The Queen's Mage

Allandra had learned to distrust warm water.

This was inconvenient, because warm water had once been one of the few harmless pleasures left to her.

There were not many. Sleep, when it came. Everly’s curls under her hand when she bent to kiss her goodnight. Strong tea before dawn. Sword practice before council, when the palace still smelled of stone and sea mist instead of petitions. The rare hour in the bath after a day spent being queen, when no one needed her mouth, her signature, her judgment, her restraint.

Now even that had become suspect.

The bathing chamber was quiet except for the soft fall of water from the copper spout and the gentle scrape of Irian’s comb through Allandra’s hair.

Irian was Lessa’s niece, a capable young maid with careful hands and the professional discretion of a girl terrified of dropping a royal hairpin. She stood behind the bath with her sleeves rolled, working oil through Allandra’s hair in slow, methodical strokes.

“You may pull harder,” Allandra said.

Irian’s hands froze. “Majesty?”

“My hair will survive.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

The girl resumed, still far too gently.

Allandra closed her eyes.

The bath was deep, tiled in blue and gold, the water scented faintly with lavender and bitter orange. Steam softened the arched windows, turning the dark glass silver. Beyond them, Myrae had gone to sleep in layers: palace lamps, garden lanterns, the lower city’s scattered fires, the harbor’s distant glimmer.

Allandra tried to breathe with the water.

In.

Out.

Lia had told her to ground through the body when the Heat rose. Not deny it. Not fight it into some dark corner where it could gather force. Name it. Breathe. Cool the magic. Open the hands. Ask the bond for quiet instead of trying to crush it.

Allandra had tried.

The old magic found these efforts educational.

Not effective.

Educational.

She let her shoulders sink beneath the water and reinforced the privacy work around the bond.

A glass window with shutters. Not a siege.

A boundary that could open and close.

Allandra could make the glass. She could picture it clearly now: tall green-gold panes, cool beneath her palms, the warmth of the bond visible beyond them without being allowed to flood every room inside her.

But when the Heat rose, her instincts did not want glass doors.

They wanted battlements.

She was Sun Fae. She was queen. She bore the Mantle of Avalusia, and the Mantle did not understand wanting as a private matter. It understood claim, protection, oath, territory, threat. It had been made by rulers and for rulers, old solar magic folded through bloodline and law until every strong feeling in Allandra became a thing with edges.

Desire did not simply warm her.

It gathered light.

It looked for something to command.

Serali had her own share of the Heat. Lia had confirmed that too. But the pressure was worse in Allandra, and Allandra could feel the terrible unfairness of that like a second pulse. Serali was newly freed from iron, newly learning the bond without that old dampening. She felt the pull, yes. Felt curiosity, want, fear, irritation, warmth.

Allandra felt all of that through the Mantle’s old hunger to answer.

To reach.

To shield.

To take the room and make it safe by making it hers.

She hated that.

She hated more that wanting Serali made it harder to hate.

Irian cupped warm water over her scalp.

Allandra exhaled.

Do not think of her.

Useless instruction.

The mind, like a badly governed council, often took prohibition as agenda.

Serali came anyway.

Serali in council that morning, one hand resting near her sleeve cuff while Merrow attempted to make “foreign advisory scope” sound like a disease. Serali looking bored instead of wounded, which was either progress or a more elegant weapon.

Serali beside Marielle two days earlier, studying the north wall diagrams with her head tilted, saying, “If your stones are sulking, they are doing so with remarkable discipline,” and making Marielle look briefly as if she had found a second religion.

Serali at dinner, Everly asleep against her arm, frozen with bewildered tenderness while pretending she was not.

Serali in smoke-blue wool, not yet one of Callenne’s gowns, but already enough to make the room look as if it had been waiting for her to enter it.

Serali touching her cuff beneath the council table.

Still here.

Allandra’s fingers curled against the edge of the bath.

The Heat moved.

Not sharply at first.

A pressure under the ribs. A brightening beneath the skin. The bond answering a thought before Allandra could turn it away.

She reached for the glass doors.

They held for half a breath.

Then the Mantle pressed behind them.

Not now, Allandra thought.

The bathwater warmed.

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Allandra felt it too late.

Behind her, Irian yelped and snatched both hands from the water.

Allandra’s eyes flew open.

Steam thickened at once, rising in a sudden white cloud. Heat rushed over her skin, sharp and immediate, the comfortable bath turning scalding at the edges of tolerable.

Irian stumbled back, clutching her hands to her chest. “Majesty—”

Allandra stood so quickly water sloshed over the tiled rim.

“Irian.”

The girl’s face had gone pale.

Allandra reached for a towel, every instinct in her turning toward damage. “Show me your hands.”

“I’m fine, Majesty.”

“Show me.”

Irian obeyed.

Her hands were red across the fingers and palms, but not blistered.

Not yet.

Thank the gods.

Allandra’s stomach dropped anyway.

“I am sorry,” she said.

The words came too fast. Too raw.

Irian blinked, startled more by the apology than the heat. “Majesty, it was only—”

“It was not only anything.”

Allandra stepped out of the bath, wrapped the towel around herself, and took the girl’s hands carefully. Her own skin was flushed from the water, but Irian’s fingers trembled.

“Go to Lia. Tell her I sent you. She will cool them properly.”

“Majesty, I can finish—”

“No.”

The word cracked harder than she meant it to.

Irian flinched.

Allandra forced herself to soften her voice. “No. You will go to Lia now. That is an order for your care, not your dismissal.”

The distinction mattered.

She hated that she had to make it after frightening the girl.

Irian swallowed. “Yes, Majesty.”

“And Irian.”

The maid paused at the door, hands held awkwardly before her.

“You did nothing wrong.”

The girl looked as if she might cry from sheer confusion.

“Yes, Majesty.”

She left.

The door closed.

Allandra stood alone in the bathing chamber, water dripping from her hair onto her shoulders, steam gathering thick around the ceiling, the bath still too hot behind her.

For one moment, she did nothing.

Then she gripped the edge of the basin so hard her fingers ached.

“No.”

The word fell into steam and vanished.

No.

Not a servant. Not a girl doing her work. Not collateral damage from Allandra’s inability to keep body, magic, and old-fae desire sorted into their proper rooms.

She crossed to the brass shower pipe set into the far wall and turned the cold valve hard.

Water crashed down.

Allandra stepped beneath it.

The shock stole her breath.

Good.

She set both hands against the tile, bowed her head, and let cold water pound over her hair, her shoulders, her back, the place beneath her ribs where the bond had begun to glow like banked embers.

The Heat fought back.

Not consciously. Not like an enemy. Worse: like weather, as Lia insisted. Like pressure. Like a summer storm thickening no matter how often one scolded the clouds.

Weather could still burn.

Allandra strengthened the glass doors.

Carefully.

Not with force. Force made the bond push back. She had learned that after three nights of lying awake with Serali’s restlessness flickering at the edge of her awareness like a candle behind dark glass.

Shutters hid.

Glass doors allowed choice.

She repeated it until the words became almost useful.

Serali would not feel this.

Not the scalding water. Not Irian’s yelp. Not the shame that had followed so quickly it might as well have been part of the same spell. Not the desire that had caused it. Not the fear beneath the desire, old and sour and increasingly difficult to contain.

She would not make this Serali’s burden.

Cold water streamed over her face.

Allandra stayed beneath it until her teeth began to chatter.

Still, under the cold, the Heat remained.

Less violent now. Contained.

But not gone.

Never gone.

How much longer?

The question had begun to follow her everywhere.

How much longer could she sit in council while Serali spoke and not feel the bond pull each word into her blood?

How much longer could she touch her signet and pretend the signal was only strategy?

How much longer could she watch Serali learn the shape of her office, her rooms, her place at Everly’s table, and not want to say mine in every language old magic had ever invented?

Her reflection wavered in the polished copper panel across the room: wet hair darkened to gold-brown, face pale beneath the flush, green eyes too bright, shoulders braced as if against a blow.

Queen.

Mother.

Widow.

Mate.

Danger.

She hated that last word most because she could not dismiss it.

The heat did not remove choice. Lia had said that, and Allandra believed her. It did not excuse, command, or absolve. It did not make Allandra helpless.

But power did not require helplessness to harm.

A queen’s lapse had consequences. A queen’s desire had witnesses. A queen’s magic could turn bathwater too hot under a servant’s hands because she remembered the way Serali had looked at her before leaving the room.

Allandra shut the water off.

The silence afterward rang.

She dressed without calling another maid.

It took longer. Her hair remained damp and half-tangled. The fastenings at her back were awkward enough to make her curse under her breath twice. Good. Let inconvenience have its use. Let the absence of hands remind her why Irian’s must not shake.

By the time Allandra reached her office, the Heat had settled into a low, dangerous glow.

Reports waited on the desk.

Harrek on lower-district rumors.

Verya on foreign correspondence procedure.

Yvander on dormant office expenditures, with three underlined questions about whether Royal Mage stationery counted as administrative or magical supply.

Marielle’s note began with Before anyone panics, which meant it should be read only after an entire pot of tea.

Allandra ignored all of it.

She took out a sheet of paper and wrote Lia’s name.

Then stopped.

The pen hovered.

She could write: Irian’s hands were reddened. Please examine.

No. Irian would already be there.

She could write: The Heat affected the bathwater.

Too clinical.

She could write: I lost control.

Too dramatic. Lia would object to the inaccuracy while missing, on purpose, the point.

Allandra closed her eyes.

Then wrote:

Irian’s hands reddened after bathwater overheated. No visible blistering when she left me. Please treat and send word.

I need further instruction on regulation.

A pause.

Then, because honesty was a door she disliked almost as much as deception, she added:

I will tell Serali. Not tonight.

She stared at the final line.

Coward.

Allandra dipped the pen again.

Not tonight, she crossed out.

She rewrote it beneath.

Soon.

Worse.

Still cowardice, but with better posture.

She crossed that out too.

The third version took longer.

I will tell Serali before this becomes another thing I decided for her.

Allandra sat back.

There.

Unpleasant.

Useful.

Probably Lia would still find a way to be displeased.

Good.

Allandra sanded the ink, folded the note, and sealed it.

Then she sat in the quiet office with damp hair cooling against her neck and the Mantle humming under her skin like sunlight trapped behind glass.

Outside, somewhere in the residence wing, Serali was likely reading wall diagrams, insulting Marielle’s handwriting, or pretending not to keep Everly’s place card near her desk.

Allandra did not reach for the bond.

She did not.

She let the glass doors stand.

Visible.

Closed.

Openable.

Then she rang for a page.