Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

Each day, Vaasa trained her offensive magic relentlessly with Romana.

They had been right—one Veragi witch was a problem, a coven was a nightmare.

Working with Romana had changed Vaasa’s offense twofold. Melisina was as flexible as water and as wise as an owl, and the cycles seemed to cater to her whims. With her, Vaasa learned balance and the importance of tensile strength. Romana, too, was as unmovable as a mountain, but unlike Melisina, she quaked like one, too. She taught Vaasa another piece of the cycle—release. Vaasa found their unique practice of magic to be curious, considering she hadn’t realized how much she would benefit from the exposure. She had strong faith in the tenets they all lived by, but her excitement grew at the thought of what she would accomplish and who she may become.

If only she had the time.

Vaasa had slept in the bed each night since Dominik had left. Neither she nor Reid made a big deal of the occurrence, the foreman acting as though it was the most normal thing in the world. Some nights she slept soundly, and others, she couldn’t breathe with his body pressed to hers.

Reid simply woke and padded off to his responsibilities, or sometimes joined the larger group for their exercises in the morning. He spent a vast amount of time with Kosana and Mathjin. Vaasa had never understood before how close the three of them were, and as they settled into her role and presence on their team, they began to frequent the villa more often.

They must have been like this before she’d arrived, she realized one evening, and the thought made her heart sink a little. She wondered what Reid did all day, but by the shuffle of papers he sometimes brought home and pored over on the veranda, she assumed it was mostly managerial. Was that what his life would be like as headman?

In times of peace, perhaps.

One hot afternoon, Reid took her to the vast salt flats and introduced her to the salt lords, the same rich men he’d negotiated with to keep restaurants like Neil’s open. They looked at her strangely, and it took a few minutes for them to warm to her. Upon seeing Reid’s affection for her, though, they softened. One even gave her a vial of purplish salt as a friendly gesture.

She kept that tucked in her pocket all day for a reason she couldn’t name.

Two weeks later, Vaasa received Dominik’s first letter.

She sat with Mathjin and he documented each word, writing down the exact translation and filing it away in a little box in his office. Scribbles across his brown ledger recorded the date and gave the letter its own serial number. Meticulously, he wrote down those numbers and placed the journal in that same box.

“I don’t quite understand what he’s saying,” Vaasa told the advisor in Asteryan, who clung to each of her words with fidelity. It wasn’t lost on her just how much trust all of this required, and she did her best to remain as open and forthcoming as she could be. “Most of this is small talk, though he mentions a gift. If there’s a part of this that’s meant to mean anything, it’s that.”

Nodding slowly, Mathjin pressed a pale hand to the table as his eyes scanned the letter once more. “Yet there’s nothing about Wrultho.”

“Nothing.”

“I have thoughts on that, but I suspect you do as well,” Mathjin said, speaking in her native tongue, if only to give her someone else to use it with.

“I want to propose they move soldiers farther east, that they take down the dam themselves. We can approach them during the conferences at the election.”

Mathjin pursed his lips, looking older now than he usually did. He had this way about him, a stern tug of his mouth that spoke about all topics with a clinical neutrality, as if he had never learned to indulge in anything. Again, she wondered why he’d spent his life alone—why here, in this land of unfiltered possibility, he’d chosen not to seek partnership. “I think that is smart, and I think I know where we should send them.”

Plucking a map from his stack of rolled parchment behind him, Mathjin laid out the four corners and weighed them down with chunks of obsidian salt stone. In front of them lay the entire continent, color coded with rivers bright blue. “They should move through this branch of waterways.” Pointing to one of the many spidering webs of small rivers that crisscrossed the eastern lands, his finger trailed down one specific path that, as she narrowed her eyes, she realized wasn’t the most convenient. It went all the way east, making the trip a bit more difficult, but certainly not impossible.

“That path is almost… random,” she commented.

Mathjin winked.

A calculated choice, then, to take the road they wouldn’t expect.

“Here”—she pointed to the little place where the dam lay—“is where the most people are. The city will suffer at the falling, probably be laid to waste.”

Sadness passed over his face. “That’s the thing about leadership. It’s often a balancing of victims.”

Even though Kosana often chuckled at Mathjin, and perhaps Reid didn’t always understand him, Vaasa felt she did. He’d been a soldier himself once, supposedly for the Icrurian Central Forces, and he’d risen up enough ranks to serve one of the richest territories.

That didn’t come without a level of moral culpability.

He had balanced victims, then, perhaps one of them being himself. She wondered what he had given up, and if it had been that splendor she had considered earlier.

“Reid will know the path,” he continued. “It was his father who charted it.”

Furrowing her brow, Vaasa leaned back. She’d never heard stories of Reid’s father—only his mother.

“I served with him, actually,” Mathjin told her. “I was his commanding officer in the ICF. He was born here in Mireh, though everyone thought he was nothing but a poor boy with a talent for the blade. He made a name for himself in our corps, married one of the most powerful witches on the continent, and sired a son who has his mother’s penchant for books and his father’s strength.”

“How…” Vaasa looked down at the map, realizing what an invasive question she thought to ask.

“How did he die?” Mathjin said. At Vaasa’s awkward, apologetic look, he didn’t even flinch. The topics others usually considered off-limits Mathjin seemingly found to be the most interesting point of conversation. As if each detail about people was simply another item on a list of who they were, and not something he saw as taboo. For Mathjin, the world simply was . “It wasn’t anything spectacular. He simply got sick, as some people do, and there was no cure—Zuheia or otherwise—that could have saved him. It was right before Reid was elected, actually.”

The Zuheia witches were scattered throughout the east, their skill for healing in high demand. She couldn’t picture Reid like that, desperate and breaking. Heart racing, Vaasa nodded. It had only been five years, then.

“You are no stranger to loss, either,” Mathjin pointed out.

“No, I am not.”

“Nor am I.”

She wondered what Mathjin had lost, but he didn’t add anything else. Even if he placed no weight on boundaries, Vaasa decided against asking further questions.

“Now, shall we discuss the economy?” he asked.

Laughter burst from her, and she sat up on her stool. “You want to teach an Asteryan the secrets of Icrurian trade?”

“How else are you supposed to serve as high consort?”

Guilt washed over her for a moment, and then she rolled her shoulders. “Mathjin, you and I both know I will hardly be serving in that role.”

“Fine. How else are you supposed to pretend you will?”

She opened her mouth to argue, but practicality barreled through her. Even though it was crass, the man had a point. “All right, let’s discuss the economy.”

And they did, the sorts of things her father would have killed to know.

He detailed the salt lords and their inner workings with Sigguth and Dihrah, outlining the major trade routes and ports along the Settara. From the map, he showed her the passage into the narrow Sanguine, and all of the winding eastern rivers. The map was expansive, so much so that it would take an outsider like Dominik years to chart half of what they’d discovered.

So she listened.

She learned.

As he explained the election and the complex relationship between Dihrah, Sigguth, and Mireh, she realized how interwoven all three territories were. And in that bond, there was a weakness. If any side of the triangle were to shift, the already tenuous relationship between the formally independent city-states would fracture. For example, say, if Sigguth could find the wood used to build ships elsewhere. If Reid’s men capitalized on their alliance with Dihrah and decided to build the vessels themselves. One wrong, selfish move, and the result could plummet hundreds— thousands —of people into joblessness.

But such was the way of power, and Vaasa knew that better than anyone else.

It was just one of the interlinked economic systems functioning in Icruria. Hazut and Wrultho were irrevocably intertwined, and Irhu depended on Sigguth’s ships for their own fishing practices. Most important, each territory contributed something influential to the military: Dihrah and Mireh were the richest of the territories and could pay the ICF. Wrultho and Hazut supplied most of the men, and Irhu and Sigguth built ships and trained their naval corps. The only groups that couldn’t seem to work together were the covens, each of them holding their history so close to their chests. They all knew the others existed, but how and to what limit was an uncertainty.

Suddenly, Vaasa understood the reasons places like Hazut and Wrultho were so against Icruria opening up to outsiders. For them, it was more than just their culture. The only thing that made them competitive was the food or soldiers they provided, and even that was being stolen from them by a dam. Even that required salt if they wanted to preserve it.

Mireh and Dihrah held more political power than the rest. Of course Reid was a front-runner for this election. His territory had the salt.

Immediately after leaving Mathjin, she wanted to review what they’d discussed with Reid.

The foreman stayed late at the High Temple that night, and she didn’t know what compelled her, but she stopped by Neil’s to get Reid some food. When she stuck her head into his office, she found Reid deeply focused on a pile of paperwork. Shooing away Esoti, who had lingered near her the entire way, Vaasa gazed at him for a moment longer than she should have.

Reid sat at his wide desk made of wood of different shades—apparently all found growing along the shore of the Settara. The ceremonial desk was passed from each Mirehan foreman to the next. Crystal vials of salt and clusters of paperweights peppered the work surface, and her chest tightened at the sight.

“Reid,” she called from the doorway.

He looked up and his expression softened, accompanied by a tilt of his head. “Is everything all right?” Then his eyes dropped to the woven bag in her hands and a smile crossed his face. “Please say that’s for me.”

“I take it you’re hungry, then?”

“Starving.” Shuffling the paperwork and tucking it into a leather portfolio he placed behind him, he made room. She rummaged through the bag Neil had given her and picked out his food, then slid to the side of his desk and started on her own container. Reid immediately dug into his, covering his mouth as if he was embarrassed. Then he wiped his fingers on a cloth napkin he kept in his desk. “How did it go with Mathjin?”

She pursed her lips, recalling the one thing Mathjin didn’t share, and a question that haunted her now. “Where is his family?”

Reid paused. Setting down his napkin, his gaze shadowed with grief. “They’re dead. Killed by Asteryan forces in the east.”

Vaasa looked down at her hands, more uncomfortable than she could contend with. “I see.” There was nothing she could say and no further questions she was entitled to ask. All she wondered was how, in the face of all that anguish, Mathjin had never chosen to hate her.

“That’s the difference we can make, you and I,” he suggested softly.

Vaasa raised her eyes.

“To change their fates. To change everyone’s fate.” Reid adjusted how he sat, turning to face her more openly. “I spent some time in the east, too, and it was… brutal, to say the least. It was there I decided I would run for foreman. That I would be headman someday.”

“How long were you there?” she asked.

“A few years.”

She thought it odd he didn’t elaborate, but by the ghosts painted in his features, she assumed he had a reason. “Is that where you learned to fight?”

He shook his head. “I learned to fight the first time someone pushed Koen to the ground. The east is where I learned how not to fight.”

Koen, the foreman of Dihrah she had met when Reid found her at the sodality there. They had been close friends, she remembered. She wondered about Reid more in that moment than she’d yet allowed herself. Who was he, truly? He’d told her so little about his past that it felt almost ignorant to trust him; wasn’t it information that faith should be built upon? Yet he’d given her something more valuable: action. The facts and figures of his past meant little compared to his actions of the present.

And if that was true of him, what did it mean about her?

“That’s why you want to lead, then? Because more people need to learn when not to fight?” she asked.

The question earned just a small tilt of his lips. “I guess. Sometimes I sit and wonder how, after all these years, people can’t seem to figure out how to get along.”

“You and I are learning how to get along.”

At that, he grinned completely. “Is that what we’re doing?”

“I’d like to think so.”

He frowned, as if unsure of his own confidence. But then he spoke. “By choosing to come back here, you have grown my capacity for hope.”

Her lips parted, but she didn’t have an answer. Not a good one. It didn’t matter, though, because his eyes returned to his food, and he added, “There have been years I have felt none of it at all.”

She could barely picture him so despondent; he always seemed to hide any pessimism. She didn’t know how she had given him hope back when she’d had so little of it herself, but it didn’t matter. Not truly. “You will win,” she assured him.

He nodded, as if he, too, believed it.

Rolling her shoulders, Vaasa relayed the details of her discussion with Mathjin, reexamining everything the advisor had taught her, this time focusing on the economics of it all. On the parts that would solidify Reid’s tenure as headman.

Leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head, Reid watched her. He relaxed slowly. Eased into their partnership. “Salt builds empires,” he eventually said, reaching behind him for the folder he’d been working with and opening it. “That’s what I’m working on right now, actually. Trying to see if there’s a way to leverage it with Wrultho.”

“Do you think the salt lords will go for that?”

“No.” He shook his head, rubbing at his jaw and the dark beard that covered the scar she’d given him. “They don’t understand why Wrultho started the violence with Asterya in the first place. To this day, their resentment of Ton runs deep.”

“Ton didn’t start the violence,” she said. Didn’t he know that?

Reid furrowed his brow.

“My father purposefully built the dam on the Sanguine. The foreman of Wrultho tried to negotiate at first. He sent his advisor. She started with peace—and by the look on your face, I suspect you didn’t know that.”

Dumbfounded, Reid dragged a hand through his hair. “That is not the Icrurian way. No territory may bargain with a foreign entity without permission from the headman.”

“But imagine if one did,” Vaasa suggested. “And saved the entire eastern half of Icruria. A man like that could win an election.”

“But if Ton wanted to be headman, he wouldn’t have given the order for an unsanctioned attack on the dam.”

“They didn’t attack the dam.”

Reid paused, then let his hand fall against the desk. “What do you mean?”

Surely Ton had come forward about what her father had done. “The treaty only asked that they send the laborers to help take down the dam safely. When Ton of Wrultho made good on his promise, my father slaughtered each workman he sent.”

Reid’s lips parted. “What?”

“I always wondered if he would be too prideful to admit he’d gotten into bed with Asterya and lost, but I thought by now he would have asked for aid. Explained the situation.”

“No, he hasn’t said a word.” Reid leaned back a little, trying to wipe the surprise off his mouth, but then sat up straight with his elbows on his desk. “But it wasn’t a real treaty, not without the headman and councilors. As equally as your father manipulated Wrultho, they manipulated your father.”

“Do you truly believe my father had any intention of following through?”

He shook his head. “No.”

But that wasn’t really all. Vaasa took a small breath, setting her container of food to the side and leaning forward, hands on her knees. “I speak six languages, not four. I read and write in them proficiently, too. That is how I was trained—to translate at his side. Which is why when you said that he honed me no differently than a blade, you were right.”

Reid clung to each word she said, not even a phantom of amusement on his face. “Six?”

She nodded. “Few people other than his children were privy to his maneuvering. I wrote the treaty with Wrultho. I sat in the room and translated their negotiations. I suspected what my father would do, but if I said anything, if I did anything…” Looking down at her tangled hands, she stopped speaking and braced herself for his anger.

Yet that fury never took shape. Nodding slowly, Reid muttered, “I should expect you’ll have a strained relationship with Ton, then?”

“You… you aren’t upset?”

“I don’t begrudge the ways you chose to survive, no.”

As she looked down at him, she wondered if anyone had ever been so profoundly compassionate. That was the crux of who he was, and why he was often unfamiliar to her. “I would expect strained relations, yes.”

With pursed lips, he leaned back in his chair once more. “We have three weeks before the election. Perhaps you can help me come up with a way to convince Wrultho to listen to us?”

“I know little of economics,” she said.

“Anything you don’t know, I can teach you.”

Letting her dangling legs kick a little, she shrugged. “All right, let’s scheme.”

There was this little tug of his mouth again—not quite the amused look she so often saw from him, but a gentle comfort, as if the world wasn’t so heavy.

It was dangerous to get used to. But Vaasa thought that if the world were different, if she had met Reid the way people should, it would have been very possible to rule a nation at his side.

To give him Asterya would be one of her life’s greatest works.

Three weeks wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t enough silence, or no silence at all, or nights holed up in Reid’s office as he taught her the inner workings of the foremanship and what she hoped eventually would be his headmanship. In that little office or even on the veranda, he’d taught her every detail of the election: the events that took place each day, what the dinners would be like, how she should pack. He even taught her the dances they’d do. There was an art gallery in Mireh, too, where they’d spent an evening. By the end of the three weeks, she could get herself around the city without any help, and people had begun to wave to her.

But as the day arrived for them to leave Mireh, peace felt like a tightrope that frayed at the edges, and she bristled at the idea of losing the city’s skyline.

Vaasa watched the enormous ship from Dihrah approach. Built of a wood sourced from the west of the Settara, the ship was light enough to float through shallow waters, with four levels above the main deck for passenger quarters. Sanded down, the wood displayed veins of black and red. Clinker-built and as grand as could be, this particular ship was so different from the vessels she’d grown used to seeing in the bay her family’s fortress was built upon. Those ships had enormous hulls that needed much deeper water. This one had only one level below the main deck—the oarsbank, where soldiers rowed. It was nowhere near as fast as the ship Reid had taken when he’d found her in Dihrah. That ship had been all business, no grandeur. This one was meant to make a statement, meant to carry large groups of people.

Which meant the trip would be overnight.

Waiting on the main deck was Marc of Mireh, Isabel standing at his side.

They boarded to meet them, and immediately Isabel rushed forward to embrace Vaasa. “Oh, it’s happening!” The curvaceous woman pulled back just enough to gaze out at Mireh’s many-level buildings. “We’ll be back home soon.”

“You will be,” Vaasa assured her, though she wasn’t so confident herself.

Marc set his hand down on Reid’s shoulder, actually grinning as he gazed at the city. “We have much to catch up on. Come, help me get these men in line.”

Leaving her with a brush of his hand upon hers, Reid plunged down the stairs into the oarsbank after Marc.

“Wait!” Amalie’s voice came from behind her, and Vaasa turned to find the woman running down the dock, a leather bag slung over her shoulder.

Vaasa’s heart rose. “I thought you weren’t coming.” Facing Ton and what felt like every person she’d known from Wrultho had been too much, and despite Vaasa’s pleas, she had understood Amalie’s choice to stay behind.

Amalie stopped in front of her, pulling back her shoulders and standing tall. She took a deep breath. “Your strength is my strength, right?”

A smile split Vaasa’s face. “Your strength is my strength,” she said.

Isabel looped her arms through both of the witches’ arms, excitement thrumming around her. So much so that a little bit of it seeped into Vaasa, too. Isabel pulled Amalie and Vaasa across the dock to where the others waited. “Let’s get that coven of yours boarded. I haven’t seen Romana in years, and she owes me a game of poker.”