Kingdom of Ash

Dorian had brown eyes for three days before he figured out how to change them back to blue. Asterin and Vesta teased him about it mercilessly as they’d traveled down through the spine of the Fangs, dramatically bemoaning the absence of his pretty bluebell eyes, and had sighed to the heavens when the sapphire hue had returned.

His magic could leap between one element and another, yet the ability to shift lay within something else entirely. Lay within a part of him that had always yearned for one thing above all others: to let go. To be free. As Temis, Goddess of Wild Things, was free—uncaged. As he had once wished to be, when he had been little more than a reckless, idealistic prince.

It was the magic’s sole command: let go. Let go of who and what he’d become since that collar and emerge into something new, something different.

It was easier realized than enacted. Since his eyes had returned to blue, like the unraveling of some thread within him, he’d been unable to do anything else. Even change them to brown again.

The Crochans and the Thirteen had halted for their midday break under the heavy cover of Oakwald, the trees barren, yet not a hint of snow on the earth. Another day, and they’d reach the rendezvous point. A week after they’d promised the Eyllwe war leaders, but they would arrive.

He sat on a fallen, moss-covered log, gnawing on the strip of dried rabbit. His dinner.

“My head pounds on your behalf, just watching you try so hard,” Glennis said from across the clearing. Around them, the Thirteen ate in silence, Manon monitoring all. The Crochans sat amongst them, at least. Quietly, but they sat there.

Which meant they all looked at him now. Dorian lowered the strip of tough meat and inclined his head to the crone. “My head is pounding enough for both of us, I think.”

“What are you trying to turn into, exactly? Or who?”

The opposite of what he was. The opposite of the man who’d overlooked Sorscha’s presence for years. And offered her only death in the end. He’d be glad to let go of it, if only the magic would allow him.

“Nothing,” he said. Many of the Thirteen and Crochans went back to their meager meals at his dull response. “I just want to see if it’s possible, for someone with my manner of magic. To even change small features.” Not a lie, not entirely.

Manon frowned, as if trying to work out some puzzle she couldn’t quite grasp.

“But were you to succeed,” Glennis pressed, “who would you wish to be?”

He didn’t know. Couldn’t conjure an image beyond empty darkness. Damaris, at his side, would have no answer, either.

Dorian peered inward, feeling the sea of magic that roiled inside him.

He traced its shape with careful, invisible hands. Followed a thread within himself not to his gut, but to his still-cracked heart.

Who do you wish to be?

There, like the seed of power that Cyrene had stolen, it lay—the little snarl in his magic. Not a snarl, but a knot—a knot in a tapestry. One that he might weave.

One he might fashion into something if he dared.

Who do you wish to be? he asked the barely woven tapestry within himself. Let the threads and knots take form, crafting the picture within his mind. Starting small.

Glennis chuckled. “Your eyes are green now, king.”

Dorian started, heart thundering. The others again halted their lunches, gaping, some leaning in to peer at him more closely. But he fed his magic into the loom within himself, adding to the emerging picture.

“Och, golden hair does not suit you at all.” Asterin grimaced. “You look sickly.”

Who did he wish to be? Anyone but himself. But what he’d become.

His silent answer sent that magical loom tumbling from his invisible grip, and he knew if he looked, his dark hair and sapphire eyes would have returned. Asterin sighed in relief.

But Manon smiled grimly, as if she’d heard his unspoken answer. And understood.

Night was full overhead, the Crochans’ fires crackling away beneath the lattice of leafless trees, when Glennis asked, “Have any of you seen the Wastes?”

The Thirteen blinked toward the crone. She didn’t usually address them all at once, or ask such personal questions.

But at least Glennis spoke to them. Three days of travel, and Manon was no closer to winning the Crochans over than she’d been upon their departure from the Fangs. Though they spoke to her, and occasionally joined Glennis’s hearth for meals, it was with as few words as necessary.

Asterin answered for the coven. “No. Not one of us, though I spent some time in a forest on the other side of the mountains. But never that far.” Sorrow flickered in the witch’s gold-flecked black eyes, as if there was more to the tale than that. Indeed, Sorrel and Vesta, even Manon, looked with a bit of that sorrow at the witch.

Manon asked Glennis, the sole Crochan at this fire under the canopy, “Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity,” the crone said. “None of us have been, either. We do not dare.”

“For fear of us?” Asterin’s golden hair shifted as she leaned closer to the fire. She’d found a strip of leather in the camp to tie across her brow—not the black she’d worn for the past century, but a familiar sight, at least. One thing, it seemed, had not entirely altered.

“For fear of what it will do to us, to see what is left of our once-great city, our lands.”

“Nothing but rubble, they say,” Manon muttered.

“And would you rebuild it, if you could?” Glennis asked. “Rebuild the city for yourselves?”

“We never discussed what we’d do,” Asterin said. “If we could ever go home.”

“A plan, perhaps,” Glennis mused, “would be wise. A powerful thing to have.” Her blue eyes settled on Manon. “Not just for the Crochans, but your own people.”

Dorian nodded, though he was not a part of this conversation.

Who did the Thirteen, the Ironteeth and Crochans, wish to be, to build, as a people?

Manon opened her mouth, but the Shadows burst into the ring of their hearth, their faces tight. The Thirteen were instantly on their feet.

“We scouted ahead, to the rendezvous site,” Edda panted.

Manon braced herself. A whisper of power flickered through the camp, the only indication that Dorian’s magic had coiled around them in a near-impenetrable shield.

“It reeks of death,” Briar finished.