The city of London was always changing.
Magic made it easy. Buildings rose and fell, as fickle as the season’s taste in fashion. Pleasure gardens became theatres, and theatres became arcades, and arcades became plazas, and so on, and so on.
Only two things ever seemed to hold their shape.
The first was the royal palace.
The second was the Sanctuary.
Kell had spent his entire youth between those two buildings. Raised in one, trained in the other, the second as solid and simple as the first was grand. In these stone halls, Tieren had taught Kell to control his power, to quiet his mind, and focus his magic when it was a torrent, spilling out with every burst of temper.
After—after the battle with Osaron, after the shadow king was bound, after Kell accepted that his bond to magic was broken—he had gone to see the Aven Essen.
“What am I now?” he’d asked, angry, and frightened, and in pain.
And Tieren had cupped his cheek and said, “You are alive. Isn’t that enough?”
Now Kell passed beneath an arch, and out into a walled courtyard, and felt the air go solid in his chest. The space had the stillness of a Grey London cemetery, the paths made of white marble, but in the place of tombstones were several dozen trees, spaced as evenly as pillars, each a different size, or age, or season.
Each one grown and tended by a priest, using only the balance of their power.
It seemed an easy enough feat, to grow a tree. But it was not—it required a mastery of all the elements. Aside from Antari, priests were the only magicians who could do that, but their talent lay not in the scope of that power, but in its restraint. A priest held no affinity for any one element, but an ability to wield them all in some small measure. They were the living embodiment of their mandate.
Priste ir essen. Essen ir priste.
Power in balance. Balance in power.
Such was the nature of magic, they said, that all scales must find their level. They could not move mountains or conjure rain. They could not burn ships to cinders or shatter walls with the force of their wind. Theirs was a gentle magic. The sea that eroded stone.
The tree was the embodiment of this restraint.
Too much power would kill it as surely as too little, and it must live within the bounds of the courtyard, without stealing more than its share of soil, or water, or sun.
When a priest died, so did their tree, not all at once, but slowly, left to wither without their care. And when it was dead, it was dragged out, and burned, and its ashes tilled into the dirt for the next priest, the next planting.
Tieren’s plot should have been empty now, but the tree remained, or what was left of it. A grey husk, leafless and dry, its roots lifting like gnarled fingers, slowly letting go of the ground beneath.
“I told them to wait,” said a voice. “I had a feeling you’d want to say goodbye.”
He turned, and saw Ezril standing in the archway. No, not standing, leaning, arms crossed and hip cocked to one side. Kell did not think he’d ever seen a priest lean before—when they were children, Rhy was convinced that he could balance a tea cup on Tieren’s head all day, and it would never spill.
Ezril padded down the steps, and he saw that beneath her white robes, she was barefoot. Her black hair hung loose, straight and sharp as glass from the widow’s peak to the ends, but it was her eyes he found most striking. Fringed in black lashes, her eyes were brown, and yet, somehow pale, like paint on a pane of glass shot through with light. Indeed, they even seemed to glow.
When Rhy had first met his new Aven Essen, he’d said, “What a waste.” She was radiant. Undeniably beautiful. But Kell’s first impression had been only that she wasn’t Tieren. He told himself that was the reason he did not like her.
Rhy said he was being unfair, and perhaps he was—after all, it was hardly Ezril’s fault that Tieren was gone. A man he’d known all his life, replaced by a woman young enough to be the priest’s granddaughter.
Perhaps Kell resented her for more than taking Tieren’s place. After all, she had been there for Rhy when he himself had not. Rhy said he would like Ezril, if he only spent time with her. His brother knew her better than he did. Perhaps he resented her for that as well.
“Aven Essen,” Kell said now, by way of greeting.
“Master Kell,” answered the priest. “Or is it Kay?” Those eyes glittered with mischief.
Kell stiffened. “Rhy has been telling tales, I see.”
She gave a careful shrug, a studied smile. “That coat of yours has many sides. So, I suspect, do you.”