Redemption

by Anne Osterlund

  Aurelia’s attention veered. She had no faith in magic. If she was expected to believe in the Oracle’s extraordinary power, then his initial reluctance to follow her did not bode well. Her father also had been less than eager to entrust his people into her leadership. Had done so only via another man’s hands with the symbolic bestowal of the key of Tyralt. Too late to halt her sister’s coronation.

  Neither magic, nor that key, would save this kingdom in the fight against Anthone.

  Know your enemy. That was the cardinal rule of power. But what good would Aurelia’s knowledge of the neighboring king serve when he sat at home on a throne, his orders already given, his authority passed on to some unknown general?

  She had racked her brain on the day’s ride, trying to remember details from her years of royal training on military strategy. None seemed relevant. She had been taught that the country to the north held little military significance. Anthone had no navy—had always relied upon Tyralt’s superiority in the region to keep its shores safe.

  But the attack had come by land.

  And before that, from within.

  Aurelia had assumed, after she rejected him, that King Edward would continue his futile attempt to marry into Tyralian power. She knew her younger sister would never share what she could steal for herself. But he had not waited for marriage. Instead he had gone after a region neither Aurelia’s father nor Melony had held worthy enough to defend.

  And now Anthone held the power.

  I must let others make the assumptions.

  “You are tired, Aurelia Lauzon.” The Oracle’s voice regained her attention.

  She pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead, then blinked, looked up, and realized that the ranks of the circle had thinned.

  The Oracle motioned for three of his men to rise. “Your escort will guide you to your tent,” he said.

  The trio stood as one, lifting bows in unison.

  She had not asked for a tent. Or a personal guard. Her gaze flew toward Robert.

  But one of the appointed tribesmen stepped between them, blocking her view. The three men formed a triangle around her. She did not want their protection, but she could not argue now, in this circle, with all the leaders watching. To publicly refute the Oracle’s offer would be viewed as mistrust. And could undermine the entire mission.

  She stepped away from the light, allowing the darkness to swallow her. A chill ran through her flesh, and her hands tightened into fists at her sides as the trio escorted her into emptiness. Memory threatened. Death and fire and betrayal.

  Shadows drifted past, voices traveling across the night like ghosts. She clung to her sense of direction. And balance. She had barely slept the previous two nights. Had stretched out on her pallet in the midst of the refugee women, but her mind had insisted that she had no right to sleep. That she had too much to accomplish. The sand now sucked in her steps. Waning fires disappeared and reappeared in her peripheral vision, their dying light a distant outline of the camp.

  The tribesmen led her to a tent at the very center. A gesture of honor. From here an enemy would have to fight through everyone else to reach her.

  She stepped inside alone.

  And a blaze of memory rushed up to assault her. She did not have to close her eyes to see the flames. Or her former mare, Bianca, dead upon the forest earth, blood pouring from the slice across her throat.

  Aurelia stumbled over her own rolled pallet, her chest pounding beneath her lungs. She had not slept alone in a tent since the night hers was burned to the ground by men assigned as her escort. No guard could ever make her feel safe. The only person who made her safe was Robert.

  Her mind released the flames, and she made a decision. Aurelia hefted the pallet and swept out of the tent and into the night.

  You will offend their tradition, her royal conscience argued. This was not the Outer Realms, in which her living arrangements as an anonymous scullery maid had garnered no one’s interest. When Aurelia had first applied for her position there, she had not even spoken enough of the language to invent a false story. No one had cared. Here everyone would care. But she had already offended the traditions of the Geordian by going to war. She was not a woman of the desert.

  You will risk your reputation.

  She doubted the rumors could be any worse than they already were. In Tyralt, every choice she made, every action she took became rumor.

  You will give your enemies proof that you don’t deserve to be queen.

  She was not here to be queen.

  Aurelia swept into a more familiar tent and tossed her pallet onto the earth.

  Robert had yet to arrive.

  She unrolled her pallet, stretched out on its surface. And failed to sleep, her mind swirling with a hundred other doubts. What if he was still angry with her? What if he believed she had selfishly recruited these men in order to gain power? What if he no longer loved her?

  No, she could not accept that possibility.

  When at last he came in, what felt like hours later, the sound of his steps halted at the threshold. “Aurelia?”

  It was the first word he had said to her all day.

  She lifted her head and glared at him through the lantern light. “Don’t even think about arguing with me, Robert.”

  • • •

  Clashing steel disrupted Robert’s dreams, the cold familiar scrape of the blade as though wielded by his own palm. The sound dragged forth memories of the fateful dawn two years ago when he had thrust his sword through his cousin’s chest, saving his own life and Aurelia’s. Constant fear had sprung from that moment, like the blood blooming through Chris’s shirt. Impossible to stanch.

  Robert’s eyes flew open, the vision of his past staining the canvas interior.

  He rolled away from the tent wall, toward her.

  Aurelia slept on her own pallet less than a foot away, her hair sprawled around her head, her skin a darkened brown from her first full day’s ride beneath the desert sun. She had fallen asleep before he had even turned down the lantern. Her breath flowed smoothly in and out of her chest. He reached a trembling hand as if to secure her calm for his own heart.

  But the clash of weapons renewed outside the canvas, and his hand convulsed. He had allowed himself to be blind. To place her survival first. To convince himself that by protecting her he was defending the future of Tyralt, a future now ruptured by warfare. I should have seen. Perhaps Aurelia had seen and that was the vision that had emptied the space behind her eyes during exile.

  Is what I feel for her true love if I love something else more?

  Until he could answer that, he could not touch her. At least not within the hazards of this tent. He snatched his shirt, pulled it over his scarred shoulder, and tugged the hem down past the waist of his trousers. Then he exited the tent.

  Pairs of men scattered the open sand to the east. Their blades were curved backward, designed more to slash than puncture. Hooked pommels with knuckle guards defined the grip, and sharp spikes sprang forth from each cross guard. Sabers. Unlike any sword he had ever held.

  Yet the clash, the scrape of one blade meeting another in the gray predawn ritual of sword practice: Robert’s body knew that sound. His instincts fought to lift the weapon he no longer carried: his father’s sword, relinquished back into Brian Vantauge’s care after Chris’s death.

  Robert had sworn never to kill again.

  He stood, worthless, as seconds swept past. The sabers blurred silver above the sand, each blade testing an opponent’s guard. Why was he here? What right did he have to join these forces when he knew he could not fight?

  A hand tightened on his wrist. “Do you miss it?” Aurelia asked.

  What I miss is my cousin. “No,” Robert replied.

  Suddenly the hilt of a saber was thrust in front of him. A man held the blade, a swath of his desert robe wrapped protectively beneath his fingers. The stranger’s eyes glittered beneath a turban. He jutted his chin in the universal form of a dare.
r />   Robert shook his head.

  “Teach,” the warrior said with a strong accent.

  Refusal flew in the face of politics. Robert wanted these men on his side—to protect his home, his family. But did he want that enough to betray his vow? And his cousin’s memory?

  Aurelia’s hand reached for the sword. “Teach me,” she said, rescuing him.

  He could not watch her accept that weapon. Could not stand idly by while she learned to slash, thrust, cut. The warriors might refuse her request. They might shun her bravery with their prejudices, believing only in male heroes. But he knew ultimately she would prevail. And he could not watch her learn to fight. To assume the task he could not accept for himself.

  He strode away, his steps steady, feigning control. He knew he was running. From her. From the sabers. From the sound of his cousin’s death.

  Even the hooves of the Geordian could not trample that sound. The herd, a shifting circle of female horses, had gathered in a mob along the opposite edge of camp. In the desert, mares were preferred for stealth during war.

  Horizon raced along their periphery.

  Robert moved closer. He needed speed. Flight.

  A firm command intercepted him. “None shall ride before dawn.” The Oracle stood at the center of the herd, his palms out and upward indicating ritual. His tone had been calm, as restrained as always.

  But the command grated. Robert turned his gaze west. He did not imagine the darker shade of the sky in that direction. Twice now, the sun had burned deep red as it had fallen.

  “A sky of fire,” the desert leader spoke again. “It is early.”

  So I am not the only one who has noticed. Yet the entire camp remained here, awake but unmoving. And, despite the speed of so many of these horses, the pace was too slow. A man alone could traverse half again as much ground as the riders had covered yesterday.

  “My parents are on the frontier,” Robert said, as though this man would care.

  The Oracle lowered his hands. “You do not believe they have headed south?”

  Robert bristled at the question’s implication that the choice to give up the land, one’s home, and the freedom to define one’s own future was as simple a decision as whether to visit an acquaintance. The frontiersmen and women he knew had sacrificed everything to come north. They had spent years traversing the same stretch of ground: plowing, planting, harvesting. Families had watched children die from diseases that might have been cured with access to a physician. Had suffered hunger, isolation, drought, blizzards. The homesteaders would not flee if they had a choice. “The people of the frontier have risked too much to leave.”

  The Oracle’s response sharpened. “And you believe my people have not.” His hand clenched his opposite wrist in a grip that would have strangled a Geordian raptor.

  So this man was not exempt from losing his temper.

  “I … I meant no disrespect,” Robert answered. He had reacted as though he had been asked the question by an aristocrat from central or southern Tyralt. As he had wanted to react when Drew had first told him of Melony’s decision not to defend the north.

  “And yet you hold those of your own region superior?”

  He had never meant to denigrate the citizens of the desert. Or the choice their leader had made to bring the last of his people to Darzai. Clearly the tribes had fought. Had faced the devastating march of the Anthonian army and had lost not only warriors but women, children, elders. Until the harder choice was to survive.

  “I did not speak from superiority.” Robert lifted his palm in the desert gesture of honesty. “But from my own need.” He needed to believe his parents were alive. That the people he knew, admired, and cared for were still fighting. That Anthone had not yet usurped all of northern Tyralt.

  “Sometimes we must accept the inferior choice.” The Oracle released his clenched grip and motioned toward Horizon.

  Robert’s temper flared. There was nothing inferior about his stallion.

  The horse nipped again at a mare. And only then did the significance of the bay’s presence—among the herd—occur to Robert. Aurelia had informed him once that the Oracle was the desert’s horse breeder. That his choices determined the foals and fillies of the Geordian. Which meant the bay stallion had been selected to define the future of that great bloodline. And the Oracle’s critique was a test.

  “The only inferior aspect of Horizon,” Robert said, “is within the flaws of those who speak of him.”

  The desert leader produced a palmful of oats from within his robes. He lifted the bribe toward the stallion. Horizon declined to approach, but a familiar bronze snout relieved the man of his burden. The leader’s eyebrows arced at the thief. “I wonder,” he said, “whether your response would be so balanced after a criticism of your princess.”

  Another test. Robert stepped toward Falcon and smoothed his hand along her wild mane. “Aurelia does not require my defense.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  The question ripped apart his chest. He could not answer—could not find the answer. Had tried for hours during the previous day’s ride to reconcile his need to return home with his reluctance to fight. With the haze of the horizon urging him faster, the pace of the group grating. And then this morning, the clash of swords. Chasing him.

  Robert could not explain his own reaction to the news of the attack on Tyralt—the way his chest had seized and he had known without any rationale that he had to go back. To the frontier. Guilt had assaulted him as if the attack was his fault—as if his home and his family were in danger because he had encouraged Aurelia’s exile. He could not discuss this with her, much less the Oracle.

  And could not explain to someone who had never heard Chris’s laugh about the inner battle constantly waging within his own chest. That to break his own vow against killing would be like admitting his cousin’s death had meant nothing.

  Robert needed to speak with someone who had waged a similar battle. Someone who understood that love and loyalty were far from cohesive. And that strength was as much of an inner battle as an external one. Someone who had suffered the guilt for another man’s death—who understood the need not to fight, yet now faced the need to defend one’s home.

  And suddenly Robert knew.

  He needed to speak with his father.

  • • •

  Aurelia had made an error in judgment; she knew her folly, in taking the sword, as soon as its weight settled in her grip. This was no light weapon designed for court. The heavy, curved saber tugged down her palm. And the blade’s tip plunged to the sand.

  The owner of the weapon scowled.

  But chuckling came from behind him. The sound felt foreign. Out of place. And she realized that until this moment the men had treated her with a distant, almost reverential manner.

  She tugged the sword upward with the leverage of two hands.

  The chuckles turned to laughter. And now the men, desert warriors and Darzai alike, were gathering with no regard for their invisible barriers. To watch the foolish princess. They were correct in their assessment of her, of course. She had disregarded their skill, or rather their lifetime of practice. Had acted as though she might gain mastery as rapidly as a hero in a fairytale.

  But the laughter was well worth the miscalculation. A smile spread across her face and she slowly rotated as though to display her two-handed grip with pride.

  Taunts began to flow from the crowd. She could not grasp the desert words, but their amused tone was clear, matching that of the men who spoke Tyralian. She had learned what she could of the Geordian’s language in her earlier time amid the Jaheem, but like swordsmanship, mastery would require far more than a matter of weeks.

  “Like a dance, Princess,” shouted a man at the back of the crowd. “You must not forget the steps.”

  A warrior came forward and demonstrated a shuffling slide.

  She tried to copy him, and more laughter rose. But there was no disdain in the sound.

  Anothe
r man stepped up, this one bearing the insignia of the Darzai Guard. He showed her the same shuffle. Backward.

  And soon there was a competition, more and more men showing her steps in different directions. She mimicked each example the best she could, letting her own laughter join the others’. Her arms were starting to ache. She knew her muscles would scream the next morning. And knew the solution was to ignore the pain. To glory in the camaraderie around her.

  Now the men were inventing steps that had no relevance. The sequences became absurd. She copied them as well, then gestured for more space.

  And traced her feet in the pattern of a minuet. “Can you dance?” she challenged, motioning at the men.

  A new roar of laughter.

  Then a man in a tanner’s vest and trousers pushed forward. He lifted his boots in a mocking imitation of her steps. His saber wavered in his hands with exaggerated effort and he leaped in an awkward bound.

  Just as she stumbled.

  His blade nicked her chin.

  Blood flowed.

  A gasp erupted from the onlookers.

  She dropped her weapon and smothered the cut with her hand, more to stanch the appalled reactions than from any sense of pain. She tried to grin, but it must have looked like a grimace because again the audience murmured.

  Then she saw Robert, frozen at the front of the crowd, his face blank.

  She had not anticipated his return. Had known he was battling his own truths. His own conscience. She had asked him once to teach her to use a weapon, and he had repelled her appeal, refusing to teach her to kill.

  But he did not know what it was like not to be able to defend himself.

  The warrior who owned the fallen sword stepped forward, sweeping it up in his hand. “Defend her honor,” he said and tossed the saber at Robert.

  Who let the blade fall.

  Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Gazes centered, not on the warrior, tanner, or her. But on Robert. Hands shifted toward hilts, and the voices of the throng deepened.

  Aurelia scrambled to comprehend the sudden change in the tone. What was happening? The injury was nothing, though she did not dare remove her hand lest the smeared blood add passion to the crowd.