The Providence of Fire (44 page)

“And what does he want with me?”

“He is curious about the Kettral, about the Skullsworn, and about you, Valyn hui'Malkeenian. It is not often the son of an Annurian emperor comes among us. Long Fist would witness this for himself.”

 

22

Adare woke on a lumpy bed in a chilly room. At first she thought it was night, then realized the darkness in the sky was storm. Someone had tried to pull a scrap of oilcloth over the window, but the wind had torn it free at two corners, and it thrashed madly against the sill while rain spattered on the floor with each gust.

The room was unfamiliar. When she tried to probe her memory, she found a wide, bright blank. The last thing she recalled was arriving on the bridge at Olon, pilgrims at her back, and even that memory felt blurry and inchoate, like something she had dreamed rather than lived. Thought came slowly, reluctantly, and when she tried to think about what happened
after
the bridge, about how she had come to the small, stone room, she could hear only a voice, the echo of immensity, singing in her ear.

Win
.

Her heart pumped unstoppably, as though held in a great warm hand.

Shivering took her, and she tried to pull up the thin, itchy blanket, then realized that she was naked. Alarmed, she started to sit up, then subsided against the mattress, as though she were a puppet and someone had silently, almost tenderly, snipped all her strings.

“We had to cut off your clothes,” a voice said, gravelly and indifferent.

Adare turned her head to find a man—dark skin, close-cropped hair—seated on a wooden chair in the shadows.
Lehav,
she thought idly. His name was Lehav.

“They were burned, singed to your skin in places.”

Her skin burned, a bright sensation, clean, not entirely unpleasant.

“What…” She trailed off, raising a hand, then letting it drop.

“Lightning,” Lehav replied. “At the Everburning Well.”

The Well.
Memory leaked in: faces, light, endless rain. A cool long spear heavy in her hand. Why was the Well on fire? What was she doing there?

“You're lucky,” Lehav continued. “I saw lightning hit three of my men down in the Waist—storms down there make this look like a clear day—saw it from thirty paces off. One minute they were standing on a small rise, the next…” He stared out the window. “Burned them black, all three of them. They were dead before they hit the ground. When I tried to pick them up, to carry them back to camp, the skin just sloughed off.”

Lightning.
Adare lifted the blanket to look at her own body. She felt as though she'd been hurled from a great height, as though she were still falling, or else not falling at all, but at the very moment of striking the earth, the terrible impact infinitely extended. Fire laced her flesh. Angry red lines, thin as hairs, graceful as lace, swooped and whorled over the curves of her skin, a delicate, indelible brand left by the lightning. The lines looked like seams, felt like seams, as though she was nothing but heat trapped inside skin, a burning light ready to burst free.

Adare dropped the blanket, and Lehav's words swam back into focus. The vision of his dead soldiers tugged at her, mixed with her own reluctant fragments of memory. The story seemed impossibly sad, tragic. She wondered how he handled the guilt, then realized there was no guilt. Lightning came from the sky. Lehav couldn't stop it. It wasn't as though he'd killed the soldiers himself. Why was she crying? It wasn't as though she'd served in the Waist. She hadn't seen her men—

The full memory lashed across her mind like a whip, so vicious that she cried out.

Lehav was out of his chair and across the space in an instant, his cool dry hands on her forehead, then checking her pulse.

“What's wrong?” he demanded, sliding back the blanket, searching for the source of the pain. Adare's breath was gone. She had no words to tell him that it was not her body that ached.

“Fulton,” she managed finally, too horrified by the memory of the Well, of what had happened there, to care about Lehav's hands running over her skin. “Birch. What happened? Did they…” She couldn't bring herself to say it.

He paused, looked her in the eye, then, evidently satisfied that she wasn't dying, tossed the cloth back up over her shoulders. He did not, however, retake his seat. Instead, he stood at the window, staring out into the storm, ignoring the gusting rain.

“What happened?” He shrugged. “Well, that very much depends on who you ask.”

“Are they
alive
?” Adare demanded. The words hurt as they left her, as though they were barbed hooks pulling free, ripping out ragged pieces of pink flesh.

He nodded. “Both of them. The lightning that hit you dead-on knocked them both out of the way—knocked a few dozen people out of the way—but those two landed far clear of the Well. A little stunned, but fine.”

“And you didn't insist on … going through with it? Going through with the execution?”

Lehav frowned. “I've seen plenty of lightning,” he said finally. “Down in the Waist. Up north.” He shook his head. “There was something different about this. It was … brighter. Sharper. More than natural, somehow.”

Adare stared.

“And then people started to talk,” he went on. “About the lightning—
Intarra's
lightning. About the fact that you were hit but not harmed. About those lines on your skin.” He shook his head once more. “Never seen lightning leave marks like that.”

It took a few moments for Adare to understand.

“A miracle,” she breathed finally.

“Their word,” he said. “Not mine.” Again he shrugged, but he'd turned away from the window, and there was something new in his eyes when he looked at her, something she couldn't quite name. “I'm stubborn,” he went on after a pause, “but not stupid. It wasn't the right moment to go throwing heretics into the Well.”

“They weren't heretics,” Adare said, relief flooding her like liquor, sweet and sickening all at the same time.

“Maybe.”

Adare raised her head. She felt stronger now, though her skin still burned. “Where are they?” she asked.

He snorted. “Just because I'm not killing your friends doesn't mean I'm letting them wander around. They're alive. They're well. That's what you want to know, right? Congratulations.”

The last word raked her with shame.
She
had done nothing to save her Aedolians, nothing effective anyway. It was the lightning that did it. Lightning and luck. Her skin burned, and she slipped an arm from beneath the blanket, studying the ruddy pattern, a sharp, bright sensation that might have been fear blooming in her mind.

“They're alive,” she murmured. Tears streaked her face.

“Normally it's a good thing when your men make it,” Lehav said, cocking his head to the side. “Doesn't always happen that way.”

Adare stared at him. “How do you do it?” she asked, voice little louder than a whisper.

“It?”

“Decide. Who lives and who dies. You've led men, both in the legions and for the Sons of Flame. Some of them must have died on your orders. As a commander, how do you make the decision?”

Lehav glowered at the storm. “You don't think about the dying. You decide what needs to be done, you pick the best men to do it, and you send them out. The dying, that's Ananshael's business.”

Adare looked at the soldier. “And the things that need to be done,” she asked. “You ever wonder if they really need to be done?”

He met her gaze squarely. “All the time.”

*   *   *

When Adare woke again, it was night, the storm had settled to a quiet patter of raindrops, someone had lit a lantern beside her bed, and Lehav was gone. For a while she lay still, feeling the burns lacing her skin, the bright ache like a spike of light in the meat of her mind. Unlike her earlier awakening, this time she remembered everything.

“Sweet Intarra's light,” she breathed.

“You've been a 'Kent-kissing prophet half a fuckin' day and you've already started with the holy horseshit.”

Adare started up, yanking the blanket around her. Nira sat in the chair by the head of her bed, tapping impatiently at the cane laid across her lap. Adare swung her legs off the bed, letting the blanket drop, then realized that Oshi stood in the far corner, inspecting a section of chipping plaster, and hastily pulled it up again.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “How did you get in?”

Nira raised her brows at the tone. “You've only got the three guards, girl. Two of 'em are still try'n'a walk straight after almost getting tossed in a burning well, then skewered by fire, and the third seems t've had a change of heart after your show down there in the city.” The woman raised her bushy brows. “Ya
do
know what them dumb fool fucks in the street are sayin'? What they're callin' ya? Intarra's second prophet. That's what.”

Adare put a hand to her forehead. The fierce, clean fire was gone, replaced by a throbbing ache. The guilt over Fulton and Birch, submerged for a while in her exhaustion, had settled on her like a leaden coat. She couldn't face Nira and her questions, not right now, but she had no idea how to get her to go away.

“What do you want?” she asked.

The woman raised an eyebrow. “Wanted ta gaze on the prophet in all her burned, skinny glory. Seen a lot of things in my life, but never a prophet.”

“I'm not a prophet,” Adare said, shaking her head. “I just got lucky.” It was the rational way to look at the situation, but the words felt wrong, somehow, ungrateful. Disrespectful. “I prayed and the goddess answered my prayer.”

Nira raised her brows. “Ya don't have ta play the pious fool for me, girl.”

“I'm not playing,” Adare replied quietly. “Fulton and Birch are alive because of that lightning. Intarra's lightning.”

“And there are black pines burned to char in the Romsdals, also hit by lightning. Ya think your goddess has got something against tall trees?”

Adare took a deep breath, then let it leak out slowly between her lips. She had no response, largely because it was exactly the kind of crack she might have made herself a month earlier. Lightning struck all the time, blasting barren mountaintops, stabbing down into the wide oceans, burning through the solitary oak in the field, most of it, probably, in places where there was no one to pray in the first place. Embracing a goddess because of a bolt of lightning was stupid; but then, it wasn't just the lightning. Adare closed her eyes and felt the deep, cool relief bathing her heart, the gratitude flowing like blood through her veins. The lightning she could write off, but not the answer to her desperate prayer.

“Intarra came,” she said, feeling defiant and foolish all at once. “She was there.”

Nira stared at her a moment longer, then shrugged. “Well, this was a disappointment. Guess one revelation looks pretty much like another.” She got to her feet, leaning on the cane. “Good luck rulin' your empire, girl. C'mon, Oshi, ya demented ape.”

Adare blinked. “You're leaving?”

Nira nodded. “Your man—Ameredad, Lehav—he wasn't our man. Didn't expect he would be, really, but there were enough pieces that fit. Not the first time we've crossed a quarter continent for a dead end. Won't be the last.
Oshi!
” she said again, jabbing her cane at the door. “Time to leave Our Lady the Princess Prophet Minister to her great and noble tasks.”

The old man raised his head from the plaster, looked over at Adare as though seeing her for the first time, then abruptly lost interest.

“Don't go,” Adare blurted. “Come north with us.”

Nira frowned. “And why, in the name of Meshkent's buggering cock, would I want ta do a shit-witted thing like that?”

“I need you,” Adare said, shocked at her own words, but recognizing the truth in them even as they left her lips. “I need a councillor.”

“Seems ta me you're well on your way to being over-counseled as it is.”

Adare shook her head. “No. Lehav will use me, but doesn't trust me. Fulton and Birch will guard me, but they won't talk to me.…” She trailed off, staring at her hands. “I'm in charge of an army now, Nira. I'm starting a civil war against maybe the best general in the history of Annur, and I have no idea what I'm doing.”

Nira's lips tightened. “I'm sorry, girl, but I can't help. You might'a forgot,” she lowered her voice, “but things didn't work out all that well when we were in charge, Oshi and me. 'Sides—ya got Intarra now ta guide your every dainty step.”

“Just because she saved me once, doesn't mean she'll do it every time,” Adare protested. She realized she was pleading, and found she didn't care. “I need someone who knows about power, who's been there before.”

Nira glanced at her brother, then shook her head. “No. I got my own work ta see to.”

“Yes!” Adare said, seizing on to the idea. “You walked all the way here looking for your Csestriim. Why? What was it you said?
He's always at the heart of important things.
Well, there's nothing closer to the heart of things than the Dawn Palace. The palace you were telling me weeks ago you couldn't get inside.”

“This,” the woman said, casting a skeptical look around the crumbling room, “doesn't look much like the Dawn Palace.”

Adare ignored the crack, pressing ahead. “I'm going to Annur. I'm going to destroy il Tornja, and take back the Unhewn Throne.”

“Last time I checked, it was your brother supposed to be sittin' on that ugly hunk a' stone, not you.”

“I have no idea where Kaden is,” Adare snapped, “and I can't afford to wait for him. None of us can. If you come with me, you'll see every important player in this empire. If your Csestriim is there, we'll find him.”