Page 20 of Circle of Shadows
Sora nodded. “One minute.”
“Then talk.”
“We saw Prince Gin,” Sora blurted.
Glass Lady raised a brow skeptically, as if she were listening to a tenderfoot’s story. “You did, did you? And how, pray tell, did that happen?”
Sora bristled. She’d never cared in the past about being taken seriously, but after the talk with Mama, Sora didn’t want to be merely a troublemaker anymore. Maybe Daemon was right—maybe it did matter now what other people thought of Sora, at least in some respects.
“Your Honor,” she said, standing tall with her arms by her sides as if she were giving a formal report in front of the entire Council. If she acted respectably, perhaps it would also command respect. “While on our annual trip to Takish Gorge three days ago, Wolf and I stumbled across a camp of nearly fifty people. They had a wall of logs around them like a fortification, and they danced around an enchanted bonfire. The flames changed colors and flared like green serpents. Then a cloaked man joined them, and when hishood fell away from his face, it was scarred. Like the Dragon Prince’s.”
Glass Lady’s expression remained emotionless. “They were dancing? Last I checked, that was not a violation of Kichonan law.”
Daemon pushed his way forward again. “Your Honor, the magic in the fire wasn’t taiga magic. Doesn’t that worry you given what happened at Isle of the Moon? And we saw Prince Gin!”
Glass Lady shook her head and sighed impatiently. “Spirit, Wolf, I appreciate your enthusiasm. Apprentices are often overly excited about their first missions. But think about it—you saw this during the Autumn Festival holidays. You yourselves just finished a reenactment of the Blood Rift. Other Kichonans across the kingdom also carry out similar playacting to celebrate Empress Aki’s victory. I’m sure what you saw was a masked actor. As for the color of this supposedly magical fire, that can likely be explained by the addition of a chemical—copper sulfate or alum—to the flames. Spirit’s roommate would know.”
Sora reddened. Fairy was obsessed with potions and poisons and all kinds of other concoctions. How could Sora not have thought of something as simple as the dancers throwing a chemical powder into the bonfire? Perhaps shehadgotten too swept up by her new desire to be more than just another apprentice.
But then the image of Hana’s and the other tenderfoots’ charred skeletons after the Blood Rift flashed in Sora’s memory. She pulled her shoulders back and said, “No, Your Honor. I know what we saw. It wasn’t just stagecraft that made that fire.”
Glass Lady crossed her arms. “The typhoon attack was five days ago, and you saw this bonfire just two days later. If it were the same people, they wouldn’t have been able to travel the entire length of Kichona in that short period of time. However... we are investigating all possible leads to explain the attack on Isle of the Moon, so I suppose I can have a dragonfly messenger sent to the taiga outpost in Paro Village and have them send someone to investigate.”
The dread in Sora’s stomach settled, just a little. Glass Lady had listened to her. The warriors would handle this. “Thank you, Commander.”
Glass Lady walked away without saying anything else.
Broomstick spoke up once she disappeared down another corridor. “I’m glad she’s going to have someone look into that camp. But for everyone’s sake, I hope you’re wrong about the Dragon Prince being alive. It would ruin Kichona if he tried to resurrect his quest for the Evermore.”
The brief relief Sora had felt disappeared. The Evermore. That’s what had nagged her when she saw Prince Gin in Takish Gorge. It’s why he’d come back. She’d just been in too much shock that he was still alive to think it all through.
The Evermore was a story in Mama’s most famous books, the Kichonan Tales, a collection of the kingdom’s legends, written before Sora was born. It was common knowledge that, as a child, Prince Gin had spent hours poring over the volume known asTheBook of Sorrow—stories about lakes that consumed people with nightmares, of days when the sky rained not water but blood, of an era when men prayed not for wisdom and compassion but for riches and power and glory.
Prince Gin’s favorite story had been “The Evermore.”Every tenderfoot, including Sora, studied it as a cautionary fable against greed. But sometimes, avaricious souls like the Dragon Prince read the story as truth rather than myth.
As a prophecy, rather than a warning.
It was Prince Gin’s quest for the Evermore that had caused the Blood Rift. The burning of the Citadel. The murder of Hana and the tenderfoots.
The dread in Sora’s stomach returned. The Dragon Prince had returned to finish what he started.
Chapter Nine
Idon’t know why you like that story,” Aki had said when they were ten years old. They were lying on the carpet of Gin’s bedroom and reading together, albeit from different volumes of the Kichonan Tales. She had volume one open,The Book of Tranquility. Her brother had volume three, as usual,The Book of Sorrow. “It’s bloody, and it gives me nightmares.”
Gin had shrugged. “That’s because you’re reading it wrong. There’s a paradise at the end of it, and immortality. That’s a happy ending.”
“There’s a cult devoted to that story. That’s how you know it’s crazy. And Father would be upset if he knew how obsessed you were. You should stop reading it.”
“But it’s not just a story!” Gin slammed the book closed, and Aki jumped. His scarred face had gone red. “Why is it that some stories of the gods are accepted as true—like Sola blessing our family and Luna gifting the taigas with magic—while others, like the Evermore, are said to be myth?”
Aki rolled over on the carpet and put her hand on her brother’s cheek. He hated his skin, but she always told him it made his outside as unique as his inside, and whenever she touched him, it helped calm him down.
But this time, it didn’t. He ripped her hand away. “The only reason the Evermore is called a myth is because we don’t already have it,” Gin said, seething. He turned away from his sister and clutched the book to his chest. “People don’t have enough faith to believe in something they can’t see.”
The Evermore
As retold by Mina Teira
