A Weaver's Heart: The King's Weaver Book 2 (Ebook)

When my mother betrothed me against my will, I never expected to find love.

I never expected to love him.

He's my king, and I'm his weaver, and we're taking our kingdom into a better future.

But weavers are going missing on the borders, and our enemies haven't been quiet.

This time, their target is me.

And this time, my life isn't just mine or his but our future child's, too.

Now, with the Harvest Feast approaching, and my mother descending to renew her alliance with Barella, I'll need all of my willpower.

Because we braved the vortex side by side, but now we'll have to face the storm trying to drive us apart. 

A Weaver's Heart is the sequel to The King's Weaver, with a genderfluid MC and her/his bi (not so tyrant) king, a trans pregnancy, an overbearing mother, a kingdom in peril, a best friend with a new crush, and all the willpower magic. 

Five Months Later

My hands aren’t shaking, but only because I’m willing them not to.

It’s morning in the Great Hall, sunlight streaming in through the high windows, casting some of the courtiers and dignitaries in shadows, some in pockets of floating light.

And it’s hard to stand in the Great Hall today, this place that’s always been a part of my home, and not see potential enemies everywhere.

In the nobles milling about in small clusters, sharing the latest court gossip or excitedly talking about the seven nights of the Harvest Festival to come.

And in the dignitaries from neighboring kingdoms, too, in their gowns or their waistcoats or their frills—or in their simple finery, too, according to their own customs. A sea of faces and nationalities and friends and possibly foes.

All of their voices combine to make a happy roar that echoes to the vaulted ceiling.

We hold the Harvest Festival every year in Barella. It’s a time when all of our allies, our neutral neighbors, and some of our enemies converge to form new alliances, new trade deals, and shore up existing treaties. It’s a time when Barellan nobility come to renew or form their own alliances, too, which will last throughout the year. As king, I’ll ask the gods’ blessing on our kingdom’s harvest and on our next year.

It’s when the whole of us can see each other as people and not just the interests we represent.

This will be my first Harvest Festival as king. Last year, my father died shortly after the harvest.

And I’m clasping my hands in front of me tightly to contain my nerves.

Not at the festival itself—that would be normal, that would be easy and expected of me as a king still new to the throne.

I carefully don’t think about the letters tucked into a hidden compartment in one of the meeting rooms nearby—one Caleb seldom goes in. Locked into a small box, with the only key around my neck, tucked inside my shirt.

One letter I received this morning. One the morning before that, and one the day before. And the feel of those letters still numbs the tips of my fingers.

I know the nobleman talking to me just now, Lord Navirat, a Council member, is saying something I should be hearing. Everything is important when you’re the king. Ever more so when you’re the king of a kingdom you’re trying to change for the better.

But I look up at my husband across the hall, who’s standing in a gray and gold embroidered coat and burgundy trousers, his light-brown hair neatly pulled back, his spectacles slightly askew. He stands at the center of his three apprentices, his hands raised and gracefully plucking on the threads of reality around him. A small crowd of onlookers has gathered to watch, though most have given Caleb and his apprentices a wider circle in which to work.

I can see those threads he’s weaving now, pulled lazily from the air around him, winding their way into the illusion of a large white rose.

Caleb stands back, his whole posture satisfied.

“There. You see? Not so hard. It’s all in the—“

Someone closer to me calls to a friend across the hall, and I catch my breath. I’m not there with Caleb, I’m here. I’m here, supposed to be listening to a Council lord, not watching my husband. Not with my husband.

But I look back to Caleb and watch as his three apprentice weavers raise their hands to try the same, darting looks around them at the watching crowds. They’re not used to an audience, and Caleb insisted their last practice before their display at the first feast of the Harvest Festival be here, to help them know what they’re getting into.

He’s not always a patient teacher—that I know. He has too much life in him sometimes to slow down enough for anyone to catch up. But he is a good teacher. He can pull apart concepts so they’re easy to grasp. He guides, and he doesn’t criticize.

Caleb moves around one of his apprentices to point up at the illusion the apprentice is weaving.

And he looks up across the room, his eyes meeting mine. He smiles, but it falters.

And what is showing on my face?

Can he hear the racing of my heart from here? I know he can’t. And still, it sounds thunderous to me.

I smile back, because he will always have all of my heart. Always.

But I turn away, back to the Council member I’ve been talking to. Or trying to listen to. Or…not trying.

“—why I’m recommending that we send a troop to the border with Akreal to find out what’s actually going on.”

My attention sharpens. Akreal.

It’s a large kingdom that shares a small stretch of border with Barella to the north.

The kingdom I’m almost certain my mother fled to after she escaped the palace dungeons.

“Why should we send a troop?” I ask. “We’re not at war with Akreal.”

Yet.

But I already have an idea of what he’ll say. I’ve been tracking the rumors, that villagers near the border to Akreal have recently taken a sharp distaste to weavers.

And weavers aren’t common enough for every village to have one, but, the fervor has grown to where people are accusing their neighbors of forbidden magic.

Of the kind of dark soul weaving that Lord Nikolai Metrial used on me.

That he’s trying to use again on Caleb.

“Excuse me,” I say to Lord Navirat, because I can’t take it anymore.

I signal most of my guards to stay here, because Caleb, I think, is in more danger than I am.

If Caleb has noticed that I’ve assigned more guards to him in the last few days than is normal around a big event like this, he hasn’t said. Yet.

I’ve mostly had the guards keep their distance, not be obvious about it.

And Caleb’s not unaware, he isn’t. He does know that tensions have been building.

But he’s been so distracted lately, so busy, that I’m not going to add to his worries.

My own personal bodyguards follow me out.

And I’ll find out what happened this time on the border, I will, and maybe I will send troops. But the letter I received this morning—I have to see it again.

I push into one of the side chambers off the main corridor, and my guards, at my signal, stay outside.

I shut and lock the door, and for a moment fight the boyish urge to lean against it, to block out the entire world.

But though the crowds gathering in the palace for the festival have been taxing, the threat…the threat is in this room.

I look around, then gather a breath and look with my weaver’s senses.

The meeting room has a normal amount of reality. As they all have since Nikolai was arrested. Since my mother fled.

But Nikolai isn’t in our palace dungeon anymore. And he isn’t dead. Much as I’d wish it on the man who murdered my father.

No, this room is normal. And I don’t sense the reality of anyone else in it.

Should I have waved my guards back so quickly?

What if I had been wrong that the only threat here is in the letters?

The autumn sunlight from the arched windows is less hallowed than in the Great Hall, more immediate in this room.

I stride to the wall to my left and press gently on one of the carved panels of wood set between plates of swirling green and gold wallpaper. The panel sticks a little, but I slide it upward carefully, just enough to reach inside the hollow and pull out the box with the letters.

My fingers hum again as I touch it. Even not touching the letters themselves yet, my fingertips buzz with the unreality within.

I pull the key from my shirt and angle the box so I can unlock it. Then I slide open the box’s lid, and shake the letters into my hands. I’ve folded them to fit in the box, and I’ve opened them when they arrived, but I haven’t dared do anything more than read them and inspect them with every weaver’s sense I can bring to bear.

I pull out the letter I received today, and let the others drop back into the box. The letter feels to my senses like it doesn’t exist, like it shouldn’t, like it was never made. Like no one has ever held it.

An unreality weaving. I can sense the threads that I still can’t see, or rather, the lack of those threads. It’s a numbness, an absence in my senses. A heavy sense of wrong.

The only other time I felt anything like this before was in my father’s bedchamber. The room where he died.

And later, as Caleb was teaching me, in my mother’s bedchamber. Which was the lesser of the two traumas. Maybe.

I carefully unfold the plain parchment, the black ink smudged as if it was written in haste. But this letter wasn’t prepared in haste, a weaving like that couldn’t have been done without thought.

There are eight words on the paper, scrawled in a cramped hand.

I don’t know if it’s Nikolai’s hand, but I don’t assume.

I can’t afford to think he’s working alone.

He wasn’t before.

“I will kill him if you tell him,” the letter says.

That’s it.

The same message as the day before.

And the day before that.

I stare at the words as if staring can make them tell me more. Tell me what the danger is, exactly, to show me how I can unravel it. I can’t feel anything more on these letters than the unreality—I can’t feel beneath it, like Caleb could.

And that’s the point. These letters are a taunt. Caleb could unravel this puzzle, but if I tell him…

I don’t think they’re an absent threat.

I fold the letter again and tuck it back into the box, tap the box lid shut, shove it back into the wall panel, and slam the panel back down into place.

I never needed to ask who “he” is—Nikolai knew Caleb as Caleb, mostly, not Irava, too. Caleb is who Nikolai hated. First with jealously when Caleb saved his life from a careless weaving when they were court mage candidates, and then…because Caleb stood in his way.

His way to controlling me.

Caleb stopped him, it was Caleb who stood between me and Nikolai’s mind control magic.

It was Irava who finally subdued him, yes. But, he only saw her for minutes, not the weeks before.

“I will kill him if you tell him.”

No more demands than that. Just a threat.

I allow myself a moment to shudder. Then draw myself up, because I have to go on.

And I can’t stop the Harvest Festival now. Too many people have been traveling to Barella for days. Many have already arrived, some will be arriving this afternoon, before the Harvest Festival officially starts this evening.

I have to tell Caleb of the danger.

Caleb is the most powerful mage in this palace—in this kingdom. He can defend himself, and I have my guards around him. I know that.

Surely he could defuse whatever traps Nikolai laid for him in those letters.

And I should be near him, too. I’m not the master weaver he is, not for a long time yet, I think. But he’s been teaching me for months now. I’m a weapon in my kingdom, too.

But, if I tell him…

If there’s even a chance Nikolai can back up that threat.

Oh gods of the autumn rains, I can’t tell him.

I swallow, and stride back out into the corridor. There isn’t a Council session today, not when everyone is concentrating on the Harvest Festival, but I tell my guards, “Get Valtair. Send runners to the Council in the palace—we meet in a half turn of the glass.”

I hesitate, then call after the guard turning away, “Tell Valtair to get Caleb.”

At least, near me, away from the crowds, he’ll be safer, won’t he?

I used to love the Harvest Festival. But now I can’t ignore my rising dread.