The Providence of Fire (47 page)

“Legitimacy.”

Valyn stared at the leach, the pieces falling into place. Sanlitun's political foes had often termed his policy with the Urghul appeasement. Since il Tornja's elevation to
kenarang,
however, Annur had begun to take a harder position, fortifying the northern border, building new forts, even allowing strategic incursions over the White River.

It was hard to say precisely why il Tornja would want to antagonize the Urghul, but history furnished a few examples. Maybe he was angling for more coin in the coffers of the Ministry of War. Maybe he was looking to expand the upper ranks of the army, to justify the promotion of a few confederates. Or maybe he wanted an open war. Valyn forced himself to consider that last option. It made a certain mad sense, especially if the
kenarang
aspired to the Unhewn Throne itself. A sufficiently violent conflict would terrify the people of Annur, maybe terrify them enough that they would accept a seasoned warrior on the throne and overlook the fact that il Tornja lacked Intarra's burning eyes.

Valyn hesitated, Sami Yurl's final words echoing in his ears. “What about Csestriim?” he asked slowly. “Yurl claimed that the Csestriim were involved.”

Balendin stared at him, incredulous. “I understand that growing up in a palace could give you an inflated sense of your own importance, but I didn't realize it went this far.” He shook his head. “Csestriim.”

Valyn frowned. There was something … strange in the leach's words. Something missing. Before he could put his finger on it, however, Long Fist was putting down his pipe. He looked first at Balendin, then at Valyn.

“What, precisely, did this person—Yurl—say?” For the first time he looked truly invested, leaning forward slightly, hand on his knee.

Valyn shook his head. “He said the Csestriim were involved somehow. That they were behind it.”

“And there were those creatures, too,” Talal added. “The
ak'hanath
.”

Balendin shook his head. His face had gone ashen, but he kept his feet. Whatever else was true about him, the leach had spent half his life with the Kettral, and the Kettral trained you to deal with pain. “Yurl was an idiot. He fought well, but he was an idiot. We knew about the
ak'hanath
. Adiv told us they had something to do with the Csestriim originally, not that the Csestriim were still alive, still involved.”

He was lying. Valyn knew all at once, without understanding how he knew. Something about the smell of him, an oily scent that was not a scent at all, a sweet intangible reek of the raw nerves that accompanied deceit.

“Another finger?” Huutsuu asked, looking to the chieftain.

Long Fist nodded.

“No,” Balendin protested. “You fucking fools…”

But the Urghul woman was already on him, peeling back the small finger on the other hand, then driving the knife into the joint, twisting and sawing, blood spattering her face as the leach thrashed. When it was all finished, Balendin slumped against the warriors who restrained him.

Long Fist looked at him for a long time. “The Csestriim?” he asked again.

“There were no Csestriim,” Balendin spat. “Unless you think il Tornja is Csestriim.”

Valyn inhaled slowly, but whatever he'd smelled or thought he'd smelled was gone. There was only the ragged, rusted edge of the leach's fear, fear he held firmly in check.

The shaman frowned, but did not respond.

“More?” Huutsuu asked.

He shook his head. “He has told us what he knows.” After a long pause, Long Fist turned to Valyn.

“I trusted Sanlitun,” the Urghul leader said quietly. “Although he led a soft people, he understood something of hardness. Now…” He held a hand toward Valyn, palm up, as though offering something precious but invisible. “Your father is dead, murdered, and I believe we share a common foe.”

“Meaning what?” Valyn asked, his legs suddenly unsteady beneath him.

“Meaning that together we can avoid a war.”

Despite Long Fist's words, the sounds of martial readiness shivered the air: the drumming of hooves, shouts of men and women, cold clatter of steel on steel.
Just a shield,
the shaman claimed, but thousands of mounted warriors were never just a shield. Full-scale war had not come to Annur in generations, and now, according to Long Fist, the decision to halt it lay in Valyn's hands.

“And how do we avoid war,” he asked carefully, “when il Tornja, the
kenarang
and regent both, is bent on it?”

The shaman smiled, revealing those bright, sharpened canines. “You kill him.”

 

24

The burn was not a burn. Not, at least, like any burn Adare had ever seen. The intricate tracery of red scar looked more like the swirls of henna that brides from Rabi and Aragat inked onto their skin, a thousand ramifying twists and whorls snaking around her arms and torso, down her legs and up her neck like tiny red vines spreading into her hair. Unlike vines, however, unlike ink, the burn was a part of her. When she flexed her arms or fingers, those burns shifted with the flesh, the scar-smooth skin catching the light until it seemed to shine, to glow. The wounds throbbed, but the pain was cold and bright rather than chafing. Still, when Adare tried to get out of bed, she felt her legs turn to water and her mind fade, all thought blotted out in a great wash of light.

It was a day before she could cross to the window and another before she could reach the door, but on the third morning, despite the wobble in her gait, the brightness stamped on her sight, she insisted on seeing her Aedolians. Lehav and Nira had assured her over and over that both men had survived the ordeal, but Adare needed to witness it herself, to stand in the same room with them, to touch them and hear them speak.

The room was dark, blinds drawn over the windows, the single lamp unlit on a bedside table. At first Adare thought they were sleeping, then Birch raised his head weakly from the pillow, and she stifled a gasp. The lightning had burned him, too, but there was nothing delicate or graceful about the bright red weal smeared across half of his once-handsome face. Of the wounded eye, she could see nothing. It was either lost or the lid had burned shut. Any expression must have been excruciating for him, but he raised his brows.

“Come to finish us off, my lady?” He tried a grin, but his voice was thin as smoke.

Adare shook her head. “I wanted … I came to see that you were all right.”

“We're fine,” Fulton cut in, although when he pushed himself up in his cot he looked anything but fine. The lightning had spared his face, but a rogue branch of the bolt had torn down his chest like a talon, ripping the skin apart. The bandages over the wound were heavy with seeping blood and pus, and he was even thinner than before the botched execution.

“Are they feeding you?” she demanded.

Fulton nodded. “Broth, at the moment. Neither of us can hold down much more.”

He narrowed his eyes, studying her. “Your face, your neck. You are well?”

“Well enough,” she said, nodding.

“Thanks be to Intarra,” the man murmured.

“For what?” Birch asked. “Grilling us like fish on a skewer?”

“For sparing the princess,” the older man replied.

“I thought it was prophet now,” Birch said. “Didn't I hear something about a prophet?”

Adare nodded weakly. “That's what some of the people are saying.”

“And what about us?” he asked, gesturing to his face. “Are we prophets, too?”

“We are soldiers,” Fulton ground out, warning heavy in his tone. “The same as we have always been.”

“The same?” Birch demanded. “I don't think so.”

For a moment the two men seemed to forget that she was there, glares locked like the horns of rutting bulls. Adare could only watch, her legs too weak to carry her forward, her mouth too dry to speak. At last Birch turned his head away, shoved the blinds aside, and stared out the window into the rain.

“I'm sorry,” she said finally, the words flimsy as wet paper, tearing apart even as she spoke them. “I'm so sorry.”

“There's no need to apologize, my lady,” Fulton said. “You did what you had to, and so did we. Everyone's alive. In another day or two, we'll be able to resume our duties.”

Birch kept his eyes on the window, and his voice was so low when he spoke that Adare wasn't sure she heard him clearly.

“Speak for yourself, Fulton.”

“Forgive him, my lady,” Fulton said. “The lightning has—”

“The lightning woke me up,” Birch snapped, turning back and half rising in his bed to glare at Adare.

“Mind your tone before the princess, soldier,” Fulton growled.

“Princess? She's a prophet now, or didn't you hear? The thing is, I didn't sign on to serve a prophet.” His eyes were wide, almost wild, accusatory and pleading both. “I would have taken a blade for you, Adare. A bolt in the belly. I would have run into a burning tower to haul you out.”

“You might still have the chance,” Fulton growled.

“No,” Birch said, voice suddenly horribly weary. “I will not. I'm done. I always knew I might be killed for you, Adare. I just never figured I'd be killed
by
you. By a deal
you
made.” He dropped his head back to the pillow, turned his gaze to the window, and fell silent.

Jaw tight, Fulton started to pull himself upright in bed, but Adare crossed to him, put a hand on his shoulder. He was feverish, skin aflame, and weak as a child when she pushed him back against the pillow.

“It's all right,” she murmured. “Leave him be. I already owe him more than I can repay.”

Birch didn't turn his head. From where Adare stood, she could see only the unburned side of his face, the handsome side, the side she recognized. Tears sheeted his cheek, but he refused to look over, didn't meet her eye. He was alive, saved, either by the grace of Intarra or Adare's own mad folly, and yet she had lost him all the same.

He is the first to see through me,
Adare told herself, staring at the man, trying to remember his casual laugh, his grin.
But he will not be the last. Or the worst.

*   *   *

“I'm not a prophet,” Adare said, shaking her head, meeting Nira's glare from across the table. “I'm
not,
regardless of what they say.”

“The fuck does that have ta do with anything?” the woman snapped.

“I won't drape myself in a lie and call it
glory
.”

“Oh for 'Shael's sweet sake, girl, you think you can rule an empire without lying? You think your father didn't lie? Or his father? Or any of your goldy-eyed great-great-founders of Annur? It's built into the
job
. Bakers have flour, fishermen have nets, and leaders have lies.”

Adare ground her teeth and looked away. They sat just inside the wide glass doors of the old palace where Lehav had made his headquarters. To the south, the lake stretched away farther than she could see, all waves and gray, like a great chipped slate. On the far side of the water, well out of sight, sat Sia, a twin city to Olon, but richer, and more beautiful. Past Sia lay the trellised vineyards of central Eridroa, then the jade hills, green as emeralds, if the paintings were to be believed, sparkling with ten thousand terraces. Adare had seen the vibrant scrolls hung in the Dawn Palace, but she had never been farther from Annur than Olon, and the sudden mad urge seized her to set out south on a lake boat, to slip out of the city when no one was watching and just disappear.

It was a childish fantasy, of course, the opposite of what she had come to do, but then, despite her success, what she had come to do was looking harder each day. According to Nira, she should have been grateful that the devout were calling her Intarra's second prophet, that the scene at the Well was being hailed as a miracle. In a single day, she'd won the loyalty of Intarra's most faithful, and besides, it wasn't as though she'd never had a title before.

Princess. Malkeenian. Minister of Finance. She'd grown accustomed to the big names, but this newest honorific—prophet—hung on her heavily as an ill-fitting coat. She still couldn't explain what had happened at the Well, couldn't be sure why she had walked away unscathed from the lightning. That Intarra had answered her prayer, Adare was just willing to believe, especially when her mind filled, as it still did several times each day, with that boundless, brilliant light, a wash of peace and power so burning hot it felt cool as balm. She'd come to the city a skeptic, and was leaving with a reverence kindled in her heart—fine. But none of that made her a
prophet
.

“It's not even your lie,” Nira went on, stabbing a bony finger into the tabletop. “It's the
people
saying it. All ya have to do is nod your dumb head and smile.”

Adare sucked a long breath between her teeth. The old woman was right enough. Word of Adare's miraculous survival was already spreading, of a Malkeenian princess who had forsaken her palace and throne to join a sacred band of pilgrims, to make her own sacrifice at the Well, who had been marked twice over by Intarra, once with the burning eyes, and a second time, to reaffirm her holiness, by a sacred web of bright scar laid into her skin. Most hagiography, of course, was bullshit. In some of the tales, people had Adare stepping into the Well itself, then borne up on a fountain of light. And yet, she had few enough advantages in the fight against il Tornja as it was.

“Listen, ya priggish idiot,” Nira said, spreading her hands. “People don't
want
men and women for leaders—they want saviors.”

“And what if I don't want to be a savior?”

“Then you're dumber than I took ya for. Which was pretty fuckin' dumb.” She shook her head in frustration. “Let me lay it out, plain as cloth: a fisherman tells his own story—where he fished, whether his nets came back full or no. A tailor tells his own story. Even a whore tells her story, though there are plenty a' crooked cocks who'll try ta take it from her.