Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“There were no Csestriim,” Balendin spat. “Unless you think il Tornja is Csestriim.”

Valyn inhaled slowly, but whatever he’d smelled or thought he’d smelled was gone. There was only the ragged, rusted edge of the leach’s fear, fear he held firmly in check.

The shaman frowned, but did not respond.

“More?” Huutsuu asked.

He shook his head. “He has told us what he knows.” After a long pause, Long Fist turned to Valyn.

“I trusted Sanlitun,” the Urghul leader said quietly. “Although he led a soft people, he understood something of hardness. Now…” He held a hand toward Valyn, palm up, as though offering something precious but invisible. “Your father is dead, murdered, and I believe we share a common foe.”

“Meaning what?” Valyn asked, his legs suddenly unsteady beneath him.

“Meaning that together we can avoid a war.”

Despite Long Fist’s words, the sounds of martial readiness shivered the air: the drumming of hooves, shouts of men and women, cold clatter of steel on steel. Just a shield, the shaman claimed, but thousands of mounted warriors were never just a shield. Full-scale war had not come to Annur in generations, and now, according to Long Fist, the decision to halt it lay in Valyn’s hands.

“And how do we avoid war,” he asked carefully, “when il Tornja, the kenarang and regent both, is bent on it?”

The shaman smiled, revealing those bright, sharpened canines. “You kill him.”

The burn was not a burn. Not, at least, like any burn Adare had ever seen. The intricate tracery of red scar looked more like the swirls of henna that brides from Rabi and Aragat inked onto their skin, a thousand ramifying twists and whorls snaking around her arms and torso, down her legs and up her neck like tiny red vines spreading into her hair. Unlike vines, however, unlike ink, the burn was a part of her. When she flexed her arms or fingers, those burns shifted with the flesh, the scar-smooth skin catching the light until it seemed to shine, to glow. The wounds throbbed, but the pain was cold and bright rather than chafing. Still, when Adare tried to get out of bed, she felt her legs turn to water and her mind fade, all thought blotted out in a great wash of light.

It was a day before she could cross to the window and another before she could reach the door, but on the third morning, despite the wobble in her gait, the brightness stamped on her sight, she insisted on seeing her Aedolians. Lehav and Nira had assured her over and over that both men had survived the ordeal, but Adare needed to witness it herself, to stand in the same room with them, to touch them and hear them speak.

The room was dark, blinds drawn over the windows, the single lamp unlit on a bedside table. At first Adare thought they were sleeping, then Birch raised his head weakly from the pillow, and she stifled a gasp. The lightning had burned him, too, but there was nothing delicate or graceful about the bright red weal smeared across half of his once-handsome face. Of the wounded eye, she could see nothing. It was either lost or the lid had burned shut. Any expression must have been excruciating for him, but he raised his brows.

“Come to finish us off, my lady?” He tried a grin, but his voice was thin as smoke.

Adare shook her head. “I wanted … I came to see that you were all right.”

“We’re fine,” Fulton cut in, although when he pushed himself up in his cot he looked anything but fine. The lightning had spared his face, but a rogue branch of the bolt had torn down his chest like a talon, ripping the skin apart. The bandages over the wound were heavy with seeping blood and pus, and he was even thinner than before the botched execution.

“Are they feeding you?” she demanded.

Fulton nodded. “Broth, at the moment. Neither of us can hold down much more.”

He narrowed his eyes, studying her. “Your face, your neck. You are well?”

“Well enough,” she said, nodding.

“Thanks be to Intarra,” the man murmured.

“For what?” Birch asked. “Grilling us like fish on a skewer?”

“For sparing the princess,” the older man replied.

“I thought it was prophet now,” Birch said. “Didn’t I hear something about a prophet?”

Adare nodded weakly. “That’s what some of the people are saying.”

“And what about us?” he asked, gesturing to his face. “Are we prophets, too?”

“We are soldiers,” Fulton ground out, warning heavy in his tone. “The same as we have always been.”

“The same?” Birch demanded. “I don’t think so.”

For a moment the two men seemed to forget that she was there, glares locked like the horns of rutting bulls. Adare could only watch, her legs too weak to carry her forward, her mouth too dry to speak. At last Birch turned his head away, shoved the blinds aside, and stared out the window into the rain.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally, the words flimsy as wet paper, tearing apart even as she spoke them. “I’m so sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologize, my lady,” Fulton said. “You did what you had to, and so did we. Everyone’s alive. In another day or two, we’ll be able to resume our duties.”

Birch kept his eyes on the window, and his voice was so low when he spoke that Adare wasn’t sure she heard him clearly.

“Speak for yourself, Fulton.”

“Forgive him, my lady,” Fulton said. “The lightning has-”

“The lightning woke me up,” Birch snapped, turning back and half rising in his bed to glare at Adare.

“Mind your tone before the princess, soldier,” Fulton growled.

“Princess? She’s a prophet now, or didn’t you hear? The thing is, I didn’t sign on to serve a prophet.” His eyes were wide, almost wild, accusatory and pleading both. “I would have taken a blade for you, Adare. A bolt in the belly. I would have run into a burning tower to haul you out.”

“You might still have the chance,” Fulton growled.

“No,” Birch said, voice suddenly horribly weary. “I will not. I’m done. I always knew I might be killed for you, Adare. I just never figured I’d be killed by you. By a deal you made.” He dropped his head back to the pillow, turned his gaze to the window, and fell silent.

Jaw tight, Fulton started to pull himself upright in bed, but Adare crossed to him, put a hand on his shoulder. He was feverish, skin aflame, and weak as a child when she pushed him back against the pillow.

“It’s all right,” she murmured. “Leave him be. I already owe him more than I can repay.”

Birch didn’t turn his head. From where Adare stood, she could see only the unburned side of his face, the handsome side, the side she recognized. Tears sheeted his cheek, but he refused to look over, didn’t meet her eye. He was alive, saved, either by the grace of Intarra or Adare’s own mad folly, and yet she had lost him all the same.

He is the first to see through me, Adare told herself, staring at the man, trying to remember his casual laugh, his grin. But he will not be the last. Or the worst.

* * *

“I’m not a prophet,” Adare said, shaking her head, meeting Nira’s glare from across the table. “I’m not, regardless of what they say.”

“The fuck does that have ta do with anything?” the woman snapped.

“I won’t drape myself in a lie and call it glory .”

“Oh for ’Shael’s sweet sake, girl, you think you can rule an empire without lying? You think your father didn’t lie? Or his father? Or any of your goldy-eyed great-great-founders of Annur? It’s built into the job . Bakers have flour, fishermen have nets, and leaders have lies.”