Page 1 of Lucent Academy: Trinity Awakens
CHAPTER ONE: THE GARDENER'S DAUGHTER
I woke to the sound of my brothers trying to kill each other with wooden swords, which meant it was a perfectly ordinary Tuesday morning in the Wood household. Their battle cries drifted up through the floorboards, followed by a crash that was probably the kitchen stool and definitely going to earn them both a scolding from Mother.
"Boys!" Her voice cut through the chaos. "If I have to come out there, you're both mucking the pig pen for a week!"
Silence. I smiled into my pillow and counted to three before the fighting resumed, quieter this time, with exaggerated whispers that somehow carried even better than the shouting had. Samuel and Simon were seven years old, identical in face and temperament, and they had not yet learned the art of subtlety. I doubted they ever would.
I pushed back my quilt and dressed quickly in the gray light of early morning, pulling on my brown work dress and tying my hair back with a strip of faded ribbon. The mirror on my wall showed me what it always showed me: a plain girl with brownhair and brown eyes and the kind of face that people called "pleasant" when they were being generous and "forgettable" when they weren't. I didn't mind. There were worse things to be than forgettable.
The kitchen was warm with hearth-fire and the smell of baking bread when I came downstairs. Mother stood at the long table with flour on her hands and a streak of it across her forehead, and she looked up when I entered with that particular expression that meant she was glad to see me and also that there was work to be done. There was always work to be done.
"Leah, thank the gods. Can you watch Lily while I finish these loaves? And check on your brothers before they bring the house down around our ears."
"I heard them plotting to storm the baron's castle and claim it for their own," I said, crossing to the basin to wash my hands. "Should I be concerned?"
"Only if they actually manage it. Then we'd have to move, and I just got the garden the way I like it."
I laughed and took Lily from her basket near the fire. My sister was three years old, small for her age, with dark serious eyes that watched everything and gave nothing away. She was the opposite of the twins in almost every respect, quiet where they were loud, still where they were constantly in motion, and I sometimes wondered if she had simply decided, upon being born into our chaotic household, that someone needed to provide a counterbalance.
"Good morning, little bird," I said, settling her on my hip. "Did you sleep well?"
Lily considered this question with the gravity of a scholar contemplating a philosophical problem. "Samuel snores," she finally said.
"He does. Like a pig with a head cold."
"What's a head cold?"
"It's when your nose gets stuffy and you sound funny when you talk. Remember when Simon had one last winter?"
Lily nodded slowly, processing this information, then pointed at the window. "Garden?"
I carried her outside into the morning sunshine, where the twins had abandoned their swords in favor of a new game involving sticks and an overturned bucket. They looked up when they heard us coming, their faces wearing matching expressions of innocence that fooled absolutely no one.
"We weren't doing anything," Samuel said immediately.
"I didn't ask."
"But if you were going to ask, we weren't."
"Good to know." I set Lily down on the grass and watched her toddle toward the bean plants with the focused determination of a tiny explorer. "What exactly weren't you doing?"
Simon, who had never been able to resist an opportunity to explain himself, launched into an elaborate account of their morning activities. It involved pirates, a sea monster, at least two betrayals, and what sounded like a minor war crime. I listened with half my attention while keeping my eyes on Lily, who had found a ladybug and was conducting what appeared to be a very serious conversation with it.
Our garden stretched out around us in the early light, neat rows of vegetables bordered by herbs and flowers, with the old apple tree standing watch at the center like a benevolent guardian. Father said the tree had been there when his grandfather was a boy, already ancient then, its trunk wider than I could wrap my arms around and its branches spreading out in all directions. The apples it produced were small and misshapen, not fit for the baron's table, but they had a sweetness to them that I had never tasted in any other fruit. Every autumn we gathered them, and every winter we lived on the preserves and cider Mother made from them, and somehow the taste of those apples had become, for me, the taste of home itself.
Beyond the garden walls, I could hear the town waking up around us. Hartwick was a proper town, one of the largest in the northern provinces, with nearly a hundred thousand souls living within its walls and the surrounding districts. The baron's estate where we lived and worked sat on the eastern edge, where the residential quarters gave way to orchards and farmland, but the sounds of the city still reached us: the distant rumble of carts on cobblestones, the bells of the trading houses marking the hour, the faint hum of a hundred thousand people going about their daily business. Sometimes, when the wind was right, I could smell the bakeries on Merchant Street or hear the calls of the fishmongers down by the river docks. Hartwick had theaters and libraries and a university that drew scholars from across the Empire, and I had lived my entire life on its outskirts without ever feeling the need to explore any of it. Everything I wanted was right here, in this garden, with these people.
"Leah," Simon said, tugging at my sleeve. "Leah, are you listening?"
"Absolutely. Pirates, sea monster, you defeated the kraken single-handedly."
"It was a two-headed kraken," he corrected, offended. "And Samuel helped. A little."
"I helped a lot," Samuel protested. "I was the one who—"
"Boys." I knelt down so I was at their level. "I need you to do something very important for me."
They both straightened, eager. The twins loved being given important tasks almost as much as they loved causing chaos, and I had learned early that the key to managing them was to channel their energy rather than trying to suppress it.
