sound. Not quite a laugh. A startled hiccup of amusement that escaped before she could smother it.

  Her eyes went huge. “I’m sorry. Your Highness, I didn’t mean—”

  Irena looked up. Affront flared for a heartbeat: at her own weakness, at being seen failing at something so basic, at the instinctive expectation that mockery from a servant deserved punishment. Then Irena saw the horror on Lira’s face, and she, too, felt horrified by her own reaction.

  The anger bled away, replaced by something weary and wry.

  “It is all right to laugh,” Irena said, flexing her fingers carefully. “I would find it funny too, if it were not my hands burning.”

  Lira hesitated. “It is… a little funny,” she admitted, barely above a whisper. “Are you okay, Your Highness?”

  “Nothing is much bruised except my pride,” Irena said.

  Lira stepped closer, worry pushing aside the last trace of amusement. Irena shook out her hands. They ached. The skin across her palms was reddening where the rope had bit.

  “I am not sure I will be able to climb this,” she said, and the admission stung.

  “It’s alright,” Lira said, kneeling beside her. “You just need… practice. And stubbornness. I’ve been hauling buckets and scrubbing floors since I was big enough to lift a mop. It’s not fair to expect yourself to match that in one afternoon.”

  “Stubbornness I possess,” Irena sighed. “I suppose we have established that, when it comes to rope work, you are the expert.”

  Lira blinked. “Expert is a strong word, Your Highness.”

  “So is ‘magic,’ and yet here we are,” A reluctant curve tugged at Irena’s mouth. “Very well. When the time comes, we find a way to play to our respective strengths.”

  Lira glanced at her hands. “We should put something on those,” she said. “Or you’ll not be able to hold a quill properly, never mind a climb a rope.”

  “And then where would we be?” Irena said. “Trapped in a tower with no magic and nothing to read. The horror.”

  Lira smiled properly this time.

  “I’ll fetch the salve,” she said. “Try not to pick any more fights with the rope while I’m gone.”

  “I shall do my best,” Irena said gravely.

  As Lira trotted off towards their small stash of supplies, Irena looked up the shaft again.

  The rope swung gently from the beam above. Far overhead, the oculus glimmered faintly in filtered light, a ring of stone around a shadowed promise.

  Irena had failed, in the most literal sense, to climb a short length of rope. Yet she had successfully lifted another person into the air with nothing but ink, words, and will. Her palms throbbed. Her shoulders ached. Her mind hummed with the memory of the levitation spell and the ringing absence it left behind. The feel of Lira’s weight in her arms.

  “All right,” she murmured to the empty hall. “We’ll figure something out.”

  The tower, as ever, did not answer. But in her mind’s eye, suspended between beam and oculus, between timber and stone, she imagined two small figures rising up together, stubborn and inevitable, refusing to surrender to their fate.