Brian McCLELLAN - The Autumn Republic

Julene shrugged. “The Deliv cabal has been glancing in on me, but I just told them I was a mercenary who’d offended Kresimir, and he kept me alive with his sorcery.”

“And they believed you?”

“Why wouldn’t they? It’s mostly truth. Besides, even if they knew I was a Predeii, they’d know I’m not a threat without hands.”

“You have a lot of knowledge, though.”

“That’s why I’m not telling them,” Julene said, the scar on her face tugged by her shallow smile. “Best get on with it, shouldn’t we?”

Taniel glanced at Ka-poel. Her face was placid. He lifted his pistol.

“I don’t suppose you’d consider going back on your promise, would you?” Julene asked mildly.

Surprised, Taniel lowered his pistol. “You think I would? After all the grief you’ve caused?”

“It was worth asking.” Julene shrugged, as if she didn’t much care one way or another.

“You want to live like this?”

Julene turned her arms over. “I might be able to get it back. The Else, that is. I can still see it, I just don’t have fingers to touch it. And even if I didn’t, maybe I deserve this. Maybe I deserve spending the next thousand years on the Deliv cabal’s torture racks, giving them every ounce of my knowledge.”

Taniel examined the side of her face for several silent moments. He wondered if Julene was truly sorry for what she’d done, or if this was all an act. She regretted summoning Kresimir, that’s for certain. But the murder? The chaos? Did she regret all that?

Taniel stuffed his pistol back in his belt.

Julene’s eyes flicked from him to Ka-poel, then back, widening slightly. “Don’t toy with me, Two-Shot. Finish it or don’t, but for those months I spent hanging from Kresimir’s beam, for these hands of mine, you owe it to me not to toy.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Taniel said. “But I’m no executioner. I’m only here because I promised to kill you when you wanted an end. Now that you don’t want an end… I’m tired of the blood. Tired of the fighting. Another gunshot won’t solve anything. But you have to promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“Let it all go. Any grudges you hold for Borbador or anyone else in Adro, they’re finished. Over. You’ve no business here.”

“Agreed,” Julene said, almost too quickly. They watched each other for some time before she raised her chin to Taniel. “I’ll remember it, Two-Shot.”

He and Ka-poel left Julene in the tent and joined Bo and Nila outside.

“I didn’t hear a gunshot,” Bo said.

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Is leaving her alive a good idea?” Bo asked, looking slightly nervous. He had begun to peel off his gloves but now had stopped.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t think she’ll bother you any more, though.”

“You better believe I’m going to have her watched, regardless.”

“Don’t blame you,” Taniel said.

“Is that it, then?” Bo asked. “Are you leaving?”

Taniel exchanged a glance with Ka-poel. It was almost time for that, yes. But not quite. “I’ve got one last thing to do,” he said.

Vlora stood outside of her carriage, looking up at the three-story town house situated on a quiet street on Adopest’s east side.

It was late in the afternoon, almost four o’clock, and Vlora cocked her head to listen for the church bell that had been rung every hour for the many years that she’d lived in this home. It was several moments before she remembered that every church in Adopest had been destroyed, and the thought of never hearing that bell again brought her sadness.

“Would you like me to come in?” Olem asked from the carriage.

“Give me a few minutes,” she said, closing the carriage door. She walked past the overgrown garden and up the front steps, slipping a brass key from her pocket.

Long practice made her stop in the foyer and listen for voices to call her name, but nothing answered her presence in the old home but the familiar creak of the floorboards beneath her feet. Dust filled her nostrils, and she wondered if anyone had been here since before the night of the coup so many months ago. Her inquiries had told her the servants were dismissed last winter.

She was a general now, but felt no sense of accomplishment from it. The newly minted House of Ministers had showered her with praise and given her the promotion with Tamas only a week in his grave. Now, six weeks later, it didn’t seem any less strange. The youngest general in Adran history, even younger than Tamas himself when he first achieved the rank. She wondered if everyone else saw it as the political stunt that it was.

Use them before they use you , she heard Tamas’s voice say in the back of her head. Show them you earned it .

She went up the stairs and sought the first room on the right – her room for six years of her life, after Tamas had saved her from the street. She remembered a time from before the coup. Before Taniel was sent to Fatrasta and before that blasted nobleman.

Laughter echoed in her memory and she tilted her head, wondering if she had heard it for real. No. Of course not.

The bed seemed so much smaller than she remembered. How had she and Taniel fit in there on those nights when Tamas was gone? Had Borbador still been in the house? Or had that been after he was taken away by the cabal magus-seekers?

The memories seemed distant now, and she left the room and continued down the hall, pausing beside the door to Tamas’s office.

His desk was coated in dust, a map of Adopest still held down at the corners by Tamas’s favorite teacup and a handful of musket balls. Vlora crossed to the desk and rolled up the map carefully before returning it to its place on Tamas’s bookshelf. She unbuttoned the gold epaulets on the shoulders of her uniform and set them on the desk where the map had been.

She felt tired. Dizzy. Weeks straight of shaking hands. Of parades and memorials. Tamas’s funeral as well, which had been attended by two kings, a queen, and what the newspapers had said were eight million mourners. It had even been presided over by the newly pardoned Arch-Diocel Charlemund.

She opened the window of Tamas’s study and watched the dust swirl in the sunlight. Slowly, she went through the various knickknacks Tamas had collected in Gurla. She ran a finger down the spines of his leather-bound books on warfare, religion, and economics. She remembered the contents of this study like she remembered the palm of her own hand, and tried to recall the first time she had ever been in this room.

The memory seemed distant. Perhaps even manufactured in the back of her mind, pieced together from the scraps of a hundred other memories. It was a faded thing, like cloth left in the sunlight for too many years.

There was a creak on the floorboards and Vlora opened her eyes, not remembering that she’d closed them. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, but she did not wipe them away.

“You don’t have to go,” she said to the figure in the doorway.

Taniel wore faded buckskins and held an old, secondhand rifle in his hands. He had grown out his beard and his hair. His eyes were brighter than she’d seen in years and he looked as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

“I do,” he said with a smile. “I’m free, Vlora.”

She stepped around Tamas’s desk and walked up to him, examining his face and eyes. She glanced back at the epaulets she’d left on the desk and she thought she understood.

“They made you a general,” Taniel said.