Chapter Text
whetstone, noun
1. a stone for sharpening cutlery or tools by friction
2. anything that sharpens:
a whetstone for dull wits
The queen’s death is one of his first memories.
He’d been two and a half when the queen died, and his memories of her death are like a blurred reel of senses. There are frames that are his own individual memory: the scratchiness of the collar of his shirt, the old women whispering in the corner of the parlor, the black armbands that he and all his family had to wear for months.
Other frames, Ignis knows, are things he has been told so many times, and things that he has seen so many times, that they feel real to him, even if they’re not his own memories: the flowers that had flooded the entryway of the Citadel, the procession that had carved through the Crown City, the black scrim and crepe that had covered nearly every building of the city.
Ignis had already had his first tutor then—he can remember his tutor’s warm, dry hand holding his own—because he’d already been marked out as a candidate. He thinks that the Queen might’ve known about him. The queen must have known about him. She would have been invested in all the children who were being considered as companions and servants for her child.
He imagines it sometimes: the queen flipping through a portfolio, looking at the headshots of children from across Lucis; reading the carefully compiled family histories and political ties; picking out her own favorites from the candidate pool, lifting their names to the top. He imagines that she smiled when she saw his dossier, when she saw that they’d been born in the same region. He imagines that, if she’d lived, the queen would have taken an interest in him; she might have written letters to him, might have given him an allowance; she might have said, This one. I want this one for my son.
The queen died, though, so Ignis will never know what she thought of him—or if she thought of him at all.
A year later, when Ignis was three, he was taken from his family and sent to his first school. This is one of his other earliest memories: his tutor’s hand, as warm and dry as it had been the year before, when the queen had died; his parents—presumably his parents—walking outside with him, to the car that was waiting. Most of the picture is blurry and indistinct: adults speaking above him, their faces and voices smearing across his memory like wet paint dragged across paper. The car is more clear, the feel of its leather seats sticking to Ignis’s palms as he clambered inside, the new, plasticky smell of his booster seat.
His tutor’s voice is the only one he can remember with clarity; his tutor had said, “Say goodbye, Ignis,” and Ignis had done so. Then the door had been shut, and Ignis had been taken away.
x
There are twenty-seven children, including Ignis. He does’t know much about the others, other than that their ages are all within a few years of his own, and that they, just like him, have been sent to boarding schools. They are twenty-six specters that follow Ignis most every moment of every day, twenty-six faceless questions that Ignis can’t ask.
Ignis’s tutor (a woman named Merab—Tomas, Ignis’s first tutor, had left a week after Ignis had arrived at his first boarding school. Tomas had said, Say goodbye, Ignis, just like he had the week before, and Ignis had said goodbye. Then the door had been shut, and the car had carried Tomas away, just like the before—but this time Ignis hadn’t been taken with him. This time, Ignis had been left behind.) speaks of the other children—the other candidates—almost every day.
“The other children,” she says, “are far more advanced.”
“The other children,” she says, “will serve the prince far better.”
“One of the other children,” she says, “will be chosen.”
And when she tells Ignis, “You must be better than the other children,” Ignis listens.
He wonders sometimes if the other children are told the same things. He wonders, as he turns four and then five—as Merab leaves and Gabin comes, and as Gabin leaves and Alan comes—as he moves to one new school and then another, feeling like a ball thrown to bounce between the walls—if he is a specter to the other children, too.
There are twenty-six other children like him, scattered across the country. He imagines it sometimes—the country spread out like a map, and all of the candidates tossed like jacks, tumbling across Lucis; lying still, waiting to be picked up and thrown again. He thinks about the pokey spikes and the rounded spikes, about the bouncy balls, and he wonders if the other children feel like they are bouncing across Lucis like he is, picked up from one region and thrown into another. Bounce, and scatter, and wait.
He doesn’t know, though. He can’t know, because he’s not allowed to know anything about the other children. He’s not allowed to know their names or their ages or their faces—not if they have light hair or dark hair, or if they’re from one of the inner provinces or an outer region.
(He wonders if one of the dossiers he’s not allowed to touch has a child that the queen would have liked better than she would have liked him.)
“You’re doing well,” Merab tells him.
“You’re a good boy,” Gabin tells him.
“You’ve made me proud,” Alan tells him.
“Like the others?” Ignis asks hungrily. He wants to know his place, his relation—he needs to know when he will be thrown again, and if he’ll be picked back up. “Am I better than the other candidates?”
(The answer is never yes. The answer is always, “Say goodbye, Ignis,” and then the closing of a door.)
x
Ignis is good at patterns. He likes watching the world around him, seeing the actions and the reactions; he likes to observe what happens around him, to watch and to count and to understand how and why. He knows how many times a younger boy needs to be punched before he starts to cry, and he knows how many times a student can talk back before an instructor loses his temper; he knows the ins and outs of boarding school life, from the ringing of the morning bell to the shutting off of lights at night.
He can finds patterns most anywhere, but for some reason he can never find them within his own life.
He is taken from boarding school to boarding school to boarding school, staying at one school for over a year, then spending less than two months at the next. There’s no pattern to be found in it, nor is there a pattern to be found in his succession of tutors. Sometimes tutors stay for months, long enough that Ignis forgets to be cautious and begins to feel certain. Complacent. Happy. Then he’ll wake up one morning, and his tutor will be gone, taken away by a car sometime during the night. Other times, his tutors stay for only a handful of days, sweeping in and out of his life as quickly as they sweep in and out of the doors of the schools.
The pattern, if there is one, is buried too deep for Ignis to find. He tries at it for a while, throwing himself at the puzzle like a poor man at a joke of an experiment. He is obedient: he rises when he’s told, listens quietly to his instructions, fulfills all his obligations; he studies and he learns and he watches as his tutors are taken away. Other times, he rebels as much as he’s able: he throws tantrums and books, he drags his feet and his tongue, he sits and he scowls and he refuses to cry when those tutors are taken away, too.
The pattern, if there is one, is that everything in Ignis’s life is eventually taken away, most often when he least expects it.
x
Ignis wakes to his arm being shaken. When he squints, he sees that it’s Cyrus who is sitting on the edge of his bed, jostling Ignis’s arm gently. Ignis groans, then begins to rub his eyes.
“Ignis,” his tutor says in a whisper, leaning back once Ignis has sat up. The room is dark and everything sounds muffled—the snoring of one of the other boys, the rustle as someone rolls over in their sleep. Ignis blinks, struggling to keep his eyes open, and Cyrus jostles his arm again.
“Get up,” his tutor tells him quietly, not unkindly, and he helps Ignis, at least a little—hands Ignis a set of clothing, helps steady Ignis while he is slipping on his shoes. He even takes Ignis’s hand and holds it as they tiptoe from the dormitory, out into the dimly lit hallway.
“Are we going to another school?” Ignis asks when they’re descending the stairs. His tutor is carrying a suitcase in his other hand; Ignis is trailing his free hand along the banister, still feeling sleepy, like the world is a blurry, buzzy kind of fantasy place.
“No,” his tutor says, and he squeezes Ignis’s hand a little. “The Citadel has called for you.”
Ignis’s feet get stuck on the stairs, like he can’t move. He can’t—his legs feel heavy, like they do after he’s been running for the entire recess break. His brain, though, feels like it’s burning up, the world going bright and clear too fast. He’s been told, again and again, that this is what he is being prepared for: to be called to the Citadel, to live in the Crown City, to advise the prince.
He thinks of the portfolio of candidates, the other children who are living in boarding schools just like him, who have tutors just like him, and he thinks, They chose me—
His tutor has taken several more steps down, and when he turns back toward Ignis, he only has to crouch a little to meet Ignis’s eyes. Ignis isn’t good at reading Cyrus, not yet; Cyrus came just before the new year, and Ignis is still uncertain about a lot of Cyrus’s expressions. Cyrus is kind enough—not as kind as Veda had been, but certainly more patient than Alan—and he is usually willing to wait while Ignis is puzzling through a problem.
Tonight, though, he seems more impatient. Ignis thinks he might be frowning, at least a little bit—his eyes are narrowed and his eyebrows look thicker and clumpier than usual, though it all might be due to the dim lights of the stairway.
“Ignis.”
“Did they,” Ignis asks, “call for the other candidates?”
He sees Cyrus’s smile, and he understands that, at least; that’s the way his tutor smiles whenever Ignis has done something especially well. That’s the way his tutor smiles when he says, Well done, Ignis, and I’m proud of you, Ignis.
Tonight his tutor says, “No, Ignis. The Citadel only called for you.” And then, as he’s squeezing Ignis’s hand and pulling Ignis down the remaining steps: “You’ve done well, Ignis.”
There is a cluster of people waiting near the front doors of the school: the headmaster and a security guard and a pair of people—a man and a woman—Ignis doesn’t recognize. They’re all speaking together in low voices, and when Cyrus brings Ignis across the foyer, the headmaster looks toward them, saying, “No problem getting him up, then? Good, good—Cyrus, the driver will take the boy’s bag.”
The man Ignis doesn’t recognize steps forward, reaching out to take the suitcase Cyrus has been carrying; he’s presumedly the driver, and Ignis looks at him curiously, at his dark clothes and his wrinkled face and his big hands. The driver looks at Ignis for just a moment, and he smiles at him. Ignis smiles back reflexively, then tightens his grip on Cyrus’s hand.
“The honor of hosting him,” the headmaster is saying, while the other stranger, the woman, is saying, “The secretary will be in contact in the coming days. There is another boy, a little older—”
They are all moving out of the building together, the driver leading the way while carrying Ignis’s suitcase. There is a car parked on the gravel at the bottom of the steps, and it is as silent and dark as Ignis’s dormitory had been. The gravel crunches beneath their feet as they move toward the car, and the cluster begins to break apart, the headmaster and woman moving around the front of the car, the driver moving toward the back.
The headmaster doesn’t say goodbye to Ignis, or even seem to notice as Cyrus moves toward the back half of the car, taking Ignis with him. The security guard, though, walks a few steps farther with Ignis and Cyrus; he says, “Goodbye,” and Ignis twists around so that he can echo it back to him.
When Cyrus opens the back passenger-side door, Ignis obediently crawls into the car. The woman who’d been speaking with the headmaster is already sitting on the far side of the back seat, and she smiles at Ignis. Ignis hesitates, halfway between the far right seat and the middle seat, and begins to turn back toward the door.
“Cyrus,” he says, but his tutor is already shutting the door on Ignis. The windows of the car are heavily tinted, and Ignis can barely make out the figure of his tutor turning away, walking back toward the doors of the school side-by-side with the headmaster. It’s foolish—he knows it’s foolish, but he still hopes for a moment; he hopes as the driver puts Ignis’s suitcase into the trunk, then shuts the trunk with a thud; he hopes as the driver comes around the car and gets into his seat; he hopes as the driver turns the ignition, the car waking up around them. Then he stops hoping.
“Hello, Ignis,” the woman says to him. Ignis doesn’t look at her—he looks at his hands instead, watching his hands as he puts on his own seatbelt, buckling it into place.
“I’m your new tutor,” the woman—his tutor—says. “My name is Petra.”
“Hello,” Ignis says, and the woman tells the driver:
“We’re ready now.”
x
“How old are you?” the prince asks.
Ignis says, “Six, Your Highness.”
“Oh,” the prince says. “I’m four.”
Ignis bites back the desire to say, I know. When the prince adds that he is almost five, Ignis again bites the desire back.
He knows many things about the prince. He knows the prince’s age and the prince’s birthday; his favorite foods and his favorite activities; the names of his governess and his tutor and his guards. Ignis knows many things about the prince, all things that Petra told him during the long hours in the car.
“Oh,” Ignis says, as though the prince’s upcoming birthday is a surprise.
The prince looks pleased with Ignis’s response, and when Ignis looks over his shoulder, the king looks pleased, too.
“Noctis,” the king asks, “would you like Ignis to play with you?”
When Noctis pulls Ignis from the room, chattering excitedly about his train set and his mechanical dog, Ignis obediently follows.
x
“Juliette said we can play if you’re not busy.”
Noctis is standing in the doorway, still hanging onto the doorknob; the door is swinging a little, a silent, well-oiled to-and-fro in time with the way Noctis is rocking on his feet. His governess is standing behind him, one of her hands resting on his shoulder, like she is keeping him upright. She is smiling—first at Noctis, then at Ignis—as Noctis repeats himself, saying, “Ignis, we can go and play—”
When Ignis looks to his tutor, she is already rising from her chair, reaching across Ignis’s desk to close the workbooks. “If the prince has asked for your company,” she says as she stacks the workbooks in the center of the desk, “then you shouldn’t say no, or make him wait. Go on,” she says. “We’ll finish in the afternoon.”
Noctis pulls Ignis from the room the same way he had weeks before, when Ignis first arrived at the Citadel. Noctis’s hand is smaller than Ignis’s, and he holds onto Ignis’s hand tightly, until both of their hands are hot and sweaty. He talks brightly and loudly as he leads Ignis down the hall, and Ignis listens with confused curiosity as Noctis talks about his toys and his games and the stories Juliette has promised to tell him.
Ignis has only played with other children a handful of times. When he was living at the boarding schools, he was always too young, too new, too strange, too busy to play with the other boys. The few times he had been allowed to play with the other boys, he’d never felt like he understood exactly what was happening; it was like there were rules, unwritten and unspoken, that all the other boys knew, but that Ignis had never learned. Playing with the other boys at the boarding schools had always felt complicated and confusing, like he’d walked into a new class and was handed a pop quiz.
A few of his tutors had played with him, but that had always been like lessons or examinations.
Veda had liked to play the most—she had asked Ignis every few days if he would like to play a game; Ignis had always said yes, and Veda had always given him puzzles of different types. She would send him on scavenger hunts, and when he’d grown frustrated and lost, she would say, You have everything you need. Think, Ignis, and find the answer.
Other times, she would lay out pieces on a chess set, the game only a few steps away from a checkmate, and she would tell Ignis, Find a way out.
She would give him riddles, and when he answered them correctly, she’d go outside to kick a ball with him, or she’d take him on walks to search for frogs and lizards—and even those things, Ignis knows, were tests.
Be observant, she would tell him. What do you see? What is happening?
And when Ignis would tell her, she would ask him, Why?
How and Why; When and Where; What and Who. All of Veda’s games were puzzles, these never ending questions that Ignis could never answer completely. Veda’s games were a lesson in asking, and asking, and asking, and never being content with an answer.
Playing with Noctis is something entirely different, and it doesn’t take long for Ignis to realize that during Noctis’s playtime, there are no expectations for either of them. Playing with Noctis is laying out figurines along the tracks of his train set, creating massacres in miniature; it is hiding underneath tables, the legs of each of Noctis’s servants a behemoth; it is making each flight of stairs another mountain on the journey to a more fantastical land. It is playing pretend, saying that they are anything but what they really are.
It is easy, because Noctis is an easy child to please. Noctis listens to Ignis as attentively as Ignis’s tutors, but when Noctis asks Why?, it’s easy to answer him.
“They’re train robbers,” Ignis tells him.
“Be quiet, or the behemoth will hear you,” Ignis tells him.
“They still have dragons,” Ignis tells him.
“We,” Ignis tells him, “are pirates,” and Noctis screams with laughter as they race down the hallway together, their hands full of any ill-gotten thing they can find: handkerchiefs, knickknacks, candies, even the governess’s keys.
Noctis is an easy child to please, and Ignis finds himself sharing most everything with Noctis. He shares the things he finds: a new kitten in the kitchens, a bird nest in the hanging gardens, a dusty music room where the furniture is draped like ghosts. He shares the things he knows: a riddle he’s learned, the beginnings of arithmetic, stories of the first kings and queens of Lucis. He shares the thing he has: his heart, and all his heart, because that’s all he has.