Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“It seemed important.”

A cold wind blew through the long pause that followed, nicking the waves, fueling the fires behind them.

“I will leave you,” Lehav said finally. He did not leave.

Adare took a long, unsteady breath.

Intarra, she prayed inwardly, Lady of Light. She had tried so many times already to compose this prayer, had failed so many times that when the last words came, they surprised her: Lady of Light, forgive me.

She couldn’t have said for what transgression she was begging forgiveness. She had failed her father and made common cause with his killer, had taken a leach as her councillor, had raised up an army to fight against armies of Annur, had stolen a throne from one brother and slid a knife between the ribs of another.…

It had all seemed so necessary.

Forgive me, she prayed again, again without entrusting the prayer to speech.

Sunlight shattered on the waves. It burned her eyes. Behind her, the flames still raged. Forgiveness, it seemed, lay far from the providence of fire. She watched a moment longer as the fishermen hauled another quiet body from the lake, then turned to Lehav.

He was studying her-his prophet, chosen of Intarra, Emperor of Annur-with dark, uncertain eyes.

“Let’s go,” said Adare hui’Malkeenian before he could speak again. “There is work to be done.”

For a while, Kaden considered it.

He hadn’t expected to end the day in the Dawn Palace, hadn’t expected to be heralded as the Emperor of Annur, but then, as the Shin said, To expect is to err.

When he emerged into the burning square at the center of the Dawn Palace, when the guardsmen knelt before him, intoning the ancient formula that had preceded all Malkeenian rulers for generations, it seemed harder to refuse the honor than to accept it. Whatever play Adare had made for the throne, she was hundreds of miles away in Raalte and had made no formal declaration of her own intent. The citizens of Annur were confused, and Kaden, standing at the center of the empire, was best situated to turn that confusion to his advantage. It looked suddenly, shockingly simple to take the throne and declare himself his father’s heir.

In the end, it was that very simplicity that made him hesitate. Ran il Tornja was not a simple thinker. Neither was Adare. Winning a single battle meant little in the larger war, and seizing the Unhewn Throne was a far cry from holding it. A single man, even a man inside the walls of the Dawn Palace, was too easy to topple, too easy to kill. They would expect him to seize the reins of power, and they would have plans in place to handle him when he did so. The events of the last day had seen Adiv killed and his force of loyalists gutted, but Kaden had no doubt that there were still people in the palace-ministers, guards, concubines-who would plant a blade in his back at a word from the kenarang, not to mention the enemies he would make with the members of his newly formed council.

Of course, even the ceding of imperial power was not a straightforward matter. Kaden spent the rest of the night just setting in motion the most basic wheels: sending messengers to the various nobles of the council; talking down the dozens of ministers who gathered like ill-fed ravens, baffled that Kaden would surrender his titles and fearful that any transition would mean an end to their sinecures; reassuring the palace guard; arranging to conclusively seal off the kenta chamber; seeing to it that the scores of people killed by Triste’s fury were properly washed, wrapped, and transported out of the palace for burial; instructing the palace staff to clean the wreckage strewn about the Jasmine Court; and then finally, just as the tip of Intarra’s Spear began to glow with the pale light of the unrisen sun, collecting his newly forged council in the Hall of a Thousand Trees, unfurling the constitution before the sight of the entire court, and administering the oaths to defend and uphold the fledgling republic against all foes.

When the audience was finally over, Kaden felt ready to collapse on his feet, and there were still hundreds of questions to answer, thousands of tasks, tiny and enormous, that had to be addressed if the Annurian Republic were to have any hope of survival.

Kaden wiped his face with his hands as he exited the hall, as though he could scrub the weariness from his eyes, the cobwebs from his thoughts. Kiel and Gabril walked at his side.

“There is something you should know,” the Csestriim said quietly, glancing over at Kaden as though gauging his readiness to hear a difficult truth.

Kaden stared at him, then waved him on.

“In preparing Adiv’s body for the fires his blindfold was removed,” Kiel said. “He could see. He has eyes.”

“Just like any other man.” Kaden shook his head.

“No,” Kiel responded. “Not just like any other man. Tarik Adiv shared your burning irises.”

Kaden stopped walking. For a long time he didn’t move. There seemed no point. There were a thousand tasks ahead of him, none of which he understood.

“A relative,” he said finally.

Kiel nodded. “Your family is old. There are many branches. Intarra’s touch is strongest upon your own, but there are others.”

Kaden had never considered the notion before, but it made a certain sense. If Sanlitun had known, he might have given Adiv a high post in the government out of some kind of loyalty. And Adiv himself … how would he have felt after a lifetime hiding his eyes while the Malkeenians flaunted their own? Bitter enough to turn on an emperor who had favored him? Bitter enough to kill? Kaden shook his head. More questions and no answers.

“I should go to my father’s study,” he said. “Look over his papers before the council meets again. What do I have, a few hours?”

“What you should do,” Kiel said, “is sleep.”

Gabril nodded. “Work without rest and you will achieve nothing.”

The First Speaker and the Csestriim had not left his side since the Great Gate was thrown open and the council admitted to the deafening tolling of the gongs. Kaden was grateful for the support, more than grateful, but after hours of talking, negotiation, and reassurance, he longed for a few hours of silence, of solitude.

Gabril, as though sensing his thoughts, patted him on the shoulder. “Come. We will see you to your chambers, and I will command the watch at your door myself.” If the First Speaker was exhausted after the long night, he didn’t show it. But then, the First Speaker hadn’t spent the afternoon fighting for his life against Adiv, Matol, and the Ishien. Kaden started to accept, then shook his head.

“There’s Triste, too,” he said. “I have to see her.”

In the chaos following his emergence from the kenta, in his urgency to see the council installed before any opposition could coalesce, Kaden had allowed the girl to be led away, her eyes blank, baffled, and hopeless. The palace guards had wanted to kill her on the spot, but Kaden stopped them, insisting on her imprisonment instead. In truth, he had no idea what to think about her final bloody massacre, no idea how to feel about it. Certainly she had saved his life, both by holding up the tunnel as Adiv sought to tear it down, and by killing the soldiers under the leach’s command. It seemed, however, that something inside the girl had snapped, some cord tethering her mind to the world. He had walked among the bodies in the Jasmine Court, had looked at their faces. There were ministers among the number, and courtiers, one old woman, and at least three children. They couldn’t all have been a part of Adiv’s plot. They weren’t all supporters of Adare and il Tornja.

The sight sickened and saddened him, both for the victims and for Triste. Whatever fury had consumed her, whatever power had torn the lives from five or six score Annurians, it was clear that she understood it no better than anyone else. In the wake of the slaughter, he wanted nothing more than to sit with her, comfort her, try to understand just what had happened and how-but there was no time. Instead, he had seen her drugged with adamanth root, locked in a barred chamber inside the Crane, and placed under triple guard while he went about wrenching aside the final foundations of empire.