“I wouldn’t.” His palms rested on her shoulders a brief moment before Victor rounded the chair to lean against the desk in front of her, arms folded. “I wouldn’t give you to him.”
“You’re his loyal servant,” she snapped. “You’re just like him, like all of them, looking for power, looking to use me—”
“I am not like him!” Victor slammed his open palm on the desk and leaned forward. “I have watched that man use sorcerers as tools. I have seen him degrade our people for the power that flows through them. I have endured him taking my students and teachers to be nothing more than cutthroats! I have watched him take a library girl and turn her into a “wretch of death” for no other reason than it suited him best.”
For being a Waterrunner, fire was alive in Victor’s usually icy eyes.
“I have balanced protecting my Tower, my sorcerer kin, against his aims and not lost my head in the process. For if I die, there would be no shield for people like us.” Victor sighed, his shoulders slumping.
The minister knelt before her and rested a palm on her knee. She stiffened at the contact; it was part fatherly and part not—combined, it felt entirely wrong. “My dear girl, do you really think I’d let him have you again?”
“So what do you want?” Vhalla asked finally. “What are you risking everything for?”
“I want to protect people like us.” Victor met her eyes. “I want to fight for a world where sorcerers aren’t feared, but revered by Commons for our powers. Where no one would think to use us. Where a sorcerer would never have to hide.”
Vhalla searched his face for a trace of insincerity. Finding none, she asked, “What do you want with the axe?”
“I want to return it to the caverns and see that no one will be able to think of using it again.” Victor’s face was overcome by an intense severity. “Do you trust me on this?”
She ran her fingers over the saddlebag, searching for the buckle on the front, searching her heart for the answer. Did she trust him? If anything, out of everyone, Victor was the one person who’d only helped her at every turn. He healed her after her fall. He stood up for her in her trial. He trusted her with knowledge of the axe, with the task of bringing it to him safely and keeping it from the Emperor or the Knights of Jadar.
Vhalla unlatched the saddlebag as her answer. Victor stared intently as Vhalla produced the legendary crystal axe, Achel.
“ACHEL,” VICTOR BREATHED. “It’s here.”
Vhalla studied the minister’s face as the soft and unnatural glow of the crystal lit his brow. The man shifted his eyes to catch hers, and Vhalla did nothing to hide her study of his person. Victor’s lips curled into a conspiratorial smile.
“I want to know about the caverns.” Her research had only yielded splotchy patches of color. She wanted to paint the picture. She wanted to finally see what everyone else had been looking at all along.
“I bet you do.” Victor peeled himself away from her. He felt twice as tall, suddenly, as he loomed over her. “But first I need to know, what do you want?”
“What do I want?” she repeated, cautiously.
“I told you my dream. I told you the world I’m prepared to fight for. What do you want?”
Rather than speaking the first thing that came into her mind, Vhalla remained silent, introspective. She mulled over the question, letting it settle across her mind and stretch into the cracks where she’d pushed her hopes and dreams into—things that had been too dangerous for her to engage in while she had been property of the Empire.
“I want . . . I want a future again. I want peace. I want freedom. I want to be free of people trying to use me for my magic.”
“So we want the same thing.” Victor beamed. “I’m relieved to know we’re aligned in this.”
“What are we aligned in, exactly?” Vhalla settled back in her chair, watching as Victor rounded his desk to a workbench in the far corner.
“The world we want to strive for—a world where sorcerers aren’t used as tools, a time and place where we are revered and left to our own, rightful sovereignty.” Victor paused his motions. “Tea?”
“Sure,” Vhalla agreed cautiously. “How do you think we can get to your future? And what part does the axe play in it?”
“We will use it to make sure no one will be able to access the Crystal Caverns ever again.” Victor placed a steaming cup of tea on the desk before her.
“How?” Vhalla took the item in question from the saddlebag, placing it on the desk next to the steaming tea she sipped gingerly.
“How much do you already know about the Crystal Caverns?” Victor sat.
“Not nearly enough. The literature is disappointingly sparse.” Vhalla pondered all the books she’d managed to read about the caverns while working at Gianna’s. “I know the Knights of Jadar needed the axe—or, at least, they thought they did—to tap into the power of the caverns. I know they needed the axe even more than a Windwalker . . .” A thought suddenly hit her. “Wait, Victor. Am I truly the first Windwalker?”
The minister set his own cup of tea down thoughtfully. “The first to be known again. The first to return to the world as far as the general populous is concerned.”
“But, not the first?”
Victor shook his head, and Vhalla stared, baffled. She’d been revered, hated, desired, for being the first Windwalker. But there were more? She spoke as if Victor could read her suddenly tumultuous thoughts, “Why me?”
“Because you were in the right place at the right time.” Victor frowned slightly. “Or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how you look at it.”
“The East outlawed all magic following the Burning Times to avoid another genocide. It pushed the Windwalkers into hiding.” Victor stood and ran his fingers along the spines of books lined up on a shelf behind his desk. “You see, there were never that many Windwalkers to begin with, not when compared to the other affinities. That just seems to be nature. But Windwalkers disappearing? That was the greatest act of self-preservation the world has ever known.”
Victor placed a thin ledger on the desk between them. There were only a few pieces of parchment inside, some names and dates scribbled on a few lines. Victor flipped through them, the dates increasing until they stopped at the most recent date—and her name.
“It’s a record of Windwalkers,” she said softly.
“An incomplete one, for sure.” He sat down once more.
“You told me I was the first . . .” Vhalla honestly felt relieved to know she wasn’t. Maybe she could return East and find others like her.
“Everyone who wasn’t actively hunting Windwalkers would believe such. Aldrik believed it, and I saw no reason to correct him or tell you differently.” Victor pressed his fingertips together thoughtfully. “Whatever happened with you, I felt my actions would continue to protect your kin by not sending the world into another Windwalker-hunt.”
“He doesn’t know this exists?” Vhalla gaped at the notion of coming across some knowledge the prince didn’t already possess.
“No, there are only three people who know this exists.” Victor counted on his fingers. “Myself, the Emperor, and Egmun.”
“Egmun,” she seethed instantly. “Why isn’t he the Minister of Sorcery any longer?”
“There was an accident.” Victor scowled. “The man was mad, insatiable for knowledge, and lusted for something beyond his reach.”
“You mean crystals.” It always came back to crystals. It seemed the world’s every orchestration had the same, underlying harmony. Notes that one’s ears had to be trained to pick up, but once one heard them, it was a cacophony of sound that drummed to a singular beat, pulsing the world forward.