Incomprehensible.
My brows lift. “The crown passed to you when your father died?”
“When he was killed, yes.”
“Killed?”
His jaw flexes. “Poisoned. We never discovered by who, but I have long held my suspicions. His last wife, Duvessa—my stepmother, Efnysien’s mother—was fond of alchemy and fonder ofthe riches she drained so proficiently from the royal coffers. I would stake my life that it was her hand that tipped the vial into his glass and stole him from us.”
I swallow a gasp. “Skies, Soren. I’m sorry.”
“It happened nearly two centuries ago,” he says, shrugging. Yet I can hear the grief buried not so deeply beneath his words and know he is still pained by the loss. “My father was gifted the luxury of a long rule, and an even longer life. He died with a smile on his face, ready to meet the aether, even if he did not fall in the glory of battle, as he anticipated…or while bedding one of his many conquests, as the rest of us assumed he would.” He chuckles darkly. “I like to think he had no regrets in either life or death. He certainly never acted like he did, given his wild enthusiasm for all of the world’s many pleasures.”
“How long, exactly, was his reign?”
“Manawydan ruled Hylios for nearly four hundred years after Emperor Belenus elevated him to the throne. Before the Cull, the two men were evidently close personal friends. The emperor was gifted with two maegics—”
“Fire and air,” I interject, nodding. “Penn told me once.”
He stares at me. “What else did he tell you?”
“Not much.” I think back to the conversation. It feels so very long ago. Another lifetime. “He said the emperor was conceived from a union of two exceptionally powerful parents. Born the product of a soulmerge—and, thus, blessed with the ability to wield two distinct elements. A powerful combination that has not been seen in all the years since.”
His throat works on a swallow. “Yes. That’s true enough.”
Enough…but not everything. Not the full of it. I get the sense there is much more to this particular chapter of Anwyvnian history than I’ve been told.
Soren shifts the conversation forward before I can press.“Emperor Belenus valued my father highly for his formidable water powers. Manawydan could spin the seas with a twitch of his finger, could command the tides and influence the currents like none ever before. Or after.”
“Until you.”
He shakes his head. “Remnants possess but a vestige of the old maegics. We are an echo of what once was. Before the uprising, before the blight that followed on its heels, Anwyvn was a land of abundant elemental power. Each of the four courts brimmed with gifted sky sylphs, water nymphs…flame breakers, earth turners…” His eyes narrow a shade. “It is difficult to imagine, even for me. By the time I was old enough to comprehend, things were already so irrevocably changed.”
Soren’s birth, I know, coincided with the Cull. With the imperial execution itself. As the first Water Remnant—the only Water Remnant—his soul reputedly entered this world at the precise moment the emperor’s fled it. His, along with King Vorath’s and those of two unknown others, scattered in distant spots across the realm. The original four of the sacred tetrad, prophesized to someday restore the balance, should they ever find their way together.
So said the oracles, anyway.
I wonder, not for the first time, about the first wind weaver, birthed in the same breath as the man sitting before me. Who were they? Where did they live? When did they die? How many others existed in the time between their demise and Enid’s discovery, seventy years ago?
The one person in the realm who might know the answers is seated mere inches away.
“Were there others before Enid?” The question flies out. “Other wind weavers, I mean?”
“Two, to my knowledge.”
Two!
I lean toward him, interest piqued. “Did you meet them?”
“Not personally, no.” He frowns, thinking back. “About ninety years ago, one managed to send a raven north to Dyved—a desperate plea for extraction. She was dead by the time Pendefyre reached her in the Soot Flats of Nythia.”
I grimace, saddened but not surprised. Nythia is one of the worst stretches of the Midlands. The fighting there has raged continuously for two centuries.
“A few decades before that, around a century and a half ago, another made it nearly to the Avian Strait, where my armies were camped. At the time, we were embroiled in a decade-long conflict with a particularly persistent king from the plainlands.” A muscle ticks in his jaw, expression darkening. “She got close. Achingly close…only to be struck down by a group of bloodthirsty culling priests and made into a depraved spectacle for the amusement of the Aranthonians.”
My whole body trembles at the thought of such an end.
Damned culling priests. Hypocritical monsters, the lot of them. They wrap their dark hedonism in false holiness, a shroud for acts of such evil only a blind man could mistake them for anything remotely divine.