Weatha and Mindette's Coming of Age Chapter One: The Chief's Daughters The crystal planet of Thingoria did not have seasons the way softer worlds did. It had light phases, weeks where the quartz spires jutting from every hillside caught the sun and turned the whole sky the color of a struck match, and weeks where clouds smothered the light and the crystals went dark and dull, like teeth pulled from a jaw. The tribe that lived among those spires had learned to read the light the way other people read a calendar. When the crystals burned gold, it was planting time. When they burned white, it was war season, and every able body picked up a spear. Chief Huldan had led that tribe for eleven light-phases, and in all that time, no one had ever seen him hesitate. He was a broad man, built like the stone he ruled from, with a voice that didn't need to rise to fill a room. He had no last name, no one in the tribe did; names were earned, not inherited, on Thingoria, but he had built something better than a name. He had built fear, and fear, he liked to say, outlived reputation. What Huldan wanted, more than gold-phase harvests or white-phase victories, was a son. A boy he could pour himself into like water into a mold, until there were two of him instead of one, and the tribe would never again have to wonder who came next. He married Silvetta, the tribe's healer, a soft-spoken woman who spent her days pressing crushed moonroot into the wounds of hunters and her nights, increasingly, flinching at her husband's silences. When she told him she was pregnant, he smiled for the first time in a season. When the child came, and the midwife lifted the baby and said, "A girl, Chief," Huldan's smile did not so much fall as go somewhere Silvetta would spend the rest of her short life trying to reach. "Say that again," he said. "A girl."
He didn't shout. That was the part Silvetta would have told you, if she'd lived to tell anyone anything, he didn't shout, didn't rage, didn't do any of the things a lesser man might do. He simply looked at his wife for a long moment, the way a man looks at a tool that has failed him, and then he did what he did. He could not bring himself to do the same to the child. Some cruelty even Huldan couldn't manage twice in one night. So before the sun rose he carried the infant himself to the home of Ferron and Greta, a quiet, childless couple on the edge of the settlement, the kind of people who kept to themselves and asked no questions of a chief who arrived at their door with a bundle and an order. "Raise her," he said. "Don't tell her whose she is." Ferron, a lean man with a scar across one eyebrow and more patience than sense, looked down at the baby's face and felt something shift in his chest that he would spend the next seventeen years never quite naming. Greta, standing behind him in her nightclothes, reached out before her husband could answer for both of them. "What's her name?" Greta asked. Huldan hadn't thought of one. "Whatever you like, dear." They named her Weatha, after the old word in their dialect for wind that changes the weather before it arrives, because even as an infant, she had a way of making the air around her feel different, restless, alive. Huldan tried again. He married Luwanna, a gardener known throughout the tribe for growing things that shouldn't have survived Thingoria's thin soil, she had a gift for coaxing life out of stubborn ground, and Huldan, in his way, respected that. When she told him she was pregnant, he allowed himself to hope. When the child came, and it was a girl again, Luwanna did not wait to see what her husband's silence might become. She was gone before dawn, off the crystal planet entirely, using what little coin she'd saved to buy passage on the first transport she could find. She ended up on Koseaphus, a planet so thick with fungal growth that its mountains looked soft from a distance, blanketed in caps and gills the
size of houses. There, in a hollow beneath a mushroom the size of a barn, she named her daughter Mindette, and swore to herself that this one, at least, would grow up far from her father's disappointment. Huldan married a third time, Searlait, a blacksmith with forearms like braided rope and a temper nearly as short as his own. When she gave him a son, Huldan wept. He had never wept before, not once, not for Silvetta, not for the daughter he sent away. He wept holding his son, and he named the boy Vorion, and from the hour the child could stand, Huldan began shaping him. This is how you hold a blade. This is how you hold silence. This is how you hold a room without raising your voice. Vorion absorbed all of it, though not, his father would come to learn, in quite the way Huldan intended. The boy had his mother's temper and his father's patience, which made for a strange, watchful kind of child, one who noticed everything and said very little. On Koseaphus, Luwanna raised Mindette alone in the shadow of the great fungal peaks, until the day a snake found them. He called himself Tackliss, and he was unlike any serpent Luwanna had ever seen, long as a man is tall, scaled in shifting greens that caught the mushroom-light like oil on water, with eyes that seemed to weigh whatever they looked at. He told her he'd been driven from his den by a rival brood and had nowhere left to go. Luwanna, alone and stretched thin raising a daughter by herself, let him stay. It was, she would later understand, too late to matter, the worst decision she ever made. Tackliss was patient in the way only something ancient and cold-blooded can be patient. He waited years, watching Mindette grow, offering just enough charm and just enough help that Luwanna came to trust him with her daughter's education. Luwanna taught Mindette to listen, to the wind, to her own instincts, to the flickers of feeling she could sometimes catch behind other people's eyes if she focused hard enough. Tackliss taught her something else. How to move without sound. How to want things that weren't hers. How a lie, told with enough conviction, could feel like the truth even to the person telling it.
He also gave her something neither of them fully understood yet, a curse, wound so slowly and so gently into her that it never felt like a curse at all. Every year she spent near him, some quiet part of her mind grew a little more tangled with his, and in exchange, something strange bloomed in her: she began to feel animals the way she felt her own hands. A bird's hunger. A fox's fear. A snake's slow, ancient patience. She thought it was a gift Tackliss had given her. It would be a long time before she understood it was something he'd taken from her first, and only handed back in a shape that suited him.
Chapter Two: Weatha's Reckoning By the time Weatha was seventeen light-phases old, she had wind in her like other people had blood. She didn't know, yet, what she truly was, not the shape of it, not the size. She only knew that when she was angry, the air in the room seemed to agree with her. When she was sad, it hung heavy and still, as if holding its breath alongside her. Ferron and Greta had raised her gently, lovingly, and had never once let her feel like anything less than theirs, which was exactly why the conversation, when it finally came, broke something in her that gentleness couldn't fix. They sat her down one gold-phase evening, the crystal spires outside burning amber through the window, and Greta held both her hands. "Weatha, sweetheart," Greta started, and stopped, and started again. "You know we love you like our own." "I am your own," Weatha said, already feeling the floor tilt beneath the words. Ferron cleared his throat. "You're ours in every way that matters. But you weren't born to us. You were born to the Chief." The silence that followed had weight. Weatha felt the air in the room pull toward her without meaning to, curtains twitching though no window was open. "Chief Huldan," she said slowly, "is my father." "Was," Greta said quickly. "Was your father. We raised you. We're your family." Weatha didn't hear the rest. She was already moving, out the door, down the crystal-lined path, the wind at her back like it had been waiting seventeen years for permission to help her. Ferron called after her, Greta a step behind him, but by the time they'd made it out their own front gate, Weatha was three houses ahead and gaining ground with every stride, the air itself seeming to smooth the path for her feet and slow the ground behind her.
She reached the tribal hall and the two guards posted at its doors barely had time to lower their spears before she was past them, not blown past, not thrown past, simply there, on the other side, as if the doorway itself had decided not to argue. Inside, at the long central table, sat a young man near her own age, sharpening a blade with the unhurried focus of someone who'd been taught that stillness was its own kind of strength. "Who are you?" he asked, not looking up. "Who are you?" Weatha shot back, chest heaving, the room's air still humming faintly around her. He set the blade down. "I'm the Chief's son." Weatha went very still. "I'm the Chief's daughter." He actually laughed, short, disbelieving. "The Chief has no daughter." "He has two," she said, and because words weren't going to be enough to prove seventeen years of exile, she raised one hand and let the air in the hall answer for her, curling tight around an unlit torch until the flame guttered and died, then flaring it back to life with a gust that came from nowhere at all. The young man, Vorion, though she didn't know his name yet, stared at her the way a person stares at a door they didn't know was in the wall. Then, slowly, he crossed the room and pulled her into an embrace so sudden and unguarded that Weatha, prepared for almost anything else, didn't know what to do with her own arms. "A sister," he murmured. "I have a sister." They were still holding on to each other when Huldan walked in. He stopped in the doorway. For one unguarded second, something crossed his face that might, in a kinder man, have been called grief. Then it was gone, folded away behind the mask he wore for everyone, even his own children. "Weatha," he said, and the way he said it, practiced, warm, entirely false, told her everything about the seventeen years she'd missed.
She stepped out of Vorion's arms. "Where is my mother." It wasn't a question. Huldan's jaw tightened. "Let's talk," he said. "Just the two of us." He led her into his private dining hall, a long room lit by hanging crystal lamps, and sat at the head of the table. Weatha did not sit. "Your mother," Huldan said, choosing each word like a man setting stones across a river, "gave me a daughter, when I needed a son. I was, a different man, then. I made a choice I've had a long time to think about." "Say it," Weatha said. He looked at her, and for once, didn't dress it up. "I killed her. For not giving me a boy." The room's air went utterly, unnaturally still, no draft, no breath, nothing, the way a held silence sometimes feels louder than a scream. Weatha didn't cry. She didn't shout. She simply looked at her father the way he had once looked at a tool that failed him, and said, "Thank you for the talk," and walked out. She was nearly to the door when Searlait came in from the opposite hall, Huldan's third wife, a woman built like her own forge, arms folded, eyes narrowing at the stranger leaving her husband's private chambers. "Who's this," Searlait said, not really a question. "My daughter," Huldan said, too quickly, too plainly, without thinking about what those two words would do to a woman he'd never once mentioned a daughter to. Searlait's face didn't change right away. That was the terrible part, it took a moment for the words to land, and in that moment, Weatha slipped past her and out into the gold-phase evening, already grieving a mother she never got to meet and unaware she'd just detonated something in the life of another woman entirely.
That night, Searlait walked to the cliffs near Ferron and Greta's house and did not walk back. She had convinced herself, in the hours between the dining hall and the cliff's edge, that her husband had kept a secret family, a secret love, an entire hidden life, and rather than ask him, rather than let him explain, she let the thought consume her until there was nothing left to do but jump. Huldan found her the next morning. And because grief in a man like Huldan never looked like grief, it looked like rage searching for somewhere to land, he arrived at his own conclusion with terrible speed: Weatha had found out about her mother, and Weatha had taken her revenge. He was wrong. He would go a long time without knowing he was wrong. Vorion knew the truth, he'd been on a midnight walk with his mother the very hour she died, half a mile from that cliff, and he told his father so, more than once, in more than one way. Huldan did not want the truth. He wanted a shape to put his fury into, and his newly-found daughter fit it perfectly. "You will not go near her," Huldan told his son, already planning a dinner, already planning a poisoning, already rehearsing the warm, false welcome he would give the daughter he intended to kill. Vorion waited until his father was asleep and went to find Weatha himself. He found her sitting on the roof of Ferron and Greta's house, knees drawn up, staring at the dark crystal spires as if they might rearrange themselves into an answer. "He's going to kill you," Vorion said, without preamble, climbing up beside her. "He thinks you killed my mother." "I never even met her." "I know that. He doesn't want to know it." Vorion picked at a loose shingle. "He's inviting you to dinner. Don't go."
Weatha let out a breath that stirred the air for three feet in every direction, an unconscious thing she was only beginning to notice she did. "I have a brother who wants me alive and a father who wants me dead. That's more family than I had yesterday." "For what it's worth," Vorion said, "I'd rather keep the one who wants you alive." She almost smiled. Almost. The next morning, Ferron and Greta sat with her one final time. "You have a sister," Greta told her gently. "On Koseaphus. Your mother had another daughter before you, before your father found out about you, I mean. You should go to her. You'll be safe there, far from him." Weatha packed what little she owned into a bag that evening and said her goodbyes at the door, holding onto both of them a beat longer than necessary. "You're still my parents," she said. "Wherever I end up." She took the only ship available to her, an old transport with a hull the color of rust and a fuel gauge that lied, and left Thingoria behind for the first time in her life. The ship didn't make it far. Somewhere in the black, empty part of space, the engine sputtered, coughed, and gave out entirely, and Weatha found herself drifting, powerless, through a region of space called Rogrinda, at the mercy of currents she didn't understand and couldn't fight. When the ship finally caught a gravity well, it wasn't Koseaphus waiting on the other side of it. It was a red forest planet called Ennars, and the ship went down hard, cracking through the canopy and slamming into a lake before Weatha managed to claw her way out and swim, gasping, to the shore. She was lost, soaked, and alone, with a storm building on the horizon. She found a shallow cave and huddled inside it as the sky opened up, rain hammering the stone overhang, thunder rolling across the treeline in long, deliberate waves. And there, in the dark, exhausted past the point of fear, she felt something she had no name for yet, a brush against
her mind that wasn't quite a thought and wasn't quite a memory, images flickering behind her eyes of places she'd never been: mountains, oceans, other forests, other storms, as if the storm itself were showing her everywhere it had ever traveled to arrive here, at this cave, on this night. She didn't understand it. She only knew, somehow, that the storm had noticed her, and that she'd noticed it back.
Chapter Three: The Iceocia Kingdom By morning the storm had passed, and hunger drove Weatha out of the cave toward the lake, hoping to find something to eat. She heard the army before she saw it, the rhythmic thud of hooves, dozens of them, and low voices carrying through the red trees. She crouched behind a boulder and watched a column of soldiers march past, riding creatures unlike anything on Thingoria: dark-coated horses crowned with antlers the color of dried blood, their manes rippling like flame in the wind. The soldiers looked human enough. That, at least, was something. She stepped out in front of the column before she could think better of it, and forty spears turned toward her in the same instant. "I'm not a threat," she said, hands raised, wind curling nervously around her ankles without her meaning it to. "I'm… I crashed here. I need help." The captain studied her for a long moment before signaling his men to lower their weapons. "You'll answer for yourself at the kingdom," he said. "Iceocia doesn't take kindly to unexplained strangers." The Iceocia Kingdom, despite its name, was not a kingdom of ice at all, it was a red-forested realm of stone towers and steep, ivy-choked walls, built into the bones of a much older ruin. Weatha was brought to its gates and promptly denied any audience with the king. "He's not taking requests today," the guard told her flatly, and that was that. She spent the night in a small barn on the kingdom's outskirts, and it was there, in the dark, that she heard something scrape against the outer wall. She peered through a gap in the boards and saw a shape she'd never seen before, low and long, doglike but wrong, with a beaked, reptilian face and claws that clicked against stone. A Mugve. A local predator, and it had already caught her scent.
It hit the window before she could move, jaws snapping shut on empty air as she threw herself backward and scrambled out through a gap on the far side, the creature already turning to give chase. It was faster than her, faster than she could outrun even with the wind at her back, and its jaws closed on her forearm hard enough to draw blood before an arrow took it clean through the skull mid-leap. The Mugve crumpled. Weatha stood there gasping, clutching her bleeding arm, staring into the treeline. "You're welcome," said a voice, and a young man stepped out of the shadows, dark-haired, sharp-eyed, a bow still raised in one hand. "Who are you?" she managed. "Prince Louiston Keeri." He lowered the bow, studying her with open curiosity. "And you're the stranger everyone's been talking about." "Weatha," she said, and found, absurdly, that the pain in her arm had become a distant concern compared to the sudden and total inconvenience of how good-looking he was. She opened her mouth to say something else, anything else, and nothing came out. Louiston watched her flounder with poorly hidden amusement. "Well. Goodnight, Weatha. It was nice meeting you." By the time she'd recovered enough to form a sentence, he was already gone, swallowed by the trees, and she spent the rest of the night furious at herself in a way that had nothing to do with the bite on her arm. The next morning she washed in the nearby pond and marched to the palace gates, only to be turned away yet again. This time, she didn't argue. She simply walked around the side of the building, found a wall low enough, and let the wind lift her the rest of the way, not a gust, not a blast, but a steady, patient pressure under her feet, as if the air itself had decided to give her a boost, and dropped silently through an open window. She wandered the halls looking for him and nearly ran headlong into him coming the other way.
"You," Louiston said, eyebrows raised. "Breaking into the palace now?" "The guards wouldn't let me in the normal way." "There's a normal way?" He grinned, and it did something unfair to her ability to think clearly. "Come on. Before someone arrests you." He pulled her into his own chambers before the guards could round the corner, and what started as an awkward apology turned into hours of conversation, about Thingoria, about Ennars, about a hundred small things that mattered to no one but the two of them. By the time the sun began to dip, they'd wandered out into the woods together, ending up on a cliff overlooking a valley where the sun sat perfectly balanced between two distant mountains. "It's beautiful," Weatha said. "It is," Louiston agreed, not looking at the view. She turned to him, and he was already turning to her, and for one suspended second the whole forest seemed to hold its breath along with them… SWOOSH… a yellow, glowing arrow split the air between their faces close enough that Weatha felt the heat of it. They spun toward the source. A figure hovered at the cliff's edge in dark, jagged armor, a semi-halo of gold light attached above a helmet shaped like something between a crown and a blade. "Ithar," Louiston breathed, already drawing his sword. Weatha didn't think. She raised her hand, and the air around Ithar seemed to simply disagree with him, refusing to hold him aloft, thickening and crackling with sudden violent charge, until a bolt of raw current arced off her palm and sent him tumbling backward off the cliff into the field below. "We have to get back," Louiston said, already running. "If he's here, his men aren't far behind." They weren't. The kingdom's outer wall was already under assault by the time the two of them arrived, minions swarming the gate in a chaos of steel and shrieking. Weatha and Louiston
fought side by side, his sword, her wind, until an arrow caught Louiston in the leg and dropped him hard against the stone. Weather’s heart dropped faster than a bullet can leave a barrel of a gun. "Go," he gritted out. "I'll…" "I'm not leaving you," Weatha said, and stood over him, and did not move, until the last of Ithar's minions lay broken on the ground. She carried him back through the gates herself, and the same guards who'd turned her away twice now thanked her with open relief, though they still, out of habit more than malice, wouldn't let her inside. Word reached King Christianus by nightfall of the stranger who'd saved his son, and an invitation followed, dinner, that evening, at the palace, accompanied by the Prince too. Weatha arrived nervous in a way that had nothing to do with weather or wind. Queen Millicente greeted her at the door with a smile that didn't reach her eyes, and led her into a dining hall where King Christianus waited at the head of a long table. "You saved my son's life," Christianus said, rising. "Iceocia is in your debt." Louiston entered a moment later, bowing with theatrical formality despite the limp in his step, and for the first time, the king and queen sat across from their son rather than at the far ends of the table, so that all four of them could speak as something almost like a family. The conversation flowed easily enough, until the king asked, mid-course, "Where are you from, exactly?" "Thingoria," Weatha said. "A small tribe. Crystal planet." "And your family there?" Weatha hesitated for only a moment. "My mother's gone. My father is Chief Huldan."
The change in the room was immediate and total. Christianus and Millicente exchanged a look Weatha couldn't read, and within minutes the dinner had wrapped itself up with a haste that felt almost rude. Louiston walked her out afterward, confused by the sudden shift, and they kissed beneath a sky gone the color of a healing bruise, orange fading into violet, violet fading into black, before she made her way back to the barn that had become her temporary home. Inside, Louiston found his parents speaking in hushed, urgent tones. "What happened at dinner?" he demanded. Millicente's face had gone pale and hard at once. "Chief Huldan," she said, "murdered my sister." Louiston went very still. "Weatha's mother." "Silvetta and I were sisters," Millicente said. "You will not see that girl again."
Chapter Four: Mindette the Thief Koseaphus smelled like rain even when it wasn't raining, a thick, mineral, mushroom-damp smell that clung to hair and clothes and never quite washed out. Mindette had grown up in it, learned to love it, the way you learn to love the only home you've ever known. She was turning seventeen now, lean and quick, with her mother's dark hair and a habit of moving through a room like she was already halfway out of it. She lived on the outskirts of a mining village at the base of Koseaphus's tallest fungal peak, in a den she shared with Tackliss and the loose, shifting brood of smaller snakes that had gathered around him over the years. She stole from the village below with a regularity that had made her something of a local legend, the thief no one could catch, because no one could catch what they couldn't see coming. Luwanna had died two years earlier. Drowned in the lake behind their home, in circumstances Mindette had never fully let herself examine too closely. Since then, it had been only Mindette and the snakes, and increasingly, only Mindette and Tackliss's plans. "There's a sword," Tackliss said one evening, coiled comfortably atop a flat stone that served as his throne, tongue flicking with something like hunger. "King Tuskroot's. Older than the mountain. I want it." "You want it," Mindette repeated. "Or you want me to get it." "Is there a difference?" Tackliss's eyes glittered. "You've never failed me, little thief." She should have asked why a snake wanted a sword. She would think about that a great deal, later. She left for the city at dawn and arrived by nightfall, sleeping in an alley before spending the following day scouting the castle from a rooftop, counting guards, timing patrols, mapping the palace's darkened windows against the hours the moon offered the least light. That night, she moved.
She scaled the outer wall in the gap between two patrols, slipped along a ledge no wider than her boot, and reached the king's balcony just as voices drifted out from inside. "I still hear him sometimes," came a woman's voice, thick with old grief. "In the halls. I think I always will." "I know," said a man's voice, low and tired. "I miss our boy every day." Mindette pressed herself flat against the stone, dangling in the dark, close enough to hear every word and unmoved by any of it, she told herself it wasn't her business, wasn't her grief, and slipped past the balcony doors once the couple had turned away, toward the sword resting against the foot of their bed. It was heavier than she expected. Far heavier. It slipped from her grip and struck the floor with a crash that seemed to shake the whole room. Both the King and Queen spun toward her. "Who's there!" the King bellowed, already reaching for a blade of his own. Mindette didn't answer, she was dressed head to toe in black, face hidden, and silence was its own kind of armor. The Queen screamed. The King demanded she reveal herself, and when the demand alone didn't work, something in his voice, not anger now, but recognition, made her hesitate. "Show me your face," he said again, quieter. She pulled down her mask. King Tuskroot stared at her for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted from fury to a kind of sorrowful clarity. "There," he murmured. "There it is. I can see him in your eyes." "See who," Mindette said, though some part of her already knew. "The snake," Tuskroot said. "The one who killed my son."
He crossed to a towering bookshelf and began tearing through volumes with an urgency that startled her, she used the moment to grab the sword properly this time, get a real grip on it, and turn for the door. She'd nearly made it when the King found the page he wanted and began to read aloud, his voice rising into something old and formal and strange, syllables that didn't belong to any language Mindette recognized. The words hit her like a wave. She staggered, the sword slipping from her fingers again, and for one dizzying moment she felt something tear loose inside her, something that had been wound so tightly around her thoughts for so long that its absence left her reeling, hollow, and, for the first time in years, entirely her own. She hit the floor on her knees. When she looked up, King Tuskroot was kneeling in front of her, his anger gone, replaced by something gentler. "You've been under a curse," he said. "A long one. I imagine you don't even remember what it feels like not to be." Mindette said nothing. She was crying, and she didn't fully understand why. "Stay the night," Tuskroot said. "Please." She woke the next morning in a guest chamber softer than anything she'd ever slept in, and found the King waiting for her over breakfast. "I want to go back," she told him, once she'd found her voice again. "I want to finish this. Properly." "You don't owe me anything." "I know," Mindette said. "I'm not doing it for you." They struck an agreement: she would return to Tackliss, pretend the curse still held, and end what he'd started years before it ever finished starting.
Chapter Five: The Snake Tackliss was waiting for her when she returned, coiled atop his stone, tongue tasting the air. "You're late," he said. "The castle was well guarded," Mindette answered, and something in her voice must have been slightly wrong, because his eyes narrowed a fraction before he let it go. "The sword," he said. "Bring it here." She crossed to the old chest where he kept his hoard, and he uncoiled to open it himself, distracted for one crucial moment, and Mindette raised the sword and struck. He was faster than the blow. He twisted aside, latched onto her shoulder with fangs longer than her fingers, and she felt the venom hit her bloodstream like fire, felt the curse trying, desperately, instinctively, to reforge the chains it had lost. "You would betray me?" Tackliss hissed, still latched on. "After everything I gave you?" "You gave me nothing," Mindette gasped, swinging the sword wildly, catching him across the jaw, forcing him to release her. "You took." The fight that followed was ugly and close, no elegance to it, just desperation on both sides. She sliced his fangs clean off mid-strike, and in fury he wrapped himself around her throat, choking off her air, dragging her backward toward the mouth of the cave and the long drop beyond it. "You were nothing," he snarled into her ear, "before me." She dropped the sword to claw at the coils around her neck, vision darkening, feet scraping the edge of the cliff… Then, the pressure vanished. Something had cut clean through Tackliss's body from behind, and his severed head fell one way while the rest of him tumbled into the pit below, and Mindette, gasping, turned toward whoever had saved her before the venom finally took her under.
She woke to the sensation of being carried, arms around her, the hum of an engine, the smell of oiled leather. She flung herself out of the stranger's grip on instinct, hitting the floor of what she now realized was a small ship, and looked up into the face bending down to help her. "It's okay," the man said gently. "I got you, my daughter. Daddy's got you." Mindette went still. "Dad?" she whispered.
Chapter Six: Reunion He was nothing like she'd imagined, in the rare moments she'd let herself imagine a father at all, broad-shouldered, gray at the temples, with an expression that softened, genuinely, at the sight of her consciousness and breathing. She threw her arms around him and wept, and Huldan, Chief Huldan, murderer twice over, though she knew none of that yet, held his daughter and, for one honest moment, felt something crack open in his chest that had been sealed since the night he killed her mother. "I have to return the sword," Mindette said, once the shaking had stopped. "I made a promise." Huldan flew her back to King Tuskroot's city himself, and the King's face broke into open relief at the sight of her walking, alive, through his hall. "You did it," he said, pulling her into an embrace of his own. "He's dead," Mindette confirmed. "It's over." Huldan and Tuskroot shook hands, sword returned, debt settled, and as her father turned to leave, Mindette lingered. "One more minute," she said. "Please." Huldan nodded and stepped out toward his ship. Mindette turned back to the King. "I want to see," she said. "My whole childhood. The curse took most of it from me. I want it back." Tuskroot led her to his library and pulled down the same worn volume he'd used to break Tackliss's hold on her, and together they sat while he read the memory spell aloud. Images bloomed behind Mindette's eyes, not quite sight, not quite memory, something in between. Her mother's face, young and radiant, holding her as a newborn. Her father, a different father, one she'd never known existed, pacing furiously, shouting about a son he'd been promised and a daughter he'd been given instead. Her mother's fear, sharp and immediate, packing in the dark, fleeing into the night with an infant against her chest.
The spell ended, and Mindette sat frozen, a storm of feeling with nowhere yet to land. "I'm sorry," Tuskroot said quietly. "He didn't want me either," Mindette said. It wasn't a question. Tuskroot didn't answer that. He didn't need to. He walked her out to Huldan's ship himself, and before she boarded, he took both her hands. "If you ever need anything," he said, "you know where to find me. Always." Mindette hugged him hard enough to surprise them both, and the King, thinking of the son he'd lost and the daughter-shaped hole in his own life, wept a little as she walked away. "Where are we going now?" Mindette asked, settling into the seat beside her father as the ship lifted off. "To find your sister," Huldan said. Mindette's head snapped toward him. "I have a sister?" Huldan hesitated, the first real hesitation Mindette had seen from him. The truth was complicated in ways he had no intention of untangling for her: two different wives, two different daughters, one dead and one hunted and himself the architect of both tragedies. So he did what he always did when the truth was inconvenient. He simplified it into something he could live with. "Your mother and I had two girls," he said. "We split you up, a long time ago. I only just found where the other one ended up." "What's her name?" He opened his mouth and found, to his genuine surprise, that he did not know. He had never asked. He had never cared to.
"What's your name," he said instead, buying time, and Mindette gave it to him without suspicion, and still he came up empty on what to call the daughter he was hunting. "Silvetta," he said finally, reaching for the only name that came easily to mind, never once registering, or perhaps refusing to register, that it belonged to a woman he'd already killed. Mindette smiled, turning the name over like a gift. "Silvetta," she repeated. "I can't wait to meet her." Huldan looked out at the stars ahead and said nothing at all about the daughter he actually intended to find, or what he still meant to do to her.
Chapter Seven: The Trap Weeks passed in the Iceocia Kingdom, and Weatha grew steadily more certain that something had gone wrong. Louiston hadn't come to see her, not once, and no explanation reached her beyond the guards' polite refusals to let her past the gate. One night, restless and unwilling to wait any longer, she scaled the wall the way she had the first time, letting the air lift her over the stone. But the kingdom was not quiet that night. Alarms rang out before she'd even reached the upper halls, and she found herself running through smoke and shouting as Ithar's forces tore through the corridors once more. Louiston nearly collided with her at a corner, sword already drawn. "Weatha!" he shouted, relief and horror crossing his face in the same instant. "Move, move!" She turned to see Ithar bearing down on her from behind, wings spread, and before she could summon so much as a gust to slow him, his arm closed around her and the two of them were airborne, smashing through a window and out into the fog-choked night. She screamed. Louiston's voice chased them out into the dark, growing smaller and smaller, until it vanished entirely beneath the wind. Ithar's lair was a ruin buried deep in the red forest, old stone half-swallowed by roots, lit by torches that guttered in a breeze Weatha couldn't feel but somehow sensed all the same, as if the air itself were on edge here. He bound her wrists and ankles to a heavy chair and left her there until she woke fully, groggy and furious. "You could have just asked to talk," she said, once her vision cleared. Ithar laughed, a dry, humorless sound from behind his helmet. "Would you have come?" "No." "There's your answer."
He crouched in front of her, studying her the way a man studies something he's waited a long time to find. "Do you want to see the real me?" "Not particularly," Weatha said, though her curiosity won out before she could stop it. "Fine. Show me." He reached up and removed the helmet, and beneath it was not the monster she'd half expected but an older man, lined face, gray stubble, old scars crossing an eyebrow and a cheek, eyes that had clearly seen more grief than any one lifetime should hold. "My name was never important," he said. "What's important is where I come from. My people lived on this planet long before the Iceocia Kingdom did. We were a pack, hunters, gatherers, nothing grand. Then an army came. Burned everything. Some of us fled, all the way to a crystal planet, if you can believe it, and built a new tribe there, out of whatever was left of us." Weatha's stomach dropped. "Thingoria." "Your tribe," Ithar confirmed. "The cowards who ran. I was one of the ones who stayed and fought. We lost. The army that beat us built their palace on our bones and called it a kingdom." He gestured at the ruin around them. "So no. We are not strangers, you and I. We are what's left of the same broken thing, standing on opposite sides of it." "And the King and Queen?" "Are why I brought you here," Ithar said, standing, mask back in hand. "You're the bait that gets them through my door. After that, you're no longer my concern." He left her there, mask sealed once more over his ruined face, and it was in the silence after his footsteps faded that Weatha finally worked her bindings loose, the ropes, she realized with something like wonder, seeming almost reluctant to hold her, fibers loosening under her fingers as if the material itself had quietly taken her side. She fled into the trees the moment she was free, not looking back.
Chapter Eight: Cherrybolt She ran until the ruin was long out of sight and the forest closed in thick and unfamiliar around her, and it was there, miles later, exhausted and lost, that she found the horse. Not a horse exactly, an Usron, dark-coated, crowned in a mane and antlers the deep red of the trees themselves. It approached her without fear, nosing at her palm as though it had been waiting. "Hey," Weatha murmured, running a hand along its neck. "I don't suppose you know the way back to the kingdom." The Usron pressed its head against her shoulder, and something about the gesture felt like an answer. "Alright," she said, climbing onto its back. "Let's find out together." They found something else first, another rider, another Usron, cutting through the trees at a dead run, and Weatha's heart leapt into her throat before she registered who it was. "Louiston!" He pulled his mount up hard, and she slid off hers, and they collided somewhere in the middle in an embrace that neither of them seemed inclined to end. "I thought," Louiston started. "I know." "My parents wouldn't even let me look for you properly. I had to sneak out." "They're going to have to get used to it," Weatha said, and kissed him before he could argue. She named her Usron on the ride back, Cherrybolt, for the color of her hair and the speed she seemed to enjoy showing off, and the two of them rode side by side through the dark trees, unaware of what was unfolding back at Ithar's lair.
Huldan and Mindette had arrived just as Ithar returned home to find his prisoner gone. Huldan needed no introduction to place him, the old scars, the ruined lair, the bitterness in his stance, and something ancient and unresolved in Huldan recognized an enemy of his own people the instant he saw him. "You," Huldan growled, already drawing his blade. Ithar barely had time to raise his own weapon before Huldan was on him, striking with an icy blast of wind that staggered him backward. The fight tore through the ruin, and it might have stayed a fight between two men if King Christianus and Queen Millicente hadn't arrived at that exact moment, searching desperately for their son and finding, instead, a battle already underway. They didn't hesitate. Whatever loyalties or histories divided them, an enemy in front of them was an enemy, and within moments it had become a three-way collision of blades and power, Ithar against Huldan, the King and Queen against Mindette, who fought with a controlled, almost detached precision that unnerved even her opponents. Ithar fell first, his remaining unbroken arm sliced clean off by the King's sword, collapsing against the stone in a heap of broken armor. Huldan, breathing hard, turned to find Christianus standing over the fallen villain, and recognized in his stance, in the shape of his face, the very leader of the army that had scattered Ithar's people generations ago. Something old and furious surged in him. "You," Huldan snarled again, and this time there was no holding back. The fight that followed was brutal and short. In the chaos, Huldan reached for whatever weapon was nearest, a jagged piece of rock torn from the ruin's collapsing wall, and drove it into Queen Millicente before anyone could stop him. "NO!" Christianus's scream tore through the ruin. He crossed the distance between them in a single stride and brought his sword down with a force born entirely of grief, ending Huldan's life in the same motion that ended his wife's. Silence fell.
Mindette lowered her weapon, watching her father crumple to the stone. She felt, strangely, disturbingly little. Whatever bond might have grown between them had barely had time to root, and what little there was could not survive the sight of what he'd just done. She stepped forward instead toward the King, who had collapsed to his knees beside his wife's body, sobbing in a way that made him look, for the first time, like an old man rather than a monarch. He rose suddenly and swung his sword at her without warning, grief curdling into blind rage, and Mindette dodged each blow with the same detached precision she'd shown moments before, until she managed to wrench the weapon from his hands entirely. "Enough," she said, not unkindly. "It's done. Come back to yourself." Christianus stared at her, chest heaving, and slowly, the fury drained out of him, leaving only the grief underneath.
Chapter Nine: Aiolos the Gentle Guardian Christianus carried his wife's body from the ruin himself, refusing all help, and led Mindette on a long, silent ride to a place she'd never have found alone, a hidden entrance carved into the side of a mountain, wreathed in wild red blossoms and half-swallowed by roots. Inside, worn stone steps descended into a small, quiet den, lit only by a single shaft of light falling from an opening far above, illuminating a bare patch of earth like a spotlight on an empty stage. Christianus laid his wife gently within that circle of light, then knelt, and closed his eyes. "Kneel," he told Mindette softly. "Close your eyes. No one is permitted to see him. Only to hear him, and speak." "Him?" "Aiolos," Christianus said. "The Gentle Guardian." Mindette knelt, closed her eyes, and felt, unmistakably, a presence settle into the room with them, warm and old and enormous, though nothing about it felt threatening. She heard something like breath. Something like a quiet, sorrowful sniffle. "Aiolos," Christianus said, voice cracking. "Please. Tell me my wife is at peace." There was a pause, long enough that Mindette almost opened her eyes despite the warning. Then a voice filled the den, deep, unhurried, carrying the calm and gravity of something that had comforted grieving people for far longer than either of them had been alive. "She has arrived somewhere gentle," Aiolos said. "Somewhere she will want for nothing, and remember only what brought her joy." Christianus wept, quietly this time, and thanked the guardian, and rose to his feet, and when Mindette opened her eyes a moment later, whatever had been in the room with them was simply gone, the den once again empty stone and falling light.
They carried Millicente's body back up together, and Christianus set off to arrange her burial. But Mindette lingered, and returned alone down the worn steps, kneeling once more in the quiet dark. "Aiolos," she said. "I have questions. About my sister." The presence returned, gentler this time, almost fond. "Ask." "I don't even know her name. My father lied to me. I don't know anything real." "Her name is Weatha," Aiolos said. "And you are closer to her than you think. She and the ones you love are gathering, even now, at the Iceocia Kingdom. Go to them." Mindette rose, opened her eyes, thanked the now-empty air, and made her way back out into the daylight, already turning her ship toward the kingdom.
Chapter Ten: Sisterhood Weatha and Louiston had barely dismounted at the kingdom's gates when Mindette arrived, breathless, and ran straight for her without hesitation, wrapping her arms around a woman she'd never met and calling her, joyfully, sister. Weatha, still under the impression her sister lived on a mushroom-covered planet a galaxy away, went stiff with confusion, but something in the desperate warmth of the embrace kept her from pulling away, and she played along until they could speak properly, later that night, alone. They sat together on the palace steps under a sky just beginning to darken, and Mindette told her everything, the truth about their father, the tangled lies he'd told her, the sister she'd been promised who never quite matched the woman in front of her now. "He told me your name was Silvetta," Mindette admitted. Weatha went quiet. "That was my mother's name." "I know that now." It took Weatha a long moment to find her voice again. Seventeen years of silence, a dead mother she'd never met, a father who'd tried to kill her, and now, a sister, real and sitting beside her, offering the one thing Weatha hadn't realized she was still missing. "I don't know how to feel about any of this," Weatha admitted. "Neither do I," Mindette said. "But I'd rather feel it with you than alone." Weatha reached over and took her hand, and something in her chest, tight and guarded since the night Ferron and Greta first told her the truth, finally began to loosen. "Every girl needs a sister," she said quietly. "Apparently," Mindette agreed, and they both laughed, small, tired, real.
King Christianus buried his wife within the week, the whole kingdom gathering in solemn red-forest silence to mourn a queen many had loved and some had feared. A month later, in a very different ceremony, the kingdom gathered again, this time for a wedding. Weatha wore white against the same red trees that had once nearly killed her, and Louiston waited for her at the altar looking, for once, entirely without his usual composure, nervous, overjoyed, utterly certain. Mindette stood beside her sister as the ceremony unfolded, feeling something unfamiliar and warm settle into place inside her. They were crowned King and Queen of Iceocia before the sun had fully set. Christianus stepped down that same evening, retiring to a quiet cottage just beyond the city walls, content in a way grief rarely allows, visiting his son, his new daughter, and his people often enough that no one ever quite thought of him as gone. Not long after, word reached Mindette of a group called the Infinitoes, heroes and warriors scattered across a dozen worlds, and something in her, restless after everything, knew immediately that it was where she belonged next. She left Ennars for the planet Qooqaa, settling in the sprawling city of Edobat, carrying with her the animals' quiet trust that had never left her, gift and burden both, long after the curse that gave it to her was gone.
Epilogue Queen Weatha rules now beside King Louiston, still riding Cherrybolt through the same red forests that once nearly swallowed her whole, the storms of Ennars occasionally still whispering their old secrets to her when she asks. She dreams, some days, of joining her sister among the Infinitoes, not yet, but someday. Mindette carries on with the Infinitoes across a dozen worlds, animals still drawn to her without explanation, still remembering the two very different guardians who shaped who she became: King Tuskroot, who broke her curse and never stopped being her father in every way that mattered, and Aiolos the Gentle Guardian, whom she has still never seen, and likely never will. On Thingoria, Vorion returned from the last battles of the Rains of Eruption to learn his father was dead. He mourned less than he expected to, given the man his father had become, and took up the mantle of Chief in his place, a steadier, quieter kind of leader than Thingoria had known in a long time, and one who made it known, from his very first day, that his half-sisters would always have a place to come home to. Ferron and Greta live on still, under Vorion's rule, in the same small house where they once took in a baby they were told to raise and never asked whose she was, the two people who, more than any chief, any king, or any curse, had given Weatha the truest thing she ever had. A home. The End