Alyssinia, the king said that people had stolen all the kingdom’s magic. Could that be possible? Could that be why it vanished?”
“I don’t know,” Finnegan said. “It couldn’t really be stolen, could it? It didn’t belong to anyone in particular. Seems to me that it just got used up. There was magic in Vanhelm, until gradually there wasn’t. And then there was magic in Alyssinia, until eventually there wasn’t. Maybe it’s a resource, and there’s only so much.”
“Then I think I got more than my fair share,” Aurora said. She picked up the candle again. “How can I learn how to use my magic if no one’s seen anything like it before?”
“First, you need a better place to practice,” Finnegan said. “Somewhere with less chance of destroying thousands of priceless books and incurring my undying hatred.”
“I’m willing to risk it,” Aurora said, but she smiled.
“I have to go to some meetings,” Finnegan said. “You read. Resist the urge to burn my books. I’ll see what I can do.”
Aurora spent the rest of the day among the library’s dustiest books, pausing only to eat. The books’ pages were yellowed and fragile, some seeming on the verge of disintegrating in her hands, but their archaic language offered nothing new. They all referred to magic as an external force that only a lucky few could influence. They spoke of great deeds that had been accomplished with magic, of power channeled to grow better crops and end droughts, magic used to influence minds, magic even used to kill, but each time, the user was tapping into something in the air, helping it bloom or perverting it for their own twisted needs. No one seemed to burn with magic of their own. If they did, no one had written about them.
But then, it seemed, truly powerful users of magic were rare. Some people could use it for small tasks, and healers were common enough to deal with the day-to-day ailments of the villages, but there were few who could use it to manipulate, to control, to destroy. A few male sorcerers, who traveled to share their talents for a price. And, every now and again, a fearsome witch.
The first, the books said, had been Alysse.
Aurora leaned closer, her fingers hovering over the page. Alysse had been her hero as a child, but her own experiences since awakening had soured those stories of the beloved magical queen.
The books seemed to confirm her newfound cynicism. At first, the story was familiar—Alysse was the daughter of one of the first people to cross the sea to Alyssinia, and people thought of her as the last remnant of Vanhelmic power, a memory of what Vanhelm could have been, if its own magic had not faded away. She had not known about her talents until she left Vanhelm for Alyssinia, an endless forest where the magic was untouched. The land that was so forbidding to the others seemed to whisper to her, and she taught her people how to hear the whispers too.
Yet as Aurora turned the pages, the story changed from the version she knew. Alysse had too much power, it said. She could have made the trees bow to her if she wished it, could have changed the direction of rivers and snatched birds out of the sky. People feared her, toward the end. A girl who could talk to nature and make the land welcome them was sweet, useful. A woman with those powers, bold and fearless and unbowed by anything, was something else. They did not trust this sorceress who could make so much happen with her thoughts. And so they murdered her, a few days before her coronation. The Alyssinians had crossed the ocean for opportunity and magic, but feared it once they found it, in the hands of their once-beloved princess.
Aurora sat back on her heels. She had never heard a hint of this before, but after her experiences in Alyssinia, it made sense. And which was more likely: a beautiful queen who vanished into the mist, or a princess forced to vanish before she ascended to the throne, because other people wanted her power?
Perhaps Alysse was able to defy those trying to control her. Perhaps she ruled, and was happy, and the truth just got twisted in a myth across the sea.
Aurora was not sure she believed it. Alysse may not have been Alyssinia’s first queen, but she was Alyssinia’s first witch. And that, Aurora was realizing, was a dangerous thing.
EIGHT
FINNEGAN RETURNED TO