Lady Smoke (Ash Princess Trilogy #2)(86)

I pause, though I know the answer well enough. It was only hours ago that Blaise nearly destroyed the entire Sta’Criveran capital. How many people would have died in a disaster like that? I would be surprised if anyone managed to walk away alive.

“They haven’t hurt anyone,” I say.

It isn’t a full answer, and Sandrin seems to realize this. He heaves himself to his feet with a groan and holds a hand out to me. “Come,” he says. “I want to introduce you to someone.”



* * *



—

Sandrin leads me through the maze of crooked streets. They’re empty, since everyone is waiting for food at the gates, but there’s something disconcerting about the quiet. It looks, more than ever, like a dead place. At the thought, I have to suppress a shudder and I quicken my step to catch up with Sandrin.

He finally leads me to another house with a sagging roof and a door that barely covers the entrance. Instead of walking up to the door, however, he leads me around back to a small patch of dry dirt where a few scraggly plants are growing. There are bright yellow peppers, violet eggplants, and pale green globes of honeydew. It is a welcome shock of color.

Near the garden, a stoop-shouldered woman with short black hair tends to a weak fire. Hanging over it, suspended by a rusted metal frame, is a large cast-iron pot.

“Mina,” Sandrin says as we approach, and the woman turns to look at us over her shoulder. Her expression is severe, but it softens when she sees Sandrin.

“Come to make yourself useful?” she asks him, nodding toward a burlap sack next to her filled with oblong, orange sweet potatoes. “They need to be peeled.”

“We came to talk about something, actually,” Sandrin says before clearing his throat. “The mines.”

Something flickers across Mina’s expression. “You can talk and peel,” she says. “Give me a second.”

Turning back to the fire, she holds her hands toward it, twisting them in the air around it. At her coaxing, the small fire grows larger, until its flames lick at the bottom of the pot. There are no tools, no matches, nothing but her.

“You’re a Guardian,” I blurt out. Another Guardian! And one from before the siege, one who understands her power and the gods more than Heron or Art or Blaise. And a Fire Guardian at that! I think of my own hands growing warm and tingly; I think of waking up with scorch marks on my bedsheets. Perhaps she’ll have answers for that as well.

Mina turns back to us, this time looking at me. “Who are you?” she asks, her voice sharp.

“This is Queen Theodosia,” Sandrin tells her.

Mina scoffs. “There is no Queen Theodosia,” she says, her eyes locked on me. “Only a frightened little princess under the Kaiser’s thumb.”

“I told you the Queen came, remember?” Sandrin asks.

“Of course I do. The entire camp wouldn’t stop talking about it. That doesn’t change anything. You aren’t a queen,” she says to me. “You can’t be a queen of a country that doesn’t exist.”

It’s the same thing Dragonsbane said to me, more or less, but there’s no bite in her voice. Instead, she sounds sad.

“Sandrin said you could help me,” I tell her. “And he was right. I didn’t know there were any Guardians here. I thought the Kalovaxians had killed them all after the siege.”

Mina holds my gaze a moment longer before glancing away and shaking her head. “I’m not a Guardian, child,” she says.

I frown. “But I just saw you—”

“You’ve seen Fire Guardians before, no?” she asks. “You’ve seen them create fires with a snap of their fingers, seen them hold a ball of flame in their hands like it’s a toy, seen them touch it without ever getting burned.”

I nod. I’d seen Ampelio do all of that and more when I was a child.

She nods toward the fire. “That is the most I can do. And even that was a struggle,” she says. “What do you know about Guardian magic?”

I shrug my shoulders. “There’s magic in the caves that ran under the old temples—in the mines now. Some people who spend a prolonged amount of time there are blessed by the gods and attain gifts—like the Fire Gift. But most aren’t. The power turns them mine-mad. They have feverish skin, they don’t sleep, their gift is unstable, until it kills them.”

Mina purses her lips. “You are more or less correct, though you have a very juvenile understanding of it—all sharp edges and black-and-white rules. Nothing in the world is as simple as that, and magic certainly isn’t.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

She considers it for a moment, casting her gaze around until an idea lights up her expression. She beckons me closer. When I’m standing just in front of her, she takes a pail and lifts it up so I can see the water sloshing around inside. “Some of the last of what your friends brought when you came before,” she explains. “Now, imagine the water is the magic in the mines—this exact amount is what imbues whoever stays there for an extended amount of time. And now imagine that the pot is a such a person.”

She pours the contents of the pail into the pot and it fills it almost three-quarters of the way full.

“We would call this person blessed,” she says. “The magic fills them up but doesn’t overflow. Were the person a smaller container, so to speak, the magic would be too much and they would be, as we call it, mine-mad.”