Chapter Twelve

I'm proud to say I only resort to eating fish out of the river the last four days of my journey back to Laconia. It… isn't the easiest to catch fish with no net, but after some magical mishaps, I figure out a way. Cooking it is a whole different ballgame, and I end up charring my first catch pretty good.

Hey, I ain't no Girl Scout.

Rune is mostly silent on the journey back. He probably knows I'm still pissed off at what happened in Acadia's castle, and I don't really want to talk to him about it.

I spend more time than I'd like thinking about the Emperor and his predicament. He was kind of an ass, but again, it isn't like he had a normal childhood, so can I blame him? If I was stuck to a chair year after year, magic keeping me alive and in place, I'd be an asshole, too.

Still, he could've let me take Fred's research out of a show of good faith or something. I suppose I could've stormed my way through the castle, but I didn't want a fight with those guards, whether they were zombie-fied or not.

You'd think that, after such a long journey, I'd be thrilled when I see Laconia's walls, but I'm not. I'm dreading telling Frederick what I learned. I don't know how he'll take it. It's one thing to assume your dad is dead, but it's another to know it as a fact—and that Empress Morimento, the one he was sent to help, is the reason he's dead… that'll sting, I'm sure.

I follow the river as it grows smaller, up to where I slipped out of the city through a broken grate. Rune lights up before I can crawl through, asking me, "Do you think he'll take it well?"

"Do I think Frederick will be happy to hear that Empress Morimento locked his dad in a dungeon and probably starved him?" I ask.

Rune scoffs, his typical haughty tone back in full-force, "Well, when you say it like that… if I were you, I would work on my delivery before telling Frederick any of that."

I roll my eyes and crawl through the hole. It's just after midday, so I don't know that Frederick will be home. I walk around the edge of the pond. A few people are busy washing their clothes in the water. When they see me, they turn their questioning gazes in my direction, but they say nothing, and within another moment they resume their duties and ignore me.

Guess it's only the rich fuckers up top who think I'm a demon.

I go to Frederick's hut and knock on the door. I hear him shout, "Just a minute!" And then I hear him lumbering to the door inside, the wood creaking beneath his feet. He throws open the door, and his amber eyes widen when he sees me.

"Rey," he breathes out my name like he thought he'd never see me again, a word he never imagined speaking. "You're… you're here. Already. Did you—" He then must realize I'm standing out in the open, where anyone can see me, because he grabs me by the wrist and pulls me inside his house, shutting the door immediately.

He breathes hard as he stands before me, like I caught him so off-guard he doesn't know what to say right away. His light brown hair is a little messy, and he has a grease smudge on his cheek. Past him, I see glass tubes of all sizes, some filled with mysterious liquids. Reminds me of chemistry back in high school.

Finally Frederick regains his voice: "Did you find anything?"

"Uh, yes, but it's probably not what you're hoping for." I reach into my bag and pull out the journal I found in Catarin Tower. I offer it to Frederick, watching as his stare drops to the leather-bound book. "I read some of it. I hope you don't mind. Got pretty bored out there."

He takes the journal from me and flips it open. His hands actually shake as he turns the first page. "My father's journal. You actually found something. I can't believe it. Where did you find it?"

"It was in Catarin Tower."

"You didn't find anything else? You didn't go to the castle?"

"No, I did, but—"

"How?" Frederick asks. "How could you have gone to the castle? You weren't gone nearly long enough to make the trip there and back, let alone there. Rey, do not take me for a fool—" He moves around the table, putting it between us, and he carefully places his father's journal in a spot away from the glass flasks and tubes.

I hold in a sigh. I don't want to tell him everything, but he should know—and in order for him to believe me, I have to show him something I didn't want to show anybody in this city.

"I made it to the castle and back by using magic to…" Oh, God, how can I say this using words he'll understand? "…move with the river."

The look Frederick gives me after that tells me he doesn't believe a word. This time I can't stop the sigh from escaping my throat, and I hold up my right hand and wiggle my fingers. As I do so, the tattoo on my wrist and hand turns from black to a yellowish-white, and tiny sparks form between my fingers, illuminating the room with a magical glow.

His mouth falls open, and no understandable words come out. He just croaks out a funny sound of awe and confusion, and then he moves around the table and grabs me by the elbow to lift up my glowing wrist to his face in order to study it better.

"How…" Frederick examines my wrist with such an intent expression, it's almost funny.

Right then, the door to his hut opens, and Prim darts inside. The moment she sees the glow, her tiny feet skid to a halt. The door swings shut behind her, and her hazel eyes widen. She gasps out, "You're an empress!"

I jerk my hand away from Frederick and take a step backward, away from them both. The magic disappears. "Uh, no, I'm not."

"You are!" Prim squeals, giddy. "Only empresses have magic. Tell her, Frederick! Tell her she's an empress!" She wears the same old dress she wore the night she busted me out of jail, her dark, curly hair pulled back with an old red ribbon.

Frederick clearly doesn't know what to say, but that's okay, because I do. I tell her, "Prim, I'm not an empress." I don't want to tell them about Rune. It's already bad enough.

Prim rushes me and throws her arms around my waist as she buries her face against my stomach. I tense, not used to affection like that. "You are," she says, and I can practically hear her grin. "I can't believe it. You're an empress, Rey. You can save us. You have to save us." She angles her head back, gazing up at me with wide, innocent eyes.

The next word she whispers so desperately it makes my heart ache: "Please."

It's one thing for me to say these people's problems aren't my own, but it's another thing for me to say it while gazing down into the pleading eyes of a girl who can't be more than eleven or twelve years old.

Prim is hopeful. She doesn't want to believe anything else. She wants me to be her savior, to help Laconia and everyone in it, to fix their problems and make everything go back to the way it was—a way Prim herself doesn't remember, since she's so young.

I try to speak gently as I peel her off me, "Prim, I—" But the way she keeps looking at me, even after I get her tiny arms off me, makes me stop.

Frederick moves to set a hand on Prim's thin shoulder. "Prim, let me have some words with Rey. Alone." He gives her a warm, kind smile, and it's that expression that makes me see just why Prim had agreed to help him in the first place. Listening to him, you just want to close your eyes and believe everything will be okay.

It's clear Prim doesn't want to go. Her mouth curls into a pout, and she glances between Frederick and me. She wants to say something; I can see it on her face, but in the end all she does is whirl around on her feet and dash outside.

As the wooden door swings shut, Frederick looks at me. "You can't blame her for hoping you'll be the answer to all of our problems. We've… we've nothing but bad luck these past twenty years."

"And I get that, I do, but I'm not an empress," I say. "My magic is… new. I only got it when I woke up in Laconia. Back home, I'm just a normal girl." A normal girl with her life falling apart, but whose life isn't nowadays? Welcome to the world and all that.

"Perhaps that is so, but here, now—you aren't normal. She's right. No one has magic other than the empresses."

Shaking my head, I tell him, "I don't know about that. You want to know what I found inside Acadia's castle? Empress Morimento's son sitting on the throne. Maybe he can't use magic himself, but magic is still affecting him. He can't get off the throne. He's been stuck there for years."

The more I say, the wider Frederick's eyes get, until I think they're about to pop out of his skull. Seconds pass as he processes everything I just told him. It's a long while before he says, "Her son, you say? That is… that is strange, indeed. What about the Empress herself?"

"Dead," I say.

"You saw her body?"

"No, I didn't. Her son told me. He also told me his mom was so insane that she threw your dad into the dungeon and confiscated all of his things."

The expression on Frederick's face now reads as crestfallen. His gaze lands on the floor between us. "I… I figured something happened to him. A part of me didn't believe he reached the castle." He rubs a hand along the side of his face, smearing the grease stain there. "I can't believe Empress Morimento would do something like that. I take it, then, she destroyed the research?"

"Not exactly." Hope returns to Frederick's face, though not for long, because I add, "He refused to give it to me unless I killed the other empresses for him."

That gets Frederick to move toward the table to lean on, to give himself more support. "He wanted you to kill the other empresses?" Just by the way he repeats what I said, I can tell he is incredulous at the Emperor's request.

I nod. "Yep. He said it would cut the threads of magic keeping him on the throne."

All he says to that is: "Interesting."

"I told him I wouldn't do it. I can't. He kicked me out after that, so I didn't have the chance to look to see if your dad's research was still there." I pause before adding quietly, "I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize. Even if you have magic somehow, I doubt you would be able to take on the others. It's probably a blessing that Empress Morimento is dead and you didn't run into her. If the fairest of the empresses could fall into such stark madness… I hesitate to wonder how the woes affected the others. But we can now assume they are still alive, which is more than we knew before."

I don't understand why it matters if they're alive or not; it isn't like they're doing anything to help the kingdom. If they're that crazy, then locking themselves away in their castles was probably the best thing they could've done.

"It is peculiar, though, that Empress Morimento's son is now on the throne—and imprisoned there, as you say. He was unharmed? No chains you could see?" Frederick asks.

"He was an asshole, but besides that, he seemed fine. No chains. No magic I could see. I didn't stick around to ask him a bunch of questions. He wanted me to help him or he wanted me to leave. It was one or the other."

Frederick starts to pace the length of the room. "My father stayed in Laconia for a few years, making sure everyone was okay. Helping the city build more homes for the refugees that made it. Before he left for Acadia, I remember him mentioning Morimento's son. I find it odd that the woes are keeping him safe. I wonder if, perhaps, the Empress herself was in that same position before she died?"

"You mean, was she trapped on the throne, too?"

"Yes, and does that mean the other empresses have met the same fate? Are they frozen on their thrones as well? And, for that matter, how does he know they yet survive? Can he feel them? Is he somehow connected to Empress Morimento's magic? If he is, it would be the first I've ever heard of something like that."

Frederick rambles just to ramble, and I listen to him for a while before I say, "He told me that empresses live a long time. That they can have children but that doesn't mean their kids are their heirs."

"He's right. Empresses were never forbidden from having families—although most avoided it because they saw it as a weakness possible enemies could exploit." Frederick folds his arms over his chest. "It's said their true heirs are the ones they know from a past life. Strong women who are ready to take up the mantle and the power that comes with it. An empress only dies when she is ready to, when she gives her power to her true heir. Yet another reason it is so odd Empress Morimento is dead. There should be another empress out there, then, to take her place in Acadia."

"I don't know anything about that," I tell him. "Sure didn't look like there was a magical woman walking around the castle. Her son was it."

Frederick's eyebrows come together. "If that's the case, then the woes have disrupted more than we thought. We have had three empresses since the beginning of Laconia. Even if her son sits on the throne, it is not the same."

I can tell he wants to further debate this, but I'm kind of in a hurry to, you know, get back home and fix my own shit, so I say, "Look, I'm sorry I couldn't get more of your dad's stuff, but I brought you back that, so now it's time for your part of the deal."

The look Frederick gives me makes my stomach clench in the worst way. "I… have been wrestling with our promise while you were gone."

Maybe it's due to the fact that I've been let down so much in my life, that anything that could go wrong does go wrong, but I know what he means, even though he hasn't outright said it. "You lied. You lied to get me to go out there and look for your dad's stuff because you knew you'd never be able to. You said you'd help me!"

"And I meant it, but… researchers have been trying to find ways to control portals for decades. Centuries, even. It's more likely that I'll find something to reverse the woes than learn how to create a portal so you can go home."

His words, though spoken kindly, still cut to the bone, so sharp that my legs suddenly grow weak and I have to take a step back.

"Rey," Frederick says, "I'm sorry. Deceiving you was wrong, but I—" He reaches for me, though I don't know why. Doesn't matter; I sidestep him and avoid his hand. "Help me get to the bottom of the woes, help me reverse them, stop them, and I will spend the rest of my life working to get you home."

I'm hurt. I'm enraged. I want to hit something. I tell him, "And how do I know that's not just another lie? Help you with the woes. Right. Why should I help you—any of you—with your problems, hmm?" With every sentence, my voice gets louder until I'm practically yelling at him, but he doesn't flinch.

I say, "No one is there to help me with my problems. No one gives a shit about me. Kicked out of school, my scholarship possibly gone. About to be homeless. No one cares about me, so why the fuck should I care about you?"

My right hand tenses up, and even though I'm not looking at it, I can feel the sparks of magic glowing, dancing along my skin, their warmth the only bit of friendship I have right now. "I never asked for any of this," I tell him. "I don't want it. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be your goddamned hero. I just want to go home and forget all of this!"

Even though I just yelled at him, Frederick is calm when he whispers, "Sometimes we are given responsibilities we never asked for, things no one else can accomplish. To deny them is to deny fate. Do you really think you came to Laconia accidentally? That you can somehow walk through the storms and survive out there when none of us can? I refuse to believe it's a coincidence. You are here because you are the answer to our prayers—"

"I don't want to be," I hiss.

"We don't always get what we want in life. Sometimes we are burdened with duties we never asked for, and we have no choice but to rise to the task."

I lift a finger at him, Rune still glowing on my wrist and hand. "Easy for you to say. This is your home. Your kingdom. Of course you want to do everything you can to save it: it's yours. It's. Not. Mine. I might never get to go home again."

Frederick quietly says, "This city is not my home. It is where I live now, yes, but my home is out there, past those stone walls. My home is Magnysia. You have the freedom to walk outside those walls, to see things most in here have only dreamed of seeing. You were sent to answer our pleas, Rey. I wish you could understand that."

All I can do is shake my head. Shake my head and back away from him, to the door. The glowing tattoo on my wrist fades into its normal black color, the magic dissipating.

No. No, it's not right. It's not fair. I don't want any of this. I don't care how selfish that makes me. I just want to go home, to blink and for everything to go back to the way things were, to a time when I had no idea what a woe was or who the empresses were. Simpler times when my problems were just that: my own.

I don't say a word more as I turn and run out of Frederick's hut. I run with no destination, passing the same group of people washing their clothes in the dirty pond. Habit drives me toward the grate in the outer stone wall, and I slip through it.

I run. I run for a few minutes along the flowing creek.

If I'm stuck here… what am I going to do?