Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Despite Adare’s flaming irises and the alleged ancestry of her own family, she had always been skeptical of the gods. Divine favor was too easy to claim, too difficult to disprove. Anything could be the work of the gods-a fallen sparrow, an unexpected flood, a single tree flowering earlier or later than the rest. The stories were all too old, the evidence too scant.

It had to be admitted, though, that the Everburning Well was no fallen sparrow. It was an actual hole in the earth, maybe a dozen feet across, and the light gushing forth from it, light so bright that to stare directly into the depth for any length of time would blind the observer, could not be denied. Even the surrounding stone bent to the brute fact of the Well, having sagged and crumbled in a circular crater, as though the earth itself were trying to funnel all that came near into that astounding brightness. Adare had heard tales of Intarra’s devout hurling themselves in, hoping to unite with her prophet. There were the other stories, too, of men and women shoved into the blazing depths as punishment for their heresies.

Even from just inside the round wall ringing the site, with the Well still a good thirty paces off, Adare had to squint, half raising a hand to block the heat radiating from the column of light. Then, realizing how such a gesture might look to the assembled mob, she lowered the hand and straightened her back, her neck, forcing herself to stare directly into the brilliance. Driving rain streaked through the light, a thousand falling stars. The stabbing lightning over the water looked wan, weak, beside that inexorable radiance.

According to the tales, the light had burned day and night for over a thousand years, fueled by the piety of Intarra’s first prophet. There were variations to the myth, but all agreed on the basic facts. When a virgin named Maayala appeared in the city-then the capital of an independent Kresh-Odam the Blind had her seized for peddling a new faith. The Kreshkan kings, Odam very much among them, worshipped Achiet-their name for the lord of war-while Maayala insisted on the primacy of the Lady of Light, arguing on the streets and in private homes that all light, that of the hearth, of the stars, of the sun, was one, and that one given by Intarra. She claimed that Intarra’s light animated all human souls, giving blood its heat, bodies their warmth. According to Maayala, mortals need not fear death, since the dissolution of the body frees the fragment of the divine hidden within, allowing it to join with the greater lights of earth and the heavens. Maayala absolved the Kreshkans of their martial duty, claiming that everyone, even the weak, even the crippled, so long as their skin remained warm to the touch, carried the divine spark inside. No fighting was necessary. No heroic feats in battle.

Odam declared the woman a liar, a heretic, and an impostor. He had her dragged to the courtyard of his fortress, tied to a stake, and, in mockery of her unflagging worship of light, he had her burned.

“If the Lady of Light loves her,” he famously said, “the Lady of Light can take her.”

And take her Intarra did.

Maayala burned, fitfully at first, with a great deal of smoke, then more readily as the fire below her truly caught. Her flesh turned to flame and that flame burned brighter and still brighter, red, then yellow, then purest white. The fire consumed the wood, then the stake itself, and yet Maayala still stood, incandescent, bright as the noonday sun, so bright that Odam and his soldiers were forced to look away, and when they looked away, they realized the flagstones of the courtyard were glowing, too, first red, then yellow, then white, burning, melting to slag, the entire ground sagging around Maayala the Undarkened as she bored into the earth, her heat and light creating the Everburning Well.

It destroyed Odam’s fortress, and, according to the chronicles, nearly destroyed Odam himself. The king barely managed to escape through a sally port as his walls folded inward, malleable as softened butter. The rock didn’t cool for a month, and when it did, the terrified and curious began to come, tentatively, to stare at the amphitheater of melted rock, at the column of light issuing from the Well at its center. Odam himself walked to the very edge of the pit as penance for his sin, staring down into the light until it blinded him.

“Ill-served I have been by these eyes,” he said when he returned. “Without them I can see at last.”

Adare envied the long-dead king his blindness and his clarity both. She could make out little more than shapes through the torrential rain, but she could see enough to know that the walls around the Well were filled to bursting. The Sons of Flame stood closest, but the faithful of Olon pressed up behind their ranks, faces fearfully bright but smeared by the rain to a nightmare of open mouths and eager eyes, all fixed on her, waiting for the promised justice. A justice that was starting to look terrifyingly like sacrifice.

Fulton and Birch were bound at the wrist but able to walk. Behind them half a dozen grim-faced Sons with long spears stood at attention. Before the prisoners, a cleared pathway ran straight into the Everburning Well.

“When the march begins,” Lehav said to the two men, “I suggest you move. One way or the other, you will be fed to the flame. Better not to have a spear in your side when you die.”

“We will walk,” Fulton said, fixing the man with his sunken-eyed stare, “without being prodded like pigs.”

Lehav shrugged. “Bold words are easy at this distance. You might feel more reluctant as you approach the Well.”

“With this rain?” Birch quipped. He seemed to have passed through his anger and reluctance and emerged once more into his customary jocularity. “I’ll jump in your ’Kent-kissing hole just to dry off.”

The crowd was growing restive, a few of the bolder members hurling insults into the driving rain. Thunder rumbled just overhead, drowning out the voices while the flash illuminated faces twisted with fury.

“It is time,” Lehav said, gesturing.

“Let’s get this over with,” Fulton growled. “I grow tired of listening to the bleating of these sheep.”

Get it over with . As though he were talking about a tedious imperial audience rather than his own life. Adare nodded, trying to steady herself, trying to see straight in the rain.

“Wait,” she said, raising her voice just high enough that they could hear over the rain. “I’m sorry.”

Worse than useless, those words, a threadbare cloak to cover her own horror.

“Do one thing for me,” Fulton said.

Adare nodded eagerly, pathetically. Even at this distance she could feel the heat from the Well. Her robes were steaming, her hair, her hands. The crowd had taken up some sort of martial hymn. “Anything,” she said.

“Win,” he replied grimly.

“I’ll second that,” said Birch.

Adare stifled a sob. She tried to speak, but found her throat closed as a fist.

Sweet Intarra, she prayed, forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

Fulton watched her for three or four heartbeats, until Birch nudged him with his elbow.

“Come on, old man,” he said, face slick with mingled rain and sweat. “You getting tired right here at the end?”

Forgive me, Intarra. Forgive me .

And then the two men, the guards who had watched her door since she was a child, who had flanked her when she left the palace and stood behind her chair at state dinners, who brought her soup when she was ill, and listened to her complain about her brothers, her parents, the two men who, in some ways, knew her better than anyone alive, began their march toward the flame. Despite the heat of the Well and the fury of the crowd, they held their heads high, and even when the mob started hurling stones and dung, they refused to flinch.