Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

It drenched her clothes, whipped Adare’s sodden hair against her cheeks, but the storm was still easier to face than what waited inside. She watched the lightning lance down, forking out in jagged inverted trunks to strike the waves, wondering for the hundredth time if there was a way out. Cloth clung to her skin. She started to shiver. If there was a way to avoid the killing to come, she couldn’t see it.

They might be guilty, she told herself, trying out the tired line once more. They might be in league with il Tornja . The words, words she’d been repeating all night long like a fragment of prayer, failed to convince. With a sick slosh in her stomach, she turned from the roiling darkness of the storm to the still, vacant darkness inside the building.

Her captured Aedolians were in the same building, although the Sons of Flame had them chained and locked in a deep basement. For two days, Adare had been forbidden to speak with them. She had railed against the restriction, but the horrible secret truth was that beneath the fury and indignation, she was relieved at the enforced separation. If she wasn’t allowed to see the Aedolians, she wouldn’t have to witness her own deceit in their eyes, wouldn’t have to tell them what her allegiance with the Sons of Flame had cost. Wouldn’t have to tell them that they would be the ones to pay. In the end, however, her own objections caught up with her. Just that morning, Lehav had agreed to let her see the two men. Adare wanted to vomit.

The commander of the Sons of Flame met her on the rain-soaked balcony, glanced out at the storm, then gestured her inside.

“It’s time,” he said, when she stepped through the door. “Ivar will show you to their cell.”

She nodded, voiceless.

Lehav considered her for a moment. “A piece of advice,” he said finally.

Adare nodded uncertainly. She was shivering uncontrollably, the water from her soaked robes puddling on the floor.

“The less you talk,” Lehav said, “the easier it will be for everyone.”

“I owe them…”

“What?” He raised an eyebrow. “An explanation?”

“Yes.”

“You can explain a lot of things to a man. His own death is not one of them.”

* * *

Each Aedolian was wrapped in enough chain to hold a small bull, bound at the ankles, wrists, and throat, then locked to iron rings set into the stone. They looked as though they hadn’t slept or changed clothes since the day Adare fled. Their long traveling cloaks, usually so immaculate, had turned brown with kicked-up dust and mud. Weeks of hard travel had scraped away any spare flesh, leaving their cheeks hollow, eyes sunken in their sockets. Birch’s golden mane had gone brown and stringy, and Fulton must have lost twenty pounds. The room stank of spoiled food and rot. A small puddle that might have been groundwater or urine had collected in a lower corner of the chamber.

Birch blinked at the sudden light, then twisted against his chains to get a better look.

He managed an awkward nod.

“My lady,” he said after a moment, voice a weak rasp. “The yellow robe suits you. Brings out your eyes.”

And all at once, the grief and confusion that had stalked her for days on silent feet took her by the throat. She stood helplessly as the door swung shut behind her, staring at the two men who had watched over her since she was a child, horrified by what Lehav had done to them. No, a grim voice reminded her, what you did to them . Whatever role the Sons of Flame had played, it was Adare herself that had brought the two men to Olon. Tears mixed with rain on her cheeks.

“My lady,” Fulton began, then broke off with a hacking cough, body shuddering. When the fit passed, he spat onto the floor: phlegm or blood, it was hard to tell in the lamplight. “Pardon, my lady,” he said, “but just what in the sweet name of Intarra is going on?”

She had hoped, even prayed-though she was not given to prayer-that the two Aedolians were in league with il Tornja; it would be so much easier to see traitors fed to the flames. Facing them, however, the notion seemed ludicrous, petty, stupid. They weren’t the kenarang ’s men, they were her men. Her guards. A part of her had known that even when she fled from them in the plaza by the Basin.

“You’re not part of it,” she said, shaking her head hopelessly, voice little more than a whisper.

“Part of what, my lady?” Fulton demanded. “Are you in danger?”

It all spilled out then, il Tornja’s treachery, Adare’s terrified flight, her need for an alliance with the Sons of Light. She crossed to them as she spoke, tugging futilely at the chains in an effort to make them more comfortable.

“You should have told us,” Fulton said, when it was all finished, shaking his head.

“I know,” Adare said, slumping to the ground, the life vanished from her legs. “I know. I wasn’t sure who to trust.”

“Although,” Birch said, raising his eyebrows weakly, “I’ve always wanted to visit Olon in the summer.”

“What now?” Fulton asked.

Adare trembled. The truth was a rusted dagger, but she owed them the truth. “Lehav, Ameredad-it’s the same guy-he wants you dead. Justice for the Sons you killed trying to rescue me.”

Fulton’s lips tightened, but he didn’t speak.

“Well, for a religious man, that’s just downright inhospitable,” Birch said. The joke was typical, but the words came out weak, as though rusted, corroded.

“I’ve tried to get him to relent,” Adare said, speaking fast, trying to drown out the guilt and shame with the sound of her own voice, “but he won’t. His people, the Sons of Flame and all the rest, they want you burned, and he won’t refuse them.” She fell silent. The words were useless. Worse than useless. Insulting.

“Without the Sons, I’ve got nothing. Il Tornja wins. Even if I refused Lehav-”

“No,” Fulton said, voice still as a stone. “You will not refuse him.”

“Ah, fuck,” Birch said, glancing away.

“This is what we are for, Alin,” the older guardsman said, turning to his companion. Adare had never heard anyone use Birch’s first name. She hadn’t even known it herself. “Our lives for hers. If she refuses this, there’s no saying what the zealots will do to her.”

“There’s no saying what the zealots will do if she agrees, ” Birch pointed out. “We can’t save her if we’re dead .”

“That is a risk that the princess will have to assess for herself. Our duty is to serve.”

“I thought service meant fighting,” Birch protested, but the anger had gone out of him. Resignation thinned his voice.

“Sometimes, Alin,” Fulton replied, nodding. “And sometimes it means dying.”

Adare had Intarra’s irises, but the guardsman’s gaze burned. Adare could argue, fight to save them both, but she knew already that she was not going to argue. She had known, even as she spoke of confronting Lehav, that Fulton would refuse her offer, known that his duty would weigh heavier in the scales than her guilt, known that her suggestion was empty as air even as she spoke it. She had watched it all coming from a long way off, watched it just as she’d watched the black storm move in. She’d seen it all coming except for the sick pit of self-hatred that gaped inside her, that ate at her guts, that would never, ever heal.

* * *

For just a moment, the sight of the Everburning Well distracted Adare from the killing that had to happen there.

Over the last few nights of the pilgrimage she had stared at the column of light bisecting the horizon, white and pale as a thousand moons, blotting out the meager pinpricks of the stars to either side. For sixteen centuries, the Everburning Well had been a beacon for the faithful and a warning to unbelievers both, an eternal symbol of Olon’s sanctity, the origin of the faith, and the reason Annur’s pilgrims had chosen this crumbling city over a dozen others.