Bursts of Fire

by Susan Forest

  Father waited as companies of men fanned through the city to engage any resistance, but the messengers returned to report no movement in the city. No soldiers in the streets, no archers in the windows. As the sun rose, Huwen followed his father into Archwood.

  The city was dead.

  Buildings stood intact, signs above shop doors rattling in a faint breeze, but no movement, no sound could be heard above the crunch of their own boots in the snow. A rat skittered along a wall, the click of its claws unnaturally loud; a crow watched silently from a rooftop. The stench of unburied dead drifted on the air, but their search turned up few corpses, and most of them frozen; the citizens must have died in stages, while those who could dig graves remained.

  Huwen looked over his shoulder. Nothing.

  The king’s company marched to the castle, and the fortress’s gates swung on unoiled hinges, their screech reverberating in the eerie quiet. The chill of death settled on all of them, and no one spoke as they entered the great hall’s large double doors. A nameless uneasiness crept into Huwen’s bones. The walls echoed as they moved from room to room.

  It had been a long time since Huwen had been here. He might have been eight or nine. He’d played in the garden with Uther and Eamon, and with those girls—Faris Olivin, and Meghra Falkyn, and the pretty one, Janatelle. Uncle Ean’s cooks had fed them strips of seared goat, a local food, hot and dripping with juices—

  Their silent inspection stilled at the sound of shouts and ringing steel. Their soldiers must have met someone still living. They waited, listening, but the clash was over within minutes. A messenger reported that a final guard had attacked them in the throne room, but these had been dispatched without delay.

  Father and the others mounted the steps to the family’s private suites. Huwen followed, heavy reluctance filling his legs as they covered their noses and inspected personal rooms. Some of the courtiers and children lay in their beds; others, no doubt, lay in graves.

  King Ean, his queen, and his magiel were in the banquet room. Huwen’s uncle, handsome and jovial, always fair-minded. He sat on a chair, cradling his daughter. Faris. Huwen’s cousin, not yet a young woman—so thin. So thin. Though not an expert in such matters, he thought she might have died first, his uncle grieved to see his daughter taken from him. The queen, Huwen’s aunt, her indulgent smiles gone, was draped over her husband and child, a slash and gout of dried blood beneath her chin, knife in her hand.

  Talanda Falkyn, separated a little from the other two, sat on a chair, wan and stiff, only candlemarks beyond life, blood on her arms and dress not yet faded to brown. She’d always frightened him, with eyes that seemed to see nothing on this sphere. Eyes that remained open. But where were Meghra and Janatelle, and that little girl magiel? They must be dead, too. Huwen wondered if they’d been buried, or if he would see them laid out on their beds. Or worse.

  Huwen’s eyes burned, and he looked up at his father. Leave this place.

  “King Ean must have died of the curse of disease.” The commander’s words grated, harsh against the silence. “With no person of the blood of the Line of Kings, Talanda could no longer use the Amber. She and the queen took their own lives rather than surrender.”

  Tears shone on Father’s cheeks. “They will be buried. Properly. With all the mourning and ceremony befitting their rank,” he said in a husky voice. “And then we leave this place.”

  The commander nodded.

  Get out! Get out! Through force of will, Huwen kept his feet from running away.

  “One more thing.” Father indicated the bodies of King Ean and Magiel Falkyn. “The Amber.”

  The final prayer stone. To be sacrificed to the One God.

  “It is our sole purpose for being here.”

  Huwen watched in horror as his father bent over the dead king. Father reached out a hand, hesitated, then touched the cold flesh of his youngest brother.

  A wail rose up. The despoilers startled, hands to hilts. Huwen peered uneasily around the gilded room, gloomy within thick stone walls. Nothing stirred. The paintings hung on the walls, silent. The furniture sat on the intricate parquet, unmoving.

  “Only the wind.” Father’s voice, harsh.

  But a chill had entered the room; a cold deeper than the wintry weather, that penetrated Huwen’s bones and lodged in him a fear he could not name.

  His father’s face pinched. The commander’s gaze swept the room, his complexion pale. The soldiers shifted nervously.

  Father resumed his search, feeling for the chain about the king’s neck from which the prayer stone would hang.

  Nothing.

  He patted the corpse’s pockets, reached inside the clothing.

  It was all Huwen could do to remain in the room, keep from shrieking out in madness.

  His father stepped back. “The prayer stone is not here,” he said emphatically, his voice shaking.

  The commander, though a brave man, looked sick. He nodded at Talanda Falkyn.

  Visibly steeling himself, Father moved to the place where Talanda, the shimmer of her skin absent in death, slumped to one side in her chair.

  The cold deepened, an agonizing ache in the bones. Frost appeared on Huwen’s breath. On his father’s breath; Uther’s; the others’.

  Again, Father hesitated. Then, deliberately, he felt for the prayer stone’s chain at Talanda’s neck.

  Was it a trick of the shadows, or did the magiel grimace? No, that was not possible. She was dead. Huwen knew she was dead.

  Father startled.

  His gaze snapped to Talanda’s open eyes, and he looked momentarily as if he were about to speak. Then he blinked rapidly, the muscles of his face spasming as if in pain. And still, Talanda’s frozen face seemed to smile.

  “Father?” Huwen’s throat was tight, his voice a croak.

  “It’s nothing.” Father released his touch, but his stare clung, bewitched.

  Leave this place!

  There was no chain.

  Father shook himself and withdrew.

  For a moment no one moved, and it seemed to Huwen the room took a breath of relief.

  Then Father felt beneath the magiel’s white robes for the treasure. Huwen turned away, sickness rising from his stomach.

  But the prayer stone was not there.

  The men shifted. Get out! Huwen’s mind screamed.

  Father straightened and turned briskly toward the banquet room door, and with audible relief, the rest followed at his heels. “Commander,” he ordered. “Dispatch men to search the city for spies or soldiers. Turn the castle upside down. Find the Amber.”

  The chill of fear lessened when they left the keep, but it did not dissipate. They waited in the bailey, the shuffle of feet echoing from the castle walls. A page brought Father some water. He removed his helm to drink, then turned to thank the boy.

  With a sigh, a feathered shaft appeared in Father’s neck.

  He frowned, surprised, raised a hand as if to pluck it from the dribble of red sprouting from the spot. Then he crumpled and fell.

  A cry sprang up and men whirled, those nearest crouching to attend him, archers nocking arrows and aiming at the walls and windows above, swordsmen springing to hunt, others taking cover.

  Huwen dropped to his knees and took up his father’s hand, disbelief blooming in his chest. Blood welled from the wound.

  His father blinked rapidly as a double line of men pushed Huwen back and, linking arms beneath his father, lifted him as a unit to carry him into the shelter of the great hall, a young soldier—no, Uther—pressing on the wound. A guard of his best men led the way, pushing through the opulent chambers and up to a royal suite with a generous canopy bed. Huwen scrambled after them, fear’s grip hardening in his stomach.

  The Holder of Histories hurried ahead and found linens to bind the gash around the arrow.

  Then the men backed away, and his father, bewildered and pinched with pain, the pillow beneath him red, took Huwen’s hand. “Huw...” He struggled to focus. />
  No—

  The Holder stepped forward and unfastened the collar at his father’s throat. His death token.

  Dread turned Huwen’s bowels to water.

  The Holder laid the death token on his father’s tongue.

  Huwen wanted to leap up, cry out, shake his father, shake the Holder, turn back the sand glass—

  A gentle breeze, scented with snow, wafted through the open windows. Father’s eyes turned glassy, his mouth slack.

  This...could not be. Only a moment ago, when? Only...

  The Holder laid his fingers on Father’s neck, just above the offending shaft. He waited.

  No one in the room moved.

  “The king is dead,” he said quietly. “Long live the king.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Janat rubbed her eyes. The stitches in the small clothes she was sewing for the wine merchant’s wife two streets over had begun to blur. Her tallow candle was burning low, and bed beckoned. She put her sewing away, corked the whiskey bottle, stretched, used the chamber pot, and removed her robe. She crawled between the frigid sheets.

  But her ruse to entice sleep by overtiring herself came to naught.

  The moment she pinched the candle out, the image of the girl—the one she’d given the curse to, to kill her baby—came to her, the way Janat had seen her that afternoon. Beaten. A black eye, swollen closed. A bruise on her jaw. Holding one arm tight to her body.

  Who would beat a young girl? Janat knew.

  It’d been tricky to create a curse to protect the mother while killing the child. But the girl looked well when Janat had seen her outside the chandler’s shop yesterday. The girl wouldn’t stop to speak where she could be seen talking to a magiel, of course. But she’d thanked Janat with her eyes and with a nod of gratitude.

  Something had happened between yesterday and today.

  A small sound—the door flew open.

  Janat scrambled up, blankets wrapped to cover her.

  Soldiers sprang into the room, a chaos of shouts and footfalls. “That’s her.” Behind the soldiers, a plainly-dressed farmer or tradesman pointed at her.

  A scream caught in her throat. The farmer looked fleetingly familiar—

  The soldiers surrounded Janat’s bed and two gripped her arms. The man disappeared through the door.

  Roughly they jostled her through the door and down the dark staircase. She squealed, her heart racing. The stink of the soldiers filled her nostrils. Fingers of iron gripped her biceps, her feet barely touching the steps.

  And then she was out of the butcher’s home and tossed in nothing more than her chemise and small clothes onto the icy boards of a cart. She yelped as one of the soldiers yanked her arm, rolling her onto her face, and catching her other flailing wrist, tied her hands with rough rope behind her back. Splinters and straw scratched her face.

  The wagon creaked under the soldier’s weight as he ensconced himself behind her. The others mounted their horses and the cart jerked into motion. Janat screamed, trying to sit up.

  A mailed glove cuffed the side of her head, a disorienting blow, and the cart rattled over the ice.

  Janat woke to the stinging touch of a cloth gently dabbing at her forehead. She tried to rise.

  “Shh.” Someone leaned over her in the barely perceptible light that filtered through a small window in the door of a large cold room. She could make out the forms of a few huddled bodies in the straw. Two others—women—sat near her, looking on.

  “It’s nothing. Only a scrape,” the woman with the bit of damp cloth said, as much to calm Janat as to inform the other two.

  “Where am I?” But she knew. The interminable journey last night had not taken her far from the butcher’s attic. The cart had climbed a maze of streets, passed through castle gates, and stopped in a small bailey. She’d been forced down several flights of steps in wild torchlight and shoved into this dirt-floored cellar. The ropes around her wrists had been removed, and she’d shivered in the straw as one of the soldiers tossed a blanket over her. The door clanged shut, and the light beyond the peephole gradually faded to inky dark.

  In the silence of skittering rats and the wheeze of its human occupants, Janat searched her memory to try to discover what her crime had been. And...where she’d seen the farmer whose pointing finger had accused her.

  She’d never seen him before. But he had the look of the young girl who’d bought the curse. The one who’d been beaten.

  Which was the answer. Of course. It had been only a matter of time before Janat sold a spell to the wrong customer.

  “Artem’s castle in Coldridge,” the woman nursing Janat responded. She sat back and exchanged glances with the other two. “You slept late. You’ve missed the first meal.”

  Janat hadn’t known she was hungry until the woman mentioned food. She struggled to sit up. She could guess why she was here, but why the others? “What was your crime?” she asked the woman who’d tended her.

  “Being magiel.” There was a pause. “And a woman.”

  Janat looked around the cell again. It was too dark to see if everyone had the inconstant skin of a magic wielder.

  The equinox.

  Gods—she could not miss the equinox—

  Survive, Mama had said. The one thing—the one thing—Janat lived for, the end to all of Shangril’s disputes and inequities—

  She had to get out.

  A scrape of footsteps on cobbles made them turn. The ruddy glow of firelight grew in the small rectangle looking out onto the corridor.

  The footsteps stopped as keys jangled against metal and the door swung open. Janat shielded her eyes and crouched. The woman beside her put a hand on her arm. Two soldiers planted themselves on either side of the door as a third ordered them to form a line against one wall. He carried a beating stick.

  Janat moved. Once they had emerged from the straw, Janat was surprised to discover there were more individuals—magiel women—than she’d thought: eight or ten. The soldier walked down the line, pulling each woman’s face, one at a time, into the light of his torch. Janat eyed the guarded doorway. So close.

  Three of them were shoved away from the wall, all with the most volatile of complexions. These, the soldier viewed a second time and selected one—a comely woman—to take from the cell. The other soldiers closed the door behind them.

  Janat slumped back to the straw. She hadn’t been brave enough to run. Foolish enough.

  One of the women muttered under her breath, “And not one has come back.”

  Wenid jerked out of his doze in the anteroom of the women’s chamber. The squall of a baby.

  The candle on the table beside him had burned away to a nub and the excited chatter of women’s voices percolated through the far door. The drapes had not been drawn over the glassed windows and a spray of stars glinted in the blackness. Perhaps one chime, by the shrine bells, not later. He straightened in his chair and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. It had been only four days since he’d accompanied young Prince Eamon to Heaven with the Ruby, praying for death tokens, and he was not yet fully recovered.

  He did not have long to wait for one of the midwives to bustle from the room and curtsey before him.

  “Boy or girl?” Wenid asked. A girl would be preferable: more powerful, at least in female things such as whelping the next generation of magiels.

  “A fine, healthy boy,” the woman beamed.

  Well. Five more women were with child. And Gweddien Barcley could provide his talents again.

  “He is a good size,” she reported, “and he has all his fingers and toes. He nursed immediately, which is a good sign that he will thrive.”

  Better and better. “How does the mother?”

  “She’s tired but gave the full afterbirth and is not bleeding too much.”

  “Then the mother will live?” A healthy mother was more likely to raise a healthy child.

  “She should be just fine.”

  Wenid climbed to his feet. “Good. I’ll send a messen
ger to the king.” Artem would be relieved—as was Wenid. Another step toward solidifying the one God’s supremacy on this lowest sphere of earth. And, to confirm Wenid’s place as the king’s chancellor. “Come to me immediately, if there should be any problem with child or mother.”

  The midwife hesitated. “Sire. The mother asked me to plead with you.”

  He turned, his hand on the door knob, cautious.

  “She wants to know...” The woman wiped her hands on her bloodstained apron. “She wants to know how long she will have with the child.”

  Women were apt to become difficult when it came to separating them from their children, to the detriment of both. It was best she be calm in these critical few days and weeks. “You may tell her I have no heart to take her child from her.”

  The midwife’s relief was evident. “Thank you, My Lord. The woman will—”

  “But much depends on her.” He would have to have this conversation with the woman, but not now.

  The midwife’s apprehension returned. “Upon what shall I tell her this privilege depends? She is distressed, My Lord.”

  Wenid rubbed his forehead. Piss. This conversation should come later. Or, perhaps he should have had it with her before. “Simply her compliance.”

  “She will want to know—”

  “The child’s power. She was instructed to endow him with magical strength.” Though, there would be no way to ascertain this for some time, likely years. The youngest magiel in history—a magiel of the Amethyst almost two hundred years ago—had taken his position at the age of eight, though his king had refrained from allowing him to use the prayer stone until he was fourteen. Even so, the child had died before his twentieth birthday. Taking on magiel duties later rather than earlier was undoubtedly wiser. The child would have much to learn.

  The midwife curtseyed.

  “And she is not to instruct him on politics, religion, history...nothing.” By the One, he would have to make a list. And have the mother watched. “No children’s tales or songs or games that have not been approved.” Sooner or later, though, they would have to be separated.