The Providence of Fire

by Brian Staveley

  “Bunking with the troops,” Talal observed. “Good for morale.”

  “Not exactly ‘with the troops,’” Laith noted after a pause.

  Adare was threading her way through the tents, aiming for the large pavilion at the very center. Her pavilion, Valyn realized, an uneasiness settling in his gut. Not the kenarang’s.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “It would have been easier to get at her in town.”

  “We’re not going to be fighting our way into the middle of an encamped Annurian field army,” Talal agreed.

  Valyn chewed on the problem as Adare approached her pavilion, pointed at something, then kicked her horse into motion once more. The soldiers bowed as she passed, and Adare nodded back, dismounting before a different tent, one half the size of her own, but still large compared with all the rest. Even in the gathering dark, Valyn could see just fine, but seeing the camp didn’t make it any easier to penetrate. He could watch Adare all he wanted; what he needed was to get close enough to talk.

  “Who wants to play dress-up?” Laith asked. “I figure a cook could get into her tent. Or a cleaning slave. Or a whore.”

  Valyn shook his head. “You don’t know the Aedolians,” he replied. “They won’t just wave through anyone with a porcelain platter. Those bastards check everyone who enters. Even if I ditch my swords, I’m not sure I’ll pass as a cook. Or a whore.”

  “If we had a bird,” Laith observed tartly, “you could just drop through the ’Kent-kissing roof.”

  “We don’t have a bird,” Valyn replied.

  “Getting into the camp itself shouldn’t be hard,” Talal said. “We’ve got the armor we stripped off that messenger.”

  Valyn considered the idea for a moment. It was bold, but then, most good plans were bold. He had an Annurian horse, Annurian armor, Annurian accent. On the other hand, his burned-out eyes were immediately recognizable. There was no way to know how much communication had taken place between il Tornja and the Eyrie, no way to know what lies the kenarang had fed his sister, no way to know whether or not the guards around Adare’s tent even knew what he looked like. There were scores of questions and precious few answers.

  “I could get past the other pickets easily enough,” Valyn said slowly. “It’s dark, and men at those posts are just normal legionaries.” He shook his head. “The Aedolians are the problem. If il Tornja is half the strategist everyone says, he’ll be guarding against us, which means the Aedolians will be guarding against us. They’ll know what I look like, which means they’ll know what you look like, too.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Laith grumbled, “I’m getting pretty sick of the fucking Aedolian Guard. If they’re not off in the ’Shael-spawned mountains trying to murder the Emperor, they’re swarming all over the two people on this continent that we need to get close to.” He turned to glare at Valyn, as though the whole thing were his fault. “When do they go away? Or do they wipe your ass every time you take a shit?”

  Valyn was about to snap out a sharp retort when he paused. “No,” he replied after a moment, raising the long lens to his eye once more, “they don’t.”

  “Don’t go away?”

  “Don’t wipe your ass. At least, they didn’t when I was a kid. Back in the Dawn Palace they would station themselves outside the privy chamber. They never came in.”

  Talal pursed his lips. “I see where you’re headed with this, but we’re not in the Dawn Palace. Whatever latrine Adare uses will be ringed with Aedolians, same as her tent. You’ll have as much trouble getting into one as the other.”

  “The difference is,” Valyn said, pointing to the soldiers below who had begun digging a hole a dozen paces from Adare’s tent, “that I’m not going to have to get inside. I’m going to start inside.”

  * * *

  By the time Valyn had threaded his way past the outer sentries, picketed his horse with the other animals, then talked his way through the inner guard, he was sweating, despite the cool night breeze. Fortunately, just about everyone in the camp looked half dead on their feet—they were resting now, but evidently il Tornja had been pushing them even harder than Valyn realized—and the guardsmen waved him through with little more than a glance at his Annurian armor and a few cursory questions. It seemed a crude sort of vigilance, but effective enough in its rough way. Even after being waved through, Valyn had to remind himself to walk slowly, to emulate the weary plodding of the other legionaries, to look at the muddied ground before him instead of glancing over his shoulder.

  They’re exhausted, he reminded himself, and you’re just one more soldier among thousands. And it’s night.

  He offered up a small prayer of thanks to Hull for the darkness. Though he could see quite clearly, the night hid his face and his eyes from the Annurians. Now that he was past the picket, no one was likely to challenge him unless he approached the Aedolians around Adare’s pavilion. By the time he reached her tent, he had grown almost accustomed to his near-invisibility, and paused for a moment outside the pools of light cast by the torches to size up her guard.

  Had he been optimistic enough to hope that the Aedolians might slacken their vigilance while surrounded by more than twenty legions, he would have been disappointed. A pair of men in full plate flanked the doorway while eight more surrounded the tent, two at each corner, back to back, facing out into the night: a double diamond. The position was simple, but nearly impenetrable—double sight lines, redundant postings, physical contact between pairs.… There were ways to break it, and Valyn had studied them, but each required multiple attackers and ranged weapons. With his full Wing he could probably get inside, but the odds of emerging again were pretty long. And il Tornja’s pavilion was likely to be the same. The thought made his palms start sweating all over again, and with an effort he shoved it aside.

  Do what you came to do, he reminded himself. The kenarang’s time will come.

  He stepped away from the torchlight and walked back into the chaos of the camp, stealing glances at the soldiers as he passed. He recognized insignia from the Thirty-third Legion, the Fourth, and the Twelfth, plus a few he couldn’t quite recall. The composition of a field army tended to be somewhat fluid. Legions rotated in and out, and the individual men comprising the Army of the North would vary considerably over the course of a decade or so.

  He circled around Adare’s latrine to approach from the opposite direction. Standard legion procedure placed the long lines of latrines on the camp’s perimeter, but then, standard legion procedure didn’t account for a princess in the midst of so many military men. Adare’s presence had forced the camp commander to improvise on the established pattern, setting aside a small patch of earth for her personal use, surrounding it with a rough tent, and conscripting two weary soldiers from their normal duties to dig a deep hole for his sister’s safety and comfort.

  It was the weariness of the men that Valyn was counting on as he approached.

  “All right, assholes,” he said, stepping inside the canvas flap, “go eat your fucking chow.”

  The nearest legionary, a young man with a wine-stain birthmark across half his face, looked up with a scowl.

  “And just who in the fuck are you?”

  Valyn snorted. “You need a formal introduction? If you want to keep digging, by all means.…” He gestured toward the hole, then turned toward the tent’s entrance.

  “Hold up, friend,” called the other. He was older than the first, and leaned on his shovel. The meager lamplight flickered off his sunburned scalp. “What’ya want?”

  Valyn turned back, raised an eyebrow. “What I want is a nice sweet girl to suck my cock as I fall into a deep sleep, but what I get is Captain Donavic, may Ananshael bugger him bloody, sending me over here to spell you two lucky horsefuckers.”

  “Who’s Captain Donavic?” demanded the younger man.

  “Who fucking cares, Hellem?” said the older, climbing out of the hole and scrubbing ineffectually at the dirt on his clothes with a weary hand. “This fella here’s goo
d enough to offer to finish our work.…”

  “Hardly our ’Kent-kissing work,” the younger soldier spat. “If the Sons of Fucking Flame are so excited about the new Emperor, why aren’t they digging her latrine?”

  Valyn clamped down on his shock, even as the older man made a shhing motion with his hand.

  “She’s not their Emperor, Hellem. She is the Emperor. One of the captains hears you talking like this, you’ll be lucky if you spend a week in the stocks.”

  Hellem shook his head, but lowered his voice. “Ain’t right,” he spat. “I’d follow the kenarang straight up Ananshael’s arsehole, but this thing, the way he’s going along with her … It ain’t right.”

  “I don’t recall them asking us,” the older soldier said. “We signed on to march and to fight, not to do the figuring about politics and palaces. I’ll tell you what we do: we obey. If the general says double-time, we kick it in the ass, and if he says dig a latrine, we dig a latrine.” He paused wearily, glancing up at Valyn. “Unless, of course, there’s someone else good enough to finish the job for us.”

  “Good enough?” Valyn demanded, trying to keep up the ruse even as he struggled to make sense of what he’d heard. “I’d let you bastards dig till the sun came up, I had my way, but then fucking Donavic would have me in the stocks all night, which is even worse than pushing a shovel so her royal majesty can shit her royal little shits in her own royal little hole.”

  The young soldier shrugged, then tossed his shovel onto the earth beside the hole. “You coulda come earlier,” he grumbled, then pushed past Valyn and out the tent flap.

  “What spiny rodent crawled up his asshole and died?” Valyn asked the remaining legionary as the canvas fell back into place.

  “Don’t mind him,” the man replied, handing Valyn his own shovel. “Hellem just joined up. Thought the legions were all about big swords and doe-eyed girls in every town.…” He trailed off as he got a good look at Valyn’s eyes for the first time.

  Valyn shifted his grip on the shovel. He didn’t want to hurt the old soldier, but one shout and the entire camp would be on him. Worse, if he failed here, it would mean all the earlier deaths—Blackfeather Finn, the messengers he’d killed—would be pointless, useless. It was a perverse sort of logic that argued for hurting the living in the name of the dead, but unless he was willing to give himself up, there was no way around it. With the flat of the shovel he could knock the man unconscious without killing him. Valyn planted his feet.

  “Something happen to your eyes?” the man asked finally. There was curiosity in the words, but no nervousness. Valyn inhaled slowly; the air inside the tent was close, still, rich with freshly turned earth, but there was no stink of fear.

  He relaxed slightly.

  “Just the way Bedisa made ’em,” he replied, forcing a shrug. “By day they’re just brown, but they look darker at night.”

  The soldier considered him a moment longer, then clapped him on the shoulder. “None of my business. I thank you for the relief in here.” He gestured toward the hole. “Truth is, there’s not much left to dig—maybe another few feet. After that, it’s just a matter of making it pretty.”

  “Never heard of a pretty latrine,” Valyn said, turning toward the hole.

  “I never heard of a princess coming along on a forced march,” the soldier replied. “Thanks again, friend.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Valyn said. “Just save my ass if you see some Urghul trying to stick me with a spear.”

  The soldier was still chuckling as the canvas flap fell shut behind him.

  Emperor, Valyn thought grimly. He’d expected to travel all the way to Annur, to find il Tornja on the Unhewn Throne and Adare shoved to the side, baffled and grief-stricken, provided she was still alive. Clearly he had underestimated his sister. Here she was in the middle of an army on the march, evidently leading that army, not to mention an entirely separate contingent of the Sons of Flame. That was one mystery solved, at least, though how Adare had come to command the loyalty of the religious order, he had no idea. According to Long Fist, she had murdered their Chief Priest.

  He blew out a long, slow breath. He had hoped to find a willing if frightened ally in Adare. Instead, she had the full support of the Intarrans and Ran il Tornja both. She wasn’t weeping for their father; she had replaced him. There was no way to be sure what it all meant, but he’d be shipped to ’Shael if it looked good.

  With an effort, Valyn turned his attention to the task before him. The latrine had to look right, or Adare would refuse it, and so for the next hour he dug furiously, tamping down the earth around the hole, piling the stones neatly to the side, then arranging the elaborate wooden seat over the hole. The seat weighed half as much as Valyn himself. It was a ludicrous thing to bring on a campaign, and yet there it was, a concession to the tenderness of Adare’s royal behind.

  As he settled it in place, it occurred to him just how different their two experiences of the world must have been. While Valyn and Kaden had followed divergent paths, both of them had been trained, tested, and tempered by people and institutions utterly indifferent to their birth. Adare, on the other hand, quite obviously lived the pampered life of Annurian nobility. The thought kindled an unexpected anger inside him—he had seen his friends murdered, been forced, himself, to murder and treachery, all in service of the empire, all to avenge his father and protect his brother. Meanwhile, what had Adare been doing? Lounging in a private pavilion while footsore soldiers dug her privy.

  He’d expected her to help change the newly imposed order, and suddenly it turned out that she was the newly imposed fucking order. It was even possible, he realized, a chill prickling his skin, that she’d been a part of the original plot. The sister he remembered from growing up hadn’t seemed the scheming, murderous sort, but then, change had come for them all.

  He shoved aside his suspicions and misgivings. There was no point speculating when he’d have the information that he needed within a few hours. He stowed the shovel at the base of one of the tent walls, then checked over the space a final time. He couldn’t be sure exactly how it was supposed to look, but there weren’t too many moving pieces to arrange. If he’d missed a detail, the blame would land on the soldiers he had relieved.

  He nodded to himself, then stood on the wooden seat, reached up with his belt knife, and cut a slit in the canvas overhead. Careful not to tear the cloth further, he reached through, took hold of the tent’s center pole, and slipped out through the roof into the night. The canvas sagged a bit, but it was guyed out tightly, and as long as he distributed his weight it seemed willing to hold him up. He checked over his shoulder. The roof of the tent obscured him from the paths immediately to the sides. He could see soldiers going about their business farther out, but the night was dark, he wore his blacks, and, as he looked over the camp, it began to rain, light at first, then heavy. It would make for cold, miserable waiting, but it knocked visibility down to a few paces at best—a good trade. He tucked his chin in his blacks and waited.

  The Aedolians came first, lanterns held before them, the light shining off their wet, gleaming armor. It was the type of error the Kettral were trained to exploit: holding the lantern high meant that the flame would blot any night vision the guardsmen had managed to preserve. In an attempt to illuminate the shadows, they were destroying any ability they had to see what those shadows held. Valyn lay still, watching them approach, then looking down into the tent as they stepped inside, covering the rest of the hole with his body to avoid any leakage.

  One guard glanced in the privy while the other prodded the shovel where it lay beneath the canvas walls.

  “Left their tools,” he observed.

  The other shrugged. “Makes no difference to me.”

  Neither noticed Valyn. Typical Aedolians, Valyn thought. They could spend all night standing at attention in the driving rain outside Adare’s tent, but when checking the privy neither of them thought to look up. After surveying the tiny space one last tim
e, both men exited, presumably to take up their guard. Valyn was left alone with the drumming of the cold rain on the canvas.

  It must have been near midnight when Adare finally stepped into the tent, cursing under her breath as she pushed back the sodden canvas, then wringing the rain from her hair. Valyn himself was soaked to the skin and shivering, but he forced the discomfort out of his mind, focusing instead on his sister.

  She was both taller and thinner than she had appeared through the long lens, and up close Valyn could see the exhaustion scrawled across her face. She tried ineffectually to brush off her golden robe, then gave up with an exasperated sigh, letting the rain puddle on the floor as she stripped it off. To Valyn’s surprise, she was wearing legion wool and leather beneath—higher quality, to be sure, than what was issued to the soldiers, but far more practical than the dress and jewels he had expected.

  “Stubborn, ’Kent-kissing fools,” she muttered, shaking her head and fumbling with the button on her breeches as she crossed to the privy, evidently still incensed by an earlier conversation. “We’ll have the local population at our throats before we even get to the Urghul.…”

  Valyn shifted on the canvas slowly, sliding his head and shoulders through the hole.

  Water sluiced through as he changed position, splattering the inside of the tent. Adare looked up, scowl on her face, and Valyn dropped, flipping in midair to land on his feet. She had just opened her mouth to scream when he clamped an arm across her throat, cutting off the cry and air alike. She started to thrash, but he buckled her legs with a quick knee and she folded to the damp dirt.

  “I’m Valyn,” he hissed into her ear. The rain on the canvas roof was loud enough to drown out anything but a shout, but he wasn’t taking any chances. “Adare, it’s Valyn. Your brother.”