David Drake: Master of the Cauldron

"Did you say she was a wizard, Cashel?" Ilna said as she put her yarn away.

"She sure was!" Cashel said. "A really powerful one but, you know, good like Tenoctris."

"If Queen Mab is who I think she is…," Tenoctris said, speaking with the careful neutrality of somebody trying not to say the wrong thing. "She's something very different from a wizard. As you and Ilna are, Cashel."

Her expression loosened into her usual cheerful calm. She added, "But you're right about her powers. I wouldn't care to speculate on the limits of them."

Garric looked over his shoulder at the ruins of Erdin. The despair that he'd avoided by refusing to think about the future suddenly crashed down on him.

"We won the battle," he said in a bleak voice, "but a disaster like this is the end of the kingdom. Look at what we've done to the second greatest city in the Isles!"

"Yes, look," said Liane as clearly as a trumpet. "A few buildings destroyed, but not a fraction of the city."

"You're forgetting the dead!" Garric said, furious because the only thing he felt at the moment was despair and Liane was taking that away too.

"I'm not forgetting them," she said, not angry but not in the least afraid of the man she faced. "A thousand civilians died, I know that. But not ahundred thousand civilians as died when the city fell a thousand years ago. And the reason most people here survived is because the Royal Army, the army of all the Isles and not just this island, stood between monsters and men!"

Liane stamped her foot. "ThisErdin grew back from total destruction a thousand years ago," she said. "Think of what can grow from the majority that survived today! Garric, if ever there was proof we need a united kingdom, you gave it today. Sandrakkan couldn't save itself, but the Kingdom of the Isles saved it. And the story will spread till all the Isles hear it."

Garric felt his tight jaw muscles relax. For a moment he glimpsed a future in which the kingdom was united, not by force as King Carus had held it but by every citizen's knowledge that unless men stood together, Evil would crush them all individually under its heel. Not a certain future, nothing was certain, but Chalcus whipped out his sword and pointed it skyward. "Garric and the Isles!" he called.

Soldiers and civilians turned, in the plaza and in the buildings fronting it. "Garric and the Isles!" a woman shouted.

The plaza filled with echoing shouts that spread beyond those who heard the first cry: "Garric and the Isles!"