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Chapter 1
Caspyn
“Get them up, and get them hidden.”
The panicked hiss pulled me out of sleep, the chill that was unusual for our home at this time of night immediately penetrating through my bones. I shivered and pulled the thin, holey blanket close as I looked toward our parents’ bed. The hearth beside it was as dark as the rest of the cabin. Even the faint glow of the embers was gone, the ashes wet as though someone had just put them out. The only light was what reflected from the moon and waves that drifted through the lone window in our home.
The window my parents were crowded around.
“Maybe they aren’t here for them. Maybe it’s the?—”
“Now, Ari. No excuses. It’s not worth the risk.” My father’s voice sliced through the inky night, cutting my mother off as they shuffled around the window, the threadbare curtain already pulled over the muddled glass.
“Caspyn?” My twin sister hissed my name as our mother shuffled her way over to us, careful to keep her steps slow.
I turned from the shadowed figures against the window to where my sister lay next to me in the bed we always shared, to those big blue eyes the color of deep water. Her eyes were a few shades darker than the blue as light as ice that my eyes were. Her deep brown curls were tangled from sleep, her lips already quivering. I reached out, wrapping her hand in mine as I tried to put on a brave face.
“It’s okay, Lily,” I lied.
I didn’t even know what was happening enough for it to be okay. She still believed me, or rather, she pretended to. She nodded once, even as her hand continued to shake, the low buzz of magic traveling through us like a current. Same as it always did.
Water between us. Like the color of our eyes. Like our names.
“Caspyn. Lily.” Ma said our names the way she had since the day we were born, as though it was one word. As though we were one person. One beautiful flower she had named us after. Not that either of us has seen one. We had never gone to land or to the deep rivers the caspyn lily grows in, with its elegant lavender petals and long green leaves. We had only heard about them or seen them in Ma’s drawings. The eight years of our lives had been on the Qit, on the floating fishing village where we were born.
“Ma?” Lily half sobbed in a panic. Ma’s hand instantly moved to cover her mouth.
“Shh, we need to be quiet. We need to be careful.” Her eyes were wide and wet as she looked between us, the soft green that reminded me of the foam that drifted against our home at tide.
“Why?” I asked, careful to keep my voice soft despite the panic snaking its way up my spine.
She pressed her lips together, that green growing brighter as the shining wet threatened tears.
“You have seen eight years now…” she began, and I didn’t need Da’s hushed bark to bring up the fear I had been holding against my heart since we were five. Since the magic first appeared in Lily.
Since I first felt it in me.
The volatile illegal magic that only brought death.
The fear that they would find us.
“They are coming.” Da was already making his way over to us, his steps as slow as Ma’s. If he moved too fast, our home would rock against the water it was floating on. The Qit was always moving, even at night, when it rocked in time with the waves, all of the tiny wooden homes and the walkways that connected us moving and shifting as the sea did. Quick moves could make our home rock differently than the rest, and they would know we were there, that we were awake.
They.
The Queen's Army of Fae.
The ones who went from Qit to Qit and village to village, taking the children with Requisite magic to be conscripted in the Queen’s Army. Killing the Catalysts’ that had stolen the magic from them.
Magic took two people, a Requisite to wield the power and a Catalyst to ignite it. I was a Catalyst and Lily was a Requisite. We knew what we were since the day she first made the water glow, since her power had moved through me and I had ignited it to create the beautiful glowing shapes.
We knew this day would come.
That they would come…to take whatever was inside me that let me conduct the magic and give it to Lily, leaving me to die, and Lily trapped in the Queen's Army as a slave.
“Now?” It was only barely a question, my hand tightening around Lily’s as I looked to the false wall beside the fireplace, the one Da had made to hide us the day after Lily’s magic presented. No one knew how they found the Catalysts, but they always did, and we needed to be ready.
“Now,” Da hissed back, carefully lifting the blanket off us and moving to scoop Lily from the bed. “Move slow.”
