Page 20 of In the Ravenous Dark
“Are these royals?” I ask, nodding at the statues.
“Famous wards. The royal gallery is restricted.”
Also curious. I’ve certainly seen plenty of statues of the first king, Athanatos, but perhaps the rest of the family isn’t supposed to compete with the city’s founder.Heseems only to be in competition with the goddess for status. I remember how the wards called the fountainhisinstead ofhers. Athanatos has definitely achieved something like godhood in the eyes of the people. Even his name—which I somehow doubt he was born with—means “immortal,” and Thanopolis was named after him.
“Why is the royal gallery restricted?”
“Now that’s a very good question. One worth asking, I daresay. But later.”
Before I can press him, the walls of the palace lift away, exposing the hallway to the open air. We’ve reached the base of the palace. Through the columns lay a lush garden of trees shimmeringin a warm breeze, bushes trimmed or magicked into the intricate, twining shapes of galloping horses and winged beings, and a riot of beautiful flowers. But it’s the wards more than the paradise around me that make me freeze, and those flickers of darkness in the bright sunlight behind them. They’re mostly gathered on the other side of the garden’s extensive grounds, toward the Hall of the Wards, I assume, identifiable by their red chlamyses with the black shields, talking in groups or strolling about. It’s the first time I could draw near them without fear of discovery, because Ihavebeen discovered. I’m one of them now: a ward, with a guardian. That doesn’t make me feel any better, and the urge to duck and hide is still strong.
My father must sense my tension. “We’ll stay over here, on the palace side. Most of them can’t enter without invitation. My office is just this way.”
I wait until we reach a wooden door carved with looping scrollwork, over which my father sketches a quick sigil to open it, before I ask, “Why did you ever come to this city from Skyllea if you knew it was like this?”
“Another good question,” he says, and holds the door open for me.
His office is huge, overflowing with scrolls and books and loose stacks of paper on every surface, even the floor. There’ssomuch paper, which has always been too expensive for me to purchase. I don’t know how to write other than the few sigils I’ve memorized and traced in my mind or in the dirt of our courtyard. I’m only slightly better off with reading, but most of what I know is what my father taught me when I was seven. My mother is fully illiterate and couldn’t help grow my meager knowledge.
“For a long while, my people didn’t know it was like this here,” my father says after resealing the door, oblivious to the wealth around him. He moves a pile of books off a chair for me, and then shoves some papers aside to lean heavily against a near-buried desk. “Skyllea refused to follow Athanatos all those centuries ago in the founding of the polis, so we remained isolated on our island.”
He points to a map on the wall, outlining a mostly bare continent, aside from Thanopolis on its plateau near the coast, with a large, oblong island to the west. He, or someone, has shaded in the frozen peaks and desert plains with smears of dark charcoal, which cover most everything other than the city’s plateau and the island of Skyllea. The blight. Within that shadow, scattered Xs mark what must be old city ruins.
“We were only aware of the blight’s coming, not its beginning—a gradual change stealing over the mainland, like winter and drought, except spring rains never came. And yet it’s worse than endless winter and drought. It’s a poison that seeps into the heart of everything that touches it, slowly at first, so that you might escape if you leave quickly. But if you linger, even to cross the mainland between Skyllea’s coast and Thanopolis without a magical shield that few know how to master, then you’ll be forever touched by it, and eventually die. All the more reason for us to stay isolated on our island, even though we heard disturbing rumors escaping this city about mandatory imposition and registration of bloodlines and strange rituals binding them to the dead. For years we ignored it, following our own path… until the blight reached the shores of Skyllea and began to affect our own lands. We are holding it off now with a shield of our own, but the entire island is still at risk. Mayhap the entire world.”
I glance at the map nervously. Lightly sketched shapes hint at other landmasses beyond our continent’s borders and oceans. “It’s continuing to spread?”
“Yes, it’s even starting to cover the sea with ice in the north, and the oceans are toxic in the south. There is an immense magical imbalance in the world, Rovan, but no one here cares because we—they’resafe behind the veil,” he corrects with a grimace. “My people actuallysuspect the source of the imbalance ishere, in this city. We weren’t sure how or why, which is why a delegation from Skyllea came to Thanopolis a couple of years before you were born. Aside from the usual diplomats, there were two bloodlines, some of the strongest on our island: myself, and a woman named Cylla. We volunteered because we were young and foolhardy and ambitious. We weren’t utterly incautious, though. Only Cylla presented herself at the palace with a small armed escort, while I laid low. She was acting as emissary of our people, but also hoped to uncover the truth of what was happening here. She went without me, because we thought they would see her as less of a threat and reveal more to her, even though she was as strong as I. We never thought they would—could—do to her what they did, or else we would have never let her go alone.” He pauses, staring off as if into the past. “We would all have run.”
“What did they do to her?”
His hand clenches atop his cane. “She was bound to a guardian and married to the crown prince within the month. Pregnant within two, with the twins. The royal family wanted the strength of her bloodline for their own, and they certainly never wanted her returning to Skyllea with whatever she learned. Our delegation was quietly slain, and I was trapped in the city alone, hunted. Cylla didn’t betray me. But the veil”—he shoots a glance upward, as if he can see it through the cloud-carved wooden ceiling—“detects the presence of magic in whoever passes through it. I warned you and your mother about it ages ago. So the wards knew another powerful bloodmage had entered the city with Cylla.”
I thought he’d warned me away from it because the blight was dangerous without a bloodmage’s shield. Not because it would betray me. I was foolish to think I could ever simply cross through the veil with a Skyllean merchant caravan.
“That’s why you were hiding with my mother,” I say.
“Not at first. At the start, I was by myself in a city still foreign to me. I managed to sneak word of what had happened through the veil with a Skyllean merchant, warning them not to send any bloodmages after us. But I couldn’t leave and just abandon Cylla.” He smiles wistfully. “Then I met your mother. I didn’t plan for you, Rovan. You became the source of both my greatest joy and then my greatest fear, once I realized how powerful you were.”
“You were afraid they would find me.” I choke on a laugh that’s half sob.
“It was why I never tried to return to you, after they found me. Icouldn’t.I was soon warded myself, by Ivrilos, and forced to marry Penelope, the crown prince’s youngest and most stubborn sister. They wanted my power for their future generations just as they did Cylla’s. And since your mother and I were never married, not officially, I was in that sense a ‘free’ man.” He spits the words with bitter irony.
“How did they force you? Did the dead man somehow… He can’tactuallycontrol our bodies, right?”
My father shakes his head. “Other than the usual threats of pain, Crown Prince Tyros promised to make Cylla’s life easier and to never touch her again, since he had his three children already—the twins and his and Cylla’s younger daughter.” He sighs. “So I married Penelope, even if I didn’t want to. But she was just as unwilling in the marriage as I, and nothing ever came of our match. No child.”
I can’t halt the words on my lips. “But you raised Crisea like a daughter.”
“Do you begrudge the girl any kindness I might have shown her?” He scrubs a hand over his face before I can answer. “Believe me, I feel guilty about it. Every single day. Every time I embraced her and remembered she wasn’t you. Every bite of food I took from a silver fork that I knew you and your mother would never be able to eat. Every night I lay in a soft bed next to a woman who wasn’tyour mother—when the princess deigned to sleep there and not with her lover. Guilt has been my closest companion.”
I flinch at the self-hatred in his voice. “Did you never try to run?” I whisper. “I don’t mean back to us. But to Skyllea.”
I can’t tell him, not yet, that journeying there has been my greatest dream. It’s too precious, too fragile.
“Oh, I tried. Several times. But I never quite mastered the trick of shielding against the blight. We have mages in Skyllea who specialize in that, but of course I could never ask the help of one of Thanopolis’s mages. Perhaps it was good that Ivrilos was too great a deterrent for me to escape.” His lips twist. “Though I’m not supposed to talk about that, so as not to sour your relationship.”
“It is most thoroughly and completely sour already,” I snap, standing abruptly from my chair to pace. And yet there’s not much room to move, with all the clutter. Nowhere to escape. I turn back to my father. “And Cylla?”
