Ashes of the Tyrant

by Erin M. Evans

  “Do you need more time?” Mehen said, a little too quickly. “Would a stroll help? Wear you out a bit? It’s not a bad walk, along the river.”

  She looked back over her shoulder at her father. “You’re stalling.”

  His fearsome teeth parted. “If caring about my daughter’s well-being is stalling—”

  Farideh tucked an arm around him. “You know it is. Come on. It’s better to have it all out.”

  They walked together back to where the caravan had camped for the night, a stone’s throw from the path the human caravan master called the Road of Dust and Mehen called Ossa Choshk. The wagons, laden with copper bars, in locked and lashed chests, and goods to tempt the dragonborn of faraway Djerad Thymar, had been circled loosely around a handful of campfires, and at their edge, a guard post had been set. A small fire crackled between a tiefling leaning against an enormous, muzzled black dog, a human man stretched out on the ground listening to her, and a young dragonborn man standing with his back to the fire, looking out at the plains of Tymanther. Beyond them, Djerad Thymar waited, impossibly large, and still a day’s ride away.

  The hellhound, Zoonie, came up on her feet as Mehen and Farideh approached, jostling Farideh’s twin, Havilar. She broke off whatever she’d been saying to Brin with a curse. “Tiamash! Zoonie, lie down! It’s just Mehen and Farideh. How’d it go?” she added to her sister.

  “Same as always,” Farideh said. As Djerad Thymar should have been familiar, so should the powers of Asmodeus have become less alien over time. It had been the better part of a year since that first time the flames had taken her over, but it still felt like a violation when it did.

  “Well?” Havilar said, as Mehen settled down beside the fire. He ignored her, scratching the empty piercings along his jaw frill. Then he heaved a great sigh and poured himself a mug of watered-down wine.

  “All right,” he said. “Ask your questions.”

  Just beyond the firelight, Dumuzi turned, looking back as if something on the road had drawn his eye and not as if he were listening to the conversation. That would be improper, Farideh was fairly sure, and Kepeshkmolik Dumuzi was never improper.

  “Who’s Anala?” Havilar asked. “Why did she call you back? Are you rich now? Are we staying?”

  “How long are we staying?” Farideh asked.

  “Anala is my father’s younger sister,” Mehen said. “She’s the matriarch of Verthisathurgiesh now.”

  “How is she?” Havilar asked. “Do you like her?”

  “Slow down,” Mehen said. He drank some of the wine. “In my youth, I would say she was dear to me. She minded me and my siblings often. She was the elder I went to with my troubles, the one who cared for me.”

  “Like your mother?” Brin asked.

  Mehen sighed again. “Yes and no. Things are different in Djerad Thymar. But keep in mind, I haven’t seen her in almost thirty years. I don’t know Anala anymore.”

  “Is your mother alive?” Farideh asked, surprised she didn’t know the answer already.

  “She died before I hatched.” He drummed his thick fingers against the mug, eyes on the fire. “To your other question, Anala called me back because my father’s dead, and so his exile doesn’t stand. I doubt very much we’re getting any coin out of this.”

  “We know that.” Havilar pointed her chin at the dragonborn in the darkness. “Dumuzi said as much in Suzail. But that’s a lot of trouble just to say sorry when you’ve never asked to come back. What’s she want, do you think?”

  “There is no telling,” Mehen said. He fell silent again, as if he were trying to sort out words. “You know the ancestor stories? ‘Khorsaya and the Thigh Bone Sword,’ ‘Clever Nala and the Ten Thousand Shadows,’ ‘The Battle of the Crippled Mountain’? Verthisathurgiesh prizes wiliness and action, and while Anala may have been like a mother to me, she is matriarch for a reason. She might say calling me back is only to right Pandjed’s wrongs.”

  “But you wouldn’t be here if it might not be more,” Farideh said.

  Mehen nodded. “That doesn’t mean we’re staying, and if I have my way, we’ll hardly be here long enough to shake the dust from our boots.” He hesitated. “I don’t want you three to be unprepared. Djerad Thymar is a dragonborn city. You’ll be as strange as you were in Suzail, girls, and Brin …” He sighed once more. “Well, I suppose you’ll see.”

  “What do we call her?” Havilar asked. “Anala? Matriarch? Auntie?”

  Mehen looked as if he hoped beyond hope they would call Anala nothing at all, and it made Farideh’s heart squeeze. “Call her Matriarch Anala, and then see what she says,” Mehen said. Then, “I’m not going to lie to you, she likely doesn’t know about you girls, and I don’t know how she’ll feel about my adopting tieflings. Mind, anyone says a word against you and I’ll make them regret it, but I can’t promise words won’t be said.”

  “Well,” Havilar said a little briskly, “we’re used to that. Better or worse than Cormyr, do you think?”

  Farideh sneaked a look at Brin and marked the abashed look that crossed his face. Just a tenday ago, they had been in Cormyr, the kingdom of his birth and birthright, a place where Farideh and Havilar had stood out worse than ever before—even setting aside the racing gossip that accompanied Brin, a nobleman in line for the throne, having a tiefling for a lover despite his engagement to the princess of Cormyr. The stress of it had proved too much for Havilar, and she’d broken things off. What was happening between them now, Farideh couldn’t say. She couldn’t say she wanted to know either—it was beyond private—but it would have helped to know what to say and what to bite her tongue about.

  “It’s complicated,” Mehen said again. “I’d guess the same as Cormyr. Worse than Waterdeep, but better than it would’ve been in …” He trailed off suddenly, and Farideh’s heart twisted around the omission. Better than it would have been in Harrowdale.

  A month ago, standing in the Royal Gardens, the air thick with the scent of lemon balm and the sound of bees. Dahl standing beside the hedge, fiddling with the leaves. Nervous, she’d thought, because of the impending siege, but no. “Would you consider coming to Harrowdale?”

  “It’s been three days,” she’d pointed out. “Are you sure?”

  “Three days since I told you I loved you,” Dahl had said. “We’ve been all but courting for months—false or not, I don’t think there’s much I haven’t learned about you by now. You can hardly pretend I’m rushing. Besides,” he said after a moment, “I have to go.” War spilling out over the North and the Heartlands, with no regard for border or boundary—how could he not go, with his mother, his family in danger’s path? Farideh had agreed—even if doubt had made its own little nest in her thoughts, she was sure she loved him.

  But then he’d gone without her and without a word to say why.

  Before they’d left Cormyr, she’d had one last message from Dahl in Harrowdale: I love you. I will fix this. Farideh had borrowed enough coin to gather the components for a sending ritual. She’d laid the lines of powdered metals and salts and dried blood, conjuring up the magic Dahl himself had taught her years and years ago that would let her speak with him on the other edge of the continent.

  “I got your message,” she’d said. “Mehen wants to go to Djerad Thymar. We leave tomorrow, unless you tell me why I should stay?” She hesitated. “I love you.”

  But only silence had followed. Farideh had sat, perfectly still, until the magic that powered the spell fizzled and crackled out of the air, a snow of dying power. The response hadn’t come.

  Because Dahl couldn’t answer? Because Dahl didn’t want to answer? Because she hadn’t cast the spell right?

  Because someone in the Nine Hells was keeping her from him?

  There was only one way of knowing at her disposal. One way of being sure, one way of saving Dahl, of bringing him back to her, and it tore at Farideh.

  All I want is your happiness, Farideh. The one who gets hurt doesn’t have to be you.

 
Asmodeus, the god of sin, king of the Nine Hells, could give her Dahl, would give her Dahl, if she just stayed quiet, stayed calm, stayed out of his business and stopped wondering what it was that made her dream of both the king of devils and the long-dead god of wizards.

  She rubbed her thumb over her bleached ring finger, the remnant of another hasty decision, another attempt to fix things that had wound up hurting more people. What was to say Dahl wanted to come back to her anyway? She thought of Lorcan then, the half-devil who held her pact and who she still thought of with complicated feelings. Don’t you think it’s more likely that he left of his own accord? I suppose he’s just not our kind.

  Hush, she told herself. He loves you. He can take care of himself. Stop worrying about this right now.

  She eyed Havilar, still sprawled across the hellhound. There was plenty to worry about that was far more pressing.

  “People will say things,” Dumuzi piped up, “but you won’t know it.”

  “Cryptic,” Havilar said.

  “Sjashukri,” Dumuzi said as if he were correcting her. “No one will be directly rude. Not even Anala. That’s not our way.” Mehen’s teeth gapped, his tongue hammering a nervous rhythm against the roof of his mouth.

  “Shjash-oo-kree,” Brin repeated. “Sounds like nobles in Cormyr.” Dumuzi looked back over his shoulder at Mehen.

  “No,” the older dragonborn said, as if the whole business annoyed him. “Sjashukri is subtler. Trickier. You’ll suspect it’s an insult or a criticism, but you cannot call it out. If … If I were to praise Havilar’s skill with a blade, and then say how nice Farideh’s script is—”

  “Then you’d be lying,” Havilar interrupted, “because her script is terrible.”

  “You have no room to talk,” Mehen said sternly. “But the sjashukri is in the way the compliments are arranged. It implies Farideh’s skills are not worth mentioning, that the only thing that comes near is her scriptwork. But no one can say that’s an insult. It’s two compliments.” Mehen coughed. “Your blade work’s come along nicely,” he added to Farideh.

  “It’s not worth complimenting,” Farideh said dryly. “I see what you mean. Should keep us on our toes.” She wrapped her hands around each other, nervous and uneasy. “Are you sure she doesn’t know about us?”

  “I haven’t been back in thirty years,” Mehen said again. “How in the broken planes would she know?”

  Farideh gave her father a significant look. He might not have returned to Djerad Thymar in thirty years … but some part of Djerad Thymar had come to find him not sixteen years earlier. Verthisathurgiesh Arjhani, Dumuzi’s father, the man Mehen had loved enough to choose exile over, had come to the hidden village of Arush Vayem and joined their patchwork little family for all of a summer, before fleeing back to the City-Bastion.

  Mehen frowned and said nothing, and Farideh squeezed her hands together more tightly. The one thing they needed a plan for and there was no plan. She glanced at Havilar scratching Zoonie under the jaw, remembering the summer, the following autumn and winter. Havilar, unsettled, uncertain, fragile as an ice crystal, and more heartbroken even than Mehen. She had loved Arjhani the way she loved all things, wholly and unreservedly, and he’d left without a word. What would happen this time?

  We won’t stay long, she told herself. We won’t run into Arjhani.

  “Here’s something I’ve always wondered,” Brin said lightly. “You all hate the dragons so much, right? Why do you call yourselves dragonborn?”

  Mehen turned a cold eye on Brin. “We don’t,” he said. “We just gave up trying to convince you all to stop.”

  “It’s Vayemniri, in Draconic,” Havilar said.

  “Vie-yem-near-ee,” Brin repeated. “What’s it mean?”

  “ ‘The Ash-Marked Ones,’ ” Farideh said, prodding the campfire and sending up a swirl of embers as the last of the sun dipped below the horizon.

  THE LAST TIME Clanless Mehen had passed through the gates of the city of Djerad Thymar, he had vowed to never return, cursing his father’s name and his lover’s cowardice, two wounds he never thought would heal. Melodramatic, he thought. He’d been too young to know plenty of people lived with wounds like that.

  “Come on,” he muttered to Brin. The young man nodded once, climbing down from the wagon seat. “What are you going to do?”

  “Ask if he needs anything else and hold out my hand,” Brin recited. “No niceties.”

  Mehen nodded back. When they’d left Cormyr behind, and Brin’s royal life with it, Mehen knew that he’d have to make sure the lad could survive this unkind life he’d chosen. He might not have been Mehen’s son, but whatever happened between Brin and Havilar, the boy was in his heart.

  Besides, he thought, looming over the much shorter human and glaring at the caravan master, humans always paid their own kind better.

  “Will there be anything else?” Brin asked. The bearded caravan master looked him up and down, a faint sneer on his face.

  “Didn’t really have much need of you it seems,” he said. “You oversold the dangers of the Road of Dust more than a little.”

  “A fortunate season,” Brin said. “I think we agreed on fifty-eight gold.”

  The caravan master handed over a purse of coins. “Thirty. You didn’t give me fifty-eight’s worth. And those devil-children and their great hound spooked my horses.”

  Brin turned his head, as if to look back at Mehen the way they’d agreed upon, punctuating the discussion with the threat of Brin’s monstrous right hand. But then he turned back to face the caravan master.

  “You’re coming from Tsurlagol, isn’t that right?” The caravan master narrowed his eyes. “You’re not the first to bring copper to Djerad Thymar,” Brin went on. “I’m guessing … you want a deal with the glassworks. Do you know that my dragonborn friends here are associated with two of the most powerful clans in the city?” He dropped his voice. “Do you even know which of the clans is powerful? Who invited you?”

  The caravan master’s eyes darted from the young man to Mehen and back. “Clethtinthtiallor,” he said, naming one of the score or so clans in Djerad Thymar.

  Brin turned back to Mehen then as though this answer wasn’t to be believed, and the dragonborn allowed himself a small smile. It was a newer clan, but its reputation didn’t suffer. Not that the caravan master knew that.

  “Listen,” Brin said. “I don’t want to ruin your livelihood so long as you don’t ruin mine. Pay what we’re owed, and I don’t tell Kepeshkmolik and Verthisathurgiesh you shorted their kin.” He shrugged and the caravan master’s scowl deepened. “It’s coin now or coin later. Your decision.”

  “I see Cormyr hasn’t left you as completely as you’d like,” Mehen said, as they walked back to the twins with their full fee. “What happened to the plan?”

  “To be honest? There’s so many of you here.” Brin gestured at the dragonborn milling around the gates and the outer city. “I figured he’s not going to be as frightened of my dragonborn guard, and if he were, he’d see a value in fighting that fear. But coin—he’d be scared of losing more coin. It’s a risky venture already, diving into a market no one’s successfully tapped.”

  “Hmph. Well done. Next time, leave the clan names out,” Mehen said. “You don’t want to stir that pot.”

  “How’d he do?” Farideh asked as they approached.

  “Full fee,” Mehen said. “He put the fear of the clans into him.”

  “Nicely done, Brin,” Havilar said.

  Brin’s smile grew a little. “Thanks.”

  Dumuzi said nothing, only frowned in disapproval, arms folded across his chest. Kepeshkmolik to the core, thought Mehen.

  But Verthisathurgiesh under the scales—Dumuzi could have been your son, he thought. If he’d married Kepeshkmolik Uadjit the way his father had planned, if he hadn’t chosen love and exile over duty and honor, then who knew how many Kepeshkmolik eggs he would have reluctantly sired.

  Some ancient part of him, awakened a
s he crossed through Djerad Thymar’s gates, noted he ought to feel regretful, ought to wish for a strapping child of his own blood.

  But there was nothing of the sort in Clanless Mehen. There was no path he wanted that left those two babies to die in the snow.

  He gave Dumuzi and Brin their shares, and the two young men collected their belongings from the caravan wagon. Mehen held out two shares of the coins to Farideh and Havilar. They traded a glance.

  “We get our own?” Havilar asked, as if there were some trick here.

  “You’re grown,” Mehen said. “You handle your own coin from here on out. That means you pay for your own supplies too,” he pointed out, seeing a dangerous gleam in Havilar’s eye. “You waste it on a fancy blade or a gown you don’t need, you’ll be the one selling at a loss when you can’t afford trail rations.” He cleared his throat, dropping into Draconic. “And don’t forget you need to … buy the herbs, regardless of what … of who … of where your day-count is—”

  “Thrik!” Havilar cried, keeping the tongue. “Gods, Mehen, we understand.”

  “You all but bought out the stall in Suzail for us,” Farideh said, her cheeks scarlet. “We’re set for a good while.”

  Mehen scowled. “Either of you get a child, I’m not paying for that either.” A lie, he thought, even as he said it. Still if he were the praying sort, he’d have told the gods to keep their blessings to themselves. They might be grown, but they were still too young.

  “No one is getting pregnant,” Havilar hissed. “Neither of us has a lover, and maybe if you’d taken up Kallan on his obvious interest—”

  “That is not your business,” Mehen snapped.

  “Well mine’s not yours!” Havilar said. “Neither is Fari’s. So if you want to get obsessed with someone’s love life, then yours is the only fair option.”

  Mehen growled, and tapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth to ease his agitation. “You’re paying to stable the dog for tonight,” he said.

  “You can use Verthisathurgiesh’s stables,” Dumuzi piped up. “Matriarch Anala gave permission.”