Language of the Spirit

By Julie Reeser

No one says this at the Queen's burning, but the kingdom is running out of Royals who can hear the Goddess speak. As Prince Damian's blood-bound Hand, Cian's magic is his to command. With their faith tested and war threatening, Cian must do the one thing that breaks her heart – find her Prince a Royal bride. With nothing but a child's rhyme and her magic to guide her, Cian embarks on a journey of heartbreak and self-discovery. Every step toward peace takes Cian farther from her own desires. What she finds is a fairy tale, but not the happily ever after she expected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julie Reeser
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201164416

Book preview

Chapter One

The world was running out of Royalty. No one spoke this truth at the Queen’s burning, but everyone thought it. Cian suppressed the urge to smooth out a wrinkle in the Prince’s mourning jacket embroidered with the Emberson roses of his House. He rarely touched her anymore, and certainly not where they’d be seen. She laced her fingers together instead.

Mistress Ariane and her dour acolytes worked the flue and monitored the heat so Queen Lamaria’s ashes could be gathered for her memorial glass. Cian sat with Prince Damian and the Regents of Salis and Gasper in the front row of mourners. The final tier of Aubade’s triumvirate elite.

As the Prince’s Hand and the Goddess Sophia’s vessel, Cian rarely left Damian’s side. She’d been there for all the deaths, and there had been too many. Queen Lamaria’s glass would hang in good company, including her late husband, King Marcus. Cian missed the days when her biggest worry had been her naming ceremony.

That day, Prince Damian had held her hand in the carriage. She’d watched him instead of the cheering crowds with their gifts and flags and hungry mouths lining the road. He’d kissed their entwined fingers before offering her a name. What about Cian?

She’d been his long before she’d been oath-bound.

Farther down the mourner’s viewing bench, Regents Fulger and Salis waited patiently for the flames to abate. When they no longer licked the tower’s top, the Regents stood as a signal to the other guests that they were free to head indoors for the reception. Damian remained seated as Regent Fulger offered his hand to the last Royal of the triumvirate.

Damian, your loss is ours. May Sophia bless you with long days.

When Damian didn’t answer, the Regent of Gasper winced, bowed to Cian, and moved on. Cian shifted Fulger to the disgruntled column she kept tallied in her head. Regent Salis shuffled past them with a respectful bow. The wind picked up, and no one else approached. Music wafted over the lawn. Cian’s stomach growled, but she held her song in her mouth, letting Damian take his time. He needed to be ready. Once he stood up, he’d be facing everything Queen Lamaria had left behind.

She was better at this than I am, he finally said. I used to sit up with her late at night while she talked trade and leverage. Always thinking four moves ahead.

Queen Lamaria’s illness had scorched through her like the lit leaves of the Flame Tree. The Goddess Sophia had offered no balm. No truth. No escape. As Sophia’s Hand, Cian still felt she’d failed the Queen somehow, and so failed Damian.

She waited. Nothing she sang would be anything other than a reflection of his grief. The images she could conjure would only wound him further. Her love for him stilled her tongue, just as her obedience to his wishes had stilled her hands.

I’m the last, he said.

So was Cian. Perhaps rarity was one of the knots that bound them together. Royal and Spirit, oath-bound to the Goddess Sophia and Her land. He, the voice of the Goddess. Cian, the Hand. What Sophia ordered through Damian, Cian must manifest. Before them, King Marcus had had Borion, his own Spirit, to sing and dance Sophia’s magic and grace. Now it was just the two of them left. The last Royal. The last Hand.

Instead of platitudes, Cian leaned toward his ear as if to whisper a secret melody. She touched her lips to his cool cheek. The sting of her magic jolted him out of his self-pity. And it awakened the heat of longing in her once again.

He turned to look at her, but instead of connection, Cian saw anger. She knew what he was going to say before he said it. They’d had this conversation over and over, never finding a resolution. He claimed he wasn’t angry with her, but with the Goddess - all while shouting and storming at Cian. To be fair, most people struggled to keep them separate. Whatever personal relationship someone had with the Goddess, that was the relationship they had with Cian. This could be helpful when navigating politics; a little fearful respect, or even guilt, went a long way toward keeping the peace. Damian’s relationship with the Goddess was more fraught.

The Regents will expect me to address the crisis, yet all I hear from Her is the same message. A bride made of moonlight and lullabies, danger, and loss. Nothing that makes me want to search terribly hard. I could get as clear a message from the card shufflers on the docks.

Cian sang. A tiny chord of reassurance, rapidly sliding to defiance. Sophia would reveal Her plan. He must keep faith and hope in his duty to Aubade. It was the same song she always sang when his frustration grew, and the song had the same gaps it always did. Negative space Damian pretended not to notice. Cian didn’t want him to search for a wife, even though she knew he must. When he found a Royal to wed, where would that leave her? She knew it was a selfish thought, antithetical to her entire purpose as Hand. She dared to slip her fingers into his palm, the leak of her magic warming them both. She couldn’t help the way she felt. Any more than he could help his anger.

He didn’t respond to her reassurances or her defiance. They both knew they’d get nowhere. Instead, he changed the subject. Did you see Jamison? He looked like he swallowed one of his fish. If I don’t reassure him and the other guilds that their contracts aren’t in jeopardy, I’ll lose them all before I even begin.

A muscle jumped in his jaw, and he closed his eyes as if to shut out his mother’s pyre. As he stood, he let go of Cian’s hand. She tried not to take it personally. Grief and good sense were both reasons enough.

The back garden had emptied of mourners. Only attendants were left to stand like statuary in alcoves and corners. Girls and boys dressed in Kaars flame and Emberson rose; the energy and idealism of youth harnessed and held for political advantage. Guild children – helps and spies.

The pyre tower rose at the northern edge of the Hands’ garden near the greenhouses. Cian’s own suites trailed behind the Palace like the fabric of a wedding gown. Roundtop trees and sylph pines shaded her latticed balconies and her too-many rooms. The terrifying beauty of the Flame Tree crowned them all. Its honey-gold bark, so like Cian’s skin, shone through autumn’s bloody foliage like the flesh of fingers backlit by fire.

The Palace itself, built over a generation by Sophia’s chosen who’d fled persecution in the Southern lands, stood high on a cliff overlooking the capital for the triumvirate, Bartholomew’s City in Istrabel. Cian and Damian followed the measured brick path under the covered walkway connecting her suites to the left wing holding the Audience Hall.

A row of three boys at the heavy doors made quick eye contact with Prince Damian before dropping their gaze from Cian’s. It was always the same: fascination or fear of the Hand of the Sun Goddess. A voiceless other of magic. Mothers whispering to their children that the Hand could see their sins. No matter the legends, Cian couldn’t read thoughts or control decisions, even if that would make her work easier. People believe what they will, though. Sophia’s light often cast shadows.

The tallest of the trio leapt forward to open the right-hand door for his Prince. His height and speed marked him Gasperian before he opened his mouth.

Allow me, my Prince. His orotund vowels paced slow and musical, unlike everything else about their people. A harsh land full of horses, cattle, and a fierce urge to live with both hands full. Bounded westward by the desert and eastward by the Saint’s Towers, they understood nothing better than risk for reward. Damian’s father had died in Gasper, crushed by his own horse during an impulsive and ill-fated wager.

In a triumvirate, everything is connected. The King’s Hand, Borion, had died of oath-loss before he’d been able to cross Knell Pass and bind with the Queen. Damian lost his father, and Cian lost her mentor. Now with the Queen gone, all of Aubade wondered how the Royalty would carry on. And, how a profit could be turned if not.

The Audience Hall resonated with softened voices, and the air swirled thick with heat and light. Damian had barely emerged from the second set of doors before Master Jamison tried to corner him. Cian stepped between them, her skin glimmering and eerie in the glass-light of the ancestor windows. Before she could shame him with song, he held up both hands in surrender.

My apologies, Hand. He glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the room pretending not to eavesdrop, and leaned in to whisper, Perhaps you can solve my problem, then? After all, it’s a strange, unnatural thing.

A twinge of hurt tightened in Cian’s chest, but she breathed it away. Pride was for Royals. Master Jamison was a senior member of the Guild Council, and more than a fishmonger. He supervised all of Istrabel’s viable shorelines and coves, delegating only ports and docks to Master Cardwerk. If he was rattled, there would be good reason, and Damian was more than busy at the moment.

Cian looked askance at Damian as he assessed the mood of the Hall. Guild Masters and Mistresses from the three lands, and their most talented underlings, plus the Regents of Gasper and Norden– all waiting for their Royal’s reassurance. They expected a show of leadership and continuity, a plan forward to fill their purses with coral coin. Damian’s best hope was Cian’s magic to lend his words veracity and force.

Damian said, Master Jamison, I understand your need is urgent. But, I must address those gathered. Allow Cian to assist me, and then borrow her after with my blessing.

Jamison swallowed several answers before he allowed the correct, and only reasonable one, to leave his lips. Of course, my Prince. And my condolences.

Damian’s shoulders squared at this first problem of his reign solved, and he turned to face the rapidly forming line of mourners he’d need to traverse for his address. Weak, autumn light pierced the tall windows of the southern wall, falling through the panes of his dead. Glass-light. Ancestors transformed by fire and sun into illuminated ghosts. A gentle reminder that a Royal was never truly alone.

Cian followed Damian as he shook hands and accepted regrets on his mother’s death. No one spoke to her or gave her a kind look. Why would the Hand need comforting or support? Cian hadn’t expected anything different, and yet it was still a relief to reach the well-worn stairs where she could perform another’s words to a room, rather than being expected to interact one-on-one. Or worse, not being expected to interact at all.

Just like every other room in the Palace, a spot smoothed to silver awaited her foot. Each Hand before her had stood exactly here as they carried out their duties for their Royals. This was Cian’s glass-light. A reassurance that she came from a line of surety, even when she felt alone. And Cian was nothing if not alone.

She took a breath to clear the tension from her lungs. As the scent of roses elicits vivid memories of a mother’s embrace, Cian’s song and dance conjured images and feelings in her listeners. Dream-like and intimate, Sophia’s magic eclipsed speech. Better than dead stories pinned to paper