Prince Arno's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Prince Arno knew the names of every lord at Rivercourt. He did not know why the palace gardens had grown so quiet this morning. He wanted to rule Dathorne someday, but a king should understand his kingdom beyond its banquet halls. So when a small water-spirit darted across the path and tugged at his sleeve, Arno stopped walking. Princess Averine stopped beside him. She had arrived from the mountains of Absaroka only yesterday, and already Arno liked how she watched things instead of talking over them. Her silver-and-blue gown caught the sun as she crouched. "It wants us to follow," she said. The spirit was no bigger than a cat, its body clear as river water, its tail trailing faint ripples. Arno had seen such creatures all his life in the palace channels. He had never seen one so frightened. It circled their feet, then shot toward the garden's lower terrace. They followed it to an old stone channel at the garden's edge. Arno had passed it a hundred times without looking. Now he looked. The channel was dry. Cracked mud lined its bottom where water should have run. Along its banks, tall red-and-gold flowers drooped, their bell blossoms browning at the tips. Averine knelt and touched the mud. "This dried days ago," she said. "Not this morning." Arno pressed his palm to the stone. No damp. No trickle. He traced the channel with his eyes, following it up the slope until it vanished behind the palace wing. "The water feeds these flowers," he said. "And whatever lives in this channel." The spirit hovered above the dead center, its ripples gone still. "Something stopped it upstream," Averine said. "A blockage, or someone closed a gate." Arno thought of the palace stewards. They tracked grain and coin and guests. Not one of them had reported a dry channel. The problem had sat here for days, unseen, while the flowers wilted and the spirit grew desperate. This was exactly the kind of trouble a king was supposed to catch. He stood. "Then we find where it stopped." Averine rose too, brushing mud from her fingers. "You mean to walk it yourself? You could send a servant." "A servant would tell me what he thinks I want to hear." Arno watched the spirit drift toward the slope, waiting for him. "I want to see it with my own eyes." Averine studied him a moment. Then she nodded, and something in her face warmed. "Good. I'm coming." They left the gardens together, following the dry channel upstream. The spirit swam ahead through the empty air, leading them past the last terrace and toward the older part of the grounds. Behind them, the wilting flowers trembled in a dry wind. Ahead, the channel climbed into shadow, and neither of them yet knew what had choked it off.