1
In Which Tala Falls Down a Mountain
On a bright spring morning in Avalon, Tala Makiling Warnock stood at the peak of the kingdom’s tallest and most terribly cursed mountain and prepared herself to fall off it.
It was much more difficult than it sounded.
Simeli Mountain had a reputation long before Avalon had succumbed to the frost. Every two weeks since Alexei Tsarevich, the seventy-fifth king of Avalon, had established a working government, a retrieval crew swept through the mountain’s base, searching for ducks that barked instead of quacked or geese that cried instead of squawked. Simeli was a popular attraction for parkour aficionados, ninja warrior wannabes, and people who were certain that the high of a spell-induced adrenaline rush trumped the risks of transforming into temporary magical poultry. Social media was rife with videos of disgruntled-looking ducks and foul-squawking geese taken by their disrespectful so-called friends, so reputations were at stake. Mountaineers and climbing enthusiasts avoided the place entirely.
Climbing Simeli was easy enough. Paths had been carefully carved into the mountainside by terrain engineers and forest ecologists. The more impatient could opt for a forty-five-minute ride in spelltech-powered cable cars to carry them to the annex.
The trick wasn’t in the ascent but in the drop.
More specifically, a thirty-thousand-foot drop.
Even more specifically, an obstacle course built into the thirty-thousand-foot drop.
People called it the Simeli gauntlet. It was called the lemming challenge among the locals who knew better.
“Friends don’t let friends fall down Simeli on their own,” Kensington Inoue informed her loftily, as if he’d been jumping off the mountain his whole life instead of starting a couple of months ago, shortly after Alex’s official coronation. The boy had made it look so easy. Everyone but Tala had completed the route. The failure rankled her.
It didn’t matter that she’d lived all her life in Invierno, where nothing ever happened and the closest she’d ever gotten to a proper adventure was arnis sparring sessions with her father.
It didn’t matter that her friends had undergone grueling physical training for years in comparison. It didn’t matter that the others had trained to join the Order of the Bandersnatch and serve as King Alex’s honor guards by the time they could walk. Loki had given her a crash course in parkour, and she’d proven a quick learner but was nowhere near the same league as the others. Her mother had been training her to dispel wards and defensive spells too, but the magic in Simeli was so expansive that not even Lumina Makiling at her strongest could override it.
Tala was now an official member of the Order of the Bandersnatch just like the others, but some days, she still felt like she wasn’t good enough.
All the other Banders had successfully completed the Simeli gauntlet—Ken and Loki and West and even Nya, though the latter had lived most of her life in an isolated village and had never even been on a mountain before. Lola Urduja and the Katipuneros had finished it so many times they could do it in their sleep despite their advanced ages. Running Simeli had been a favorite pastime in their youth, long before the Snow Queen had blanketed Avalon in frost and sent Alex, Tala’s family, and countless other Avalonian refugees into exile.
No. That wasn’t right. It was Alex who had, in an ironic twist, caused the frost, to prevent the Snow Queen from causing more damage to his kingdom. And he’d done it using the Nine Maidens, a massive monument of a spelltech so incredibly powerful it had taken twelve years to find their off switch.
“It’s been a while since we’ve been gallivanting around like this,” Tita Baby said, sounding far too excited to jump off a mountain when she’d complained about her rheumatism only the day before.
“Yes,” Tala echoed, staring down at the sheer vertical drop.
“Took eighteen tries for me, you know.” Tita Baby said cheerfully. “It was then I learned I needed glasses pala.”
“Twenty times for me,” Tita Teejay sighed. She pursed her lips, using them to point in Tita Chedeng’s direction. “She made it in only thirteen.”
“Twelve,” Tito Boy signed.
“Punyeta,” General Luna swore, although Tita Chedeng assured Tala he actually meant fourteen.
“Took me a sixth try to get it right,” Ken admitted. “What about you, Loki?”
“Three.”
“Show-off.”
It had not occurred to Tala to count, but she knew she was well into the late twenties at this point.
“Took me six tries too,” Nya commented, her curly hair whipping around her as she stared over the edge.
“Bet I can finish this round faster than you can, Rapunzel.” Ken had a glint in his eye, as he always did whenever he was in the mood for playful pestering. Ken had pulled off his infamous Yawarakai-Te prank on the Ikpean girl only the week before—pretending to lop his leg off with the sword, knowing full well
that the blade could only cut the nonliving—and had received a punch for his efforts while in midswing. His left eye still looked a little swollen. As far as Tala could tell, he’d had the world’s worst crush on Nya ever since.
Nya raised a questioning eyebrow. “What do I get for winning?”
“Dinner at your favorite restaurant, my treat.”
“And what happens if I lose?”
“Dinner at your favorite restaurant, my treat.”
“What’s the difference, then?”
“My level of smugness.”
Nya’s lips quirked up. “You’re impossible.”
“What’s impossible is you beating me, so be prepared for me to be absolutely insufferable at—”
Nya calmly stepped off the cliff with the same ease she might have had strolling through a park. Suspended in air for a few brief seconds, she only had time to flash Ken a bright grin and flip him the bird before gravity took control, and she was soon lost amid the rising mist.
“Is that a yes?” Ken yelled down, cupping his hands as if she could hear him better that way. “Should I take that as a yes?”
“Smooth,” West complimented him.
“No, it wasn’t,” said Loki, who took things unironically.
Ken shot them a wide grin. “She likes me,” he said happily before he, too, was jumping.
“We’re wasting time,” Lola Urduja said crisply. A flock of birds tried to sweep past, but all it took was a glare from the old woman for them to change course, breaking their vee formation to carefully swoop around her instead. “Shall we wait until we run out of decent air, or shall we begin?”
West bowed to her, then obediently pitched himself forward. The other Katipuneros followed suit, tottering briefly into the space where rock met air before toppling out of view. Though frail-looking on solid ground, the elders dove down swiftly with surprising grace, twisting effortlessly to avoid the incoming rush of wind.
“Are you gonna be okay?” Loki asked.
There was an obstacle course built inside the Simeli visitors’ center, a rudimentary facsimile of the lemming challenge, and Tala had trained there constantly under Loki’s watchful eye. But even without the added practice, she’d gone through the drop enough times to know that she was more than capable of the physical aspects of the course. The problem was that there was more to the Simeli gauntlet than just strength and agility.
“I’m good,” she said. Loki was officially joining the Fifth Honor as a cadet that day, and she couldn’t be prouder of them. Unfortunately, that meant they wouldn’t be around as much to help her practice. Which meant she would have to look to someone else for further instruction.
Like her father.
And she wasn’t ready for that just yet.
“I’ll meet you at the bottom, then.” Reassured, Loki flashed her an impish grin as they spread their arms out on either side and let themselves fall backward off the peak.
As Ken had said, show-off.
“You go ahead, hija,” Lola Urduja said. She always insisted on being the last one off, to be in a better position to spot and head off accidents.
Tala suspected she was the reason for the elder’s precautions. “Right,” she said, taking a deep breath. She stared down at the fog coalescing below her like a hazy blanket. I’m going to beat you today, she thought, trying to psych herself into believing exactly that, and jumped.
The first obstacle was the four winds themselves. North, east, south, and west were at constant war with one another, and the result was a vertical labyrinth where you had to spin and twist to keep from slamming hard into gusts that blew in all directions, using trajectory and your own momentum to springboard your way through. Tala could see airflow from the north wind rising up to greet her and flung herself to the right.
She avoided the eastern wind that would have slammed her into the mountainside and clung tightly to the southern gale instead, the only one pushing her in the direction she wanted to go. Riding the south had its own dangers; to prevent fatal mishaps, a sturdy net was stretched underneath all that magicked space.
Tala kept her eyes peeled for the telltale glitter of spells that marked the second part of the course. They were easy enough to miss and then easy enough to dismiss even if you didn’t. There were eleven steps total, suspended in thin air and spaced five feet apart. They were called swanshirts after Avalon heroine Princess Elisa’s swan-cursed brothers.
Tala let go of the southern wind and launched herself onto the first of the swanshirts. She bit back a grunt of pain as her hands came into contact with the rough, abrasive surface. Swinging her legs, Tala focused on the next nearest ledge below her, angling her body so she could swing herself down.
A densely packed whirlwind of boxed air spun a thousand feet below the eleventh and final swanshirt, and it served as a trampoline to reach the next stage. If you didn’t leap high enough, you hit a pack of dense bespelled air that you came out of sprouting feathers and a beak.
Beyond that was a jumping spider platform that required her to brace her legs against two nearly translucent walls set four feet apart, forcing her to hop forward along its length in increments while hoping she didn’t lose her balance. Tala’s arms were sore by the time she’d muscled her way through, bringing her to the last and final course, which was where she kept screwing things up.
It didn’t look like it should be difficult, which was the most frustrating part. It was a warped wall made from a dense, naturally occurring wave of wind; you had to run up the steep incline and grab at the edge to pull yourself up. From there, it was another thirty-foot fall.
Tala scal
Long, thorny brambles now encircled her from all sides. The base of Simeli Mountain was overgrown with these invasive species. They called this area the Labyrinth; most participants spent more time here than they actually did falling down the mountain.
This was the part everyone hated. People had tried cutting their way through in the hopes of a shortcut, only for the brambles to entrap and keep them immobile until Simeli staff arrived to extricate them. The admin had been very explicit about banning offenders for life; not only were the thorns from some species of endangered plant that flourished only in Avalon, the overabundance of it here meant that one would have to slash their way through at least fifty miles of thorns before any visible exit presented itself.
There were already a few chickens and ducks waddling about, eventually tottering out of view underneath the thorns. Tala’s agimat, her inherited magic-negating curse, had protected her from this fate, which was the only good thing she had going for her each time.
The internet was full of tips and tricks on how to overcome Simeli, save for this part of the gauntlet. The area was cursed to forbid anyone from revealing its secrets, lest they be hit with a forgetfulness spell.
Her friends had been particularly stubborn about not telling her. Tala could respect that. They didn’t want her to cheat. She didn’t want to cheat. She couldn’t count it as an accomplishment if she had.
Except she also maybe wanted to cheat. She’d done this over twenty times by now. She’d free-fell the required thirty thousand feet to say that she had, in fact, finished Simeli. She was literally back on the ground, for crying out loud.
But no. She had to get out of the bramble maze on her own. The only tip regarding the Labyrinth that wasn’t under a sealed indictment was that it was constantly shifting and changing, which meant any map of the place was rendered useless in a matter of minutes.
She hated escape rooms. The last time she’d been in one was three years ago, when a short-lived mystery maze had opened in Invierno. Her mother enjoyed it; she’d been the brains of the team and was extremely competitive. In contrast, her father had lolled around, cheerfully admitting he was a lazy arse and that Lumina would be better off without him getting in the way—
No. She wasn’t going to think about her father right now. According to Simeli’s hall of fame board, Lumina Warnock was the seventh-fastest person to complete the lemming challenge in recent memory. If her mother could do it, then so could she.
Tala was still at it over an hour later, five minutes past the personal time limit she’d allotted herself because she always hated making the others wait and still nowhere closer to getting out of the maze.
“I give up,” she announced resignedly.
There was a cheerful, thrumming sound behind her.
A golf cart puttered into view. It was full of geese.
Its driver, an old lady who Tala had unfortunately met several times by now, leaned out to squint at her. “Had enough, little miss?” she asked, not without sympathy.
“Yeah,” Tala mumbled, shamefaced.
“Don’t worry, dearie. You’ll do it at the next try.” The old woman said that each time, but Tala had stopped believing her after the tenth attempt. No doubt she’d said the exact same thing to all the fowl now clustered around her.
Scowling, Tala climbed into the cart. A pair of mallards scooted out of the way to give her space.
Her friends were waiting for her. A private room had been allotted for them—knowing the Avalon king had its perks—though it was early enough in the morning that there were few other people around. West was still holding up a banner he’d made that spelled Congratulations across it, like he did every time despite evidence to the contrary.
But something was different this time. Nya was twisting nervously at the sleeve of her shirt, and there was a slightly apologetic expression on Tita Chedeng’s face, like the one she’d worn when she’d offered to dog-sit for a neighbor and Sparkles had snatched Tita Baby’s freshly laundered underwear off the clothing line.
Tala hopped off the cart, and golf cart lady continued merrily on toward the medical center.
“It took you only fifteen minutes to reach the warped wall, compared to the twenty from last time,” Loki said, eyes on their watch. “This is excellent, Tala. You’re only ten seconds behind the general.”
“Talentado,” General Luna added affectionately.
“I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what she was apologizing for. That she wasn’t good enough to finish? That they had to wait so long for her in each instance?
“Don’t ever be sorry,” Nya chided.
“Walang iwanan,” Lola Urduja said.
“What does that mean?”
“That we won’t leave anyone behind. That we’re all in this together, no matter what.”
Ken mulled that over, a grin breaking over his face. “Walang iwanan. I like that.”
Tala smiled sheepishly at them and then froze. A man stood a few yards away, oversize hands stuffed down the pockets of his coat. His dark eyes watched her carefully.
It was her dad. He’d offered to move out to give Tala the space she needed to process their situation, but she’d thought even that was a step too far, a decision too hasty. Still, they barely talked at home despite her mother’s determined efforts, and it almost felt like they were living apart anyway.
No. That wasn’t accurate either. She’d been the one to refuse to talk, went out of her way not to be there when he was. She knew he didn’t like it but had honored her reasons and let her be.
Her mother had been more vocal, urging Tala to forgive him, pointing out that he was still her father no matter what. Lumina was a Filipina, and she subscribed to the view that nothing was more important than family. But Tala was petty and hurt and also someone who prized being honest with the people she loved and expected the same thing from them. She’d already gotten into several arguments with her mother about her dad. It wasn’t fair to pretend like this was just some typical problem they could resolve as a family.
Most families didn’t have immortal fathers who’d been responsible for the genocide of at least a million people. Most families didn’t have fathers who’d once been the consort of the Snow Queen before he’d grown a conscience that was several hundred years too late in the making.
“Dad.” Tala had tried to say as little of it as possible to her friends, but she knew they were aware of the ongoing tension between her and her father.
Kay Warnock’s eyes now looked tired and worn. Tall as he was, his shoulders were slightly hunched, like he would shrink himself down if the world would pay him little notice that way.
Her father took a step forward, faltered when Tala didn’t do the same, and remained where he was. “I wanted to talk to ye,” he said gruffly, his Scottish brogue more pronounced than usual. “Something’s happened.”
Tala froze. “Is Alex…?”
“No, His Majesty’s fine. But the king wants all of ye back at Maidenkeep.”
“We have a thing to do with Zoe first,” Ken said, slightly evasive. “Alex knows about it.”
Kay nodded. “He gave that a mention, aye. He’ll give ye an hour, two at best, and then you’re all to assemble at mission control. But he’ll be wanting tae talk with the Katipuneros right away, Urduja.”
The others were already peeling off their air patches, running off to grab knapsacks they’d stored in the center’s lockers for safekeeping.
“Is it bad?” Nya asked worriedly, voicing their unspoken concerns. Alex wouldn’t have sent Kay if it had been something of little consequence.
“I’d rather not say things out here in the open,” Tala’s dad said carefully. “We’ve got a looking glass on standby. Alex gave me five minutes, and I’d appreciate a little more movement on the lot of ye.”
While the others made ready, Tala stared at him. He turned and met her gaze with a steady one of his own, and it was she who had to look away.
I wanted to talk to ye. He knew she didn’t want to see him. His understanding and his quiet compassion were the only constants she’d always known about him, which was why the truth of his past had hit her like an oncoming truck.
“I know ye don’t want to, love,” he said softly, “but it’s important. I’m sorry.”
She could think of only one reason why he would seek her out now, and it had everything to do with the sword. That was a secret only they knew and shared, and it tied them together in ways that neither wanted.
And Tala didn’t want to think about the repercussions of that either.
ed the warped wall with little effort and dropped to the ground beyond it.
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