Song of Blood & Stone (Earthsinger Chronicles #1)(71)
“Jasminda, this could be dangerous! There’s no telling what it could be doing to you. You don’t know anything about this kind of magic and neither does anyone else.”
“But this a chance to get what you want. What the country needs. It’s the only chance we have of awakening Her. If I can figure out a way— If I can help even a little, I must.”
He leaned back, shaking his head. “No, no, you don’t have to. You don’t have to risk yourself. What if it hurts you? What if it kills you?”
She leaned back, gazing at him softly. “Then you are the only one who will miss me.”
He froze.
Her jaw trembled at his stricken expression. “And if I die to awaken Her, then my life will have meant something to someone.”
“You mean something to me already. You mean everything.” He grabbed her free hand in both of his, dragging it onto his lap.
“I can’t mean everything to you, my darling Jack. You should not let me.”
“I cannot help it. It is far too late for that.” He lowered his head, bringing his lips to her hand.
“I must keep trying,” she said. They sat in silence, both staring at the caldera.
He kissed her hand again, then let it go.
The imprint of his lips burned hot against her skin. “Will you catch me if I fall?” Her voice was breathless.
Tear-filled eyes met hers. “You know I will. You never have to ask.”
She swallowed the knot forming in her throat. With a single finger, she stroked the caldera and everything faded to black.
The Assembly Room grows quiet as all eyes focus on me. Their expectant gazes draw me back to the present. My mind had been aloft, far from this room and out in the early-summer sunshine, feeling the waves gently lapping at my feet. That is how I wanted to spend my birthday, at the sea, as I always have before.
I straighten my shoulders and regard the room. Every face holds a tension it never has held before. And it is all my fault.
“All here are agreed?” I ask, my voice low. I speak out loud as has been the custom during Assembly for the past half a millennia. I will not give in to the paranoia of so many of my cousins gathered here, afraid of eavesdroppers.
We are agreed, murmur many Songs against my consciousness.
“Today is the first day of my twenty-first summer. I am the youngest Third. Vaaryn, you are two hundred years my elder. Your leadership has been unblemished. I am untested. Is this really wise?”
When Father, the last Second and the youngest son of the Founders, passed into the World After, Vaaryn assumed his responsibilities in the Assembly. The idea of leadership passing to me was unfathomable.
“Yes, dear cousin,” Vaaryn says. “I am not much longer for this world. It is best that the youngest should lead us.”
Most Thirds lived only a few years past their two-hundredth birthday. Fourths less than that, and Fifths barely made one hundred. The Silent were old at seventy.
“But it is because of me that we face war with the Silent. It is because of me—” I choke on the words as a sob rises to my throat. Yllis is there with an arm around me, steady and stable, my rock in the storm.
Yllis’s mother, Deela, rises. “So it must be you to lead us through. We have lived in peace for hundreds of years with the guidance left by the Founders, but perhaps it has been too easy for us. We have never been challenged in this way before.”
“Eero and those who follow him have poked at a sore that has been dormant for a long time,” Yllis says. “The Silent have no voice in the Assembly. Their parentage is not claimed. If it was not Eero now, it would have been someone else in the future. It is not all because of us.”
He wants to take more of the burden of Eero’s fate away from me, absolve me of some guilt, but it is mine to hold. Yllis developed the complex spell, which allowed me to share my Song with my twin, but I was the one who used it. Who kept using it and ignored the truth for too long—giving Song to the Silent would cause them to go mad. The Silent were so for a reason.
“Very well,” I say. “I accept.”
It is as if the Assembly takes a collective breath. “Be it so.”
And with three little words, I have been made Queen.
CHAPTER NINE
The pounding of rain against the window lulled Jasminda into a state between sleep and wakefulness. She sat in the palace’s Blue Library, books spread around her, all of them on Elsiran history. Her mother had begun teaching them history, but after her death, Papa continued their lessons on more practical matters. Math and basic engineering, biology and horticulture—things that would be useful in maintaining the farm.
In the royal library, the options were limitless. Wanting to start at the beginning, she’d pulled down dozens of books from the shelves, growing more and more uneasy with each one she read through. Elsiran history before the war was treated like a fairy tale or a parable. Tales of the Founders were little more than children’s stories written for adults. There were no dates, no names or locations—just stories of wonder and generosity from the esteemed Founders.
Even their eventual fates were never mentioned, only that leadership eventually passed to one of their descendants, the Queen Who Sleeps, who continued their wonderful work. Then, inevitably, each book would contain a short and very vague passage on her betrayal by the True Father and the spell he cast that placed her into an endless sleep. A sleep that could only be broken when he is sent to the World After. His true identity or where he came from were never touched upon. Nor were his motives.