Elowyn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Elowyn wanted a seat on the council of elders, and tonight she meant to steal the proof that would earn it. For centuries that hidden council had steered her people with secret magic. No one outside it knew their names. Elowyn knew one. She had traced his spells to a quiet stone room beneath the white spires of her family's cascade house, and she had been digging ever since. She gripped her vine-wrapped staff and pressed her palm to the cold door. The crystal atop her staff flared green. The door opened. The elder was already waiting. He sat in a plain chair, silver-haired, hands folded, watching her with pale eyes. She knew him only by reputation: a recluse who had not shown his face in public for forty years. He did not look surprised. "You noticed me," Elowyn said. "Weeks ago." His voice was dry and calm. "I let you keep looking. I wanted to see how far a girl would go before she understood the risk." He raised one hand. The vines on her staff curled tight, choking the light from her crystal. "People who learn our names do not keep them long." Her staff went dark. Her charm would not save her now, and she knew it. So she did the only thing left. She stopped lying. "Then let me earn a name," she said. "I didn't come to expose you. I came to join you." She pulled a folded parchment from her cloak and held it out. "Your spellwork is slipping. Three of your wards failed last season. I mapped every crack. I can fix them. The council needs new blood, and you know it." The elder took the parchment. He read. His jaw tightened. Her notes were correct, and his silence proved it. "Who helped you draw these?" he asked. "No one." The lie came easy, because the truth would cost two lives. He studied her a long moment. Then he released the vines. White blossoms sprang back open along her staff. "You will come before the full council in seven days," he said. "If they do not believe you useful, they will not let you walk out. Do you understand what you are asking for?" "Yes." She did not understand all of it. She said yes anyway. Elowyn climbed back into the night air, heart pounding. She had survived. She had won her hearing. But her maps were only half-finished, and seven days was not enough time to complete them alone. She needed the two cleverest scholars she knew. She needed Theron's runecraft and Aldric's ancient languages. And to get their help, she would have to tell them exactly whose names she had been chasing, and exactly how easily all three of them could die for it.