Энтони Райан - Queen of Fire

He walked away as Draker led the black-clad towards the docks. “Donʼt sniffle now, thereʼs a good fellow. Donʼt you know how lucky you are to greet a new dawn in the Greater Unified Realm?”

Picking his way through the streets, all strewn with bodies and the myriad wreckage of a shattered city, Frentis found himself recalling a dream, or what he now understood to be the beginning of his connection with a soul the Deputy Treasurer thought monstrous. I would have been terrible, she had said as they gazed on a shoreline awash in corpses. But terrible as fate would make me, I am not him.

He paused at the sight of a mother and child, crumpled in death outside a bakerʼs shop. The little girlʼs eyes were open, her head lying close to her motherʼs, the mouth slightly agape as if frozen in some unheard final question. Seeing the wounds on the motherʼs arms, earned no doubt as she tried to shield the girl from the frenzy of blades that killed them, he couldnʼt suppress the notion that he and the Empress were conspiring to make that sea of death a reality.

“Brother?” It was Illian, regarding him with an expression that bordered on amazement. He felt the dampness on his cheeks and quickly wiped the tears away.

“What is it, sister?”

“The Garisai found a few hundred grey-clads hiding in the vaults beneath the merchantsʼ quarter. The city slaves are clamouring to get at them. It could turn ugly.” She forced an uncertain smile, eyes still lingering on his. Frentisʼs gaze went to the cut on her forehead. Thirty-Four had done a typically precise job of stitching it closed but the scar would be deep, and long. “Stopped itching, at least,” she said, her fingers going to the wound.

No uncertainty in her, he surmised. All this death and she remains undaunted. She was right, the Order is the best place for her.

“Iʼll be there directly,” he said. “Tell Draker to form the free folk into a working party to clear these bodies. Theyʼll be paid in bread, we shouldnʼt expect them to work for nothing.”

They soon began calling it the Mud March, a name Lyrna somehow knew would persist into the history of this campaign, should there be any scholars left to write it. The rain started the day they began the inland march and didnʼt let up for the following two weeks, turning every track into soft, clinging mud, trapping feet, hooves and cart-wheels until the army ground to a halt having covered less than a hundred miles.

“The price, Highness,” Aspect Caenis explained at the council of captains. “The crafting of such a storm created a great imbalance in the elements.”

“How long will it last?” Lyrna asked.

“Until the balance is restored. A day, or a month. There is no way to tell.”

“Is there none in your Order who can assist us?”

He gave a helpless shrug. “The girl from the Reaches was the only soul I ever met who held such a gift.”

Lyrna ignored the pointed implication in his words, knowing he still chafed over her refusal to compel the Gifted from the Reaches to join his Order. In some ways she was finding Aspect Caenis just as unyielding as the unmourned Tendris.

“We need a road, Highness,” Count Marven insisted. “Volarian roads are famously well-made, and immune to the elements.” His finger tracked across the map to a line twenty miles north. “This one serves the northern ports. Itʼs a four-day diversion from our intended line of march but it should save us weeks of slogging through mud.”

Although she disliked the notion of abandoning the direct approach to Volar, Lyrna could see no alternative. She was about to confirm the order when a rarely heard voice spoke up.

“That would be a mistake, Highness.”

Lord Al Hestian stood near the rear of the tent, a gap on either side of him as none of her captains seemed to relish proximity to the man now referred to as the Traitor Rose. She had tended to exclude him from these meetings but the impressive performance of his men during what had quickly been dubbed the Battle of the Beacon, and the recent loss of so many captains, provoked her to a change of heart. She had spared him for a reason, after all.

“How so, my lord?” she asked, seeing Count Marven stiffen. Of all her captains, he seemed to harbour the greatest enmity towards Al Hestian, something she assumed had been born of their time in the desert war.

“The obvious line of march should always be avoided,” Al Hestian said. “The road will be patrolled, policed. Word of our position will be conveyed to Volar within days. If we are to send forces north, they should only be diversionary.”

“Whilst we continue to wallow in mud,” Count Marven said.

“No rain can last forever, Dark-born or no. And if we canʼt march through it, neither can the enemy.”

“Time is the true enemy,” Lyrna said. “Every day of inactivity allows the Empress leisure to gather forces at Volar.” She straightened and nodded at Count Marven. “Battle Lord, issue orders to change the armyʼs line of march come the morning. My lords, to your duties.”

Alornis was drawing again when she returned to her tent, the charcoal stub moving with feverish industry across the parchment as she hunched over her easel. During the day she would tinker with the cart-mounted ballista, all the time barely saying a word, but at night she would draw. It was only when she worked that her face took on some animation, tense with concentration and eyes lit with memory, though, judging by the nature of her drawings, Lyrna divined they were memories best left alone. Burning ships, burning men, sailors screaming as they flailed in a storm-tossed sea. Page after page of expertly rendered horror produced in a nightly ritual of self-flagellation.

“Did she eat something, at least?” Lyrna asked Murel, shrugging off her rain-soaked cloak.

“A little porridge only, Highness. Though Davoka had to practically force it on her.”

She went and sat by Alornis for a time, the Lady Artificer acknowledging her presence with a barely perceptible nod, her charcoal continuing to move without interruption. Lyrna took some heart from the fact that this sketch differed from the usual finely crafted carnage, a portrait of some kind. Alornis set out the basic shape of the face with a few expertly placed lines then began to detail the eyes, dark eyes, narrowed in judgement and reproach, eyes she knew well.

“Your brother loves you,” she told Alornis, reaching out to still her hand, feeling it tremble.

Alornis didnʼt look at her, eyes still fixed on the picture. “Itʼs my father,” she whispered. “They had the same eyes. He loved me too. Perhaps, if the Faith has it right, he still sees me. It could be that he loves me more now, for we are the same are we not? He too once killed thousands by fire. Sometimes he would dream of it, when he got older and the sickness came, thrashing in his bed and calling out for forgiveness.”

Lyrna resisted the impulse to shake her, slap her, try to force a return of the bright, sweet girl she had met in Alltor. But looking into her confused eyes she knew that girl had gone, consumed by fire along with so many others. “Take your sleeping draught, my lady,” she said instead, gently but firmly tugging the charcoal from her fingers. “Hard marching tomorrow, you need your sleep.”

They made the road in three days, the rain slackening a little by the third day, though the going was scarcely any better to the north. Brother Kehlan reported numerous cases of men falling out on the march due to a condition known as “guardsmanʼs foot,” an affliction brought on by constant immersion in water whereby the skin became like a sponge. Soon almost every wagon was laden with grey-faced soldiers, their feet bound in bandages wrapped in canvas to keep the rain off. So it was with considerable relief that they first set foot on the road, a truly remarkable example of human construction that shamed the dirt tracks typical in the Realm. Malcius, if you had seen this, Lyrna thought, noting the gentle curve to the roadʼs surface that allowed the rain to flow off to the sides. You would have scraped the treasury clean to cover the Realm in such wonders.