Page 132 of Artemysia
“I have a feeling it’syouwho’s complicated.”
Again, spot on. I won’t admit out loud that he’s right, but I’m curious how he judges loyalty. “How can I be loyal if I agreed to spend the night with you?”
“You were willing to risk it all to save him. To do it all yourself. Ijust saw you take down a rabid Syf. You didn’t let go when he bit you. I’m sure you could throw me out of this tower window before my pants came off, if it came to that.”
“Before you could unhook that ridiculously fancy buckle at your waist.”
His grin widens and reaches his eyes this time, replacing the coldness he usually displays by default. “It’s part of the royal heirlooms. We don’t have the gold and silver that South Kingdom has in their mountain border. What we do have, we melt into stupidly heavy trinkets. Like this buckle.”
“Heavy trinkets should not be mistaken for strength. Though your legs must work hard to carry such a thing around the manor.”
“You’re right on both points,” he agrees. He swings open his office door. “So you’ll help me?”
“I’m going to need a lot more information.”
“There’s proof of everything on my desk.”
He ushers me into his office, which resembles more of a library, with books lining the high walls from floor to ceiling. A ladder slides along rails, offering access to the highest shelves. Strange mechanical gadgets and contraptions tick away discordantly around the room, some disassembled as if tinkered with.
“Have a seat.” He pulls out a chair from behind a massive desk.
As I settle in, the prince creaks open a heavy chest next to me, revealing scrolls of maps and old documents. Unraveling one of the larger scrolls across the desk, he weighs down the corners with books before pulling over a wooden stool to sit beside me.
“Most of your subjects don’t know that the rest of the world is Syf?” I ask, absently poking at a half-assembled pendulum clock.
“Of course not. You can imagine the disbelief and ensuing hysterics.”
Still skeptical, I ask, “How long have you known this?”
“Twenty-five years ago, my father caught a Syf spy in his court, collecting old maps and books. Forgotten world history that Syf had been stealing for centuries. We caught him with this, the last of it. It turns out all these records showed what was beyond our peninsula.”
Toryl taps on a landmass shaped like a fish jumping out of water on the map. North Kingdom is the fish’s head, while South Kingdomis the narrow valley near the tail end. Artemysia runs between the two kingdoms, across the widest section between the two human kingdoms.
He goes on. “No ship we’ve ever built has overcome the tides and storms that push us back to shore. South Kingdom is bordered by impassable mountains to the south. How did we end up trapped here?”
He swipes at the peninsula’s fishtail, the mountainous region. “What is on the mainland? Syf magic must prevent us from going where they don’t want us. Even crossing the forest has been impossible for centuries.” He taps the belly of the fish, indicating Artemysia, across the middle of the peninsula.
I never stopped to wonder what was beyond our lands. It’s widely accepted that our fertile agricultural lands are enough to sustain us, and we have no recorded history of sea-faring activities. But why didn’t anyone question what else was out there? Perhaps for my generation, we were too busy fending off Syf.
But what about before that?
Were we always unsuccessful in leaving our peninsula?
“My father spent the next few years experimenting with ways to weaken Syf, as a defense against their control of human knowledge and progress. They keep us in the dark, so we are unable to expand,” he says bitterly. “From what we know, the Syf have been successful in South Kingdom, containing their growth. Part of my father’s long-term plan is to invade the South for their precious metals in the mountains…”
I’m listening with open-mouthed shock, trying to absorb this knowledge. King Foss said Artemysians “preserve” human life. What is the truth? Who is lying? Will North Kingdom invade South Kingdom? Stargazer needs to know of this threat immediately, for the safety of our people.
Toryl flips pages of old, handwritten books describing Syf lands around the world. He shows me what few modern people know.
The only mention of human society references the inhabitants to the north and south of Artemysia. Artemysians were deemed the keepers of mankind, tasked with containing humans to the peninsula, preventing them from expanding and leaving the area.
What shocks me is how tiny our peninsula is compared to theother landmasses on the map.
He jabs a finger on several large land forms, continents I never knew existed. “We need to prepare ourselves to fight back against the Syf, or mankind will forever be under their control, like zoo animals.”
Zoo animals. Topreservehumans.
A human preservation. Is that all we are?
