Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“Who did this to you?” she demanded.

Triste opened her mouth to reply, then closed it, shaking her head. Morjeta studied her for a few heartbeats, then gathered her daughter in her own arms once again. Kaden couldn’t see Triste’s face, buried as it was in her mother’s shoulder, but her hands closed convulsively around the fabric of the older woman’s gown, and, from the shuddering of her shoulders, it seemed that she, too, was crying.

After a moment he turned away, uncomfortable and unsure where to put his eyes. For eight years the only people to lay their hands on him had been his umials, and then only to administer penance. He tried to imagine how it might feel to be wrapped up in an embrace like that. Imagination failed him. He had envisioned his own homecoming hundreds of times over, especially during the early years with the monks, but neither of his parents, if he remembered them correctly, would have wept, and now both were dead. There was no one in Annur who would throw their arms around him. No one anywhere. Kaden tried to make sense of the subtle tug of feelings the thought aroused in him, but Morjeta, finally, was turning away from Triste, rubbing the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands, and greeting them.

“A thousand apologies, sirs,” she said. “My daughter has returned after a long absence.” She cocked her head to the side, curiosity shouldering aside the initial welter of emotion, then glanced back at Triste. She shared her daughter’s sleek black hair and delicate features, although Morjeta was taller by several inches, and when she wrapped a protective arm around Triste’s shoulders once more, she made her daughter look younger than her years. “ How have you returned? Who are these gentlemen?”

Triste shook her head furtively, gesturing to the wooden screens around them.

Morjeta’s lips tightened, but she nodded, a tiny inclination of the head.

“Once again, you must forgive me. Please, follow me. Once you’ve bathed and dined, it would be my honor to entertain you in more privacy.”

Three days’ hard ride south of the Urghul camp they hit the White River. Valyn reined in his horse as they topped the rise, gazing down into the shallow, winding valley below. Back at the base of the Bone Mountains the White was shallow enough in some places to swim a horse across, frothing over the jumbled boulders in a spray of foam that gave the river its name. Here, however, a thousand miles to the west, it ran deep and dark, a sinuous snake a quarter-mile wide, draining all the vast pasturage of the steppe.

“Careful,” Valyn said, backing his horse down the northern side of the hill.

The chances of being spotted by an Annurian patrol were thin. The river still lay a few miles off, and along this section the border forts were spread at least twenty miles apart. Still, there was no point perching atop the hill, offering a stark silhouette to whoever might be riding in the valley below. The evening sun already smudged the western sky, and in another hour they’d be able to ride the final miles safely.

Laith sighed audibly. “We’re swimming, aren’t we? At night.”

“We are,” Valyn replied absently, scanning the far bank for rising smoke or some other sign of one of the forts. After years flying on the back of a kettral, it was frustrating to be tethered to the horizon. Five minutes in the air, and he’d know everything he needed to know, but he didn’t have five minutes in the air. He spared a thought for Suant’ra, hoping that she had returned to the Eyrie somehow. That would be the best thing for her, and it would play into his own plans as well. A bird returning empty usually meant the Wing was dead, and if people thought he was dead, maybe they’d stop hunting him for a while, long enough, at least, for him to get close to il Tornja and find out what was going on. To kill the man if necessary.

He was still grappling with Balendin’s revelation. He had known, of course, that the plot to destroy his family extended into the highest strata of Annurian society, into the Dawn Palace itself-there was no other way to explain the involvement of both the Mizran Councillor and a large portion of the Aedolian Guard. Still, it felt different to have a name. The name. If Balendin was to be believed, il Tornja had devised the entire plot. He had pulled Yurl’s strings and Balendin’s, Ut’s and Adiv’s. Every death could be laid at his feet.

Something dark and bestial coiled around Valyn’s heart, squeezing, squeezing, until the air burned in his lungs. His knuckles ached, and he realized he was clutching his belt knife, that he’d drawn the blade halfway from its sheath as though the kenarang stood before him. He stared at the hand. The knuckles were pale, tendons rigid beneath the skin of the wrist.

“Leave the horses here?” Talal asked, breaking into his thoughts.

Valyn hesitated, shuddered away the rage, slid the knife back into the sheath before anyone could notice, then nodded. Even the indefatigable Urghul beasts couldn’t swim the massive flow. It would mean running on the far side, but running was nothing new. Once they hit settled territory it wouldn’t be difficult to steal new horses.

“No bird,” Laith grumbled as they dismounted, then turned their mounts free. “No horses. We might as well be slogging around in the ’Kent-kissing legions.”

“Makes you feel for the common soldier, doesn’t it?” Talal asked.

Laith stared at the leach as though he were mad. “Hull can have the common soldier. I joined up with the Kettral to avoid this kind of shit.”

“Luckily,” Valyn cut in, “you know how to swim. At least you’re not stuck back in the Urghul camp.”

“Are you kidding? Gwenna and Annick have their own tent, a kid to bring them food twice a day, and skins and skins of that horse-piss fire liquor they drink up there. We, on the other hand, just lost our horses and are about to dive into a river that originates with glacial snowpack. I’ll take the Urghul side of the equation any day.”

The water was cold, far colder than the sea around the Islands, cold enough that Valyn insisted the three of them run the bank until they were sweaty and hot before starting across. All Kettral could swim more or less indefinitely, given the right conditions, but the seeping cold of that black running water would sap the strength from the strongest swimmer in minutes.

Cadets learned about cold water the hard way. Each year the trainers sent a group up to the Ice Sea where they were dumped in the drink and told to paddle for the shore a half-mile distant. It was a trivial distance, but no one ever made it. Valyn remembered swimming until his lips turned blue, his limbs went to lead, and his mind filled with hazy fog. The trainers were there to fish him out once he started to sink, but he still remembered the sensation, first the shock, then the gradual creeping weight in his chest, then indifference swaddling him like a soft blanket.

Halfway across the White River he found the same heavy lassitude pressing him gently beneath the surface. Laith’s head and Talal’s were barely visible in the moonlight, dark splotches a few paces from him on either side. The flier’s stroke was visibly weakening, and when Valyn glanced over at Talal he realized that all of them were struggling.

He rolled onto his side for a moment, lifting his head above the water as he swam.

“Faster,” he said. His mouth felt stiff and awkward around the word, as though the syllables were cold stones on his tongue, and for a moment he thought neither of the two had heard. When Laith turned his head for his next breath, however, he cursed briefly but eloquently, then picked up the tempo. Talal, too, seemed to get the message. Valyn was hauling the inflated bag with their weapons, and the other two started to draw away from him. Grimly he rolled back onto his stomach and redoubled his effort. He couldn’t maintain the new pace for long, but the choice was stark: swim or die.