Path of the King - Chapter 6 (Patreon)

“His circuits are defective.”

The room was so silent you could have heard a pin drop onto the thick, impossibly soft carpet that covered the floor.

My mother’s fingers dug into my shoulder hard enough to bruise, her perfectly manicured nails leaving four neat red gouges in my skin, blood welling up to stain the pristine white of my linen shirt. 

“What did you say?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper and cold enough to send shivers racing down my spine.

The spirit healer—a highly skilled and very expensive expert hired from the Council of Sands—looked up from where he had begun to pack away his mystic codes. “The boy’s magic circuits are defective. They're not technically inert, but I doubt he’ll ever be able to do anything with them. There’s a mismatch between his spirit and body and it caused them to form incorrectly.” He shrugged and turned back to his tools. “Nothing to be done about it. He got off lucky. I’ve heard of magi utterly crippled by such malformities”

“Nothing to be done about it?” my mother echoed, her voice the same dangerous tone as when I made a particularly severe mistake during my lessons. “He got off lucky?”

The healer didn’t even seem to notice. “That’s what I said. You’d need something a lot stronger than just magecraft to fix it. The Einzbern could have probably done it back in the day, and I guess you could try to track down Lady Aisha, but other than that you’re probably out of luck. Unless one of my colleagues is really holding out on me, I can’t name a single healer I’d trust to work on him.”

He sighed heavily, his face a carefully sculpted mask of remorse and disappointment, and folded his hands on top of his bag. This was a man well-used to handing out bad news, one who had grown numb to it. He got paid either way. “It happens sometimes. Usually a bad interaction between different bloodlines––”

“He is as pure as any magus can claim to be,” my father interjected harshly. “To suggest otherwise is an insult to both me and my lady wife!”

The healer raised his hands in front of him defensively. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Sometimes it just all comes down to bad luck.” I felt his eyes flick towards me and then he sighed heavily. His voice was a lot more honest when he said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do anything for him. He seems like a good kid.” 

My parents shared a long, meaningful look, but I was far too out of it to pay them much attention. My life crumbled around me, the pain in my shoulder falling away as I struggled to come to terms with the healer’s words. 

My magic circuits were defective. Malformed. I would never be able to use magecraft, never be able to amount to anything. I doubted a normal child my age would have been cognizant enough to know what was going on, but I was far from a normal child. Normal children didn’t remember their past lives after all, didn’t have memories about worlds eerily similar to the one in which I found myself now. 

But what was the point of it all now? Reborn in a world of gods and magic to a family of magi, but doomed to mediocrity and mundanity by a quirk of fate, a bad roll on some cosmic die. 

I swallowed back a sob, a half-remembered brunette in formal black and white clothing seated in a wheelchair rising up to the forefront of my mind. What had been her name? Flora? Fiona? No, no, that wasn’t it. Something about the world tree? I couldn’t fully remember. I’d only ever watched snippets of that show. 

Like the healer said, at least I wasn’t a cripple. That was something, right? Mom and Dad would fix things. They would. We had money, servants, connections! Nearly two-thousand years of magical excellence! The healer was wrong. He had to be wrong. 

I would happily trade my arms and legs for a chance to do magic. Real magic. 

“Mom?” I said softly, hating how pathetic my childish, trembling voice sounded. 

Her grip tightened further until my bones creaked in protest, but I welcomed the pain. It grounded me in the moment, and drew my attention away from the doom spiral threatening to consume my mind. 

“Don’t you worry, my little king. We’ll figure it out. We’ll fix this.”

Lie, lie, lie, my mind supplied. I’d been playing the lying game with my Mom and tutors for years already. Mom was a good liar, but she was frazzled right now, and I knew all of her tells. 

I told my treacherous mind to shut up. 

She turned me around and crouched down until her eyes were on the same level as my own. “My darling boy, your father and I need to speak with the healer. Privately. Run along now.”

The sudden stiffness in the healer’s shoulders almost made a tiny, vengeful part of myself smile. Sucked to be him. I easily recognized the tone of my mother’s voice, and it seemed that this time he did too. That same tone of voice she used when she caught dad with one of his maids or attendants who wasn’t his Hephaestion. The ones I rarely ever saw again. 

I wondered if I’d ever see this particular healer again. Probably not. The real question was if anyone else ever would. 

Had this been my old life, I doubted I would have been able to keep a tremor out of my voice. But poor enunciation could mean death for a spellcaster and was unbecoming of the heir to a family as old and noble as my own. “Okay.” 

My mom smiled and leaned in, placing a small kiss on my forehead and briefly wrapping her arms around my narrow shoulders. Her lips were clammy, and the hug felt forced in a way it never had before. Mom rarely hugged me, but whenever she did it was because I’d done something well and I could feel her approval in her touch. There was none of that today. 

She let go of me and stood up. I bowed my head in farewell, turned tail, and fled. 

Anet found me several hours later curled up on my too-large bed, my face buried in a thoroughly soaked pillow and soundless sobs wracking my body. I didn’t hear her calling for me, nor the creak of my door opening, too lost in my own thoughts and fears, but I certainly felt it when she shoved her cold, bare toes under my side and jabbed the bruise on my shoulder with her finger.

“Keon?” Her voice was soft and quiet, quite unlike her usual exuberance.

“Go away,” I mumbled back, my hoarse voice all but lost in the pillow. My sobs hadn’t always been silent and my throat felt raw and inflamed. 

Anet ignored me. She poked my shoulder again, lower this time, and I winced. “You said we would go play in the fountain again today.”

“No I didn’t,” I said petulantly. I was supposed to be more mature than this, but it was hard to remember that sometimes. A child’s brain just wasn’t meant to hold an adult’s mind and that was never more apparent than when I was with Anet. 

Though I couldn’t see it, I could imagine Anet’s lips twisting into that expression that was half scowl, half childish pout, and one-hundred percent her. “Yes you did,” she insisted correctly. I really had said that. She wriggled her toes, burying them deeper into the gap between my side and my blanket, then grabbed my other side and tried to roll me onto my back.

I resisted vehemently, clinging onto the bedsheets with one hand and my pillow with the other. Anet had already started her family magic training and was stronger than any preteen girl had a right to be, but not strong enough to dislodge me with force alone. 

“I don’t want to,” I whined.

Anet didn’t let up. “You promised!” she insisted.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I tried to placate, “and I’ll ask Azi to make us brownies!”

That made her pause for a moment. Brownies were a rare treat for both of us, far too pedestrian a dessert to be served at our family’s tables. It had taken months of roundabout requests and corrections to get close to what I wanted before I managed to hunt down an American cookbook and learn the appropriate Arabic words. I’d been glad to recapture a taste of my old life, but for Anet it had been love at first taste. 

Unfortunately, Anet was not so easily deterred. “That’s a great idea. You can do that after we play in the fountain!” Then she redoubled her efforts, tugging so hard I was worried she’d rip my shirt. If her nails had been half as long and sharp as my mom’s, she would have torn it into ribbons by now, but my shirt and side were saved by her persistent nail-chewing habits. 

For a time it became a contest between my stubbornness and Anets. A contest I was certain that I would win. Then Anet decided to cheat like the dirty, no-good cheater she was. Her attack faltered for a moment, and then I felt her fingers brush against the hem of my shirt sleeve. 

My eyes widened. “Anet, nooooo!” I cried, but it was too late. 

In the face of this new strategy, my resistance crumbled in moments, but Anet was not content to just achieve victory. Her tickling did not pause until I lay breathless on my back, my pillow thrown halfway across the room and my arms clamped against my sides in a futile effort to save myself. 

“A-anet,” I panted, my heart pounding and blood rushing in my ears. “Mercy. Mercy. Please.”

“You’ll go to the fountain with me?”

I nodded, taking deep, heaving breaths as my body fought for oxygen. 

Thankfully, that was good enough for her. Anet sat up. Despite her cowardly exploitation of my weaknesses, she hadn’t gotten away from me unscathed. Her face was red and beaded with sweat, her hair was a tangled mess, and her pink, blue, and white flowery dress was badly rumpled. 

For a moment she looked like a conquering queen standing over the bodies of her fallen foes. Her eyes blazed with determination and there was a fierce smile on her face. Then she finally got a good look at me and the fires of victory were replaced by concern. 

That was one of the woes of training children for magus life from the moment they were old enough to crawl. They could get scarily perceptive sometimes. She took in the blood on my shoulder, the slowly darkening bruise just peeking out past the neckline of my loose shirt, my swollen red eyes and nose that had nothing to do with laughter, and the hopeless fear that even relentless tickling couldn’t wipe from my face. 

“What’s wrong?”

I probably wasn’t supposed to tell her. Our families were longtime allies, but there were limits to such things and alliances, especially ones not yet strengthened by ties of blood and marriage, could crumble in moments. 

Having an heir incapable of magic was a huge blow to the family name and reputation. No doubt my parents would want to carefully control how and when such a fact came out, if it was ever allowed to come out at all. I didn’t think it likely, but the idea that I might be quietly shuffled off to some far-away property, or, the deeply cynical part of me that remembered that my mom and dad were not just my parents but powerful magi, an unmarked grave, had crossed my mind more than once in the past few hours. 

But I was just a child. And Anet was Anet. 

I stared up at her for a long moment. “We spoke with a doctor today. A spiritual healer my parents hired. And…” my throat closed up, my lips unable to form the words.

“And?” Anet prompted.

I looked around nervously. We were alone in my bedroom, though that didn’t mean that we were actually not being observed. “You can’t tell anyone.”

“Okay.”

“No one. Not your mom, not your dad, not the servants, no one.”

Anet nodded emphatically. “Okay,” she agreed again.

I wondered what she’d think. Would she still want to be my friend if I told her I was…defective? “I’m…” I choked on the word I was going to say. I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m never going to be a magus.”

Anet said nothing. After a moment, I risked opening my eyes and found her staring down at me in confusion. “What?” she asked, sounding rather baffled. “But you love magic. You said you were going to be the greatest Hephaestius in history, the one who finally managed to reach the Root.” Confusion turned into indignation. “You can’t just give up on that because of something your doctor said!”

My laugh was as short and sharp as a child’s could be, nothing like the breathless giggles from when Anet had been tickling me just moments before. “I don’t have a choice.” I swallowed heavily, and my voice was very small as I finished. “I’m defective. The healer said my circuits didn’t form correctly, and I’m never going to be able to do magic.”

Anet frowned the way only a preteen girl could, her cheeks puffing up and her lower lip vibrating indignantly. “But that’s not fair! He’s a healer, he’s supposed to fix you!”

“He said there was nothing he could do. It would take a miracle to fix my circuits.” I’d recognized both of the names he’d thrown out, of course. Both from this life and my last. How could I have not? Every child was taught the names, appearances, and temperaments of the handful of living calamities known as Campione just in case they were unlucky enough to meet one, and the legacy of the Third True Magician had come up several times in my lessons. “Nothing less than True Magic or a divine Authority.”

“And you’re just going to let that stop you?”

Her words drew me up short. It was such a… childish thing to say. So very optimistic. The healer had said those things as a throwaway, not a real option to pursue. I had no doubts that that was what my parents had heard as well. They would probably try to look into other options, but this was not the first healer we’d met with. If he thought it was hopeless, it was safe to say he was probably right.

Was I going to just let that stop me? Was I just going to give up? Were my dreams really worth so little to me? 

I was quiet for long enough that Anet decided to poke me again, this time right in the cheek. “Keon?” 

I shook myself. It was too early to say anything for certain. Maybe mom wasn’t lying. My parents were powerful, experienced, and well-connected magi. Maybe they really would find a solution the healer had missed. 

But I still wrapped Anet’s words and tucked them away at the back of my mind. It wasn’t a plan yet. Not even really the idea of a plan. Just a tiny seed that had every chance of never sprouting into much of anything.

“Do you still want to go play in the fountain?” I asked abruptly.

Anet leapt to her feet, bouncing up and down on my bed several times beside. “Yes! Yes yes yes! Let’s go!” She grabbed my arm and tried to tug me to my feet, only to lose her footing as I sat up and come tumbling down on top of me. I tried to wriggle out from underneath her, but she grabbed my arms and we rolled together across the bed. When I tried to sit up again, Anet snatched a dry pillow and smacked me over the head with it. 

“Hey!” 

“That was for being stupid!” she declared with the sort of absolute certainty only a child (or an idiot) could manage. 

There was nothing I could really say to that, so I didn’t even try. Instead, I groped around behind me until my fingers closed around another pillow. Then I brought it around in a powerful swing that knocked Anet’s pillow out of her hands and caught her square in the face.

The room was utterly silent for a long moment. And then Anet grabbed another pillow.

We did eventually make it to the fountain. Eventually. 

On a completely unrelated note, I had a dozen brand new pillows on my bed when I returned to my room after dinner. And Anet started shoving loose feathers down my back whenever I annoyed her.