Bursts of Fire

by Susan Forest

  She also—potentially—knew about the Amber. Huwen had been evasive. Neither had he reported that Talanda’s daughters’ bodies had been found in the city. Something had frightened that boy, badly, saying that Talanda had cursed Archwood—Orumon—from beyond death.

  Such a thing...could not be possible.

  He studied the girl, her expression hooded now, wary. She would divulge nothing about the existence of her sisters. The Amber. Her mother’s power.

  But the debauched magiel fawning at his side would tell him anything.

  Well. That decided it. Wenid rapped on the door to the corridor and his sentries returned. “Bring her.”

  “Sire?” Panic sent Gweddien’s voice a register higher.

  The girl paled in fear.

  A crack like thunder exploded somewhere beyond the walls, and the floor convulsed.

  He gave the boy a faint smile and nod. “You may come as well.”

  CHAPTER 39

  When the door rumbled shut and clanged against its stone sill, the depth of lightlessness in the dungeon had been absolute. The emptiness of the silence had been absolute. Meg sank against the rough wall and slid to the floor, hugging her shoulders for courage.

  She’d been only superficially searched. Her knives were taken, her male body patted down. It mystified her. The quilting in her small clothes still concealed her four undiscovered potions. But someone had shouted an order, and the soldiers shoved her here, not taking time to make her strip.

  She shivered with the penetrating cold.

  By Kyaju, this was not supposed to happen. Kilovan was to have assassinated Wenid. Meg was only supposed to be along to find their way through the castle and if need be, to toss a spell of Confusion into the air to mask them as they escaped.

  She touched the outlines of the vials she still carried, encased in thick padding. A Heartspeed, a Confusion, a Memory Loss, and a Poison—the last to be taken only under the worst conditions, before she could betray secrets.

  The poison was swift but not instantaneous. She’d seen a rat die of the stuff once. It stiffened and shuddered, trying to crawl as it convulsed—

  Her bowels loosened. She would not have the courage to put the vial to her lips.

  But, would she have the courage to face— She had no idea what her captors might do. Rape. Torture. Magiels were burned.

  The plan to assassinate Wenid Col had been hers. Why had she been so angry, so confident, so—so stupid? Every other time, Sulwyn had stepped in, forbidden her to act on her wild plans. Protected her. She should’ve listened.

  She shifted her position, fingers exploring the time-smoothed oak of the door, the moss-furred stone of the wall. The air in the cell was close, stale, and it stank of piss, and worse.

  Hunger came, then faded.

  The silence of the tiny space was broken only by her own breaths, the sound of her clothing moving against her skin and the rough stone as she adjusted her stiff limbs.

  So.

  She waited in the dark. The cell door did not hold her; she could open it when she wanted. Something had happened to Kilovan. He’d been caught. She knew he’d been caught. He was imprisoned elsewhere, or dead. She hoped he wasn’t dead.

  Something touched her and she screamed, her shriek dying almost immediately in the small space. A spider on her neck, that was all.

  She hadn’t found a chamber pot, so she dampened the earth a few paces away, then returned to her stony seat.

  She slept, and woke with a start. How long had she been here? She was no longer certain of the time. Not long, though. A few candlemarks. She was barely refreshed.

  She peed again, then rasped her tongue around her mouth, searching for moisture. A headache throbbed against the back of her neck. No food or water. They’d forgotten her, and there would be no sentry beyond the door. It might, by now, be deep night.

  She climbed to her feet, too anxious and restless to sit longer. She couldn’t stay here. To remain, guilty with spells and flickering skin, was to invite discovery. She was a magiel. She would be put to death. She was a rebel. She would be tortured. She was a woman. She would be raped.

  Deep night—if it was—or the chaos of the battle, which should start at dawn, would give her the best opportunity to escape.

  Or...

  To commit murder. Meg was—almost certainly—the only one left to do it. The thought made her stomach twist.

  How could she? She had no weapon.

  Four spells.

  Heartspeed, for her own endurance.

  A Confusion. No good for killing. Besides, she needed it to escape the castle.

  A Poison. To take if she was captured. It would kill Wenid, though.

  A Memory Loss. Why had she brought such a silly spell? She should’ve brought another Disguise instead. She touched her cheek. The stubble of her old man camouflage was mostly gone and she could now feel her own youthful hair and supple skin. So. Fifteen candlemarks, at most, could have passed since she’d swallowed the elixir. It might now be past midnight.

  She touched the door, the handle, the lock. The door was thick and the iron strong, but it was meant to withstand force, not tricks. The interior of the lock was simple, and she readily found a time when the position of the tumblers was open. To use magic was a poor strategy when she needed her wits about her, but this was a small magic, its costs most likely fleeting.

  The door eased in its jamb. She pulled with all her strength on its massive bulk and it grated away from its stone sill. She wet her lips, a fluttery, empty feeling in her stomach.

  The opening on the far side was as inky as her prison. There was no guard.

  But the air moved slightly. She oriented herself. She’d come from the left, she was sure of it.

  She pulled the door closed behind her with an ear-shattering clang, announcing to all that she had gone. Reaching into her small clothes for the triangular vial, she removed it from her clothing, and shook it. Small crystals clinked against the glass; the Memory Loss. She poured a single crystal into her palm and pocketed the container.

  The uprisers had swallowed Meg’s spells of fearlessness and strength. They shuffled now, with restless energy, and grumbled with focused aggression. On King Gramaret’s order, they took the battle to the walls. Their missiles, though less skillfully loosed than their counterparts’, found their marks.

  And, wonder of wonders, Orville’s machines flung fire and iron into the city, toppling crenels, cracking stone, burning timber. The king’s men could not hold against their fury.

  Janat’s wrists were tied behind her.

  “My Lord Magiel!” Gweddien scurried to his master’s side fawning, panicking. “I didn’t mean for you to do this to her. Don’t do it! I’ll do what you want. I’ll hold her down—”

  The magiel turned on him. “Do you wish to come?”

  Gweddien’s mouth closed and he swallowed, wildness flitting through his eyes.

  Gods, what had alarmed Gweddien? And where was the old magiel taking them?

  Janat crumpled to the floor. But the soldiers lifted her by her upper arms and dragged her, wriggling and screaming, toward the door until the pain in her twisted shoulders was too great. She walked.

  And when Gweddien tried to catch her eye, a guard shoved him. He stumbled forward. A second crack of thunder reverberated overhead, rocking the floor. It was too early for spring thunderstorms.

  The corridors of the great hall had taken on a different character. Pages, serving girls, soldiers and courtiers, tense and pale, hurried this way and that. Panic?

  The magiel pushed his way, hobbling on his cane, down a spiral stair.

  Gweddien had tried to signal her.

  Traitor. He’d given her up to Artem’s magiel. Given her name.

  They descended into darkness, stopping briefly at a niche where one of the guards took a handful of candles from a box. Wenid lit them with a word. A small magic with little cost.

  They came to a deep basement and at the end of a short
roughhewn tunnel, a door. They entered a chill, dank cell. At a nod from Wenid, the guards released her and stationed themselves just within. “Unbind her,” Wenid told Gweddien.

  Gweddien slipped behind her and worried vigorously at her knots. “Don’t drink it,” he whispered. “On your death token, swear—”

  Wenid’s head snapped around. “You are dutiful?” he asked. “You would not wish me to deny your need.”

  Gweddien pulled the ropes from her and hurried to where Wenid placed his hands on a warded closet by a table. Oddly, there was a bed beside the table.

  Janat calculated. She would not bypass the soldiers guarding the room’s solitary egress. She would not be able to wrest a blade from them. There might be spells here...Wenid’s spells. And he would know where they were and what they could do.

  She could cast without ingredients. Weakly. Not powerfully enough to stop a magiel.

  Gweddien watched hungrily as Wenid poured a small measure of some powder into two goblets and added a mouthful of wine to each. As soon as the older magiel gave him a mug, Gweddien gulped its contents greedily.

  Don’t drink it.

  He shot Janat a look of shame, then lay on the bed, curling himself away from her.

  On your death token. Swear.

  What was in the wine? Wenid turned, holding out the second goblet.

  She could not run, could not fight.

  She took the goblet. Yes. There was wine, and something else. Wolf tears, strong. Lotus. Black moly root. And...a plant she didn’t know. Only a little of this, but collected under the rising Warrior Star.

  “You have no choice,” the magiel said.

  She pulled the unknown plant back to a time when it was fresh-sprouted. Gods, she hoped this weakened its potency.

  She smelled the wine. “Is it a love charm?” Wolf tears. She found a time when the wolf smelled smoke, and the tears were more water than magic. The black moly root. She brought it forward in time, wizened it, dried it to flakes to precipitate out of the wine.

  Wenid put a hand on the back of her neck, more strongly than she would have thought possible, and pushed the cup to her lips. “No more delay.” The wine splashed against her throat and she swallowed reflexively, stumbling to her knees.

  He bent and tipped the glass hard against her lips. She choked, gulping most of its contents before shoving the cup away. He let it fall, dribbling only dregs into the packed earth floor.

  And then...

  She stood beside Janat and Wenid.

  She watched as he took her elbow, and felt no touch.

  She blinked. Curious.

  There should be sounds of voices as the guard’s and Wenid’s lips moved, but, no. She heard only the sound of wind on a glacier.

  Then she was looking down on the three of them from far above the low ceiling. Wenid led the Janat in the cell to lie on the pallet beside the unmoving Gweddien.

  She lifted through stone and wood and glass, now looking down on the city from a great height. The forest. The...

  A gray mist engulfed her, swirling, neither light nor dark, damp nor dry, warm nor cool. A limitless expanse that shifted restlessly, sorrowfully, touching her with vast anguish.

  Ghosts. Clear now, and visible. Untold numbers of them, wailing in despair.

  She...was not a ghost, not dead, but surrounded by, filled by, translucent, colorless grievers. The dead. Worldlings and magiels with no death token when they passed. Never to attain even the lowest sphere of Heaven.

  Still she rose, floating above the sea of spirits, hoping she had in some small way, blunted Wenid’s magic. Somewhere far off, Gweddien, like her, rose.

  As she ascended, formless, she lightened, buoyed, filled with joy. She had no ears to hear sound, no eyes to perceive color, no nose to scent freshness, yet her nonexistent senses burst with vibrancy within peace and wonder. Her nonexistent body thrummed on the edge of an intense pleasure just out of reach.

  She came to a barrier.

  And beyond lay...

  Euphoria.

  Huwen paced the parapets of the castle wall in the capricious flicker of the torches, touching a man’s shoulder here, giving an encouraging word there, playing the king. The ultimate father, younger than most of them. Oh yes. That was him. The one in command. He schooled his face to keep from betraying his sickness at the carnage. Shame at his hand in this slaughter. His terror of Wenid’s grip on his brother.

  By the One, he’d never commanded an army—not one up to its neck in blood and death. His generals shouldered most of the work and the details of deployment, but the ultimate responsibility was Huwen’s, alone.

  Three men jostled past, darting toward a ladder cresting the wall, adding their strength to the swordsmen hacking at men clambering up. Archers shouted about a runner below, and three of them loosed missiles at the hapless man.

  It was heartbreaking. Brother hewing brother.

  By all reports, the attackers were possessed. They had charged fearlessly through a rain of arrows and climbed the slopes below the town walls, and Huwen’s own men, professional soldiers, faltered in the face of the magic that drove them. Despite lack of training and inferior weapons, the uprisers were on the brink of victory.

  With earth-rocking explosions, demon machines had flashed brilliant light, and the stones of the town wall, and of the keep, leapt into the air and fell in a rain of destruction. They flattened a section of the city wall—ten feet thick—sending the people of the town streaming into the castle, refugees. Now, these machines—from the distance of almost a mile—threatened the walls of Coldridge castle.

  The streets below the castle walls, and as far as Huwen could see, were filled with sparks of torchlight glinting on a sea of seething bodies and gleaming blades. The smell of sweat and crap and vomit and blood filled the air, amid the grunts and screams of men.

  The ladder was repulsed, but one of his men lay against a crenel, an ax wound in his neck. There was no one to carry him away—all were engaged, running to the next ladder, nocking arrows—

  Was this better? Better than using the Ruby against his own people?

  The bargain his father had made with the One God for Eamon’s life bound Huwen to his father’s debt. It was not possible, under divine curse, to give in to upriser demands for a prayer stone.

  How could he cut short this bloodshed? Talk with the commoners? His first act as king, to reveal his weakness as a leader? And how effective would such talks be when he had no olive branch to offer them?

  Perhaps Wenid was right. Using the Ruby to quell the rebellion must be more merciful than this brutality.

  A roar went up, and below the castle gate the uprisers pulled back from one of the coughing, fire-and-steam-spouting trebuchets.

  The royal general’s men were quick to use the distraction to push their struggle with renewed shouts and clanking of swords, but the uprisers held their ground.

  Most of the uprisers’ machines remained in the field, but a cadre of fanatical warriors had brought this inferno snarling within an iron cage before the main castle gates. Only now had it begun to hiss clouds of hot steam, its fires flaring in the dark, its hideous growling and rattling rising to crescendo. The uprisers defended it fiercely, and Huwen’s men had not been able to get near it. Sooner or later, it would begin flinging chunks of stone at the castle.

  A man shrieked, shoved onto the side of the machine, branded.

  The soldiers Huwen commanded were good. The men below and on the parapets fought with discipline. But they were too few, and too exhausted from weeks of siege. They needed more men.

  Huwen spotted his general a short distance down the wall shouting incoherently in the din. Uther was at his side. There was no use calling to either of them.

  Huwen shouldered his way among the men until he reached the commander. “More men!” he said into his ear.

  The general gave him a look that showed he comprehended the order, and equally, failed to comprehend where they were to find them.
/>   “The household guards,” Huwen yelled.

  The general took only a moment to nod. He took Uther aside and bawled instructions into his ear.

  CHAPTER 40

  The horse Rennika had stolen from the Arcan soldiers the night she and Meg escaped capture was no rebel horse, so she felt no compunction about leading it quietly from the upriser camp, laden with a filched tent and a bit of misappropriated food. Supplies would be helpful, no matter what she decided.

  Once out of earshot, she mounted and guided the beast through the woods in the direction of the King’s Road. To reach Highglen, if she were to follow the road, she must go through Coldridge. If Highglen was her destination. She wanted to return to Yon and Colin and Ide. Yet...she wanted to know what had happened to Meg. So there was no decision to make until she reached Coldridge.

  She emerged from the forest near the bridge. The wide plains below the hill where Coldridge sprawled were filled with upriser armies. Little was visible in the dark except patterns of torchlight, but the armies had engaged. Archers flung darts from both sides of the conflict.

  —something bizarre had happened to the town wall.

  It was as though a careless giant had stepped on one of the battlements, for a chunk of it had dissolved into a pile of rubble, crawling with men like a disturbed ant hill. Platoons of attackers wormed forward under a canopy of shields, bringing their ladders into the deserted streets outside the town wall; and fiery, smoking trebuchets, such as Rennika had never heard of before, lofted rocks or flaming balls of pitch over the walls.

  Rennika could leave the road, stay on the south side of the river, and make her way through the forest to Grassy Bluff. But the horse would be difficult to take through the dense trackless woods, especially if there were waterfalls or cliffs, and particularly at night. And walking to Grassy Bluff, carrying her tent and food on her back, would take a week. Besides she didn’t want to lose the horse she’d so carefully stolen.