Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Huutsuu looked from Pyrre to Gwenna, considered the amused quirk of the Skullsworn’s lip, then the open fury in Gwenna’s eyes. “This,” she said, shaking her head, “seems unlikely.”

Before Valyn could cut in, two more Urghul shoved their way out of the crowd, dragging Balendin between them. The leach didn’t resist, not even when they tossed him to the ground at Huutsuu’s feet, but Valyn saw the way the taabe watched him, eyes wary, almost frightened.

“Ah. Valyn,” the leach said, elbowing his way to his knees. “I’ve missed your playful banter each evening.” The words were light, but Balendin smelled weary, wary.

“I’m glad the Urghul didn’t kill you,” Valyn replied.

Balendin raised an eyebrow. “Reconsidering my offer of cooperation?”

“Not at all. It’s just that I’m planning to put the blade in you myself.”

“An easy thing to say when there are no blades around.”

“Just wait,” Valyn replied. “Just wait.”

Huutsuu was shaking her head. “Civilized people. This is how you speak to one another?”

Valyn turned back to the woman. “Where are we?” he asked again. “What is this?”

The Urghul woman gazed over the encampment, as though considering the question herself. Thousands of fires smudged the sky with their smoke. Valyn could smell burning dung and burning meat, horse shit and human, turned-up earth and wet hides. Thousands of voices murmured in his ears, so many he could never hope to untangle them. He hadn’t been around so many people for years, not since leaving Annur.

He turned back to the Urghul woman. “What are you planning?”

“I will let Long Fist explain,” she replied. “He is eager to look upon you.”

“And just who in Hull’s sweet dark is Long Fist?”

Huutsuu remained silent a moment, as though there were no easy answer to the question. “A priest. A shaman. The one who binds us together,” she replied finally.

“And what does he want with me?”

“He is curious about the Kettral, about the Skullsworn, and about you, Valyn hui’Malkeenian. It is not often the son of an Annurian emperor comes among us. Long Fist would witness this for himself.”

Adare woke on a lumpy bed in a chilly room. At first she thought it was night, then realized the darkness in the sky was storm. Someone had tried to pull a scrap of oilcloth over the window, but the wind had torn it free at two corners, and it thrashed madly against the sill while rain spattered on the floor with each gust.

The room was unfamiliar. When she tried to probe her memory, she found a wide, bright blank. The last thing she recalled was arriving on the bridge at Olon, pilgrims at her back, and even that memory felt blurry and inchoate, like something she had dreamed rather than lived. Thought came slowly, reluctantly, and when she tried to think about what happened after the bridge, about how she had come to the small, stone room, she could hear only a voice, the echo of immensity, singing in her ear.

Win .

Her heart pumped unstoppably, as though held in a great warm hand.

Shivering took her, and she tried to pull up the thin, itchy blanket, then realized that she was naked. Alarmed, she started to sit up, then subsided against the mattress, as though she were a puppet and someone had silently, almost tenderly, snipped all her strings.

“We had to cut off your clothes,” a voice said, gravelly and indifferent.

Adare turned her head to find a man-dark skin, close-cropped hair-seated on a wooden chair in the shadows. Lehav, she thought idly. His name was Lehav.

“They were burned, singed to your skin in places.”

Her skin burned, a bright sensation, clean, not entirely unpleasant.

“What…” She trailed off, raising a hand, then letting it drop.

“Lightning,” Lehav replied. “At the Everburning Well.”

The Well. Memory leaked in: faces, light, endless rain. A cool long spear heavy in her hand. Why was the Well on fire? What was she doing there?

“You’re lucky,” Lehav continued. “I saw lightning hit three of my men down in the Waist-storms down there make this look like a clear day-saw it from thirty paces off. One minute they were standing on a small rise, the next…” He stared out the window. “Burned them black, all three of them. They were dead before they hit the ground. When I tried to pick them up, to carry them back to camp, the skin just sloughed off.”

Lightning. Adare lifted the blanket to look at her own body. She felt as though she’d been hurled from a great height, as though she were still falling, or else not falling at all, but at the very moment of striking the earth, the terrible impact infinitely extended. Fire laced her flesh. Angry red lines, thin as hairs, graceful as lace, swooped and whorled over the curves of her skin, a delicate, indelible brand left by the lightning. The lines looked like seams, felt like seams, as though she was nothing but heat trapped inside skin, a burning light ready to burst free.

Adare dropped the blanket, and Lehav’s words swam back into focus. The vision of his dead soldiers tugged at her, mixed with her own reluctant fragments of memory. The story seemed impossibly sad, tragic. She wondered how he handled the guilt, then realized there was no guilt. Lightning came from the sky. Lehav couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t as though he’d killed the soldiers himself. Why was she crying? It wasn’t as though she’d served in the Waist. She hadn’t seen her men-

The full memory lashed across her mind like a whip, so vicious that she cried out.

Lehav was out of his chair and across the space in an instant, his cool dry hands on her forehead, then checking her pulse.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded, sliding back the blanket, searching for the source of the pain. Adare’s breath was gone. She had no words to tell him that it was not her body that ached.

“Fulton,” she managed finally, too horrified by the memory of the Well, of what had happened there, to care about Lehav’s hands running over her skin. “Birch. What happened? Did they…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

He paused, looked her in the eye, then, evidently satisfied that she wasn’t dying, tossed the cloth back up over her shoulders. He did not, however, retake his seat. Instead, he stood at the window, staring out into the storm, ignoring the gusting rain.

“What happened?” He shrugged. “Well, that very much depends on who you ask.”

“Are they alive ?” Adare demanded. The words hurt as they left her, as though they were barbed hooks pulling free, ripping out ragged pieces of pink flesh.

He nodded. “Both of them. The lightning that hit you dead-on knocked them both out of the way-knocked a few dozen people out of the way-but those two landed far clear of the Well. A little stunned, but fine.”

“And you didn’t insist on … going through with it? Going through with the execution?”

Lehav frowned. “I’ve seen plenty of lightning,” he said finally. “Down in the Waist. Up north.” He shook his head. “There was something different about this. It was … brighter. Sharper. More than natural, somehow.”

Adare stared.

“And then people started to talk,” he went on. “About the lightning- Intarra’s lightning. About the fact that you were hit but not harmed. About those lines on your skin.” He shook his head once more. “Never seen lightning leave marks like that.”

It took a few moments for Adare to understand.

“A miracle,” she breathed finally.

“Their word,” he said. “Not mine.” Again he shrugged, but he’d turned away from the window, and there was something new in his eyes when he looked at her, something she couldn’t quite name. “I’m stubborn,” he went on after a pause, “but not stupid. It wasn’t the right moment to go throwing heretics into the Well.”