Autumngale

by Sarah K. L. Wilson

  The Grandfather looked up.

  Now! Use the Eye now!

  Tamerlan dropped through the branches of the chandelier right on top of him.

  His feet hit the ground with a smack. But where was the Grandfather? He should have felt the pain of smacking with full force onto the Legend’s back or shoulder. Instead, nothing.

  Byron whirled in Tamerlan’s body, trying to see everywhere at once with one eye as he drew his sword, but there was nothing – no one there but stunned priests.

  Their shocked expressions bloomed into snarls.

  Tamerlan’s heart kicked into high gear as they rushed toward him, drawing their own swords and knives in the whirl of their billowing robes. It was like a bush of roses had come to life to attack him, white petals whirling in the wind of anger.

  Byron raised his blade, meeting the first lunge with a fast parry and spinning to the side between two priests. His pursuer couldn’t get a clean swipe at him as the other two closed over his path. The white of their robes rolled in the breeze of their attack.

  A fist swung toward him and he dodged the strike, ducking under it. He stabbed quickly, precisely, and a priest fell to the ground, red blossoming over his white robe.

  Another spin and he cut down a second priest. A blow clipped the blind side of his head – hard enough to leave it ringing in pain but not hard enough to stop him. He whirled to the side and jabbed his sword in the belly of the man who had hit him.

  “Get out of there!” Etienne called to him and he looked up from the fray in time to see him on the other side of the room near a small door.

  Byron kicked out, striking one of the priests in the gut. As he hunched over in pain, Byron jumped up, stepping on the hunched man and leaping from his bent back to the shoulder of a shocked priest with a sword in each hand. Before the man could react, Byron was spinning into the air in a tucked tumble, sword still in hand.

  He was going to skewer them like a lamb for Festival!

  But his spinning roll brought them free of the priests, landing beside a cursing Etienne.

  “You’re a fool!” the other man spat as they ran through the door.

  The guards on the other side turned in confusion at the same time that Byron grabbed the closest one by his collar and bashed his head against the wall. He didn’t see what Etienne did to the other guard – that was his blind side. But he was still side by side with Tamerlan when they met the second pair at the main door.

  Tamerlan spun in an arc of destruction, his sword whipping up so quickly that the guards could barely scream before blood spattered the wall and the ceiling and then they were running through the door of the cathedral and out into the downpour.

  “He disappeared!” Etienne said between breaths as they ran out into the alley. “You dropped and he was gone before you landed!”

  There hadn’t been enough time to use the Eye. Which meant it had all been for nothing.

  The smoking.

  The killing.

  The letting a Legend loose.

  His hands were steady as a mountain. The shakes were gone as Byron piloted his body. But at what cost? His heart was sinking faster than a lead weight in the sea.

  “Let’s go do some good,” he heard Byron say with his voice. What a load of trash. What good could possibly make up for all the evil done on this stormy day?

  6: Queen Mer

  Marielle

  THE SMELLS WERE RETURNING and with them, her sense of self was returning, too. Every burst of scent was effervescence to her – new life. Hope, perhaps.

  She could almost scent her way as she tried to find her path through the tangles of history. The smell of the sea – aquamarine in its tangled scent and enticing in its salty embrace lapped against the Dragonblood Plains. The smell of the rivers and canals grass-green with growing life and thick with the scents of river plants and the fecundity of the rich soil lining the banks led her along. The musky smell of dragons sleeping deep under the rock – or wait now the smell of their musk was up in the air – was like a layer under everything else. A bedrock. The bones of the earth, the skeleton of history. She hadn’t realized how tangled the dragons were with the lives of the people of the Dragonblood Plains until she smelled them under everything. And around everything else, flowing in and through and around was the scent of vanilla and lilac magic swirling in ribbons of turquoise and golden sparkles like a potent drug.

  It was all the glorious smells that reminded her that she was Marielle. She was a Scenter. She was pledged to the Windfinders and pledged to justice.

  She was not Time.

  It was the smells that finally brought back her humanity. That reminded her of her loves and hates, of her attractions and petty irritations – of all the things that made her alive.

  She blew through a crowd like the wind on the edge of a rocky seacoast. Alive, but a spirit here as she swam through time.

  Ships bobbed in the distance. Around her, anticipation swirled in every whiff of breeze. The scent of cilantro filled the air and spring grass green swirls of color were everywhere. She studied faces. She watched flickers of fear in lightning blue puffs. Spurts of silver certainty. Hope in bronze rolling waves. They painted the crowd like the work of a master.

  What time was she in? The clothing of the people was different – older, like her grandfather’s grandfather’s clothing. But the people were the same – the same expressions, the same scents swirling in them, the same feeling of a crowd that was looking to a central figure.

  The figure rose up on steps to a makeshift platform and Marielle startled when she realized what she was seeing. That wasn’t ...?

  It couldn’t be.

  But the scent was all right – exactly as she would have guessed it would be. Power, smelling like gardenias and rolling from this figure in ribbons of royal blue mixed with a residual scent of the turquoise salt of the sea.

  She was tall – that was to be expected. And harsh – of course. She had a nose she could have stolen from a hawk – that Marielle wouldn’t have guessed. History had forgotten the nose. But far from her statues, which were always swathed in white and shells, she wore only a simple fisherwoman’s dress. And her hair – far from the flowing locks tangled with starfish and seashells – was cropped around her shoulders in a no-nonsense cut that kept it out of her way.

  But glory swirled around her in byzantine purple, swallowing up the blue and turquoise as if this moment was so significant that it dwarfed everything else. It tinged the platform and the crowd and even spread into the distance until all Marielle could see was purple.

  The woman began to speak and the crowd fell silent.

  “From the sea lies our only hope. A people set apart unaffected by what we do here today. You saw me send the families forth. They will be protected from our choices here.”

  What was she talking about? Was she talking about the renowned time in history when Queen Mer sent her people out, telling them to never rest or stop until they found the story that would make sense of everything?

  Marielle felt a thrill run up her spine. She was watching history. She was seeing it with her own eyes! But in the history books, Queen Mer hadn’t been a plain fisherwoman with a hawk nose. She’d been a beautiful and glorious queen who sang to the sea and stopped it from raging, who sang to the land and ended the civil wars.

  “You judge me for what I did. You say I banished them. You say I sent them to die. But you know just as I do, that we have no other choice. Someone must be saved to live on. And someone must stay to fight. Together – and only together – we can end this constant cycle of civil wars. If we don’t – none of us will be left to feel resentment.”

  Someone beside Marielle snarled and she looked at his face – at the garnet rage that rolled off him filling her nose with the scent of pitch.

  “There’d be no war without the dragons!” He cried. “No war if they didn’t steal our children!”

  The woman with the hawk nose spun to look at him, pointing throu
gh the crowd.

  “I am one of you! I saw my sister dragged through the streets and hung upside down as they opened her throat to feed the dragon! I fought beside you in the first uprising. And the second. We tore down the Lords. We raised our own. And what did it get us?”

  “Choan writhes beneath us!” someone called.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “The dragon stirs. Our fate hangs in the balance, yet still, we fight, neighbor fighting neighbor. Homes and livelihoods stolen in the night. But today we change that.”

  She pulled something from a sack she was holding – a sack Marielle hadn’t even noticed that she had.

  “I took this crown from Lord Y’ni.” The woman lifted the crown up high. Even from here, Marielle could smell the faint traces of blood and violence drifting off the crown. “I cut it from his head while he still lived. I claim it now.”

  She jammed the crown on her head, glaring at the crowd as if she dared them to say anything about what she was doing. A chunk of something that looked like dried fur was stuck to one of the points of the crown.

  “I am your queen now. Queen Mer of the Sea. And I will end the fighting in the streets and unite you all beneath the tide I bring with me.”

  Behind her there was a roar, as tentacles reached up out of the sea, framing the hawk-nosed woman like a crown of the sea. Marielle gasped. The Kratoen! She’d heard rumors of the mighty Kratoen, the creature of the sea enchanted by Queen Mer to do her bidding, but like all other stories, she’d thought it was only a legend. Yet here he was.

  The tentacles curled and snatched at floating wreckage – wreckage that Marielle hadn’t noticed until now. It wasn’t the only one. Had there been a sea battle out on the raging waves? How many ships had sunk to leave that many wrecks behind? And had Queen Mer been the cause of that?

  Marielle looked around her. There were no children in the crowd. The people were coated in mud and blood. They carried makeshift weapons. Had there just been a battle here? In the heady feeling of finally scenting again – and of seeing a living moment of history – she hadn’t even noticed the residue of war all around her.

  The tentacles disappeared back into the sea with a crash and the spray of the water they smacked as they left misted the crowd.

  “I baptize you with my reign. I claim you as my people!”

  “What about our daughters and sons? What about their blood?” someone in the crowd yelled. Perhaps that was what they had been fighting about.

  “No more will we steal your children,” Queen Mer called out and the roar of the crowd swept up so strongly that the ground beneath Marielle seemed to tremble with it.

  “Then how will we bind the dragon?” someone else called when the roar died down.

  “From here on, we will purchase any person we take from willing families. Yes, we need the blood of the dragonblooded to keep us safe, but no more will you fear the kidnapping or quelling of your overlords. We will only take the willing – those willing to give themselves.”

  But those around Marielle asked the question she wished she could still ask. “Who would be willing?”

  But the answer was there a moment later – there in her memory. Who would do it? Anyone who needed a second chance that money could provide.

  She tasted bitterness on her tongue at the thought. Lord Mythos claimed that her own mother had been willing to give Marielle’s life to the dragon. And before that, Tamerlan’s father had been willing to give his sister. There was no telling what a person would give for the right price. When wealth greased the wheels to your dreams, no price was too steep for hope.

  “Not only for this,” Queen Mer said, “but for everything. We will not take your sons and daughters without recompense.”

  The crowd cheered, but Marielle’s heart sank. She’d just watched Queen Mer sell the souls of her people’s children for generations to come.

  Queen Mer was supposed to be the savior of the five cities of the Dragonblood plains – the mother of the People of Queen Mer who lived only on the sea. She’d stopped the endless cycle of internal wars – hadn’t she?

  What Marielle had just seen didn’t quite line up with what she’d been told.

  But she had watched it. She was no longer inhuman floating in time. She could see things now. She could learn. And maybe, just maybe, she could find her way out of the trap the Grandfather had put her in.

  7: Stalking Shadows

  Tamerlan

  IT DIDN’T FEEL RIGHT to have someone else running his body even when they were doing something good. And the looks Etienne kept shooting at him told Tamerlan that he knew exactly what was going on here. But he couldn’t be more condemning of Tamerlan than Tamerlan was of himself. He knew exactly how guilt-soaked he was. He was sodden to the core.

  And that made him just a bit angry. Because what was he supposed to have done? What would anyone else have done? Not everyone could be Etienne who could apparently do anything. Tamerlan hadn’t even seen him descend to the lower level or get past the priests. And who knew how he learned to climb like that!

  They’d fled the temple, cleaned up in the canal, and then Byron had sped along the canal to the Trade District, broken into a warehouse, and stolen a barge and filled it with grain. Tamerlan hadn’t been surprised when he sped down the river toward the refugee camp.

  Neither had Etienne.

  “This will wear off soon, and then you’ll be wanted by the authorities,” he said dryly as they drew near to the camp. “And then you’ll have to hide from more than just the shadows that you are sure are stalking you in the night.”

  Byron ignored him. He was a man on a mission – as always.

  “I know that you’re in there, Tamerlan,” Etienne pressed. “Take control of yourself and stop this before it’s too late.”

  As if killing a bunch of priests hadn’t already been bad enough. As if he’d had any other choice. What was he supposed to do? How else was he supposed to capture the Grandfather? It was just too hard to fight with your hands tied behind your back!

  “Take courage, good man. Justice will prevail,” Byron said with his lips.

  “Uh-huh. And so will the guards when this Legend is done with you. Once this grain is distributed there will be no more hiding. Everyone will have seen your face.”

  “Do not speak to me of flouting the authorities,” Byron said. “We saw your note. You foment revolution.”

  Etienne’s expression turned stony. “That’s not your affair.”

  “Revolution is a dangerous thing,” Byron lectured him. “Better to help the people from behind the scenes and let them decide when to make a move. If you force their hands there may not be the result you wish. I saw a man force a revolution once – he only ended with his head on a pole and it was put there by the people he was trying to help! Better to shame the rulers until the people see for themselves.”

  “You’re shaming something, alright,” Etienne muttered.

  And his resentment was understandable, but Tamerlan wasn’t the only one with secrets in his heart. And it was hard to feel much compassion for Etienne now. After all, it was Etienne’s plan to take the rest of his vision. One eye hadn’t been enough.

  The barge hit the bank, sliding up beside a make-shift dock. And as always when he came here, Tamerlan’s heart lurched.

  A group of children ran toward the dock, their elders hanging back not certain what to think of a strange barge. All of them were dressed in worn, dirty clothing and soaked to the bone in the rain. The shelters here were abysmal. Firewood hard to find. If it were this bad in autumn, how much worse would it be in winter?

  And it was winter that Tamerlan feared for these people – for the people he had betrayed and damned to this refugee camp.

  It was hard not to agree with Bronzebow. What could it hurt to help these people? Even if it meant stealing, wasn’t that a small crime compared to the ones he’d already committed?

  See? I will make you a proper thorn in these Landholds’ flesh in no time!


  And he wanted that. If it wasn’t for Marielle in the clock, he would stay here with Byron forever righting this great wrong – and they would build an orphanage.

  I was raised in an orphanage. I could devote myself to that, yes.

  Bronzebow leapt from the prow and hurriedly tied up the barge, lifting up a small child of about five.

  “And what is your name, little dragon?”

  The child laughed, “Is that food on that boat?”

  “It is!” he said with a laugh and the warmth flooding Tamerlan was partly his own and partly Bronzebow’s. “Go get your parents!”

  Squeals filled the air as the children ran into the rain and it was only moments later that their tired-eyed elders arrived, drenched and uncertain. It was as if they were afraid to hope. As if hope would sear worse than the scars already lacing their souls.

  “Help me get this grain out of the rain!” was all Bronzebow had to say with Tamerlan’s voice, and then they were there, pressing in with silent desperation.

  He moved grain for almost an hour, handing sacks in the pouring rain to one desperate almost-hoping face after another. The worn hands of mothers clung to him with thanks on their lips and tears in their eyes. Fathers with new lines etched into their faces threw sacks up onto their shoulders, gathering a child or two up with them as they hurried away. The grain wouldn’t be enough. Not for the whole winter. But it might get them that far, at least.

  It was enough for now. For this moment.

  Etienne worked beside him until the barge was empty and the two of them were left exhausted in the hull.

  “I don’t like seeing my people like this,” Etienne said. “The rulers of Yan make them dependent on that dole. It breaks their spirits. Doles rob a man of his independence, of his self-respect, of his calling.”

  “Maybe not for long,” one of the refugees said, leaning in close in the rain. He was a dark-haired man with a limp. He clung to his bag of grain like he was afraid someone might snatch it away. “If you want hope, look for the tent of Variena. She has plans for us.”