Nocturna (A Forgery of Magic #1)(20)

With that, Paloma took the Englassen books and swept out of his rooms, shutting the doors behind her. Alfie was left with nothing but the bitter taste of anger and pity on his tongue.

He sat at the edge of his bed, rubbing the back of his hand across his eyes. It was over. Those books had given him nothing and now he had to move on, but he couldn’t stomach the thought of leaving Dez behind, of moving forward toward a throne that had been Dez’s since birth. To do it, he would need to be brave.

Brave. He had something to make him brave.

He walked to the far side of his room where the chest he’d kept on the ship was left in the corner. “Abrir,” he said. At his word, the lock clicked open. Alfie stared at its contents.

Within it was every book, talisman, and trinket Alfie had acquired while away from home.

The last three months of his grief kept in a box.

Alfie pulled a stub of a violet candle out of the chest. A woman in a marketplace in the winter kingdom of Uppskala had sold it to him and told him that he must burn it at midnight under a waxing moon to speak with a lost loved one. He’d been so desperate that he did for a week before tossing it in the chest, never to be used again. Then he decided to stop looking for things that might call his brother back and start seeking whatever would give him the power to enter the void and find his brother, which led him to Rayan’s games.

Alfie had once drunkenly confided in one of the players about looking for magic that could pull propio from one body to another. Then he could take that criminal’s propio, open the void his brother had been spirited into, and go find him himself.

The man had simply said, “Well, if what you’re looking for even exists, I’d bet that type of spellwork was cooked up in Englass. Sounds a bit like their style, eh?”

That nameless man had lit a fire in Alfie’s mind. It was true. The last time bruxos dabbled in such foul spellwork, Alfie’s ancestors had been conquered. By Englass.

Englass believed magic belonged to Englassen nobility and no one else, which was why they’d developed siphoning spellwork to take magical energy from those of Castallan in order to give it to Englassen nobles. If the practice of moving propio magic from one body to the other was being studied somewhere, it had to be in Englass.

Back during enslavement, if a Castallano was discovered with a moving shadow, they were killed in fear of being able to resist the siphon spellwork.

Alfie would have been murdered before he could walk.

It was despicable for him, a Castallan prince, to even think of studying Englassen practices. Yet here he was. Alfie kneaded his temples with his fingers. Why was he still doing this? Still looking for solutions when, logically, there was no way anyone could be saved from what had happened to Dez. Still, even if his forays into the illegal led to nothing, every time he added an object to this chest, it was a way of saying, I’m still looking for you; I will always look for you.

He hoped that wherever his brother was, he knew that.

Alfie scoured the chest until his hand closed around something small, something to make him brave. He balanced it on his palm. It was a wooden dragon figurine on a gold chain. The dragon had once been a bright silver, but now the paint was chipping.

Dez had given it to him when he was eight years old and nightmares kept sending him crawling into Dez’s bed. Dez had told him to be brave, but Alfie had never felt very brave.

“Well, I made you something that’ll help you be brave always,” Dez had said.

Alfie perked up at that. “Really?”

“Really.” Dez reached into his pocket and opened his palm to show Alfie a silver dragon figurine. When Alfie reached to stroke its nose, the dragon nuzzled his knuckles.

“But how will it keep me brave?”

“Well,” Dez said. “If you want to be valiente, you need a dragon to protect your bravery for you. Keep it safe.” Alfie quirked an eyebrow. “Trust me. I’m going to open the dragon’s mouth and when I do, you give me your fiercest, bravest roar, all right? Just like a dragon.”

Alfie was skeptical, but if Dez was suggesting it, it was worth a try. Dez tapped the dragon’s nose and it stretched its small mouth open. Alfie roared his wildest roar. He laughed when Dez reared back, pretending that the roar had hit him like a physical force. Then Dez tapped the dragon’s snout again and it closed its mouth.

“We got it!” Dez said. “The dragon caught your bravery right in its mouth. Safe and sound.” The dragon stretched its jaws in a yawn on Dez’s palm. “Your bravery will always be here with the dragon. So you can stay brave all night, okay? No more nightmares.”

Dez tilted his open palm toward Alfie’s. The dragon ambled onto Alfie’s hand before curling into a sleepy spiral on his palm. In that moment, Alfie had felt invincible.

On the day Dez had disappeared, the dragon, too, fell still as death.

Alfie had hidden the dragon away because it hurt too much to see it. Tonight he pulled the chain over his neck and let the dragon fall against his chest. He was going to need every ounce of bravery he could muster, because he was going to have to become the king that Castallan needed and hope that Dez would forgive him.

He locked the chest with a word of magic and crawled into bed. On his bedside table sat a long-necked bottle. Alfie took a swig of the sleeping tonic and chased it with a swig from a bottle of tequila, hoping it would calm him and let him rest easy. The combination left him woozy and heavy-limbed. He held the dragon until, at last, sleep took him.