The Mage Heir Read online

  The Mage Heir

  Kathryn Sommerlot

  Book 2 of 2 in the Life Siphon duology

  Amazon Distribution ASID B079MCPC3L

  Cover illustration 2018 by Jenny at Seedlings Design Studio

  Amazon Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  To Rob and Caroline—

  the cheerleaders who always encourage me to keep writing

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Tatsu woke with such a start, he almost couldn’t breathe.

  Heart hammering, he spun up and onto one knee, grabbing his bow and notching the arrow even before his thoughts had completely righted. He waited for one breath and then another, poised and ready to release the arrow into the shadows of the trees. Everything around them seemed threatening, and it shouldn’t have been a surprise—they were fugitives, after all.

  His throat closed, pulsing along with his heartbeat. When nothing jumped out from the darkness, it seemed unlikely that the soft sounds were one of the queen’s guards come to drag them both back to the prison cells in Aughwor.

  “Alesh?” Tatsu said, voice low. There was no response. It wasn’t Alesh and Ral either, and Tatsu was glad they’d stayed in Dradela, though his stomach clenched at the thought of the queen guessing their involvement in Yudai’s escape.

  They were half a day’s walk to the mountains with their camp set up in a small clearing, close enough to feel the threat from both Chayd and Runon breathing down their necks. If the queen hadn’t sent guards after them, then Runon certainly had. The last thing Tatsu wanted was to underestimate Nota—no, his mother, no matter how difficult it was to think of her like that. Underestimating is what had gotten them into the whole mess in the first place.

  Whatever was stirring within the brush faded away—a small rodent foraging across the forest floor—and Tatsu’s arms dropped back down to his sides. He focused on slowing his heartbeat back to normal.

  He was jumping at shadows, and at such a rate, he’d exhaust himself long before they could hide themselves in the peaks. He settled back down and willed his body to relax as the branches overhead waved gently in the night breeze. There was nothing strange about the trees, but Tatsu kept thinking that he could hear them sing.

  After traveling through so much of the drained land and its twisted aftermath, nature didn’t hold the same comfort that it used to.

  Tatsu couldn’t see the moon from his vantage point beneath the tree cover, but he guessed that it was halfway through the night, giving them three or four hours before the sun rose. Yudai, sleeping several paces away near the fire pit, was curled into a tight ball on his leather bed roll. Occasionally, he would murmur in his sleep and turn over, but none of it seemed to be enough to wake him. Small favors, if nothing else.

  Tatsu closed his eyes, but unbidden, his mind pulled up a scene he’d spent weeks trying to bury: Zakio’s body crumpled in the crimson-stained snow. Tatsu pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes hard enough to leave red spots dancing in his vision after he’d pulled both hands away. The image remained even after he resumed staring out at the trees. When he let his head fall back against the trunk he was leaning against, his hair caught in the rough bark.

  At some point, he managed to nod off, still in the uncomfortable position against one of the thicker trees, and by the time he woke again, the sky was beginning to streak with color. Leaning forward, he winced at the pain the movement elicited in his stiff neck. He was preoccupied enough with the tightness to only vaguely notice Yudai stirring across the fire, but the anguished yell a second later startled any residual sleepiness out of him. A split-second of spinning around showed that they were still alone in the clearing.

  Whatever relief he felt was achingly short-lived.

  Yudai sat up with both hands raised in the air, looking from side to side. Around him, stretched out like a too-bold shadow, was his own sleeping outline burned brown into the withered grass. Tatsu could see the drained blades bent and curled over on themselves, even the ones that weren’t crushed beneath Yudai’s weight. In only a single night, life had been bled dry by Yudai’s wild, uncontrollable magic.

  Yudai looked up at him, eyes shimmering with vulnerability.

  “No,” was all Yudai said, and that single word reverberated through Tatsu’s core until he feared he could no longer stand. His chest heaved, a pang of copper blood on the back of his tongue.

  The life siphon had endured.

  One

  From his vantage point atop an outcropping of stone on the east side of the mountain, Tatsu stared out over the horizon. The withered trees of the siphon’s original devastation stood out against the turning colors of the hill’s opposite side. Twisted toward the ground, the old trees were still there, but they were far enough away that they didn’t pose a threat. Still, Tatsu stayed for a few minutes, enjoying the last bits of warmth from the setting sun as he looked over the brown swath of long-drained land. With the season slowly cooling into autumn, he knew they wouldn’t be able to stay where they were in the high altitudes. Already, there was a chill when the sun went down that whipped against his cheeks, and the thought of remaining where they were, with relatively few provisions, wasn’t helping the tightness in his gut.

  After the sun began to dip low behind the dark shapes of the mountain range, Tatsu sighed and made his way back down the rocky slope. Their path, long abandoned and overgrown with weeds, snaked through the higher cliffs and coniferous trees, and they were high enough up on an old trade trail that Tatsu didn’t see any movement in the trees down below. While escaping had been the goal, the quiet around them gnawed at Tatsu’s subconscious. If anyone had followed them, he saw no signs of it, and the stillness was unsettling.

  Hunting in the clusters of dark-needled trees was lacking. The abandoned paths only went so far, and after a while, they would have to start looping back, which would impact any potential food supply.

  Tatsu couldn’t hear much by way of animal noise as he made his way back towards the small cavern they were set up in, but the mountain insects were already migrating down the slopes, and after that, the birds and rodents would follow.

  Yudai was sitting near the fire when Tatsu entered the cave.

  “Anything?” Yudai asked. He didn’t look relieved when Tatsu shook his head. The white-drained ends of his hair hung ragged in front of his eyes, but the roots were growing in their natural black, and the transition between the colors looked like a dark halo around the crown of his head.

  “We have at most a few weeks of summer left,” Tatsu said, taking a seat across the fire. He leaned forward to twirl the hare that was roasting over t
he flames, split by a makeshift spit. “Anyone on our trail will probably give up once the cold front comes down.”

  “And we’ll freeze if we try to stay here,” Yudai replied.

  Tatsu kept his eyes steadfastly glued to the fire when he answered, “You’re not wrong.”

  “You’ve been worrying about it for a week. I can see it on your face every time you come back from hunting.”

  When Tatsu didn’t answer, Yudai shifted on the ground. Tatsu watched him stretch out his legs and wiggle his toes near the warmth before he continued, “How long were you going to stew over this on your own?”

  “That’s not what I was doing,” Tatsu said, but it was weak.

  “Well, you certainly weren’t being truthful.”

  “What have I been lying about?’”

  “We can’t stay here for much longer, and a lie by omission is still a lie,” Yudai said, sounding a bit put-out. “We have to find somewhere else to go.”

  Tatsu looked across the fire at Yudai, who raised both eyebrows and said nothing. As the silence grew too imposing, Tatsu sighed.

  “I’ve been going over our options,” he said, taking his time with the words. “I just can’t come up with an end point. We can’t go to Runon—”

  “No, we can’t,” Yudai interrupted. His eyes flashed dark and angry.

  “—and we can’t return to Chayd,” Tatsu finished. “The queen’s response at this point will be much worse than simply using you for revenge.”

  “I’d rather die,” Yudai said, low and more of a growl than anything else. His gaze dropped down to his fingers splayed wide in his lap, curling and uncurling in tandem. “I’d rather die than be used as a slave again.”

  After another tense moment, Tatsu said, “I know. I won’t take you back there, you know that. Right?”

  Yudai raised his head, teeth chewing on his lower lip. “Where will we go?”

  “Far,” Tatsu said. “Rad-em, maybe, or Joesar. Or we take a ship across the Oldal Sea to Dusset and hope luck is on our side.”

  “Wonderful,” Yudai said with a mirthless laugh. “That’s worked out well so far. And what are we going to do when I start draining the world around me while we sleep every night? You know it’s getting worse.”

  “I don’t have an answer for you,” Tatsu said honestly.

  Yudai laughed again. “We’re leaving a bright trail for anyone hoping to catch us, without any plan on where to disappear to, crushed under the hourglass hanging over our heads.”

  “Are you yelling at me or the world?”

  “Myself,” was Yudai’s frustrated-sounding response before he pressed his hands against his face and stilled, lost in his own thoughts.

  The hare was beginning to char on the bottom, so Tatsu spun the spit and sat back again. Even while staring at the sizzling meat, his appetite was fading away. Apprehension returned, throbbing in time with his heartbeat.

  “They must have done something to you in Dradela,” Tatsu said quietly as the cavern seemed to close in around them. “There’s a reason that the drain started up again. It can’t be a coincidence that it was only after the queen tried to use your magic for herself.”

  “Knowing that doesn’t get us any closer to shutting it off.”

  Tatsu couldn’t come up with anything to say to that, at least not anything inspiring. Instead, he crossed his arms over his knees and tried to push the thoughts from his mind.

  “You think this is a result of being a prisoner in Chayd?” Yudai asked.

  “It makes sense, but I doubt you were in any state to remember what the Chaydese mages gave you.”

  Yudai’s mouth was a hard line when he shook his head. “There was only a vague awareness of people around me and nothing else. It’s not very helpful.”

  “Then we’re stumbling in the dark,” Tatsu said and sighed. After a few seconds of looking at Yudai’s form, dejectedly hunched over on itself, he added, “I wish I could find you something else to wear. The brown is insulting.”

  “Is it?” Yudai asked, looking genuinely surprised. “I had no idea.”

  “That’s the color that the lowest citizens wear,” Tatsu said. “For royalty, it’s… something akin to a slap in the face, I suppose.”

  Yudai seemed to consider that. “It doesn’t bother me. It’s not an insult in Runon.”

  “When we found you, you were wearing white.”

  “Nota has a twisted sense of humor,” Yudai agreed. “In Runon, white is the color of funerals.”

  “Fitting,” Tatsu said, and there was a sudden tightness in his chest that he didn’t totally understand. Across the fire, Yudai pushed himself up to his feet, his face still lined with a bitterness there didn’t appear to be a remedy for.

  “Less talk of dying,” he demanded, “and cut up that hare. I’m starving.”

  They moved on the next day, and the path they were walking sloped further upward through short, jagged switchbacks, though the route wove them around several large rocks and sheer drop-offs that Tatsu stayed clear of. Frequent rests, required for the demanding climb, slowed their progress. Even though they didn’t have a destination or an arrival time, the creeping pace made Tatsu’s skin crawl. The uncomfortable buzzing under his skin had increased following their discussion, and they had to get off the peaks before it was too late. There was suddenly a looming limit on their time, and as it crept closer, so too did Tatsu’s apprehension.

  When they were unable to find a cavern to set up camp in, they had no choice but to rough it in a small clearing between the trees. Tatsu didn’t mind sleeping under the leaves, but Yudai’s agitation seemed to grow as the sky darkened. He paced back and forth between two ancient tree trunks with his hands clasped behind his back, over and over, until the stars came out.

  “You’re going to have to sleep eventually,” Tatsu pointed out, voice mild, once the moon was high overhead. It earned him a growl in reply. “Please just sit down.”

  “This clearing will be dead by morning,” Yudai snapped. When he turned to retrace his steps again, Tatsu could see the twist of his fingers clenched together in tight fists.

  “You can’t do anything about it, so there’s no point in blaming yourself. It’s probably just making the whole thing worse.”

  The look Yudai threw him was dubious at best, but evidently, the possibility was difficult to ignore. Yudai eventually settled himself down between two patches of yellow-green weeds, and he ran his finger over his lip a few times before his eyes flickered up towards Tatsu. “Distract me.”

  “You could ask nicely,” Tatsu said.

  One corner of Yudai’s mouth quirked upward. “I could,” he agreed, and said nothing more.

  “Did you know that my mother had other children?”

  Yudai blinked and sat back, face slackening.

  “Good distraction,” he said, and from his tone, he was just as surprised by the question as Tatsu himself was. “I was actually wondering when you’d ask about that.”

  “Did you?” Tatsu pressed. His lungs felt too big for his chest, pressing against his ribs in a mad attempt to break free. Part of him wanted to take the whole thing back, to inhale the words and swallow them back down his throat—but the other part of him was so desperate for the answer that even the anticipation of an emotional gutting wasn’t enough to stop it.

  “No,” Yudai said. There was nothing on his face that betrayed any other truth. “Not until you showed up in the castle that day. But it makes sense.”

  “Why?”

  Yudai’s head fell to one side a little, and the white ends of his hair brushed against the curve of his cheekbone. “There was a mage in Runon, when I was young, who served as my mentor. He wasn’t particularly gifted or strong, but he was a sensible man, and my father respected him. He never tried to hide his distrust of Nota. He told me that she’d spent years trying to convince my father that marrying her and producing magical heirs was the best thing he could do for his country.”

  Tatsu shook his
head. “I don’t understand what this has to do with me.”

  “Don’t you?” Yudai asked, sounding surprised again. “If she’d had a child that possessed no magical abilities, it would severely discredit her bid to be at my father’s side. There would be no guarantee that their offspring would share the gift. Her only hope was to hide the evidence of such a child to save her own chances at becoming queen.”

  Though expected, the hurt blossoming through his body shocked him with its strength. Shame rippled all the way down his arms, weakening his muscles until his fingers trembled against his thighs.

  “It didn’t work anyway,” Tatsu said, so quiet he thought perhaps Yudai missed it.

  But Yudai’s face was open with sympathy. “No, it didn’t. My father married an advisor’s daughter. And every chance Nota thought she still might have had was destroyed when I was born.”

  “The most powerful mage Runon had ever seen,” Tatsu said and tried to smile. He couldn’t quite manage it.

  He expected the quip to earn him a smirk, but instead, Yudai’s expression wrinkled further. “That’s what they said anyway.”

  As Tatsu tried to pull himself out of his own thoughts, Yudai put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

  “I’m just—I’m trying to understand,” Tatsu said, and then clarified, “Understand my father, I mean. The Queen of Chayd knew about me and my heritage, but I don’t know how.”

  “Your father probably went to the crown for protection,” Yudai suggested. “He was Chaydese, so the country would’ve felt compelled to help him. Without magic, you really weren’t much of a threat to them.”

  Then Yudai chuckled, and his fingers tightened around Tatsu’s shoulders. “Until you were a threat to them, and in a way that no ruler ever could’ve predicted.”

  It was not the first time that the full realization of his transgressions hit him, but it seemed to knock more of the wind from his lungs than it usually did. Tatsu struggled to find his breath and right himself in the forest that had suddenly flipped upside down, leaving him with nothing to hold on to.