Roxy:
I was up bright and early the next day, eager to get Vincent's last test over and done with. I woke up with a long, hot shower, using the time to think about the day ahead and the impending visit, which I was becoming more and more curious about. When I got out, I focused on slowly heating up my body to evaporate off all of the water; drying my hair with care, so that it didn't become a complete mess.
I watched my reflection in the full-wall-length mirror of my room while I ran the brush through it. The red streaks - a mark of my status as a Protector - were far more prominent than they had been when I had first arrived at the camp. Back then, my hair had been chocolate brown, with only a few flashes of red running through it. It would never completely change, but there was now more red than brown. It made me look bold and dangerous; important.
When my hair was dry I threw on some denim shorts, a black tank top and some big black boots. I wasn't really sure what Vincent and I were doing today, but the weather in the Helian Realm was always warm.
Vincent was leaning against the side of the house when I got outside, playing with a small ball of fire in his fingers, closing his hand to starve the flames of oxygen and then opening it up again to let it flare. "You're late," he said, without even looking up at me.
"Hardly. Two minutes at most - you can't have been waiting here very long," I replied, walking over to him. "Where are we going today, anyway?"
"Ah, you'll have to wait and see." He raised his eyes to meet mine, the grin Avery was so crazy about spreading across his face.
We got on his bike and set off along the road, riding in silence until we reached a large, derelict house. It looked as though something had drained all of the life from the place years ago. The brick work was a dull, deathly grey; more fitting for an Arcan tomb than a house in the Helian Realm. The faint cobwebs of long-dead ivy vines wound their way across the walls, enclosing the smudged, broken windows in its spindling trap. It had even crept across the tall, black door at the front of the house, betraying its neglect.
"Here we are." Vincent looked ahead, his face set. The glint is his eyes betrayed his amusement.
"Here? Are you sure? It doesn't look like anyone's been in this house since the turn of the century - well no one who's alive, anyway."
"This, Roxy, is the house of Dr Jacob Scott," Vincent said with a flourish.
I paused for a second. Was he kidding? "That writer you're obsessed with?"
"The greatest historian who ever lived," he corrected. "He's written on the most important events of our life: from the Border Wars to the-"
"-Brizan Occupation, yeah I know who he is Vincent, but why are we here?"
"Dr Scott has become a recluse since the death of his late wife and rarely receives visitors. You are going to talk your way into his home and get him to treat us like honoured guests - without telling him who you really are. Your final test is on Control."
Control was a Helian Protector's most deadly power. It gave us dominance over any other living person, with the exception of other Protectors or members of the Royal family, which was forbidden by the highest Helian laws. It was a power that we had kept secret from all of the other Realms, making it our greatest weapon.
It was extremely difficult to get right though and I had been struggling with it since I first arrived at the camp. The problem was that it wasn't something I needed on a daily basis. I was already a princess, all I had to do was look mildly annoyed and everyone did what I wanted. I rarely even needed to raise my voice anymore, people were so afraid of me. This made practicing Control pretty tough, as everyone did what I wanted without me having to try. Control was all about effort: getting the right tone of voice and wording.
Vincent grinned wickedly and gestured for me to go ahead of him, towards the house. When I didn't move his smile grew even wider. "What's the matter Roxy? Scared that you can't do it?" He had me there. I shot him my dirtiest look before storming towards the door. There was no way I was letting him think I was afraid - I wasn't afraid of anything - I just didn't like going out of my way to make a fool of myself.
Standing on the porch, I took a deep breath before ringing the doorbell. We could hear the resulting sound echoing through the house. Then there was silence. Nothing stirred. The air around us was still, the house even stiller.
"No one home. Oh well, guess we'll have to try another day," I said, barely trying to hide the enthusiasm in my voice at such a lucky escape.
"No... he should be here." Vincent looked confused.
"Maybe he died years ago and no one noticed." I smirked - what luck. But the words were barely out of my mouth when we heard the echoing footsteps along what must have been a wooden floor inside.
Dr Scott was a squat, balding man in his late sixties. What was left of his hair was white and frazzled and he had a partiality for ridiculous polka dotted ties. He looked like a relic from the Midnight Era and had clearly never heard of de-aging serum. I knew all of this because his picture is on the back cover of all of his books, which Vincent had made me read last year. All I could see of Dr Scott in the flesh was an eye - very bloodshot and a watered down brown colour - which was inspecting us through a small peep hole in his door, probably trying to assess our risk factor.
I arranged my face in the brightest smile I could muster and, with a great deal of false cheeriness, said: "Hey, Dr Scott? I'm Nora and this is my Tutor, Victor. I'm writing a paper on the Brizan Occupation for school and was wondering if I could ask you a few questions?" The trick to lying convincingly is to stick as close to the truth as possible. Nora's my middle name and talking to him was crucial for my studies - they're just not the sort of studies Dr Scott thought I was talking about.
"No," came the gruff response and the eye began to retreat from the door.
"Wait! Let us in." I put as much effort into my tone as possible, trying to make it honey sweet, like Vincent was always telling me to, but to no avail; the eye kept getting smaller.
"Make it a negative - that's easier, remember?" Vincent whispered in my ear, coming up close behind me on the porch. "Soft and gentle."
"Dr Scott, don't go." The words came out soft and inviting, oozing like honey. The eye stopped.
"Well done, keep going. Stick to negatives and use that tone exactly."
"Won't you let us in? This really won't take long."
The door creaked slowly open to reveal Dr Scott. He was standing in his hallway, looking slightly bemused in a dishevelled dressing gown and slippers. He looked as if he had been wearing the same clothes for the last five years. I raised my eyebrows at Vincent: this was his hero? But he looked just as confused - clearly he had not realised how much of a recluse Dr Scott had become.
"Thank you." I shot the doctor a dazzling smile and walked past him, along the dusty hallway into what must have once been the lounge. There was an antique fireplace in the centre of the room and I made straight for it. The bottom was covered in a thick carpet of ash, but it was cold and there was no sign that a fire had been lit there recently. I cupped my hands together and then opened them out slowly, a gleaming ball of flames expanded between them as I did. Once it had swelled to the size of a human head I put it down in the fireplace. The room was immediately filled by its warm glow and I dragged the biggest chair in towards it, so that I could feel the full force of its heat.
"Oi! That's my chair. Who do you think you are, coming into my house and moving around my furniture?" He didn't, I noticed, offer any thanks for the fire, though he must have realised it was there, since he removed his dressing gown to reveal the pair of orange and green pin-striped pyjamas he was wearing beneath it. This trip kept getting better and better. I rolled my eyes at Vincent, who had come into the room behind him.
"But Dr Scott, you couldn't possibly mind where I sit." I concentrated on keeping the honeyed edge to my voice and his expression went blissfully blank. "Why not take a seat yourself?" He sat down without another word.
The trick to using Control, so Vincent was always saying, was to keep your voice as light and kind as possible. That way, your victim wouldn't feel like they were being commanded, which meant that their minds offered far less resistance. For the same reason, negative commands, "Don't do this" or "You can't think that" were much easier than direct ones: "Get me a drink" or "Jump off that cliff over there." Slipping the word "not" into a Control had a dramatic effect. Of course, the more the power was used, the stronger it became, making it easier and easier to manipulate the people around you.
A lot also depended on the strength of the mind you were working on and how frequently Control had been used on it before. Your average Helian wouldn't do anything extreme unless you were incredibly powerful and only someone who had been Controlled continually for many years would ever jump off a cliff if they were told to. In fact, there had only ever been one recorded occurrence of someone killing themselves as the result of Control and that was centuries ago. Death was a difficult thing to force the mind to consider.
Dr Scott had clearly been placed under Control more than a few times though, his mind was already quite weak. But that was unsurprising, given the time he has spent in the army, under Protector command. However, it could also be because he had lived alone for so long. Seclusion wasn't good for anyone; it made you forget how to protect yourself.
Control is actually a lot harder than most Protectors expect: there's a lot of psychology behind it that has to be considered carefully if you're going to make any breakthroughs. I guess that's why I found it so hard to do. I never paid much attention in the early theory lessons, so I had to pick up all the rules as I went along.
I looked at the doctor, my face a picture of mock disappointment. "Aren't you going to get us a drink? You're not being a particularly good host, you know." It took the few seconds that he looked at me, confused, to realise that I'd let the tone in my voice relax too much, so the Control hadn't worked.
"I mean, Dr Scott, won't you get me and my tutor a drink each? And one for yourself, of course." Of course, I'm so considerate. That time the Control registered and the doctor left the room, the vacant expression back on his face.
"You're doing well," Vincent congratulated me as soon as the sound of the doctor's footsteps had retreated down the hallway. "It's not as hard as you think when you put your mind to it, is it?"
"I never said it was hard," I protested defensively. "I said that it was unnecessary and required way too much effort. Why should I concentrate on injecting sweetness into every word I say, when shouting at people gets the same result with far less effort?"
"Because, as we saw at the door, when people don't know who you are, they're not going to respond well to being treated badly."
"So I'll make sure that they know who I am before I tell them what to do." I smiled, knowing that I was winding him up.
"What if you don't want them to know who you really are?" Vincent retorted.
"Why the flames would I possibly want to keep my identity a secret?" Being a Princess (and next in line to the throne after my father, as long as I got married) was a good thing and not something I would ever want to hide.
"A Protector should be prepared for every eventuality," he said, quoting one of the first rules of Protectorship. "How else can we protect the Realm efficiently?"
I was unsure how to respond properly to that, so settled for simply rolling my eyes at him and changing the subject. "So why did we come here anyway? Are you going to get him to give us a lecture on his time in the war?"
"No Firefly, you are."
"As if. Sorry Vincent but I've already had my boredom quota for the month. I'm not going to ask to be sent to sleep."
"Do you want me to fail you, Roxanne?" So that was how he was going to play this - I was waiting to see how long it took him to resort to threats to get what he wanted. He was using my education as an excuse to learn more about his idol.
I was born a month after our Occupation of the Brizan Realm began, so was too young to remember any of it. But Vincent had been sixteen when the first ships embarked; old enough to watch the men going off and to get excited about it, but not old enough to join them himself. He wasn't due to start his own Protector training for another ten months. My parents had put him in charge of my care when I was three and a half, and for as long as I'd known him he had been fascinated by the war. I think it must have been the biggest disappointment of his life that the Occupation finished before he had the chance to join them. Plus, his babysitting duties with me meant that he hardly ever got to see any action or put his powers to use. He was probably as relieved as I was that, once I officially passed, we'd be free of each other.
The footsteps had returned, so I settled for scowling at Vincent and turned towards the door to see Dr Scott re-emerge. He was carrying a tray with three steaming glasses of mulsum on it. I'd always hated mulsum (it was sweet and sickly) but took the glass anyway. I wasn't going to drink it as I couldn't be sure he hadn't done something to it while out of sight. I'd only sent him into the kitchen so that I could speak to Vincent.
Instead, I held the cup tightly in my hand and heated it further. The warmth from my hand would evaporate the liquid so that it would look as though I had drunk most of it. A quick glance at Vincent told me that he was doing the same thing.
I decided that it was time to try a positive Control - the few negative ones I'd performed so far had gone well and I wasn't entirely sure how to phrase this next request any other way, so I didn't really have much choice.
"Dr Scott, tell us about your time in the army - you were a solider during the Brizan Occupation weren't you?" I wasn't entirely sure whether the Control worked or if Dr Scott was just eager to have a captive audience to tell his glory tales to, but he was away seconds after the words had left my mouth.
"I served in the first regiment," he began proudly. "Under General Emmerich LeMarc." Ah, he was one of my father's men. "Being picked for the General's regiment was a great honour, so I took my role very seriously." I got the impression from these opening lines that his story was going to be both long and tedious...
"I remember that first day as if it were only yesterday. We approached the Brizan Realm hidden in the darkness of night. Unlike our Realm, which is made up of one, large continent, the Brizan Realm is split into eighty-one separate islands, but only nine of these are populated. At the time, the three main islands were those in the south, west and centre. So we split our troops: some lined up along the western most islands, another group covered the south and the remaining three regiments surrounded the central island where the Brizans' had their capital city, Larielle. Our orders were to take these islands at dawn. Once our occupation of them was secure, we'd move to the north and east to take the remaining islands there.
"The Brizans were foolish - too trusting - and their night watch was minimal. We took every sentinel out with fire before they had a chance to raise the alarm, so we were able to dock on the beach to the west of Larielle without attracting any attention. We were armed lightly, but effectively. Heavy, clattering weapons had been avoided, since the operation was entirely dependent on stealth. If we lost the element of surprise we'd be done for. We even wrapped cloth around our shoes to muffle the sound when we moved.
"We knew we were safe though: we had General LeMarc at our head, plus four Protectors. They were young and strong, with hair the colour of blood and dark, dangerous eyes: Lane, the King's son-in-law; Byron, the eldest and wisest; Leander, the strongest of the four and his partner, Beline. The mere sight of them sent the first few guards running for cover - they reached the Queen's bed-chamber without producing a single ember.
"But, of course, I wasn't there myself, so I don't know whether that's true or just gossip. But it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they managed it. The power, it seemed to radiate from them; an aura sent by the Fire God himself. The rest of us - the ordinary soldiers - were spread across the city, to quell any resistance which might arise when the Brizans awoke and discovered what had happened.
"I was stationed outside the main temple, in the centre of the city, in sight of the palace itself. We slaughtered the priests inside as they slept, to stop the Brizans from gathering at the temple for sanctuary. General LeMarc had been quite particular about us doing this while they slept, so that they didn't get the chance to pray. It seemed overly cautious to me, since everyone knows that their Water God does not exist. Their prayers could not have done any harm.
"We took possession of the city with ease. Once her guards had been executed, the Queen, Aurelia, surrendered without a fuss - she knew she was no match for four Protectors in their prime. Her own Protectors were also subdued without trouble. Some - the ones who put up the most resistance - were killed, but we left most of them alive, as a gesture of goodwill. So long as the Brizans were willing to adopt Helian customs and faith, we didn't feel the need to massacre all of them. At daybreak, they awoke to discover that their entire lives had been torn apart overnight. The Queen was escorted out onto the main balcony as General LeMarc delivered his Declaration of Occupation.
"Queen Aurelia was the most beautiful person I have ever been blessed enough to lay eyes on. Her hair was long and sleek, hanging down past her shoulders, and it sparkled as if woven from pure gold. Her eyes, too, were bewitchingly beautiful, a turbulent blue to rival the sea itself, and her skin was alabaster and smooth, like marble. She moved with delicate, fluid motions, like water - all Brizans do to an extent but she, somehow, displayed even more grace than the others. At first, I think even General LeMarc was intoxicated by her and he was married with a baby on the way.
"But then she spat in his face, right between his eyes. He hit her so hard in response that I thought her porcelain skin might shatter. They took her back inside after that, keeping her under close observation. I don't think anyone outside of the palace saw her again until after the Occupation was over."
"How did it end?" I interjected. The Occupation had lasted for eleven months and I didn't fancy listening to every day's events in minute detail.
The doctor looked thoughtful for a moment and then shook his head. "I'm not entirely sure. Something went wrong - horribly wrong. Emmanuel, the Queen's commander and the head Protector for the Realm, managed to overpower General LeMarc and doused our Protectors with enough water to prevent them from using their flames. Lane, Byron and Beline gave up easily enough, but Leander kept fighting. He thought he could overpower them with his strength, but the Brizans must have been planning their resistance for months - there were too many of them and he was killed.
"We lost over half of our troops in the resulting battle. I was one of the lucky ones. I made it back to the ships ahead of the riot and we set sail straight away, not giving the Brizans a chance to catch us up. It was heart breaking to see the Helians who didn't make it back in time, stranded on the shore, waving at us desperately in the hope that we'd come back... They were swallowed quickly by the crowd. I can't even consider what must have happened to them.
"General LeMarc and the three remaining Protectors were kept under close watch in the castle and we heard nothing more from them for a few months - most of us gave up hope and presumed that they must be dead by now. King Nero even went as far as organising state funerals for his sons-in-laws, Emmerich and Lane. His daughters were distraught - both had young children who were now fatherless and even the lineage of the throne came into question: everyone had presumed that the crown would go to LeMarc after the King's death, but with him presumed dead, and his only child an unmarried girl, it looked like the absolute power would pass out of the direct line of decent. General LeMarc's wife, the Princess Seraphina, was devastated.
"But, by some miracle, all four made it back alive. To this day, no one quite knows the finer details of their escape, but it is presumed that they had inside help - how else could they have got past twenty three guards and two Protectors?"
How indeed. My father's escape had always bothered me, but he refused, point blank, to speak about it to anyone, including my mother. I think this was probably the source of the simmering tension that had existed between them for as long as I could remember. I have heard that they were blissfully happy when they first married, but I don't think I've ever seen them so much as smile at each other when in private. They have a public front, which they put up whenever we have guests, pretending to be happy and in love, but as soon as the house is clear of visitors they go to their rooms on opposite sides of the house and refuse to speak to each other.
I looked over at Vincent, who was staring at the old man in admiration. He was obviously impressed by the story. Even though he had already read every book written on the war, and knew its ins and outs back to front, he still got some strange kick hearing the story all over again. He clearly wasn't going to be regaining the power of speech without first being prompted, so I decided to take control.
"Well thank you very much for telling us such an insightful story, Dr Scott." I stood up and met Vincent's eyes pointedly. "But we really must be leaving now." Vincent glared sulkily but stood up as well.
"Amazing, absolutely amazing," he gushed, shaking Dr Scott's hand vigorously.
We left the house quickly, but not before I'd had the chance to scoop my fire back up and extinguish it. Back at the bike I smiled. "Well that was... interesting."
"You did well," Vincent managed to say after a few seconds of silence. "Better than I expected actually. I think you are ready for your graduation."
My eyes glowed with excitement at the words I had been longing to hear for the last three months.
"When?"
"Oh... how does the day after tomorrow sound?"
"Seriously?"
Vincent laughed, "Yes, seriously. You're ready - there's nothing else I can teach you. It's time to re-join the real world."