Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“She didn’t betray you, ” he said. “Not when she gave you up the first time, and not now. She knows Adiv, she understands his power, his ruthlessness, and she’s frightened for you, frightened that if she doesn’t do something to stop me, he’ll kill us both. She tried to help me, brought me to Gabril, helped to set up the meeting with the nobles. But when Adiv appeared in the temple, she quailed. It must have seemed the game was up, and she did what people so often do-she threw her lot in with what she hoped would be the winning side. She tried to protect herself and her daughter.”

Slowly Triste’s fury subsided, replaced by a blank hopelessness. Her hands dropped, and she backed away, not looking at him, not looking at anything.

“The list of names,” Gabril said quietly.

Kaden nodded. He’d already memorized the list of the conspirators-it was a trivial matter-but he couldn’t trust that Morjeta would remember them perfectly. He’d given her barely enough time with it, but when he returned, there was no doubt-the paper had moved ever so slightly. There was a new tension around the leina ’s eyes. Her knuckles were white and bloodless where she clutched her skirts.

“Both of them,” Triste said, her voice lost, flat.

“Both of them what?” Kaden asked.

“They both gave me up,” she replied. “My mother gave me to … him. He gave me to you.”

Kaden opened his mouth to reply, then realized he had no consolation to offer.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “They gave you up.”

Il Tornja tried to dissuade her.

“It’s going to be a brutal march, Adare,” he said, nodding out over the inky expanse of the lake. The sky was still full black, the stars undiminished by any hint of dawn, and yet the Army of the North and the Sons of Flame were already ranked in their marching columns, the men muttering to one another. They kept their voices low, in the way of people everywhere who speak before the sun has risen. “You can’t ride,” the kenarang went on. “The lake bottom won’t support a horse, and if you give up halfway there, Ameredad can’t spare more than a few men to guard you.”

She bristled at the talk of giving up. “These are my soldiers,” she replied stiffly. “They are marching to defend my empire. I will march with them.”

“There is little you can do when we reach the Urghul.”

“I can be there.” Adare didn’t know much about soldiering, but she’d read enough treatises on war to understand the importance of morale. “I can show them that I’m not going to hide while they lay down their lives.”

And, she added silently, I can keep an eye on you.

She’d been forced to make common cause with the kenarang, but that didn’t mean she trusted him, not even with Nira’s hidden noose of fire tight around his neck.

Csestriim . Her mind still bucked at the notion, refused to truly accept it. She’d read thousands of pages about the Csestriim-treatises penned by scholars had who pored over their ancient cities, speculation by philosophers, religious tracts, and fantastic tales-but for all the ink spilled, none of it had seemed real . The fact that il Tornja, her father’s killer, her former lover, the man who at that very moment stood at her side gazing north into the night, was thousands of years old, had worn hundreds of names and played dozens of roles through the millennia … it just seemed impossible.

“Adare…” he began.

“I’m going,” she said. “Seventy miles. Thirty-five a day…”

“More, with the convolutions of the shoreline.”

“I’m going.”

He nodded, as though he had anticipated her stubbornness. How much of what she’d done had he anticipated? The question made her flesh crawl. She had no answer.

“At least,” he pressed, “march with the Army of the North, with me.”

Adare hesitated. The plan, hammered out between il Tornja and Vestan Ameredad while Adare looked on, was to split the armies. Ameredad would take the Sons up the eastern shore of the lake while il Tornja and the Army of the North moved along the west. The division meant that if the Urghul did try to slide down the sides of the lake, there would be a force to meet them whichever route they chose. Better, if the two armies were able to match pace-a big if -they’d have a chance to catch Long Fist between them. The arguments made good sense, but the division worried Adare. Ideally she would have been able to keep an eye on both Ameredad and il Tornja, but then, the world wasn’t ideal.

“The Sons are mine,” she said.

Il Tornja nodded. “Understood. But you are Emperor now. Which means the legions are yours as well. It would do the men good to see you among them. Ameredad is more than capable of leading his own soldiers.”

Adare hesitated. It was a question, really, of who she could trust more. Or who she trusted least. Ameredad had nearly killed her, but of the two, il Tornja was by far the more dangerous. Which meant staying with il Tornja.

“All right,” she said finally, “I’ll stay with the legions.”

He nodded, then waved over a messenger.

“Inform the commander of the Sons of Flame that the Emperor has decided to march with the Army of the North.”

The man repeated the words back, saluted, then jogged east across the drying lake bed toward the assembled ranks of Intarra’s faithful. Adare wondered how Lehav would take the news, then decided it didn’t matter.

For a while they stood side by side in silence, an emperor who was not truly an emperor and a general who was far more than a general, watching the cold breeze ruffle the surface of the lake, shattering and shifting the reflected light of the stars.

“What happens if we don’t get there in time?” she asked.

Il Tornja shrugged. “Andt-Kyl is a choke point across the Black,” he replied. “It’s the one place we know the Urghul have to go. If they get past it … we could be hunting them all over the north, chasing them down while they burn towns and murder Annurians from Breata to Katal.”

“But the swamps,” Adare said. “The lakes. If we can’t move through this mess, how can they?”

“Oh, the terrain will slow them down for a while. It might take weeks for the army to break out of the Thousand Lakes, but they can split into dozens of bands, work their way through the wetlands at whatever pace they want. Once they break out onto solid, open ground, it’s over. They have a mounted army. We don’t.”

“Well then,” Adare said grimly, “we’d better get there in time.”

And so, as the sun rose through the trees and the cool wind gusted south across the lake, Adare marched north, Ran il Tornja at her side, Fulton stalking a pace back, the long ranks of the Army of the North strung out along the narrow strip of dry lake bed between the trees and the lapping water.

That water seemed to go on forever, stretching north to where it hazed with the horizon. Seventy didn’t look like much on the maps. Adare had covered ten times that distance since fleeing the Dawn Palace. Not, however, at the pace of the army quickstep, not hammering six or seven miles before the sun was even up. Her legs trembled, the arches of her feet ached, her shoulders had wound into a knot so tight it hurt to turn her head, and all she could see to the north was the endless line of dark firs marching away into the distance.

Rounding a sharp promontory sometime before dawn, she stumbled on the uneven stones littering the newly dried fringe of the lake. In a moment, Fulton was at her side, taking her elbow discreetly.

Adare shook him off.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”