My mother's quarters in the Royal Residence opened onto a wide stone patio that faced the mountains, not the city. The cold breeze brought in the fragrance of jasmine flowers blooming in clay pots and the smell of the scraggly plants that lived in the cracks between the rocks of the mountains.
I knocked on the door. "It's Elyan. Are you awake?"
"Come in," came the voice of Queen Aliya. She had not been asleep either. A tiny oil lamp illuminated her silhouette. She stood at the low block wall that separated the wilderness from civilization.
The oil lamp was serving as a paperweight on her table. It weighed down a stack of, not poetry as was her preference, but certification disputes from the Trade Boards. My father had eliminated the guilds years ago, but the master craftsmen still found ways to argue about each apprentice.
She didn't face me as I stepped out through the doors and onto the patio with her. "Your father turned you away, didn't he?" Her voice was as gentle as the breeze.
I joined her at the wall. "He wanted me to sleep. He thinks I'm not thinking straight."
With her face illuminated by the starlight, I could see the sharp intelligence barely obstructed by the warmth in her eyes. "Well, are you, Prince Elyan?"
"No. He was right. I'm exhausted. I'm lucky I'm still on my feet." It felt like my eyelids had weights attached to them. "But the stones are an anomaly. I just can't prove it with the objective measurements that our tools can provide. He gave me the logic of an engineer. He feels that anomalies that can't be measured aren't a bedrock on which we can build a foundation."
"Nadim loves the bedrock," she said with a little smile. "It's how he saved us. When my father, I hope the Emperor was kind, refused to send the tribute we owed and brought the Legion to our gates. It wasn't epistemology, poetry, or history that saved the city. It was Nadim's systems and his foresight. He secured the grain supplies. He organized the militias. He reinforced the walls with high-quality brick. He didn't cower. He worked."
She turned back to the mountains. "He negotiated with Legion Commander Cassian as the only man in this city who could prove, with brick and logic, that our city was worth more alive than dead. He trusts what can be measured. It's not a flaw, Son; it's his sword and shield."
"He's blinded by it." I argued. "If I don't have irrefutable numbers, he rejects it."
She took my hand in the firm grip of a woman who had guided a man from prison to the throne. "He's not blind, Elyan." She smiled. "He's scared. You know the history of Elias' death, but you don't know the details."
"I know that Elias was in prison with Father," I said. "For stealing."
"For stealing what?" My mother asked with an arched eyebrow.
"Bread?" Nobody had ever really given me a straight answer.
"I overheard a woman in the marketplace telling someone that he had been put in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to save his sister," she said, chuckling under her breath. "But that story sells Nadim short. Nadim wasn't a common thief. He went for flowers."
"Flowers!?" I stared at her. "What possible flower was worth going to prison for?"
"The Desert Starsuckle," she said softly. "It was my mother's favorite. My father, the old king, had stripped the mountains of every single wild plant to keep them for himself. Once a person is infected with the lung fever, the Starsuckle is the only cure we know of. Nadim wouldn't steal a loaf of bread to fill an empty belly. He always thought that bread was life and that taking life from another person was wrong. He didn't harm the plants. He just wanted blossoms and seeds. So he could save his sister, plant the seeds, and save anyone else who came down with the fever. This crime enraged my father. He flogged Nadim and threw him into the pit, not because he was a thief, but because my father thought that saving lives desecrated my mother's memory instead of enhancing it. Your father broke a foolish law to save lives."
She squeezed my hand again. "Your father was that kind of man. Those prison walls were not a place of reform and restitution like they are now. They were a place of death. Your father watched Elias die. You know that Elias was the Royal Tutor, the man who taught me? He taught your Uncle Akram. My younger brother, Kareem, had him humiliated and thrown away because Elias dared to correct his accounting, to suggest that truth mattered more than royal vanity. Elias spent years grinding grain on a defective mill that sent stone dust into his lungs. It grayed them. Scarred them. And eventually turned his lungs to stone. He died suffocating."
She took a breath, as if dying with her beloved mentor. "Even as he was slowly dying, between the coughs, he taught your father. He taught him physics. He taught him logic. He taught him that competence could defeat power. Your father held Elias as he took his last breath. He saw a genius ground to dust by the incompetence of cruel men."
Memories of Elias were always treated with reverence in my family. A reverence they held for no other, living or dead. They gave his books the highest place. Spoke of him with not just admiration, but with love. The horror made my breath catch. Imagining that man killed horribly for no other reason than that he corrected some numbers made it impossible to exhale. I didn't know what happened to Uncle Kareem or my grandfather. No wonder they had never shared these details with me before.
My mother continued. "When your father sees you chasing anomalies, he doesn't see a scientist. He sees Elias reaching for the stars while being choked to death by dust. He sees you reaching for something that will eat you because you aren't watching the ground beneath your feet."
I felt the stones in my pockets. "I'm not stealing flowers, Mother. I am trying to save the trade routes. We are desperate. We have to look at every option."
"You are looking for a weapon," she said, squeezing my hand again. "Elias searched without expectation. But perhaps that's why he fell. He found truth, but he didn't use it as a weapon. He thought the truth was strong enough. Your father survived because he learned to use the stone that killed Elias to build walls."
She let go of my hand and walked to the table. She moved the lamps and guild reports and picked up a small, velvet-wrapped bundle that had been hidden beneath.
"Your father respects Elias the Engineer, the Logician, the Scientist," she said, bringing me the bundle. "Elias taught him to calculate flow rates and aggregate mixtures. But he has always thought that Elias the Historian, the man who wrote of myths and unverifiable ancient histories, was impractical if not useless."
She handed it to me. "He rules in the world of men, Elyan, as a shining light, a beacon of practical competence in a world of selfish fools. But you... you can be more."
I unwrapped the package. Inside was a codex, old and brittle. It smelled of ancient dust and refuse.
"What is this?" I asked.
"Elias called it his 'Speculations'" she said. "Years ago, Kareem partially destroyed Elias' library. I managed to get his order changed to get them sent to the dump instead of the fire. I had hoped that someone might find them."
She smiled, her eyes looking into a distance that wasn't there. "I didn't know that immediately thereafter a starving orphan boy found them. Your father didn't save these scrolls after he became king. No, he saved them when he was a starving sixteen-year-old searching the dump for a meal. He used them to learn to read in a cave in the mountains. He saved the scrolls when he couldn't save himself."
I had never handled an Elias original. My father had scribes to make copies of everything; he must have been afraid that some accident or future incompetence might damage the original dump-salvaged scrolls and codices. He probably had some packed away in his secret location in the mountains just to make sure.
She touched the codex in my hand. "He knows every word in every scroll. But in his heart, he doesn't care about this one. He believes that poetry and myth are luxuries for a world where death isn't lurking around every corner. Elias gave him a lens just before he died. It was the clarity of logic. But your father has been so focused on the ground, he forgot about the stars."
I opened to the first page. It was signed "Elias." I ran my index finger over the name. "Why give it to me now?"
"We're hitting a wall," she said. "Your father is trying to solve this crisis using logic and law. He's playing by the rules that got him the throne. Of course he's winning the argument of logic, but we are losing the city."
She looked me in the eye as the last of the oil was burning in the lamp. "A king must be the solid bedrock that his people stand on. A prince must be the horizon. You must look past what is known."
"He wanted me to put the rocks away," I told her. "He told me he needs a prince, not a geologist."
"Then be a prince who reads," she said. "Go to the library. Take this codex. Compare it with what remains of Elias' journals. If you want to sway your father, don't bring him magic. Bring him historical precedent. Show this isn't an anomaly in the sky but pavement on the ground."
I clutched the delicate codex in my hand. Saved from destruction by the boy who became my father. Preserved by a queen who understood that survival meant more than just bread.
"Thank you," I said.
She kissed my cheek. "Don't thank me yet. Elias was led to a cell because he didn't fight. Nadim got the throne because he did. You must find your own way. Wait until dawn. The city will be waking, and your mind will be sharper."
She turned back to the mountainside and rested her arms on the wall. A whiff of Starsuckle, a flower I had taken for granted all my life, came into the room.
I left her to the starry night. My father had ordered me to go to sleep and accept the world as it is. My mother had given me permission to imagine what it ought to be.
I returned to my quarters and collapsed onto the bed, still holding the codex. I would sleep now, but tomorrow I would be in the library.