Sadie

Sunlight filtered into the gilded library. Light wood shelves stretched up to where the roof began to slope with rolling golden ladders on either side of the aisles. A burgundy carpet bisected the room upon which sat tables strewn with giant tomes, scrolls, and maps. It looked more impressive than the temple of knowledge in Damrienn, more gilded than the castle of Olmdere, the frescoed ceilings more beautiful than any painting I’d ever seen before.

I walked through the space, taking it all in as Navin walked to the center table littered with books. Histories written in four of the Aotrean languages lay in front of me along with sheets and sheets of music. Navin’s long fingers traced over one of the sheets. Blotted with ink, it seemed hastily scribbled by someone, the browning curled edges denoting its age.

“Long before the written word,”

he said, peeking up at me and then back down to the page, “there was song. Songs were the first magic in the world. Songs did far more than tell our people’s stories. They mended and they moved. They created and they destroyed.” His eyes flicked up to me and he said, “And then the Wolves came.” I shuddered as he passed me another scroll, reading over the poem of the Wolves appearing from the sky.

“The Onyx Mountains?”

I flipped over the page. “Is this . . . Valta?”

“Those mountains weren’t always there in the sky,”

he said, passing me another piece of paper. One of the faded yellowing pages was a map, but where the telltale spots of floating mountains usually were was nothing but desert sand. “One day, as the songs go, the sun vanished from the sky. The whole world went dark. And when the light shone again, there were mountains in the sky and Wolves roamed the land.”

I shook my head. “Our histories say the humans arrived on our shores, bringing their monsters along with them, begging the Wolves to rid them of the creatures.”

Navin weighed his head side to side. “The humans did beg in the end,”

he said. “It was our own folly. When the Wolves came, they wanted our song magic, and not just the smaller tunes. They wanted the eternal songs—the ones that created and destroyed. When the humans denied them, the Wolves attacked.” He passed me another sheet of music. “And so we did what we did best. We sang something new into creation.” He twisted one of the heavy leather-bound tomes toward me, a painting of a juvleck battling an ostekke on the page.

I sucked in a breath. “Humans created the monsters?”

“They were meant to battle the Wolves, to protect us and our secrets.”

His throat bobbed and he nodded. “They were once within our control.”

My mind spun so fast I thought I might topple over. “Like the way Rasil controls the samsavet?”

“Yes,”

Navin said. “Rasil’s grandfather created that samsavet, and the beast is still controlled by his direct descendants through song and blood. But that creature’s creation came at a great cost to the world.”

“What about the other monsters? What happened to that control?”

“More and more were created, more hastily and by those who didn’t possess a strong enough hold on their magic. This place was once a bastion for the Songkeepers. A refuge filled with hundreds of musicians who wielded the magical songs in the wars . . .”

He shook his head, sorting through the stacks of paper and books. “The Songkeepers were dying in droves. If their magic didn’t consume them, they died in the ancient wars. So few were left with the eternals songs to protect humankind . . . Our sect was almost entirely destroyed.” His fingertips trailed delicately over the pages. “You’d think we’d have learned the cost of wielding such magic was too great, but they were desperate times and the War of Wolves demanded more and more power from us. But all magic comes at a price, a balance that the humans weren’t respecting.”

“Like the giving of one’s soul for a dying wish,”

I murmured, studying a painting of a golden scale weighing two orbs—one golden, one emerald. The gold was the same shade that now scarred Calla’s body, the emerald a perfect match to Sawyn’s lightning bolts. My limbs felt light. My fingers tingled as I mindlessly turned through the pages.

“The creation of monsters needed a counterbalance. Their creation brought dark magic into the world.”

Navin continued on quicker as I whipped my head toward him. “That dark magic found the first hosts that would claim it. It turned some on both sides into the first sorcerers.” I sucked in a sharp breath. “In the end, humans were so plagued by the beasts that they’d created, and the sorcerers that had turned to the darkness because of their creation, that they begged the Wolves to save them. Humans vowed they’d lay down their magic and never bring dark magic into the world again. They knelt to the Wolves, promised that they’d make them kings and Gods if they saved us.” I gaped at the pages. “That is where our stories can agree at least.”

“When Rasil’s grandfather created that samsavet?”

I whispered as my heartbeat thundered in my ears. “That created dark magic.”

“At a terrible price. One he and I both paid for our whole lives along with the rest of our court.”

Navin’s eyes glassed over. “The dark magic that samsavet created was claimed by Sawyn.”

“By all the Gods.”

I braced my hands on the table to keep from toppling over. My cheeks flamed, my stomach clenched, and bile burned its way up my throat. “I thought sorcerers were created by death magic. I thought it was through their killing that the darkness took over.”

“It is.”

Navin tilted his head, squinting, as if trying to figure out how to explain something so complicated to me. “But the killing is only the spark; without the creation of dark magic by the humans, there’d be no kindling for the flame. Without the creation of more monsters, there’d be no more dark magic in the ether for anyone to claim.”

“You’re saying if Rasil’s grandfather hadn’t conjured that monster, then Sawyn would’ve never existed? Olmdere would still be whole?”

“Yes.”

“I feel like I’m going to be sick,”

I groaned, fanning myself with the music sheets. “And the Songkeepers?”

“There are so few of us left,”

Navin said. “There was a time when only one human in all of Aotreas still knew the eternal songs. Her name was Nahliel.” He passed me a charcoal sketch and I recognized the shape instantly: Galen den’ Mora.

“Ora’s grandmother?”

“She made it her life’s work to travel the continent and find those who still contained the spark of magic needed to wield songs. When she died, she wished for Galen den’ Mora and her line still takes up the mantle of finding new Songkeepers all around the continent.”

I scrutinized the sketch in my hands—a simple line drawing of Galen den’ Mora high on a mountaintop. “How can you know who has this magic?”

“Little tests,”

he said. “Most of us never knew we possessed it. Most of us didn’t even know such magic existed. We didn’t realize the songs we’d sing for protection, for courage, for healing actually had power. I never knew my affinity for music was a gift from the Gods, nor did I know what I could do with it. There was a Songkeeper who rolled into our village, playing her music, and Rasil, my brother, and I all took to it straightaway. When I fled with my father, Rasil came with us. He took me to Valta, reunited us with grandparents he’d never known. It was here we found out Rasil came from a long line of Songkeepers. It was here that I met Ora.” Navin stared down at his boots and rubbed the back of his neck. “If only my brother came with us.”

I stiffened. “Your brother?”

It dawned on me all at once. “This is the secret you wanted him to take to his grave.”

Navin’s eyebrow arched. “Could you imagine if Sawyn got her hands on this magic? If she could conjure new monsters at will? If she could control them? If she could create an army of fellow sorcerers?”

“She would’ve destroyed all of us,”

I said breathlessly. “So you can do all these things? You can create monsters?”

“I have the power to, though I don’t know the specific song to conjure and control monsters. That song is kept in a very hard to access place so as not to tempt those who would use it for less than honorable reasons. It was hidden in plain sight, secreted away for safekeeping after what Rasil’s grandfather did. I have never created a monster and will never try,”

Navin said decidedly. “I won’t bring more dark magic into this world. I won’t curse this land with more sorcerers.” His eyes grew vacant again, and I knew he was going back to Olmdere as a child, reliving the tyranny of Sawyn all over again. “But I know where to find the eternal songs, yes.”

“And Ora knows where to find them, too?”

My eyes darted from one map to the other, landing on the detailed drawing of Damrienn. “Do you think the Silver Wolves know?”

“I think they know something. How much, I have no idea. If they know that the humans have a secret that could help them rule the entire continent if they could just unlock it,”

he said, “it would destroy the world.”

“How many of you are there now?”

“You met most of them during the battle in Olmdere castle.”

My eyes widened remembering the flurry of badges during the melee. “They were all Songkeepers?”

Navin nodded. “Ora had been summoning them every night since Calla set sights on Olmdere. Those songs Ora sang through the night were meant to call them home.”

I racked my brain, remembering the tunes and ballads Ora would sing as we drifted off to sleep each night. I began to question every song I heard coming from them. What other powers could they wield? Was every moment with them an illusion? A manipulation?

“I just don’t understand why?”

I looked all around, scanning the ornate library. “That is one part I still can’t comprehend. Why would Ora summon your entire order into battle to help a Wolf?”

Navin sighed, wandering from the table and dropping down into one of the upholstered leather chairs. “There is a divide amongst the Songkeepers now.”

He steepled his fingers and pressed them to his lips. “Those like Ora who want a world where Wolves and humans live side by side. Equals. Where we acknowledge that Wolves did save us long ago but that they hurt us now and perhaps there needs to be a balance, a harmony between us. No one bowing to the other anymore.” His lips pursed and he looked at me. “And then there are those like Rasil and his grandfather.”

“And what does Rasil want?”

Navin’s eyes darkened. “To use whatever magic necessary for the world to revert back to a time when Wolves didn’t exist here at all.”