Wanted it with a fire that rivaled any need.

His royal father had a gift for metals, and his mother an easy touch with water, but magic wasn’t like black hair or brown eyes or elevated birth—it didn’t follow the rules of lineage, wasn’t passed down from parent to child. It chose its own course.

And already at the age of nine, it was beginning to look as though magic hadn’t chosen him at all.

But Rhy Maresh refused to believe that he’d been passed over entirely; it had to be there, somewhere within him, that flame of power waiting for a well-timed breath, a poker’s nudge. After all, he was a prince. And if magic would not come to him, he’d go to it.

It was that logic that had brought him here, to the stone floor of the Sanctuary’s drafty old library, shivering as the cold leached through the embroidered silk of his pant legs (designed for the palace, where it was always warm).

Whenenever Rhy complained about the chill in the Sanctuary, old Tieren would crinkle his brow.

Magic makes its own warmth, he’d say, which was well and good if you were a magician, but then, Rhy wasn’t.

Not yet.

This time he hadn’t complained. Hadn’t even told the head priest he was here.

The young prince crouched in an alcove at the back of the library, hidden behind a statue and a long wooden table, and spread the stolen parchment on the floor.

Rhy had been born with light fingers—but of course, being royal, he almost never had to use them. People were always willing to offer things freely, indeed leaping at the ready to deliver, from a cloak on a chilly day to a frosted cake from the kitchens.

But Rhy hadn’t asked for the scroll; he’d lifted it from Tieren’s desk, one of a dozen tied with the thin white ribbon that marked a priest’s spell. None of them were all that fancy or elaborate, much to Rhy’s chagrin. Instead they focused on utility.

Spells to keep the food from spoiling.

Spells to protect the orchard trees from frost.

Spells to keep a fire burning without oil.

And Rhy would try every single one until he found a spell that he could do. A spell that would speak to the magic surely sleeping in his veins. A spell that could wake it up.

A breeze whipped through the Sanctuary as he dug a handful of red lin from his pocket and weighted the parchment to the floor. On its surface, in the head priest’s steady hand, was a map—not like the one in his father’s war room that showed the whole kingdom. No, this was a map of a spell, a diagram of magic.

Across the top of the scroll were three words in the common tongue.

Is Anos Vol, read Rhy.

The Eternal Flame.

Beneath those words was a pair of concentric circles, linked by delicate lines and dotted with small symbols, the condensed shorthand favored by the spell-makers of London. Rhy squinted, trying to make sense of the scrawl. He had a knack for languages, picking up the airy cadence of the Faroan tongue, the choppy waves made by each Veskan syllable, the hills and valleys of Arnes’s own border dialects—but the words on the parchment seemed to shift and blur before his eyes, sliding in and out of focus.

He chewed his lip (it was a bad habit, one his mother was always warning him to break because it wasn’t princely), then planted his hands on either side of the paper, fingertips brushing the outer circle, and began the spell.

He focused his eyes on the center of the page as he read, sounding out each word, the fragments clumsy and broken on his tongue. His pulse rose in his ears, the beat at odds with the natural rhythm of the magic. But Rhy held the spell together, pinned it down with sheer force of will, and as he neared the end a tingling of heat started in his hands; he could feel it trickling through his palms, into his fingers, brushing the circle’s edge, and then …

Nothing.

No spark.

No flame.

He said the spell once, twice, three more times, but the heat in his hands was already fading, dissolving into an ordinary prickle of numbness. Dejected, he let the words trail off, taking the last of his focus with them.

The prince sagged back onto the cold stones. “Sanct,” he muttered, even though he knew it was bad form to swear, and worse to do it here.

“What are you doing?”

Rhy looked up and saw his brother standing at the mouth of the alcove, a red cloak around his narrow shoulders. Even at ten and three quarters, Kell’s face had the set of a serious man, down to the furrow between his brows. Kell’s red hair glinted even in the grey morning light, and his eyes—one blue, the other black as night—made people look down, away. Rhy didn’t understand why, but he always made a point of looking his brother in the face, to show Kell it didn’t matter. Eyes were eyes.

Kell wasn’t really his brother, of course. Even a passing look would mark them as different. Kell was a mixture, like different kinds of clay twined together; he had the fair skin of a Veskan, the lanky body of a Faroan, and the copper hair found only on the northern edge of Arnes. And then, of course, there were his eyes. One natural, if not particularly Arnesian, and the other Antari, marked by magic itself as aven. Blessed.

Rhy, on the other hand, with his warm brown skin, his black hair and amber eyes, was all London, all Maresh, all royal.

Kell took in the prince’s high color, and then the parchment spread out before him. He knelt across from Rhy, the fabric of his cloak pooling on the stones around him. “Where did you get this?” he asked, a prickle of displeasure in his voice.

“From Tieren,” said Rhy. His brother shot him a skeptical look, and Rhy amended, “From Tieren’s study.”