By the Morning Light

Chapter One

It all began with a seemingly innocent suggestion. I was nine and Emile was ten. Even back then we were inseparable, so close the others used to tease us incessantly about it, asking when our wedding was. I never understood that since we were both in love with Michel, the beautiful dark-haired eleven-year-old who ignored us—much to our joint disappointment. Michel was serious, even at eleven, and only cared about training for the Order of the Ayres Knights. Ayres, our city, was ancient and had a castle, an abandoned monastery and all sorts of places for a pair of siblings to wreak havoc.

That was the other reason why I never understood why they said Emile and I were going to get married. We were brother and sister. Even at nine I knew you didn't marry your brother. I asked Maman about it, but she told me it was just boys being boys. I was grateful that she, unlike Papa, didn't suggest I only play with the girls instead. I did, sometimes. Emile would tag along too, even though I knew he didn't care about dolls and dresses and tea time. But like I said, we were as close as two people could be, and where one went, the other did too. Maman said we should have been twins, with the way Emile and I seemed to know exactly what the other was thinking or feeling. I always thought this was normal, but when I asked our friends if they had this sort of bond with their siblings, they looked at me as if I were crazy. Apparently you were supposed to hate your sibling, or at least mildly tolerate them, but that had never been the case with me and Emile. He'd only been one when I was born, but Papa said he was so enraptured with his new baby sister that he screamed and carried on whenever someone tried to take him from my side.

"They could hear you screaming from the next farm over. More than once they asked if we were murdering you," Papa would recall fondly as Emile's face reddened. Did his embarrassment deter him from playing with me?

Never.

During the weekdays we rose early, tended to the chickens, and ate breakfast with our parents. Then Emile and I would grab our satchels, kiss our parents goodbye, and follow the dirt path to school. We lived on the outskirts of Ayres, which was fine by me. We had a big field for farming, a barn with animals, and farmhands to help Maman and Papa. Everyone living in the center of Ayres was squished together. They had cobblestone paths instead of dirt ones and the view outside their bedroom window was of the house next door. My view was breathtaking and spectacular and Emile would tease me for spending hours in my window seat, just gazing at Ayres and the land beyond it. But for all his teasing, he'd end up joining me and we'd stare at the castle where the Knights trained and the shops and homes that were stacked closely together like the jagged spikes on a dragon's spine. The city sat on a huge cliff that stood sentinel over the Adrianna Ocean, and beyond that was the rest of the world.

Emile and I spent hours discussing what was beyond the sea to the east and the plains to the west—the other cities and the people, and Emile was convinced there were dragons out there, even though Michel told him that was stupid since everyone knew the dragons were extinct. Emile had gone quiet at that, and I knew Michel had hurt his feelings. But he was right about the dragons. They were gone, although the magic wasn't.

Magic had almost ripped this world apart. Back when nearly everyone had it, the stronger ones had become obsessed with power. They discovered they could steal it from the weaker, which is what they did until that, too, wasn't enough. So they looked to the dragons. Dragons were ancient, immortal creatures brimming with magic, and the magicians had to have a taste of that power. But killing a dragon was no simple feat, and everyone who challenged them was felled.

They had found a way to defeat them, though. The exact method had been lost, so claimed our teachers, but Emile and I knew they were lying. The Knights had purged all records of magic from the libraries of Ayres after the old wars had ended and the dragons were all killed. If the magicians hadn't sought more power, the Knights claimed, the world would have remained peaceful. But because of their selfish intentions, non-magical innocents had been caught up in the bloodshed and paid for it with their lives. "Magic is evil," the Knights had proclaimed. "Magic has no place in this world. If you are caught practicing magic, you will be tried and put to death."