Are you coming into this story in the middle? Start from the beginning of Book 2, or scan the Table of Contents (coming soon). You don’t need to read the first book to enjoy this new adventure, but you can find the beginning of Book 1 here.
“There’s the soon-to-be world-famous bard!” Hax slaps my shoulder as he walks by, hitting the purple and yellow bruise and making me exhale an unintentional whimper.
Mieklo jumps onto the table and begins to chitter loudly, scolding him.
“Sorry! I was going to ask how yesterday went, but it seems I already got that answer.” He blows a raspberry at Mieklo. Hax is about twice my age, but that doesn’t mean he’s grown up.
“It’s not so bad. I figured I’d be sore.”
“Rent can fix that up for you,” he says as he slides into a chair in front of a bowl of steamy porridge. Mine is already half gone, and the rest won’t last long. It’s not nearly as good as Blaize’s amaranth porridge, but I’m famished.
“I don’t want to bother him. You’ve all been working hard on cleaning up the mess from the erebus attack. I already feel like I’m not contributing enough.”
“We’re a team, Lo,” Hax says. “The more you learn, the more it will help you, and that helps all of us. You’re family now.”
Such a personal comment from him takes me by surprise. My face grows hot, and I don’t know how to reply. Luckily, I don’t have to.
Keahi and Noelani come down the stairs into the greatroom. The two jabalashari* twins are nearly luminous with their golden skin against their silky dark hair and pale linen robes. Keahi’s robe is trimmed in maroon, and Noelani’s in dark blue. That’s the only way I know to tell them apart. They whisper back and forth with their foreheads almost touching. I’ve also never seen them separate.
Before they reach the bottom step, Hax is on his feet, and his whole demeanor changes. “Good morning, most lovely ladies,” he says.
They giggle in unison and join us, and I’m all but forgotten. The twins sit on either side of Hax, and he soaks up the attention as they whisper and nuzzle him, stroking his sleeves. The three elementalists continue like they’re the only ones in the room.
I stare at the last of my porridge, watching it drip from the spoon back into the bowl, and try not to look at or listen to the three across from me. I’m glad when I see Jilli, Blaize, and Aleria come down the stairs. They give me something else to focus on.
“How was your first lesson with Leito?” Jilli asks. She towers over the table, even after she sits down, dwarfing the wooden chair that nearly disappears beneath her. She sets her giant zweihander against the wall, where it stands taller than me.
Blaize perches on her chair with one foot tucked up close to her body and the other on the floor. The elf digs into her bowl of porridge, watching Jilli and I with her one green eye and one gray eye. Her long, pointed ears stick out from beneath the golden hair streaked with silver. After a few bites, she makes a face and slips a jar from a spot hidden on her person. She drips some honey into the porridge.
“Lo?”
“Yeah,” I say, snapping back to her question. “It could have gone better. You’ve been soft on me in our spars.” I grin at her.
Jilli sputters a moment. “The bard fights with sticks. We had to be more careful with real blades.” Jilli crosses her arms over her chest. “Besides, shouldn’t you be learning magic from him, not weapons?”
“Leito says bards use both.”
“Good,” Jilli says. “A warrior should rely on her blade.”
Blaize grunts an agreement as she continues to eat. She sneaks more honey into her porridge.
Aleria eats quietly. I haven’t had much time to get to know the fighter. I know she’s strong, because she fought the erebus head on with just her longsword and her shield, keeping them from Leito and the twins so they could cast their spells. She and Jilli have grown close since fighting hordes of demons side by side.
“Good morning, all.”
I didn’t even hear Rent come down the stairs. The others murmur a round of greetings.
My porridge makes a plop sound as it drips off the spoon. It seems very loud, despite all the miniature conversations that have sprung up at our large table.
Rent ignores my noisy breakfast and slides into the chair next to me with a fond pat on my unbruised shoulder. He stifles a yawn with his hand and rubs the sleep from his eyes. Rent is the oldest one at the table, his dark hair streaked with gray at the temples, and his day’s worth of beard looks sprinkled with salt and pepper. He wears a pale gray robe, heavier than those the twins wear, and the golden symbol of the goddess Deishaen glints from his breast. Despite the beard and a few wrinkles, the resemblance between the priest and his brother Hax is obvious.
Mieklo slowly pads across the table to seat himself between Rent and I. He softly chitters at the older man, as if he would start a conversation. I’m surprised to see him interact with someone other than me.
Rent obliges. “I appreciate your opinions, little one.” He pulls a piece of torn parchment from his robe and gives it to the xichu. “Here you go.”
Mieklo squeaks and turns away from both of us, eating the parchment in private.
I realize my mouth is hanging open. I shut it with a click as my teeth meet. “Is that how you got on his good side?”
“He is quite a simple creature, ruled by his stomach, much like my brother.”
I snicker, but the joke is lost on Hax. He’s paying no attention to us whatsoever. Kaehi and Noelani are taking turns feeding him. Ugh, but it proves Rent’s point.
The mood in the greatroom changes, like a shifting breeze, and everyone pauses their conversations to look to the stairs. Leito hums a tune and taps his feet, verily dancing down the stairs. His presence is distracting, then captivating, and in seconds he has the attention of the whole room, our table and every other. Even the two barmaids pause to watch. When he notices all the attention on him, he breaks into a huge smile, his white teeth starkly shining from the dark umber of his cheeks.
“It’s another beautiful morning,” he says in his musical voice. He sits to my other side.
“The whole city smells like smoke and sulfur and rotting demon corpses,” Aleria says, pushing away her empty bowl.
“But the sun is shining, my dear.”
“We’re between a desert and the mountains. The sun is always shining.”
“Yes, isn’t it glorious?”
“Why do you have to be such a morning person?” Aleria rests her head in her hands and stifles a yawn.
“I’m just happy to be alive,” Leito says. “Don’t the rest of you realize how close we came to complete ruin? We could be dead, but instead we’re all here sharing a meal as friends. Isn’t that incredible?”
The lack of enthusiasm from our table doesn’t deter him from continuing. “Today is also the day our young friend, Lola-Grace, begins her magic training.”
I shrink down into my chair as everyone shifts attention, but a moment later it shifts back to the individual conversations.
“You’ve got this, Lo,” Jilli says.
I force a smile, but I have my doubts.
Leito never touches the bowl before him. He springs up from the table and tugs me along with him.
“You’re not going to eat?” I ask, rising slowly. Anything to delay us.
“We have work to do,” is all he says, but he doesn’t head for the inn’s front door. He hums and skips back to the stairs.
“Then it hardly seems a time to go back to bed,” Blaize says. She’s finished her porridge, and now she’s fully perched on the edge of her chair, both legs drawn up underneath her. She looks ready to draw her daggers, jump over the table, and leap into a fight, but all of that energy remains bottled up.
“Bard magic is more delicate work than sword fighting,” Leito explains with a dismissive wave. “No need for us to sweat and get all dusty.”
I follow the bard upstairs, Mieklo running up my arm to curl around my neck. He gestures me into the room at the top. It’s an inn room, so there’s not much decor, but there are a few tidy packs and I see Leito’s lute propped up near the bed, against a small side table. The room has a faded smoky-sweet scent, like old incense, but there’s none burning. The single window brightens the room, the sashes thrown back to let all of the light in.
Mieklo scampers down me and then up to the highest point in the room, the headboard of the bed. He chitters softly, watching me but studying Leito closer.
“Please, make yourself comfortable.” Leito walks straight to his lute and lifts it like a child, cradling the body of it against his chest. He strums it a few times, making adjustments.
I’m still standing in the doorway.
“Come, come.” There’s no impatience in his voice. It’s soothing, but still I hesitate.
Leito lets go of the lute, and it dangles from the strap around the back of his neck. He comes over to me and pulls me along again.
I sit on the corner of the bed and look up at him expectantly.
Leito lifts the lute and hands it to me.
My palms strike the animal-gut strings, making a discordant noise that almost causes me to drop the whole thing.
With a quick motion, Leito grabs the lute by the neck with one hand and tosses the strap over my head with the other. “Careful there.” Then he settles it onto my lap.
My face burns all the way to my hairline. I don’t know what to do with my hands.
“One step at a time,” Leito says in his calm, reassuring voice. “Take the neck in your left hand. Like this. Good. Now, put your right arm through the strap and drape it over the body of the lute. There you go.
“Just feel it for a moment. Get used to its weight, its shape, its presence.”
I’m holding it right, but it feels awkward. I know it won’t bite me, but I can’t help the mental image that thought creates, a roaring mouth forming from the hole in the lute’s center.
“Okay, now lightly strum it.”
I overcome my fear enough to run my fingers over the strings. My nails catch and make the lute’s voice stutter.
“Do you feel the sound?”
I strum again, more confident. There’s a rumble in my chest from the deep echo of the lute’s body as the strings vibrant. I nod.
“There’s a tale bards tell, that the universe began with but a spoken word. Jovha made all creation with her words—the sun, the moons, our planet, and many others. Our music attempts to shape the world in a small echo of what Jovha did.” Leito reaches down and strums the strings, making a deeper noise, a sharper, more harmonious note than it made for me.
“Words are power, and music is magic. Do you feel it?”
I don’t feel anything except the vibrations. I strum a few more times, but the notes I make from the lute don’t sound anything like the single note Leito made. “I don’t feel any magic.” The admission is a heavy weight in my stomach.
Leito chuckles. “Magic may come from words and music, but not all words and music are magical. They must also have intent. I can teach you music, I can teach you words, but the magic will come from within you.”
“What if I don’t have any magic in me?”
“You were created with magic. It is in you.”
I frown down at the lute, studying the tightly stretched strings, the round body, the graceful neck. I still have my doubts, but Leito believes in me. He’s taking his time to teach me. I’ll do my best to not disappoint him.
* Translations:
Jabalashari refers to the mountainfolk of northwestern Kiferog.
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Effy J. Roan is a writer of dark and epic fantasy. She loves dragons, dogs, and endless worldbuilding. She likes to create monsters and research cultures and food for her fiction. You can find her on Facebook and Instagram.
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