The maid gasped when she brought my supper, but the king looked at her with haughty dismissal, and she bowed and stuttered and left the room with great haste. She obviously told the rest of the servants, because no one scolded me or tried to wash our words away.
He spent the day with me, and when he left, I wandered from one word to the next, touching them, saying them in my mind. As I did, I was unable to stop the moisture that rose in my eyes and slipped down my cheeks. It was the happiest day of my life.
That night, just like before, the words filled my dream and spun in the air above my head. In my dream I could speak, my tongue was not tied, and my voice was not trapped in my throat. The words were mine to command and control, and I walked through King Tiras’s castle unlocking doors and moving furniture, until I found myself back on my balcony with a longing to fly.
I plucked the word fly from my lips and pressed it to my breast, commanding myself to soar like the poppet from my most terrible memory, and as I rose in the sky, the Prince of Poppets, the poppet that caused my mother’s death, appeared, beckoning to me. As we flew, the poppet became an enormous eagle with a white head and huge black wings, and I could not keep up with him, so I laid across his back, his feathers soft beneath me, my arms locked around his neck, and we flew until the light began to seep over the Jeruvian hills. Then he was gone, and I was falling and flailing, unable to remember the words to save myself.
The next day, Greta delivered a stack of books—all of them a good deal smaller and simpler than The Art of War—sneering that they were from the king, and I began to devour words, decoding them, uncovering them, losing all sense of time for the pursuit of language. I wanted to speak, if only by the written word, and I was insatiable. I was not a typical student. I was voracious. Determined.
When darkness fell, I burned a dozen candles to continue my studies, falling asleep among piles of books and waking to do it all again. The words I couldn’t decipher, I copied in never-ending lists that the king, upon his return, read and explained.
There were combinations of letters that made little sense and words that contradicted the things I thought I understood, but I committed each word to memory, and over the space of several weeks, my thoughts started to appear in written sentences behind my eyes, fully formed and complete. They were simple sentences with holes and probable misspellings, but sentences, and one night, half delirious, my eyes aching, I begged a candle to move closer. Come here, candle. The sentence trembled in the air like the text from a page.
And the candle obeyed.
Horrified, I gasped and leapt from my chair, making the candle I’d commanded topple over on my open book. The flame of the candle licked the page like a cat over spilled milk, and the book was almost instantly engulfed in fire.
One dusty book triggered the destruction of the next. The fire spread with an audible whoosh, enveloping the table completely. I ran for my wash basin and upended it over the blaze. It wasn’t enough. The flames jumped to the chairs, and I tried to smother them with the heavy, braided rug from my floor. The rug proved ineffectual, or maybe it was my fear, but I retreated as the flames rose to the giant beams above my head. Smoke billowed around me, and I ran for the door, pounding desperately for someone to hear. The breeze from the open balcony doors pulled the flames toward the drapes, and they too were instantly engulfed, barring my only exit from the room. I tried to find the words to extinguish the flames, but I was terrified. Terror was not conducive to conjuring perfectly formed sentences.
I sunk to the cold, stone floor, trying to breathe, desperate to think.
Out, fire. Out.
I saw the words rise, and the fire in my chamber whooshed through the balcony doors, gone but not doused. That wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind. I ran to the balcony doors, following the fiery banshee I’d created. It had fled my room and was climbing the tower wall like a living thing. The fire had simply spread outward. I heard shouting and realized someone had spotted the flame.
How did you spell disappear? I searched my memory, choking on the smoke still filling the room.
Die, fire. Disappear. This fire is no longer here, I commanded fiercely, the words bold and blue, cold and clear. I watched them fall on the flames, and the fire sputtered immediately.
I repeated the rhyme, more confident now. The words shot from my mind, and the flames disappeared completely. A pale ribbon of smoke rose from the blackened wall, the clinging soot the only remnant of the blaze.
I tried to instruct the soot to disappear too, but it stubbornly remained, proving that I could put out the fire, but I couldn’t yet save myself from the natural consequences of my mistakes.
The door to my room slammed open, and I found myself face to face with a livid Tiras, who waved at the smoke and scooped me into his arms.
“Are you trying to kill yourself? Or are you trying to create a diversion for escape? It’s a long way down, even for a lark.”
The room suddenly filled with scurrying servants, and I was rushed from the smoky room, disheveled and terrified, clinging to the king who promptly dumped me in another chamber—right next to his own—and barked at me that burning alive was a terrible way to die.
I curled my hands around the silk-covered arms of the chair I’d been tossed into and seethed at his manhandling.
You are an ass! I thought to myself, the words ass and Tiras becoming almost one in my head.
“You think I’m an ass?” he asked, outrage making him hoarse.
My head shot up and our eyes clung.
You look like a god but you act like an ogre.
“An ogre?” His voice was beyond incredulous. “A god?”