Rebecca Ross - The Queen’s Rising

“You are worried?”

My eyes snapped back up to Francis’s face. “Of course I’m worried.”

“You shouldn’t be. I think you will do splendidly.” For a change, he wasn’t teasing me. I heard the honesty in his voice, bright and sweet. I wanted to believe as he did, that in eight days, when my seventeenth summer marked my body, I would passion. I would be chosen.

“I don’t think Master Cartier—”

“Who cares what your master thinks?” Francis interrupted with a nonchalant shrug. “You should only care about what you think.”

I frowned as I pondered that, imagining how Master Cartier would respond to such a statement.

I had known Cartier for seven years. I had known Francis for seven months.

We had met last November; I had been sitting before the open window, waiting for Cartier to arrive for my afternoon lesson, when Francis passed by on the gravel path. I knew who he was, as did all of my arden-sisters; we often saw him delivering and receiving the mail to and from Magnalia House. But it was that first personal encounter when he asked if I would give a secret letter to Sibylle. Which I had, and so I had become entangled in their letter exchanges.

“I care about what Master Cartier thinks, because he is the one to claim me impassioned,” I argued.

“Saints, Brienna,” Francis replied as a butterfly flirted with his broad shoulder. “ You should be the one to claim yourself impassioned, don’t you think?”

That gave me a reason to pause. And Francis took advantage of it.

“By the way, I know the patrons the Dowager has invited to the solstice.”

“What! How?”

But of course I knew how. He had delivered all the letters, seen the names and addresses. I narrowed my eyes at him just as his dimples crested his cheeks. Again, that smile. I could see perfectly well why Sibylle fancied him, but he was far too playful for me.

“Oh, just give me your blasted letters,” I cried, reaching out to pluck them from his fingers.

He evaded me, expecting such a response.

“Don’t you care to know who the patrons are?” he prodded. “For one of them is to be yours in eight days …”

I stared at him, but I saw beyond his boyish face and tall gangly frame. The garden was dry, yearning for rain, trembling in a slight breeze. “Just give me the letters.”

“But if this is to be my last one to Sibylle, I need to rewrite some things.”

“By Saint LeGrand, Francis, I do not have time for your games.”

“Just grant me one more letter,” he pleaded. “I don’t know where Sibylle will be in a week’s time.”

I should have felt sympathy for him—oh, the heartache of loving a passion when you are not one. But I should have remained firm in my decision too. Let him mail her a letter, as he should have been doing all this time. Eventually I sighed and agreed, mostly because I wanted my grandfather’s letter.

Francis finally relinquished the envelopes to me. The one from Grandpapa went straight to my pocket, but Francis’s remained in my fingers.

“Why did you write in Dairine?” I asked, noting his sprawling script of address. He had written in the language of Maevana, the queen’s realm of the north. To Sibylle, my sun and my moon, my life and my light. I almost burst into laughter, but caught it just in time.

“Don’t read it!” he exclaimed, a blush mottling his already sunburned cheeks.

“It’s on the face of the envelope, you fool. Of course I’m going to read it.”

“Brienna …”

He reached toward me and I relished the chance to finally taunt him when I heard the library door open. I knew it was Cartier without having to look. For three years, I had spent nearly every day with him, and my soul had grown accustomed to how his presence quietly commanded a room.

Shoving Francis’s letter into my pocket with Grandpapa’s, I widened my eyes at him and began to close the window. He understood a moment too late; I caught his fingers on the sill. I clearly heard his yelp of pain, but I hoped the hasty shutting of the window concealed it from Cartier.

“Master Cartier,” I greeted, breathless, and turned on my heel.

He was not looking at me. I watched as he set his leather satchel in a chair and pulled several volumes from it, laying the lesson books on the table.

“No open window today?” he asked. Still, he had not met my gaze. It might have been in my best interest, for I felt the way my face warmed, and it was not from the sunlight.

“The bumblebees are pesky today,” I said, discreetly glancing over my shoulder to watch Francis hurry down the gravel path to the stables. I knew Magnalia’s rules; I knew that we were not to create romantic entanglements while we were ardens. Or, more realistically, be caught doing such. I was foolish to transport Sibylle’s and Francis’s letters.

I looked forward to find Cartier was watching me.

“How are your Valenian Houses coming?” He motioned for me to come to the table.

“Very well, Master,” I said, taking my usual seat.

“Let us begin by reciting the lineage of the House of Renaud, following the firstborn son,” Cartier requested, sitting in the chair across from mine.

“The House of Renaud?” Saint’s mercy, of course he would request the expansive royal lineage. The one I struggled to remember.

“It is the lineage of our king,” he reminded with that unflinching gaze of his. I had seen that look of his many times. And so had my arden-sisters, who all complained about Cartier behind closed doors. He was the most handsome of Magnalia’s arials, the instructor of knowledge, but he was also the strictest. My arden-sister Oriana claimed that a rock dwelled in his chest. And she had drawn a caricature of him, depicting him as a man emerging from stone.

“Brienna.” My name rolled off his tongue as his fingers snapped impatiently.

“Forgive me, Master.” I tried to summon the beginning of the royal line, but all I could think of was my grandfather’s letter, waiting in my pocket. What had taken him so long to write?

“You understand that knowledge is the most demanding of the passions,” Cartier spoke when my silence had extended far too long.

I met his gaze and wondered if he was trying to tactfully imply that I did not have the fortitude for this. Some mornings, I thought the same myself.

My first year at Magnalia, I had studied the passion of art. And since I had no artistic inclinations, the next year I squandered in music. But my singing was beyond redeeming and my fingers made instruments sound like caterwauling felines. My third year I had attempted dramatics until I discovered my stage fright could not be overcome. So my fourth year was given to wit, a very fretful year that I tried not to remember. Then, when I was fourteen, I had come to stand before Cartier and asked him to accept me as his arden, to make me into a mistress of knowledge in the three years I had remaining at Magnalia.

Yet I knew—and I suspected the other arials who instructed me knew this as well—that I was here because of something my grandfather had said those seven years ago. I was not here because I deserved it; I was not here because I was brimming with talent and capacity as were the other five ardens, who I loved as my true sisters. But perhaps that made me want it even more, to prove that passion was not just inherently gifted as some people believed, but that passion could be earned by anyone, commoner or noble, even if they did not have intrinsic skill.

“Maybe I should go back to our first lesson,” Cartier said, breaking my reverie. “What is passion, Brienna?”

The passion catechism. It echoed in my thoughts, one of the first passages I had ever memorized, the one all the ardens knew by heart.