I retrieve them from beneath my bed. I toss him one, and he catches it instantly. He falls into a fighting stance. I fall into my own. The one he taught me. The one Father taught him.
“So,” he starts. “This is what I learned today.”
GILDED
The day I kill a man is the first time my father looks proud of me. His golden gauntlet falls heavily onto my shoulder, fingers curling around my arm to turn me around, toward his small council. The hard lines of his face soften slightly as he smiles. “Gilding, can you imagine? Behold the strength of our line. And not even in the heir.”
He’s put the attendant I accidentally gilded on full display, in front of his council’s meeting chamber. A proud symbol of the crown’s strength.
Later, my mother finds me retching in my room. Her hand is warm on my back.
“It was an accident,” she says. “We all make mistakes.”
Maybe, but mine—this one—cost a man his life. His name was Albert. He had a family. A daughter my age. Pearl. We’ve played together.
And now.... now his gold-coated corpse is being viewed by the king’s closest circle. My monstrous action is beingcelebrated.
The next day, my father asks me to do it again, to perform for his council, but I can’t. I can’t doanything. I don’t want to. My shame and regret have extinguished the abilities that have always come so easily to me. Now, I couldn’t summon a flame if I tried.
He stops talking to me again. I’ve gone from being a wonder to an embarrassment.
Before I could even talk, my mother found me in my crib, the room on fire. As she’s always told it, I just stared at her through the flames.
My mother was shocked. My abilities weren’t supposed to be so advanced, for a second son.
She didn’t breathe a word of this to my father. In the middle of the night, she rushed me to her friend, a Wildling she shares a garden with. That friend, in turn, led us to a tall man named Elk.
I don’t remember any of it, just what Elk told me later. How he trained me, as a baby. How he had to feed me honey to soothe my tantrums, lest I burn down the entire Mainland. How he taught me to breathe through my anger. How he taught me to keep this great power buried. My mother brought me to him in secret, until she was confident that I had learned control. Then, the training stopped.
My mother told me not to tell my father about the strength of my abilities, and over time, I figured out why, but sometimes ... I wished I could. Maybe if he knew ... maybe it would make him look at me like I mattered.
Now that power has vanished. And my mother has started to worry.
She’s waiting in my room when I return from dinner. She’s made tea. She motions at the chair across from her.
“Sit with me, would you?”
I pause. “Is something wrong?” We always have tea in the dining room. Never this late.
“Of course not,” she says.
Bitterness. A lie I can taste like over-steeped tea, thanks to my flair. The one she doesn’t know about.
I take a hesitant step forward. Sit. She pours me tea. Stirs in the honey. We take a few sips, before she says, “Your power.”
“What about it?”
“It’s gone.”
We all know that. Me, most of all. I stare into my cup. “I’m glad. I don’t want it.”
The look of the man, gasping for his last breath as his skin hardened into gold, is seared into my mind.
I squeeze my eyes against the memory.
Her warm hand finds mine. “Oro. You were born with great ability. We kept it in check, but if it’s buried too long ... I fear it will overtake you.”
She must see that I don’t care about the prospect of it overtaking me. Let it. It’s what I deserve, after what I did.
