The Power and the Glory

Book 4 Chapter IX: Unwanted Advice

And I can go anywhere I want
Anywhere I want, just not home
-- Taylor Swift, My Tears Ricochet

The last time Arafaren got a telegram it had been from the headmaster of his school warning him that if he didn't immediately improve his work he wouldn't be allowed to come back after the holidays. Most of the other telegrams he got were of a similar sort. So when a servant handed him one, his first reaction was to think of all the people he had offended recently.

It came as a shock when he saw the telegram was signed "Irímé". He had nothing to do with his sister's fiancé and certainly hadn't done anything to warrant an angry telegram. Then he actually bothered to read the message, and things became simultaneously more and less clear.

Please forward to Abi, read the first line. That was all well and good, but if Irímé didn't want Arafaren to read the rest of the telegram then he should have sent it to a different one of her relatives. Something strange happening stop have you done something stop.

Arafaren was many things -- none of them good, according to his parents and older siblings, whose favourite ways to describe him included "irresponsible" and "will annoy the wrong person and end up in prison some day" -- but in spite of what some people believed he wasn't stupid.

When Abi first arrived her foster brother had sent Arafaren a very confusing letter that referenced corpses and hungry ghosts. Abi herself had reacted as if he had given away some big secret. Then Abi had gone to visit one of her friends. Lo and behold, the planet had promptly experienced an outbreak of walking dead. Add to that the strange girl in funeral clothes who showed up during the festival, and a pattern began to emerge. A pattern that Arafaren didn't like at all. He may be a prankster who never took anything seriously, but even he knew there were some things in the world that shouldn't be meddled with. Dark magic of all sorts was at the top of that list. And necromancy was at the top of the list of dark magic.

From painful experience of Aunt Jiarlúr he knew that any letter he sent directly to Abi would first be read by their aunt. Therefore he had to find a way to get a letter to Abi indirectly. Arafaren made a mental list of everyone he knew in the Gengxinese court. It was a very short list with only two names on it: the sons of the current ambassador to Saoridhlém. He didn't know either of them well enough to trust them to pass on a message like this.

"Is Mirio still in Gengxin?" he asked Kiriyuki casually when they met at the Silver Palace that afternoon.

Kiriyuki eyed him suspiciously, but apparently decided the question was innocuous enough to answer. "Yes. I think he plans to stay for at least another month."

As soon as he got home Arafaren went to his room, got out a writing pad, and carefully composed a letter to Abi and a note to Mirio asking him to forward it to her. There was no easy way to ask "Are you a necromancer?" and in the end he settled for being as blunt as possible.

This telegram arrived from your fiancé. I think I know what he means by "have you done something". I have two questions: why in the Nine Heavens are you playing with necromancy? And are you going to get yourself or someone else killed?

He finished the letter with a very emphatic "You idiot!" written in the boldest letters he could draw and underlined several times in case she somehow missed seeing them.

His letter to Mirio was even shorter. Please give this to my idiotic sister and don't let Aunt Jiarlúr know.

Arafaren put both letters and the telegram in an envelope, addressed the letter to Prince Mirio at the royal palace of Gengxin -- he didn't know the exact address, but the letter was bound to reach the right person. There couldn't be more than one Prince Mirio in Gengxin, especially since it wasn't a Gengxinese name -- and sneaked down to his mother's study. Hartanna and Líusal were arguing about something in the drawing room. No one else was around. It was easy to get into the study, take a wax stick and Hartanna's seal from her table, and seal the letter to look like an official communication.