Promising Light (12 page)

“Don’t try to escape,” Vin said,
pointing at her. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have
to.”

She didn’t respond. How could she
try to escape without reins? With three shape changers around
her?

“Myra will do what she needs to,
just hold on with your legs. Lean forward if you have to.” He
nodded to the old carriage man, and Amina took off down the path.
Myra started after her in a soft trot at first, then picked up
speed. Grace leaned forward, holding onto her long neck as they
raced by the forest. She was soon alongside Amina and Vin, and they
rode on.

* * *

When they finally stopped, Grace’s
legs were aching. She leaned on Myra for balance, wiping sweat from
her brow. “How long have we been riding?” she asked Vin, who was
leading Amina over to a creek. It was so dark she could hardly see
the two of them as they walked farther from her.

“A couple hours,” Vin
said.

Grace followed the sounds of his
voice and the trickling of the creek. Myra walked behind her, and
the four of them drank from the water. “Is this safe to drink?”
Grace asked after she’d already had a dozen handfuls of
water.

“I hope so,” Vin said. She could
see the gleam of his teeth as he smiled. “It tastes fine to
me.”

Grace looked up at the stars,
holding back a yawn. They’d left the forest behind; the sky
stretched out over their heads, endlessly beautiful. “How much
longer?”

“Four or five hours until we can
rest.” Vin pulled a water skin out of his bag and filled it up.
“We’ll travel slower now. We probably lost anyone who may have been
following us.”

She looked back at the path, fading
into the darkness. “But if Dar’s helping them, won’t they have an
advantage?”

Vin stood up. “Dar’s helping the
prince?”

Grace’s legs ached with pain as she
got to her feet. Her back hurt, as well; she tried to stretch it,
moving her torso back and forth. “That’s what Lisbeth said. Do you
know Dar?”

“We all know each other,” Vin
said, stroking Amina’s mane. “He’s a distant cousin of
mine.”

“Did you know Sierra and Sashe?”
Grace thought of the curious woman at the circus, wondering what
happened to her two years ago.

“Yes. Did Dar tell you about
them?”

“Not much. Only that people had
been killed, and Sierra left after that.”

“I haven’t seen her since then.”
Vin glanced up at the stars. “We should get going.”

Grace raised her eyebrows as she
approached Myra. “But what happened?”

“Let’s talk about it later. We
should save our energy.”

She rolled her eyes, mounting Myra.
Why was it so hard for people to give her straight
answers?

As the hours passed, the stars
vanished, and the sky slowly lightened from inky black to reddish
blue. The sun was just rising when they stopped. She could tell
they were now in the flatlands, but Grace was too tired to ask
where they were in relation to other cities she knew. Vin found a
large oak tree off the path by a few hundred feet, and they curled
up by the trunk with their blankets. Amina and Myra stood by,
eating grass.

Grace watched them, yawning.
“They’re just like horses.”

“It’s something, isn’t it?” Vin
asked.

“How distantly are you and Amina
related?” A moment too late, she wondered if it may have been a
rude question.

“Very distant,” Vin said. She
could hear the smile in his voice. “She’s an Avialie from Kia. We
may have shared a great-great-great cousin or
something.”

Grace let out a large yawn, then
closed her eyes. “How did you meet?”

“I traveled to Kia a couple years
ago. I wanted to explore the world. I met Amina at her family’s
fabric shop. I bought all kinds of things I didn’t need because I
wanted to please her.”

The last thing she heard before she
fell asleep was his soft chuckle.

When she woke up, the sun was high
in the sky. The shade of the tree had moved, leaving Grace in the
sun. She slowly sat up, her body stiff and sore. She rubbed her
eyes and glanced around.

Vin was sorting through his bag.
“Hungry?”

“A little bit,” Grace
said.

He pulled some fruit and bread out
of his bag, then passed her a water skin. “We’ll get there around
nightfall if we keep up a good pace.”

“To the manor in
Belisha?”

“Yes. You’ll meet the rest of the
elders.” Vin chewed on some dried meat. “You’ll get a much better
welcome there.”

“What do you mean?”

Vin glanced over at Amina, still in
her horse form. “You’re what we’ve been waiting for,
Grace.”

Grace didn’t respond at first as
she ate some berries. “So, you think I’ll break the curse just
because Lisbeth says so?”

Vin nodded, his eyes still on
Amina.

“I don’t know anything about
prophecy. Does it happen often? Has Lisbeth had visions before?”
She wished she’d have thought to ask earlier.

He tore off another piece of his
dried meat. “A few… she predicted the war among the Cosa family and
the Zinna family.”

Grace stared at him, having never
heard of these families except for the mention Amina made the
previous night. “Was it a big war? I’ve never heard of
it.”

“They’re two other magical
families. A bad political move a couple years ago soured things
between them, and a war broke out a year ago. Lisbeth predicted
that.”

Grace fell silent. She looked out
at the stretching fields around them. Across the path, the field
was growing wheat, the tall stalks waving in the soft breeze.
Behind them, there was only grass and wildflowers. She wanted to
ask questions about the other families, what sort of magic they
could do, how many there were, if they might die out because of the
war, but she forced herself to think about Lisbeth. One vision had
been correct.

“What about others?” she
asked.

“I don’t think I know of any.” Vin
brushed his hands on his pants and began to pack up. “We should get
going.”

Grace let out a frustrated sigh and
finished her bread. As they were saddling the horses, Grace told
Vin, “I’m sorry I fell asleep on you this morning.”

Vin smiled. “You were pretty
tired.”

“You’ll have to tell me more,” she
said, stroking Amina’s face. The horse form had similar eyes to the
human form of Amina. She wondered how long Amina could stay a
horse. Maybe Grace had met horses that were really humans. Grace
mounted Myra, and they set off. “How long can you stay in a
different form? How long could Amina stay a horse?”

“Technically, she could stay a
horse for as long as she wanted to,” Vin said. “But every day she
stays a horse, the more humanity she loses.” At Grace’s alarmed
face, he added, “It won’t start for at least a week. If she stayed
in that form for more than a week, she’d start to lose the function
of her human brain. And that’s where the will to change comes from.
If she stayed like this for… a month, she may not be able to change
back. She might not even remember she was human.”

“What about Caleb? He was a rope,
how long can he stay like that?”

“Well, inanimate objects are very
different. More than a day, and you start to lose the connections
to your brain. But trees and plants are like animals as long as
you’re connected to a life source, like the soil.”

“Fascinating,” Grace whispered.
“Lisbeth said that the purer your blood is, the stronger your
powers are.”

“Yes. Inanimate objects,
elements—”

“Elements?”

“Fire, water, air, earth, those
sorts of things.” Grace listened with her mouth open, trying to
imagine Dar changing into fire. Vin continued, “Those, and trees
and plants and such are harder to change into than animals. Certain
animals are easier than others, too, of course. Land animals are
generally the easiest, water animals and insects the hardest. And
humans are easy, a child can do that by age five,
usually.”

“I can’t believe it… so, anything
around us could be a shape changer?” Grace looked at the flowers,
the squirrels, the trees. She doubted she would ever see the world
the same way she had before.

“Supposedly. But shape changers
can almost always sense each other, and most magical folk can sense
other magic.”

Grace thought of the man at the
tavern, the one who knew about her and Dar at the masquerade ball
and in the greenhouse. Was there a shape changer at those places?
And if so, why couldn’t Dar sense him?

“But there’s also magic to mask
the aura,” Vin added, answering her unspoken question. “It’s
complicated, but the Cosa family could do it.”

A chill traveled up her
spine.

“We should pick up speed,” Vin
said. “We’re going to lose time if we talk the whole
way.”

They interspersed the ride with
galloping and trotting. They soon came to a fork, the left sign
saying Rahuda, the right Belisha, and they headed right. During
slower times, Vin finished his story about meeting Amina. He had
stayed in Kia for three months just for her, and he’d finally asked
her for a formal courtship. They got married six months later and
traveled back to Shyra. He told her about their cottage in Shyra,
the garden they had, and the chimney that occasionally clogged with
leaves and other things, filling their house up with
smoke.

“Why did you leave it?” Grace
asked.

Vin looked across at her. “We left
to help Adrian and Lisbeth with you.”

“Help them what with
me?”

“Help them take care of you, help
protect you, anything they needed. Anything you need.”

Grace chewed on her lip. “You put a
lot of faith in a woman who’s only made one correct
prophecy.”

“She’s made more… and really, we
have nothing else to hope in.”

“Wait, I thought you said you
didn’t know of any others,” she said, looking at him
sharply.

Vin shook his head, his gaze ahead
of them. “I don’t think I said that.”

She huffed in annoyance. “Yes, you
did. After we woke up.”

He cleared his throat, shrugging.
“Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. You can ask Lisbeth once we
reach Belisha.”

They had another small meal as the
sun began to set. They passed through an eerie forest and traveled
for another hour before they finally approached the manor. It was
an old stone building, at least three stories, and it looked hidden
inside the hill behind it, the mossy stone blending in with the
grass. Some of the rooms were lit, the windows glowing warmly in
the night. A stone wall surrounded the manor, and a gate closed
them off.

Amina and Myra changed back in
front of the gate, and Vin whistled three times. The gates opened
by themselves, and they walked through an intricate garden to the
front doors. Someone answered the doors for them; Grace recognized
the teenage girl from the camp.

“You made it through the forest
all right,” she said as they came in, relief in her
voice.

“Yes. Any trouble for
you?”

“No,” the girl said, closing the
doors behind them. They stood in a high-ceilinged room that was
warm with heat from the fireplace. Chairs and couches were placed
on the rich rugs. “Come, everyone’s waiting to eat
dinner.”

The corridors twisted into
confusing patterns. Most of them were lit with torches, but some
were dark except for the girl’s lantern. Each door they passed
looked different to Grace; some were made of wood, others stone,
some tall, others short, some with signs, others with paintings,
others bare. She felt as if they were still outside, breezes
without a visible source blowing through her hair, vines and ivy
woven in the stone walls, the fragrance of dirt surrounding them.
It seemed as if they were in caves under the hill instead of a
manor. Perhaps they were; they’d been walking for so long. Her body
yearned for rest; she never wanted to ride a horse
again.

Grace smelled the dining room
before she saw it. That spicy smell wafted through the air as they
neared two open doors. Warm firelight and soft chatting met them at
the doors. There were at least two dozen people; the group from the
camp seemed to have grown. A hush of silence fell as the guests saw
the new arrivals, and everyone moved to take his or her seats
around the immense table.

An old man stood at the head of the
table next to Lisbeth. He was tall with broad shoulders and a
paunch. His hair was dark gray, his face pockmarked. He beamed at
Grace, motioning to the seat at the head of the table. “And this
seat is for our guest of honor.”

Vin nudged her in the back when she
didn’t move. “Go on,” he murmured.

Grace walked to her appointed seat,
every eye on her as she moved. Her face heated up. She must have
looked a mess from riding all day; she didn’t even have a dress on.
Though most of these people looked like traveling gypsies, some of
them seemed to be from wealthier blood. She reached the head of the
table and nodded her head at Lisbeth and the tall man.