Wicked As You Wish (A Hundred Names for Magic #1) - Rin Chupeco Page 0,1
moving right out again. And it took a lawsuit to learn that Steedbrew Extra Bold Coffee Elixir didn’t work, not because the company was a scam, but because most caffeine spells just didn’t function in town either.
“I’m Alex…” A significant pause. “Smith. I live down the street.” The boy looked down. “Probably not the first meeting you envisioned,” he added, a little miserably.
He was still trying to keep up the pretense, though Tala knew who he was. Lola Urduja and her parents had been planning Alex’s arrival for weeks. Tala had been instructed to treat the prince like she would a normal person. As if she had friendships with other nobles to compare to.
But even then, no one had told her that Alexei Tsarevich, the last remaining prince of Avalon, could turn people into frogs. “I’ve never met royalty before, Your Highness, but it’s not so bad.”
She’d said the words softly, but the boy darted a quick, fearful glance around all the same. “You shouldn’t be saying that,” he muttered.
“Seems like maybe you need to hear it every now and then.”
“Ha. Maybe I do. Been bounced from place to place enough times, it’s hard to remember who I’m supposed to be.”
“I’m Tala Warnock. I live here.” She gestured at the house behind her. “Looks like we’re neighbors.”
“Looks like it. Any interesting places around here?”
“There’s the abandoned Casa Grande domes to the west, if you like graffiti and mold. And ghosts. Some people hear one moaning at night there.” The Casa Grande domes were a fire hazard in the form of an abandoned tech facility. The business failed and the company had moved on, but nobody had gotten around to pulling the whole place down yet.
“Sounds like it could only be improved with a wrecking ball.”
“They’ve been trying. Apparently it’s also the only thing around here that doesn’t reject magic, and the walls had been coated with some weird spell that’s made it invulnerable.”
Alex made a face. “I take it not a lot of things happen in this town.”
“That’s a good assumption, yeah.”
“Warnock. So, you’re Kay’s daughter?”
“Yup.”
Alex looked unconvinced, probably because Tala was short and brown as can be, and her father was a pale-skinned, bearded mountain.
“Well, he is my father. I look more like my mom.”
“People say I look like my mom too,” he said, and a bitter smile crossed his face.
“I’m sorry.” History books and Wikipedia had not gone into the specifics of his parents’ deaths, but Tala could only imagine. How do you offer your condolences to someone whose parents were killed when he was only five years old? How do you cheer up a prince whose kingdom had been literally frozen, seemingly for all of eternity?
The last war was only a dozen years ago. It was called the Avalon-Beira Wars, and it was a battle to the death between both kingdoms, which ended with Beira’s ruler, the Snow Queen, missing, and Avalon in ice and totally unreachable. Other countries hadn’t been exempt from the violence. What little was left of Wonderland had been further decimated. Its explosion set off tsunamis along Eastern Russia, California, Japan, and the Royal States’ West Coast.
The lingering magic from Wonderland hit other parts of the world as well. The Kati Thanda was now a frozen lake amid the deserts of Western Australia. Fighting broke out after the Chinese kingdom’s Yangtze River became inundated with fish that could supposedly grant wishes. Even now, travel advisories in Brazil warn that one out of every hundred thousand visitors to reach the Sugarloaf Mountain’s summit in Rio de Janeiro inexplicably turn into swans.
It was still a bad time to be Avalonian; refugees found within the Royal States’ borders were rounded up and deported without their day in court, magic-proficient or not. The Royal States’ king was known for such cruelties. King John Portland (unaffectionately known as “King Muddles” to detractors and the internet, mainly for his generally incoherent speeches) was from an extended branch of the confusing Jenga mess that was the American royal family tree, the first of his dynasty after the more beloved King Samuel had passed.
“It’s not your fault.” He paused. “You’re not gonna tell, right?”
He could have been talking about the curse, but Tala knew he wasn’t. Some things were frowned upon even more than magic. When she was six, her parents had sat down with her and talked about how some boys like other boys and how some girls like other girls and also some like both and how there were