Julian began chanting a different spell that struck Noa as familiar, but she couldn’t place it—as usual, the words fell out of her head right after she heard them. Julian collapsed against the rock, his face gray, but kept chanting. The warship rolled and floated for a moment upside down, and then it slid below the waves.
Noa shook Julian’s shoulder. “What if Xavier’s still alive? He’ll swim ashore!”
“No, he won’t,” Julian said darkly. Noa blinked, then turned back to the sea. Now that she thought about it, the other warships were getting smaller far too fast. And the ripples that marked where Xavier’s ship had sunk—those were shrinking, too. She turned to look at the row of volcanoes on the horizon, and found that they were moving. But no—they weren’t moving.
Astrae was. Away from Xavier and Gabriela and the ruins of their ship.
As Noa watched, the ripples and the cloud of krill grew smaller and smaller, as did the foam churned up by the whales’ hunt. Mite leaned her head against Julian’s shoulder, and he put his arm around her. The clouds Gabriela had summoned dissolved, streaming off the island like rainwater after a storm.
Noa knelt at Julian’s side. “You did it,” she said wonderingly.
“Me?” Julian gave her a serious look. “I think you’re forgetting someone.”
“Well,” Noa said, puffing out, “I guess I—”
“Mite, obviously,” Julian said. “It’s quite clear that she did it.”
Mite’s eyes grew even rounder. Noa glared at Julian. But she was smiling, too, which made for an awkward glare, and Julian, seeing her face, began to laugh. The three of them sat together on the mountaintop and watched the sea churn in Astrae’s wake.
28
Noa Figures Some Things Out
“What will you learn at magic school?” Mite said. “Nobody else can do your magic.”
“I expect I’ll learn the rudimentary theory,” Noa said in a misty voice, because she didn’t actually know.
They were in Noa’s bedroom, packing—or, more accurately, taking everything out of Noa’s wardrobe and chests and laying it on the floor in categories so she could decide what to pack, and checking quantities against her list in the Chronicle.
It was a month after Xavier’s death, and the Marchenas were back in the palace at Queen’s Step. With General Lydio’s ships—not to mention all his mages—they’d retaken the heart of Florean without too much trouble, given the disarray in Xavier’s forces after he died. Xavier didn’t have an heir, so there was nobody to give his soldiers and mages orders apart from the generals, and the generals didn’t know what to do. Julian had sailed Astrae right to the palace and demanded that the council surrender. When they didn’t, he had told Beauty to pound her tail against the cliffside below the councillors’ apartments. As the rock began to crumble and the apartments grew perilously close to tumbling into the sea, one of the councillors had emerged to inform Julian that they would surrender, provided none of them were fed to Beauty or burned alive by Reckoner. (Just as there were exaggerated stories about Julian, there were also exaggerated stories about Reckoner, and many people in Florean believed that the Dark Lord’s dragon was an enormous beast that could breathe flame so deadly it rivaled a volcanic eruption. Noa and Julian had laughed themselves silly at the look on the councillors’ faces when they saw Reckoner for the first time.)
None of this meant that the Marchenas had won the war altogether—there were a few islands where Xavier’s mages had holed themselves up in castles and whatnot and refused to surrender to the magician they still called the Dark Lord. But most of Florean belonged to Julian now, and Noa knew he’d soon capture the rest.
Noa wouldn’t be there to see him do it, though, because she was going to Northwind Island.
The headmistress had written to Julian soon after he’d retaken Queen’s Step to say that she’d heard about Princess Noa’s unique powers (apparently the whole of Florean was buzzing about her and Mite), and that since she was around the right age, she could come and study at Northwind if she wanted to. Noa had dug out her suitcase before Julian was finished reading the letter.
Renne was dead. Gabriela, characteristically, had escaped. There had been no whisper of her anywhere, but Noa was convinced she was biding her time until she could get revenge on Julian. Julian pretended not to care where she was, but Noa had discovered that he’d been about to send word to her family that she’d get a full pardon if she surrendered. It was the first time Noa had needed to talk him out of doing something out of kindness rather than wickedness.
Mite furrowed her brow. “Will you learn how to boss the ghosts around? Julian says bossing people around is your special skill, and he doesn’t know why dead people should be any different.”
“Mite,” Noa said with dignity, “why don’t you go down to the kitchens and have a cake? Tomas’s father sent over some fresh ones. Licorice spice, your favorite.”
“Oof.” Mite flopped onto the bed, looking green. “I don’t think I can eat another cake. I might be sick.”
“Now I’ve heard everything.”
Julian poked his head into the room. “My Noabell,” he said, surveying the organized wreckage of Noa’s bedroom, “only you could make packing a suitcase look like a military campaign.”
“Can I go to magic school, Julian?” Mite said.
“Maybe when you’re older, Mighty Mite.” Children usually attended Northwind when they were twelve or thirteen, though some went when they were younger. It depended on when their parents decided they were ready or when they got fed up with the side effects of having a magical child who didn’t understand their magic, such as explosions—though Mite was really the worst-case scenario.
