Interlude 13

B eing a queen was supposed to have been awesome.

It was not awesome.

It was awful.

Maybe that was because they didn’t let Lift do anything truly queenly, even if she was wearing an illusion of Navani’s face and body. She’d tried suggesting Opposite Day, where servants got to beat their masters, and offered to sign it into law. She’d suggested seventeen new holidays. In a moment of trying to be more reasonable, she’d even asked that they let her play with that stuff that blew up when you mixed it, like Navani did. Lift had promised she’d heal if she lost any appendages that she really needed.

Each time, her keepers—Brightlady Khal and Brightlord Aladar—had laughed. As if she were joking. Except they didn’t laugh when she was actually joking, and said that Aladar’s face looked like he’d sneezed when he was brushing his teeth, and had frozen that way.

“You … sneeze when you brush your teeth?” he’d asked her instead.

Well, yeah. Sometimes, she supposed. She didn’t track it or anything.

She sat back in her “throne” with a huff. Navani didn’t even have a proper throne room from which Lift could spout dictates and yell for people’s heads to be offed. Instead, Navani had an office. For meetings. It had a nice chair, but it wasn’t a throne at all.

Today, the desk was arrayed with a wide variety of foods, all exotic, to keep Lift distracted. That’s what they did—pile food in front of her. Have her walk the hallways so everyone thought Navani was still here, and not sucked through a hole into the past or something. They’d have her cancel meetings claiming fatigue, then they’d stick her in Navani’s rooms. They kept giving her games or books to try to keep her occupied. As if she could read. “Young ladies are supposed to like these,” they said. As if she were a lady.

She pushed her plate around with a fork, sitting on Navani’s chair with her legs hanging over the side. She looked like Navani, even to herself, but the illusion wasn’t great.

Well, it was kind of great. Wit was good with this stuff. But Lift was shorter than Navani, so the illusion always had to include a full gown to hide that her waist was far lower. And though the illusion looked like it was staring people in the eyes, she was actually looking out from the chest somewhere, which could be kind of distracting. Like having two bowls strapped to the sides of your face.

“Lift?” Wyndle said, forming his bearded face from a pile of vines, his eyes as crystalline gemstones and seeming worried. “You aren’t … eating? Look at all of this expensive food they’re forced to give you to keep you out of trouble!”

“Don’t wannit,” she mumbled, her voice Navani’s.

“Is that caviar? Lift, that’s caviar!”

She flopped onto her stomach, laying across the chair with her waist on one armrest, her upper chest on the other, dangling one arm down toward the floor. This room was so tiny. No windows. Why would Navani have an office without a window? Except for the fact that she’d want nobody to watch her having private meetings, of course. Other than that.

“Lift …” Wyndle said, sitting on the desktop, offering one vine as a hand to pat her on the shoulder. “It really wasn’t your fault. Master Wit explained it. You didn’t cause the explosion.”

“You think they found Gav in there?”

“Certainly they did! They’re Bondsmiths, Lift. Most incredible and accomplished of all Radiants. Why, I’ll bet they found him instantly. Lift? It’s all right.”

“There’s nothin’ I can do. Just like Wit said.”

“So why mope?”

“I just wanna be parta stuff,” she muttered. “I was one of the first. And I’m never part of anything.” She stared at the floor. “And when I am, I make it go wrong. Every time. You can lie and say it ain’t true, but it ain’t ain’t true, Wyndle. You know it always gets messed up. If I’d been better at this, maybe I coulda saved Gav. I didn’t. Couldn’t even save myself.

“So they lock me in a room when the world’s gotta be saved, otherwise … I’ll trip. I’ll knock into people. People are dyin’. Gav is lost. But I’m here in this uncomfortable chair, savin’ nobody. Because if I were there? It goes wrong. They know it.”

“The chair is uncomfortable?”

“Mmmph.”

“Have you tried … sitting in it?”

She flopped around, lying back across the armrests and staring at the ceiling.

“Storms …” Wyndle said. “No wisecrack?”

“Mmmph.”

“This is dire. Dire indeed. I … um … I …” He drew himself up, then offered the secret handshake.

Well, storm him for a Voidbringer.

It kind of made her feel better when he did that.

“Lift,” the tower said, a shimmer appearing on the table in the designated spot. “What is ‘peeky time’?”

“Children’s game,” Lift said, taking Wyndle’s offered hand and shaking. “You play it with babies, like the drooling really, really young babies who ain’t old enough to play real games, like hitting each other with sticks.”

“Oh, okay,” the tower said.

“Why?” Lift asked.

“I heard echoes of the term in a deep hallway on the thirty-third floor,” the tower explained. “But there’s housing in that direction, so maybe a woman was out walking her baby.”

“You can’t tell?” Lift said.

“I … am not fully functional without Navani,” the Sibling said, their voice growing softer. “It won’t be a big problem for some weeks yet, as she’s partially here. In the Spiritual Realm, she’s kind of everywhere. But … it is having an effect.”

Lift grunted. “You worried?”

“I shouldn’t be. I didn’t want to be here, in this situation. I can’t decide if I’d rather still be asleep or not, and Navani can be … determined when she wants something. I chose to accept her Words, and it was my decision, but I … I waver.”

“I’m glad you’re awake,” Lift said. “You make the tower all deevy.”

“I assume that’s a compliment.”

“Oh!” Wyndle said, perking up. “It’s the best compliment, from her.”

“Nah,” Lift said. “Too many people understand it now. Need a new word.” She flopped around to where she was lying on the chair with her feet in the air and her head hanging down under the desk. “Hey, Tower. What did this voice you heard sound like?”

“I can re-create it,” the Sibling said, and projected the sound of a distant, inhuman voice saying “peeky time” in the most forlorn way ever.

Lift slammed her head against the underside of the desk as she tried to sit up. “Storms! Ow! Storming storming storming storming storms. Sibling, that’s my storming chicken, you storming tillwallop!”

“Your chicken can actually talk?”

“I told you! An’ better than Wyndle!”

“Hey!” he said.

“You use too many words I don’t know,” Lift said, standing and rubbing her forehead. “That strange monster man that took the chicken, then sold me to the enemy? He vanished into the hole with Navani, right?”

“By your description, yes …” the tower said.

“So he musta left my chicken somewhere! It could be starvin’!” She grabbed a plate off the desk. “Do chickens like caviar?”

“Maybe?” Wyndle said.

“I’ll bring some curry just in case,” she said, grabbing another plate. “I gotta go save it!”

“Lift,” the tower said, “I can send a contingent of guards. You can send a contingent of guards. We—”

“No,” Wyndle said, growing taller. “We have to do this. Ourselves. Right, Lift?”

“Storming right,” she said. Then smiled at him. “Thanks for backin’ me up.”

“Always,” he said.

“And you don’t think it will be odd,” the Sibling’s shimmer of light said, “for the queen to go out by herself, hunting through distant hallways?”

“Sure,” Lift said. “But you can eat the illusion, right?”

“Well, it was made with Towerlight, so I can cancel the power sustaining it, but that’s not—”

“Good enough!” Lift said. “There’s no time! My chicken needs caviar. But first, record me sayin’ these words with Navani’s voice …”

In a second, she was back to herself. Wearing her clothing—just some trousers and a loose shirt—like she’d put on this morning before being transformed to Navani. Bands wrapping her chest underneath. She hated how she looked most days, so that part of the illusion was nice, but this wasn’t a job for a queen.

Seconds later, Lift strode out past the guards at the door, who were surprised—but not that surprised—to find that Lift had somehow snuck past them to pester the queen. The Sibling projected Navani’s voice from inside, telling them not to interrupt her for a while—as Lift had distracted her from some very important paper reading.

Just like that, she was free for the first time in forever —or since that morning at least—to do what she wanted. And what she wanted, what she needed, was to be a hero. Even if only to a single frightened animal.

With the Sibling’s help, they were able to figure out exactly where the evil guy’s den was. A room that the Sibling, upon focusing on it, couldn’t sense.

“Ralkalest,” the Sibling explained from a glowing spot on the wall in a back corridor. “You probably call it aluminum. Some of the rooms in the tower have to be lined in it for practical reasons. Sometimes you need to contain a being of immense power. I’d forgotten it was even here—as I can’t sense what’s inside.”

Lift had positioned herself underneath the room. The corridor one level down went under it. Since the lock mechanism appeared to be jammed, this felt like the best way in.

“Aluminum?” Wyndle said. “Oh … I don’t like that. We could get trapped!”

“We ain’t gonna get trapped,” Lift said, climbing up the wall on some vines he’d grown for her. Soon she was hanging upside down, her long dark hair falling around her head. “But we are gonna be careful in case that monster man with the scars left guards or somethin’. That might be why the door won’t open. Now hush and turn into a sword.”

“But I can’t cut through aluminum!”

“What?” Lift said. “What use is a sword what can’t cut stuff?” Storming spren. Every time she needed him …

“The sheeting is very thin,” the Sibling explained. “Because it’s so valuable. Basically just foiling. You should be able to punch through, even with a Shardblade.”

“Glad someone is useful. Now hush, both of you.”

“Okay,” Wyndle said, “but why come in from the bottom ?”

“More dynamic,” Lift said, then thrust her hand to the side and he appeared as a sword. She didn’t do that often, as swords felt … wrong to her. But they were good for chopping. She sliced a circle out of the ceiling, and indeed, did hit some resistance. It stopped the Blade more soundly than the Sibling had thought it might. However, once she got a chunk of the ceiling out, she could reach up and bend back the sheets of metal and pry them out of the way. They weren’t terribly thick, so she managed it, after turning Wyndle into a crowbar.

After some further effort, she got a nice Lift-sized circle cut out of the ceiling. The blocks of stone that she cut out had been clattering to the ground—and the last, biggest ones fell with a crash to wake the dead. She winced.

Is that part of being dynamic? Wyndle asked in her head, because he was now a sword.

“Shut it,” she muttered, then dismissed the Blade and pulled herself into the hole. She stuck her head up into a round stone chamber, with some books in a case along one wall and lit by some spheres on top of it. Other than that, the only furniture was a mattress on the floor.

However, a cage hung from the ceiling with her chicken in it. Her heart leaped. Hanging near it was some old guy. He seemed to be unconscious, or maybe dead, hanging by a chain from the ceiling, and was way, way too naked.

“Ugh,” Lift said, wincing.

“What?” Wyndle said, growing up beside her. “You’re always staring at men—”

“Not old ones,” she said. And not one who looked like this, bloodied from what had probably been torture. It turned her stomach to see the poor man like that. Plus he was bearded and rather hairy. Like, actually really hairy.

“Bleck,” she muttered, then hauled herself up inside. Seemed empty otherwise. So she took some caviar out of her pocket and climbed on the bookcase to offer it to the chicken. “Hey. Hey, I’m here. I got you.”

The animal’s feathers looked terrible—worn and ragged, faded, rather than the chipper bright red she’d seen from it just before the occupation. It still had that hurt wing, but it perked up when it saw her and got excited.

“Hello!” it said. “Hello, hello, hello!”

Nearby, the man hanging by the chains stirred. Lift got the door to the chicken’s cage open and the animal out, after which it clung to her arm with claws that were way too sharp. The man blinked open red eyes, then frowned.

“That is … unexpected,” he said.

“You need help?” Lift said, clutching her chicken close. “’Cuz uh … I’m maybe a hero or somethin’.”

“That would be appreciated,” the man said, his voice ragged. “Quickly though, before—”

The door opened. The supposedly broken door. Yeah, Lift loved being right, but she could have been wrong now and it would have been okay.

Three people entered, and they were not official guards or anything like that. Two thugs, with knives strapped to them. One woman in a havah, with rings glittering on her fingers. It took one glance from the woman—her expression angry—for Lift to guess these were associates of the terrible man who had taken her captive and sold her to the enemy.

Storming Sibling bein’ blind lately. Lift growled, then summoned Wyndle as a sword and shouted, “Hey Sibling, if you can hear, send those guards! I really shoulda listened to you!”

No reply. But if the tower heard the bird, then it could hear her. Lift didn’t try to engage the two thugs as they surged toward her, but instead swung her Blade for the chains holding the captive to the ceiling. It didn’t work, because of course she wasn’t storming lucky enough for that. The chains were something the sword couldn’t cut.

“Go,” the man said. “Run. I’ll survive.”

Chicken under one arm squawking up a storm, Lift dodged off the bookcase as one of the men swiped for her. She landed near the hole in the ground, and moved to hop down through it, then glanced over her shoulder at the dangling man.

Storm it.

Not today.

She dropped the chicken through the hole, hopefully to safety. It fluttered down. Then, as the thugs reached for her, she began to glow with Light. Enough from breakfast, and snacks, even if she hadn’t been eating as much as normal. She made the ground slick, and pushed off between the men. They cursed, but she immediately collided with the bookcase in a stumbling mess of fluttering pages and messy long hair.

“Grab her,” the woman said. “Quickly. We need to vacate the tower.”

Lift popped up from among the books, then yelped and scrambled back from the two men. She tried to build up speed with her awesomeness, but there wasn’t room in this chamber to really do that, or maneuver. She ended up sliding between them and colliding with the small bed, spilling spheres and falling over her own legs.

Storm it, why were things always like this for her?

Why, every time she thought she was making progress, did her body betray her? Why couldn’t it just stay the same ? Why couldn’t things just stay as she wanted them ?

She looked back at the men and again thought of running, as the chicken was making a frightened ruckus below. But again she felt stubborn.

Not today.

She’d failed too much lately.

She’d seen her mother in a vision, and that haunted her. She hated the weakness inside that refused to admit, deep down, that she was alone. She hated that she’d gotten Gav in trouble, and couldn’t help, because she couldn’t figure out how to work with this stupid body that kept growing.

Today, she was mad.

They shouldn’t have pushed her today. She screamed and kicked off the wall as the thugs got close. Light bubbling up from someplace deep within her, she made the ground slick, and wind moved her hair as she scrambled around the room, building up speed, staying just out of reach until …

She slid up onto the wall. Moving by instinct, in a crouch, sliding with one foot, then the other, pushing against the stone with bare skin that was sometimes impossibly slick. Her hair streamed behind her as she rounded the room, confused thugs spinning. As one touched her, she made him slick. His knife dropped from his other hand and his legs went out from underneath him. He went down hard, and Lift spun off across the floor, coming around again and leaping to put both feet into the other fellow’s face.

Her feet didn’t slide free. They had impossible traction, and remained as if glued there, slamming him backward to the floor by his face as she put her full weight into it. Skull met stone with a crack. She hopped free as the woman met her eyes, and Lift knew … somehow knew … the woman was awesome too. So Lift was ready as the woman came zipping through the room, insanely fast.

The ground became full of traction, and the woman, in her speed, hit the patch. Snaps announced the woman’s legs breaking as she put too much force behind her motions, and she tripped as Lift always did.

Lift came to a sliding rest beside the toppled bookcase. Hair falling around her face. None of the three moved. The only sound was that of the chain rotating as the man looked toward her.

Lift stood up, sweat streaming from her, and felt a powerful headache coming on. Wait. That … that was Zahel hanging there. The sword ardent—she usually saw him when she went to watch the guys training. With the blood and that hair, she hadn’t realized … She cringed beneath his gaze. Why was he peering at her so intently?

“That was,” he said—and she winced at what might come next—“perhaps the most impressive display of raw talent I’ve ever witnessed.”

She … slowly uncringed. “What? I fell over myself.”

“That woman is a full Feruchemist. You reacted in time despite her manyfold speed enhancement. And the use of Abrasion … your manipulation of forces …”

Lift looked to Wyndle, who was appearing from his vines as they regrew beside her. He gave a no-shoulder shrug.

“I usually trip,” Lift said. “Like, a lot. I’m terrible at this.”

“You ever seen someone new to Shardplate try to walk, child?” the swordmaster asked.

“… No?”

“Incredible power,” he said, “demands incredible training, otherwise it can manifest as clumsiness.” He looked at her, and seemed … different. When she’d seen him before, at the practice grounds, he’d always been so in different. Now he almost seemed to be glowing, not with Stormlight, but with enthusiasm. “You need,” he said softly, “a teacher.”

“You need,” she replied, “some pants.”

Some guards finally arrived, and as they were cutting the man down—and she snuggled her chicken—Lift kept thinking back on those words. A teacher. She’d had lots that had wanted to teach her. She’d run from them.

Was this different? Could this be different? Did she want it to be? That would mean changing.

But everything … everything was changing, no matter what she decided. Even the Nightwatcher had lied to her. She couldn’t pretend she was ten anymore. Pretending she was ten …

That had gotten Gav in trouble. Because she refused to grow, and refusing to grow meant refusing to learn. She hated it, but she couldn’t. And if she wanted to stop being useless …

Maybe …

Storms. If everything was going to change, she had to change with it, didn’t she? Either that, or she could go sit in a room and complain that she never got to do anything relevant.

That night, after they let her slip out of her illusion for the evening, she found the man at the medical rooms. Now properly clothed, grumping—appropriately—at the way the doctors tried to care for him. Seemed like he had a right good attitude.

He saw her standing in the doorway. Feeling so lanky and awful, she looked away, arms wrapped around herself, but spoke softly.

“How would we start?”