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Image description: a raven in flight, its tail and wing feathers dissolving into black smoke, lit from behind by a large, yellow-tinted full moon. Image from Pixabay. |
This passage comes from the very beginning of the book, featuring Arkady (as usual) and Thyld. We've seen some of Arkady's relationship with his mother and the beginning of his search for transformation magic... Now it's time for these two aspects of his identity to come into direct conflict.
Enjoy!
Shapeshifter
The
hardest part of being a shapeshifter was letting go of the form you took.
Trading weight with the universe was a complex and delicate process—it took time to shed
antlers and fur, or to molt feathers and draw the wing bones back into the ridges
of your spine. And all that time you had to keep your mind clear, your thoughts
focused on returning to your first form, the body you were born in. You had to
come back to your first form every so often to renew your magic or risk burning
yourself out. That was the price of a shapeshifter’s freedom—you had to learn to be as comfortable in your own
form as you were in others, and to recognize when the necessity of preserving
your freedom was worth the pain of relinquishing it.
Arkady hated it. He had
spent most of his life thinking his body was a prison. It had taken him years
to realize that it wasn’t his body imprisoning
him, but other people—he had the right to be himself, no matter what the world
thought he ought to be. And shapeshifting was a part of who he was, and he was
proud of it. It was unfair to ask him to give that up, even for a little while,
just so the universe could balance the amount of matter it contained.
He closed his eyes. You are Arkady fe Normonne, he told
himself. You are a man. You are a mage.
You are a prince.
Bitter thoughts flooded his
mind—no, I’m not, because Mother can’t even
acknowledge me or use my real name in front of anyone else, and she still doesn’t
really know me, she still wants me to be her perfect
princess and inherit the throne and lie to the world about who I am every day
of my life just so I can be king like her because she thinks I’m really just a girl—
I
am not a girl, he insisted. And anyone who says otherwise isn’t worth a damn.
With a sigh, he shifted
back into his first form. His body still looked wrong to him, though not as
much as it had in the past. He had cropped his dark hair short, and with a
combination of binding and loose clothing his chest was noticeably flatter. The
tea that he made from the ginseng plants he grew in pots by his window helped
stop his monthly bleeding and deepened his voice a little. His face remained
more or less the same—dark eyes, folded at the tips, that he’d inherited from his father; pale skin and a straight nose that
came from his mother. Supposedly King Mathylde fa Normonne of Kevarya had
ancestry that traced back to the Khasakan horsemen and hunters of the ancient
steppe, but Arkady’s blonde, gray-eyed mother looked far from it. Not that it
mattered anyway. She was the king, the first woman to claim the previously
masculine title for her own, and Arkady was her heir.
He had almost let himself
forget that. He almost thought he could run off into the wilderness and no one
would be able to find him, save for the few servants who provided for his needs
and kept his woodland cottage from being discovered or attacked. Here in the
Mountains of Old, all magic was heightened—Arkady had wondered if the energy of
the mountains themselves helped to shield him from the outside world while he
learned to shapeshift. But in the back of his mind, he always knew that the
solitude he had known for the past year and a half wasn’t going to last much longer.
And now someone from court
was coming for him. He had seen the carriage coming up the road as he flew
overhead in raven’s form, barely half an hour ago. Now all
he could do was wait for the knock on the door.
There it was. Bold at
first, then hesitant the second time. He briefly considered shifting into
someone else and telling whoever had come for him that this was the wrong
cottage. The servants might give him away, but it would at least give him a
little more time—
“Arkady?”
The rush of joy at hearing
his true name was short-lived. He knew that voice. Oh, no. Please, dear Ancestors, no.
Dazed, Arkady walked toward
the door and opened it. There, in the middle of the forest on the side of a
mountain nearly two hundred miles from the City of the Crown, stood his mother.
She wore a plain woad-blue dress—plain by royal standards, anyway—embroidered
with white thread that matched the thick, fur-trimmed cloak wrapped around her
to protect against the cold wind. Her posture was rigid, as always, even though
she had complained to Arkady many times that her back ached constantly. She was
never one to show vulnerability, in appearance or in action.
Arkady forced himself to
meet her eyes and spoke first. “Why are you here?”
His mother furrowed her
brow in clear disapproval of his brusqueness. “Hello,
Arkady.” She paused slightly before saying his name, unused to the feel of it
on her tongue. “May I come in?”
He stepped aside to let her
through the doorway, then pulled up a birch-wood chair and gestured for her to
sit. She did so, and he pulled up another chair for himself, tucking one leg up
to rest upright on the seat. His mother winced for a fraction of a second
before returning to her neutral expression.
“You never did like sitting in chairs properly,” she said.
I
don’t
like doing anything properly, Mother, he thought
instinctively, and almost said it aloud before stopping himself. “Why are you here?” he repeated instead. Might
as well get right to it.
“Arkady,” she said again.
“Mother.”
Did she think she would be
forgiven for simply saying his name over and over again?
His mother closed her eyes
and let out a deep breath. “One of the mages at
court—a seer—had a vision.”
Arkady raised an eyebrow. “What does that have to do with me?”
“The vision was of you,” she said. “You spoke to the seer. You said… You said that I
was going to die before spring comes.”
Arkady’s muscles seized up all at once. Suddenly, it took all his
effort just to breathe, just to keep looking at his mother’s face as he processed
what she said. Mother was going to die. She was only fifty-two—if
she lived until Silent Moon, maybe she would live to fifty-three. People didn’t die of natural causes at fifty-three, especially not kings
with magical healers at their disposal and all the luxuries royalty could
afford. Which meant a plague was coming, or a war, or a direct attempt on her
life. She would die, and none of the healers would even try anything because it was foretold. And he would have to be the
one to deliver the news.
He would have to be king
after her.
He had known this ever
since he was a child, if only in the abstract. It had been an inevitability,
almost like a prophecy of its own. After his mother died, Arkady would be king.
But he had always thought it would be later, when he had come into his own as a
shapeshifter and everyone saw him as the man he truly was. As of now, he was
twenty, barely an adult. Aside from his mother, his uncle, and his archery
tutor Sebastian, no one at court knew his identity. His family had done a damn
good job hiding it from the world.
And Arkady hated to admit
it, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to stop hiding.
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