Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

For a long time, Adare said nothing. She studied the note in her hands, then the hands themselves. They should be trembling, she thought. She felt as though her whole body were trembling, caught in the grip of loss, and grief, and anger. Her hands, however, were still. She might have been testing a bolt of fine silk between her fingers rather than holding a message from the man who had murdered her father. She had come to Annur to start a war, only to be welcomed into her own palace. She had come home, returned to her place, but it was not hers, not fully, not yet.

“You have heard,” Adare said, raising her eyes to the Mizran Councillor, “of the events at the Everburning Well?”

Adiv nodded slowly. “I hear, in the murmurs from the south, the same word again and again: prophet. Would that I had eyes to see Intarra’s markings on your flesh.”

Adare ran an absent finger along the burns on her wrist, tracing the ramifying swirls.

“You will repeat the murmurs,” she said. “You will confirm them, here in the capital.”

The man hesitated, then nodded. “Of course, my lady. Of course. Intarra has ever smiled upon your family, and if anyone deserves this title, it is you-”

“That is not all,” Adare said, cutting him short.

Adiv paused, pursing his lips.

Now, Adare thought. The burns on her skin flamed, as though traced with a glowing knife. She could hear her heart in her ears, and wondered in brief amazement that the others couldn’t hear it, too. It has to be now .

“I will march north,” she said, “and I will do what needs to be done, with the Urghul and il Tornja both. I will do this because there is no one else to see it through. My father is murdered, Kaden is murdered, and though Valyn may survive somewhere, I have the eyes. I will sit the Unhewn Throne. I will see Intarra’s justice done.”

Collateral.

Even back on the Islands, Gwenna had hated the word. For one thing, the two meanings were always getting tangled up. She’d eavesdrop on veteran Wings in the mess hall just after they touched down, and collateral seemed to come up a lot. Trouble was, you couldn’t always tell whether they were talking about collateral as in hostage, or collateral as in some poor, miserable idiot who had nothing to do with anything and ended up dead anyway .

’Course, it didn’t help, the way that the former seemed to have a habit of becoming the latter. As far as Gwenna was concerned, the word was just a way to weasel around a hard truth. Instead of, “I had to grab the guy’s kid and put a knife to her throat to get him to cooperate,” you were encouraged to say, “We had collateral when we hit the target.” Instead of saying, “The kid got burned down with the building,” it was just “some collateral damage.”

As much as she hated the word on the Islands, however, she was discovering that she liked it even less now that she-she, and Annick, and Pyrre-had become the ’Kent-kissing collateral.

“Are we just going to sit here?” she demanded. It was a stupid question, but it felt good to say something. Talking wasn’t doing, but it was a long sight better than waiting with your thumb up your ass to see if the bloodthirsty, savage chief in whose care you got dumped intended to play nice, which, as far as Gwenna could tell, was exactly what they’d been doing for the past day.

“Certainly not,” Pyrre said, raising her head from the far side of the fire. “I intend to drink heavily.”

The assassin was making the most of the comforts of the api Long Fist had provided. Sprawled out on a mound of bison hides, half reclined, one hand playing idly with her hair, she might have been waiting on a servant to bring another pitcher of chilled juice. Only she wasn’t drinking juice. Gwenna had tried one gulp of the clear liquor in the skin and nearly spat out her own tongue. Pyrre just tipped back her head and shot a long stream into her mouth.

“You shouldn’t be drinking,” Annick said, looking up from the bloody shank of bison she was cutting into strips, then drying over the fire. “We should be planning.”

“I do love a good plan,” Pyrre agreed. “Why don’t you girls whip something up and let me know the details?” She frowned. “Hold on. A plan for what, now?”

“Oh, for ’Shael’s sake…” Gwenna spat.

The Skullsworn stopped her with an elegantly raised finger. “Have a care about how you invoke my god.”

“A plan,” Annick said, ignoring the exchange, “for how to get out of here.”

“And why,” Pyrre asked, raising her eyebrows, “do we want to get out of here?” She gestured to the fire, the sizzling meat, the bulging skin of liquor in her hands, then to the clean hides stretched over the poles above them, keeping in the heat, the light. “Admittedly, we got off to a rough start, but Long Fist is turning into a gracious host. Maybe it was just those boys of yours he didn’t like.…”

If Long Fist didn’t like the men on the Wing, he was well rid of them. Valyn, Talal, and Laith had ridden out the day before, strapped with arms and laden with provisions, packs filled with anything that might kill-poisons, arrows, even a blowgun. It was an insane mission-going to kill the Annurian kenarang -but the shaman had made sure they had everything they might need to get it done. Everything, that was, except for half of the fucking Wing.

“You will remain here, my honored guests,” he had said to the women-almost an afterthought. When Gwenna told him how she felt about that, told him that she intended to make her own decisions, he had only spread his arms in invitation: “Certainly you must decide your own fate: honored guest, captive, or corpse.”

Valyn tried to step in then, but the ugly fact of the matter was that they had no leverage. They were free only because Long Fist had set them free, and for all the tall bastard’s talk of cooperation and mutual understanding, he wasn’t suffering from an overabundance of trust. Valyn’s word was all well and good, but Long Fist wanted something more substantial, more persuasive, and so Annick, Gwenna, and Pyrre had graduated from captives to honored guests .

Honored guests. It was worse than collateral .

“You should relax,” the assassin continued. “Life is an eyeblink. Try to enjoy some of the largesse spread before us.”

“You’re so busy guzzling the rotgut,” Gwenna snapped, “that you might not have realized Long Fist’s largesse doesn’t include a single weapon. We’ve got one pathetic belt knife between us,” she said, gesturing to the slender blade Annick was using to saw at the meat. “A dull belt knife.”

“Probably,” Pyrre said, “because the last time we had weapons, we tended to leave the sharp parts of them inside his soldiers. Besides,” she went on, eyeing Annick’s belt knife, “it’s simple enough to kill men with a belt knife. If we decide there’s a pressing reason to trade the meat, drink, and fire for an unwinnable fight.”

“You were fighting hard enough when they had you tied up,” Gwenna snapped. “And the fight was even less winnable then.”

The truth was, Pyrre made her all sorts of uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable made Gwenna mad. It wasn’t just that the Skullsworn was good at killing-everyone on the Islands was good at killing. The thing that really set Gwenna’s teeth on edge was Pyrre’s indifference, her obvious failure to give half a shit about all of the things Gwenna herself was ready to die for. Squaring off against an entire Urghul army was daunting enough without having the Skullsworn mocking her the whole way.