Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“Then what do you suggest?” Kaden asked, showing impressive restraint.

“Fly me to the kenta, ” Tan replied. “I will visit the Ishien, learn what they know, while you return to the capital with your brother. We will all meet in Annur.”

Kaden said nothing. He stared out over the western peaks so long that eventually even Pyrre propped up her head, squinting at him between slitted lids. Tan also remained motionless, also staring west. No one spoke, but Valyn could feel the tension between the two monks, a silent struggle of wills.

“No,” Kaden said at last.

Pyrre rolled her eyes and dropped her head back against the rock. Tan said nothing.

“I will not be shepherded from place to place, kept safe while others fight my battles,” Kaden said. “The Csestriim killed my father; they tried to kill me and Valyn. If I’m going to fight back, I need what the Ishien know. More, I need to meet them, to forge some sort of alliance. If they are to trust me, first they have to know me.”

Tan shook his head. “Trust does not come easily to the men of the order I once served.”

Kaden didn’t flinch. “And to you?” he asked, raising his brows. “Do you trust me? Will you take me to the kenta, or do I need to leave you behind while Valyn flies me all over the Bones searching?”

The monk’s jaw tightened. “I will take you,” he said finally.

“All right,” Valyn said, rolling to his feet. He didn’t like the plan, but at least they were moving, at least they were finally doing something. All the sitting and talking was keeping them pinned down, making them easier to find, to attack. “Where are we going?”

“Assare,” Tan replied.

Valyn shook his head. “Which is what … a mountain? A river?”

“A city.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It is old,” Tan said. “For a long time it was dangerous.”

“And now?”

“Now it is dead.”

It was her eyes that would get her killed.

Adare understood that well enough as she studied herself in the full-length mirror, safe behind the locked doors of her chambers inside the Crane. She had exchanged her ministerial robes for a servant’s dress of rough wool, traded her silk slippers for serviceable traveling boots, discarded her silver rings and ivory bracelets, scrubbed the faint traces of kohl from her eyelids and ocher from her cheeks, scoured away the delicate perfume she had favored since her thirteenth year, all in the effort to eliminate any trace of Adare, the Malkeenian princess, the Minister of Finance, all in the hope of becoming no one, nothing.

Like killing myself, she brooded as she stared at her reflection.

And yet, there was no killing the flame in her eyes, a bright fire that shifted and burned even when she stood still. It seemed unfair that she should have to shoulder the burden of Intarra’s gaze without any possibility of reaping the rewards, and yet, despite coming into the world three years prior to her brother, Adare would never sit the Unhewn Throne. It was Kaden’s seat now. It didn’t matter that Kaden was missing, that Kaden was ignorant of imperial politics, that Kaden knew none of the players nor any of the games; it was upon Kaden that the entire empire attended. The fire in his eyes would put him on that massive seat of stone while the flame in hers might see her murdered before the week was out.

You’re being unreasonable, Adare chided herself silently. Kaden hadn’t asked for his eyes any more than she had. For all she knew, the conspiracy that ended her father’s life hadn’t stopped there. Stranded among oblivious monks at the end of the earth, Kaden would make a pitifully easy target. By now, he, too, could be dead.

A contingent of the Aedolian Guard had departed months earlier, led by Tarik Adiv and Micijah Ut. At the time, the decision had surprised her.

“Why not send the Kettral?” she had asked Ran il Tornja. As kenarang, il Tornja was Annur’s highest-ranking general, nominally in charge of both the Kettral and the Aedolian Guard, and as interim regent, he was responsible for finding Kaden, for seeing him returned safely to the throne. Dispatching a group of men by ship seemed a strange choice, especially for a leader who commanded an entire eyrie of massive flying hawks. “A Kettral Wing could be there and back in what … a week and a half?” Adare had pressed. “Flying’s a lot faster than walking.”

“It’s also a lot more dangerous,” the kenarang had replied. “Especially for someone who’s never been on a bird.”

“More dangerous than trekking through territory north of the Bend? Don’t the Urghul pasture there?”

“We’re sending a hundred men, Minister,” he’d said, laying a hand on her shoulder, “all Aedolians, led by the First Shield and Mizran Councillor both. Better to do this thing slowly and to do it right.”

It wasn’t the decision Adare would have made, but no one had asked her to make the decision, and at the time, she’d had no idea that il Tornja himself had murdered her father. She, like everyone else, had pinned the death on Uinian IV, the Chief Priest of Intarra, and only months later, when she discovered the truth, did she think back to the conversation, dread curdling in her stomach like rancid oil. Maybe il Tornja hadn’t sent the Kettral after Kaden because he couldn’t. The conspiracy couldn’t extend everywhere. If il Tornja wanted Kaden dead, the easiest place to do it would be in some ’Shael-forsaken mountains beyond the edge of the empire, and if the Kettral remained loyal to the Unhewn Throne, the regent would have to send someone else, a group he’d been able to deceive or suborn. That the Aedolians themselves, the order devoted to guarding the Malkeenians, might turn on her family seemed impossible, but then, so did her father’s death, and he was dead. She had seen his body laid in the tomb.

The facts were stark. Il Tornja had murdered Sanlitun. He had also sent Ut and Adiv after Kaden. If they were part of the larger conspiracy, Kaden was dead, dead while Adare herself remained unmolested, unharmed, to all appearances tucked safely away in her comfortable chambers inside the Dawn Palace, protected by her irrelevance. Emperors were worth assassinating. Evidently their daughters or sisters were safe.

Only, she wasn’t safe. Not really.

Her eyes strayed to the massive tome that was her father’s only bequest: Yenten’s cumbersome History of the Atmani . She had burned the message hidden inside, the terse warning in which Sanlitun fingered Ran il Tornja, Annur’s greatest general, as his killer, but for some reason she had kept the book. It was suitably grim, 841 pages detailing the history of the immortal leach-lords who ruled Eridroa long before the Annurians, then went mad, tearing their empire apart like a damp map.

Is that what I’m about to do? Adare wondered.

She had considered a dozen courses of action, and discarded them all, all except one. The gambit on which she finally settled was risky, more than risky, riddled with danger and fraught with uncertainty, and for the hundredth time she considered not going, giving up her insane plan, keeping her mouth shut, continuing her ministerial duties, and doing her very best to forget her father’s final warning. She had never set a foot outside the Dawn Palace without an entourage of Aedolians, never walked more than a mile on her own two feet, never bartered over the price of an evening meal or haggled for a room in a highway inn. And yet, to stay would mean returning to him, to il Tornja, would mean a daily miming of the love she had felt before she learned the truth.

The thought of going back to his chambers, to his bed, decided her. For a week after her horrifying discovery she had avoided him, pleading illness first, then absorption in her ministerial work. The labors of the Chief Minister of Finance, the post to which her father had appointed her in his final testament, might plausibly fill up a day or two, but she couldn’t dodge il Tornja forever, not without arousing suspicion. He had already come looking for her twice, each time leaving behind a small bouquet of maidenbloom along with a note in his crisp, angular hand. He hoped her fever would soon pass. He had need of her counsel. He missed the softness of her skin beneath his fingers. Skin like silk, the bastard called it. A month earlier the words would have called a flush to her cheek. Now they curled her fingers into fists, fists that, with an effort, she unclenched as she watched them in the mirror. Even something as insignificant as those pale knuckles might draw attention.