by Stephen Hunt
‘I’m sorry,’ said Willow. ‘Carter and his father are prisoners inside the king’s own dungeon. They were taken when the national assembly was dissolved during their testimony. There’ll be no blood or revenge … not for you or for your friend.’
‘I don’t give a fig about revenge,’ said Duncan. ‘Not over what the pastor did to me … a wild dog only knows how to bite. As soon as I’ve helped free Lady Cassandra, my business in Weyland is done. Perhaps the empire’s business, too.’
‘You may have forgiven Carnehan, but by the Seven Saints, I’ll see the man swing for this,’ swore Willow’s father. ‘I’ll present Northhaven to the king, turn it into a royalist city, and His Majesty will hand me that bastard’s neck for the magistrate’s gallows.’
Duncan looked like he didn’t care either way. ‘Why bother? The pastor was a shattered man when I last saw him; as dangerous as a spitting snake and as insane as a hornet. I just want Cassandra back, alive and safe.’
‘Weyland’s enemies are Vandia’s, now,’ said his father. ‘We’re allies. If your abducted Vandian girl is being held in our acres, I’ll recover her safe for you. You have my word. Perhaps when you’ve done a man’s duty for these foreign allies, you’ll reconsider your place among your real family. I can see that your travels have hardened you, changed you. You’re your own man now. The decision will be yours to make and you’ll call it true whatever may come to pass.’
Duncan nodded, seemingly satisfied by their father’s offer and his fawning words of support. Willow was anything but satisfied. Her father’s lips moved, but all she could hear was Leyla Landor’s words. Willow tried to bring forth some platitudes of flattery and encouragement, but they choked in her mouth. Oh Carter, we should have left the country when we could. Abandoned it to its madness. Taken Sariel up on his offer and escaped to some far-called land a million miles from this evil and insanity. This isn’t my home any longer, no more than it’s my fool of a brother’s.
Cassandra’s muscles were stiff from the cold as she pierced the darkness of unconsciousness, discovering she had merely traded it for the dark velvet of a night sky spotted with silvery stars, more stars than she had ever seen before. Whole whirling constellations scattered above her head. She lay under a coarse blanket and a crackling fire burned nearby, the smell awakening a rumbling hunger deep in her gut, voices filtering in from unseen speakers. They didn’t sound happy. Who, then? Cassandra gazed around. She was surrounded by wreckage, aircraft wreckage, but not the Lightning Gull … there was too much of it, a twisted wooden airframe with ribbons of fabric rotted by age rising up around her, clawing towards the starlight. Like camping in a broken, tumble-down castle. This had been a merchant carrier once, one of the slow nomadic cities of the sky. Cassandra remembered the still air above the steppes; there were few trade winds to ride and even fewer places to trade for fuel, making it a dangerous crossing indeed. I’m still on the plains of Arak-natikh. She remembered the last few seconds of her descent, but not the crash itself. The pain throughout her body spoke well enough for how hard that had been, as though she was lying in a bath of scalding water despite the freezing night; but there was little warmth from the burning, she was numb and shivering. A reaction to shock or something worse? She tried to get up, but while her arms twisted out from under the blanket easily enough, finding purchase on the icy grass in the hollow of wreckage, she couldn’t stand. That was when she realized that the pain across her body burnt everywhere except her legs, cold and numb from more than the cloudless night air. They’re paralysed. She tried to move her legs again, and when she failed, she slapped her thighs with her fists, trying to feel something, anything. But she might as well have been beating the ground for all the sensation that came from the strikes. Cassandra swore in frustration, moaning as she tried desperately to roll over, stand, but her legs dragged around below her torso; a useless weight of meat, no feeling there, nor the slightest evidence of obeying her urgent commands.
A figure appeared, tall and dagger-thin and almost as dangerous. The Nijumet witch rider, Nurai, drawn by Cassandra’s convulsions across the dirt. She called out. ‘It is as I warned you. The useless foreign sow is broken. Better to have left her in the Rodalian machine to burn … that would have been a clean death, at least.’
Alexamir appeared, looking as hale as when he had leapt out towards an enemy flying wing with only a parachute for company, but his solid face was creased with worry. ‘Is it true, golden fox? Can you not stand?’
‘My legs,’ said Cassandra, trying to keep the rising terror from her voice, ‘they’re dead below me.’
‘You are a healer,’ spat Alexamir towards the witch rider. ‘Use your skills.’
‘It is not my healing skills that whisper of her fate, it is my Sight. She will not walk. I saw that when we warmed our skin around the fires of her wooden pigeon.’
‘If she cannot walk, she will ride. Or let us signal one of Temmell’s chosen.’
Nurai did not look happy. ‘There are none due here for many weeks.’
‘You used one to reach the steppes,’ accused Alexamir.
‘I foresaw where one of the chosen would be passing, as is my gift.’
‘And you will not use your Sight for her?’
Cassandra did not know who the chosen were, but she guessed they had something to do with how rapidly Nurai had put Rodal behind her.
Nurai shook her head in contempt. ‘To what fate, what end? Abandon her here. Perhaps the rice eaters will follow after their pink-skinned sow. The mountain folk seemed eager enough to recapture her the first time. What victory would it be to return with this?’
‘You’re lying to me,’ said Alexamir. ‘You saw this fate before I stole her from Talatala! You knew she would be broken in the crash. This is what you wanted all along.’
Nurai pulled the hood of her cloak back up around her head, but not before Cassandra saw the sly look she stole toward her, and she knew that Alexamir had the right of it. This had been the witch rider’s plan all along. Alexamir would have gone raiding to steal Cassandra back whatever the witch rider had said or done, so she had reluctantly facilitated his strike on the Rodalian town, knowing that their escape would leave Cassandra a cripple out in the steppes. Useless to the nomads, and useless to Alexamir. Nurai had managed to keep the wild barbarian horseman for herself after all. Cassandra was cursed as surely as if the witch rider had slipped a blade into the Vandian noblewoman’s spine.
She groaned in agony, reeling with the implications of her condition. It was more than her future that had ended out on the plains. Princess Helrena Skar could not possibly hope to seize the diamond throne with a crippled daughter. Lady Cassandra would not be seen as a marriageable match for any alliance beyond the truly desperate. Bad enough that as a woman, Helrena Skar couldn’t treat the great houses of the empire as endless breeding stock for the imperial harem … her mother was limited to the heirs she could personally produce. With a cripple as her only current heir, what would the house’s chances be of prospering? Next to none. I have to die here tonight. ‘Leave me. Take the blankets, kick out the fire and ride off.’
‘Then you will surely perish,’ said Alexamir. ‘This cold is nothing to me, for Alexamir this is as warm as summer, but you will not last the night.’
‘That is what she wants, you fool,’ said Nurai. ‘She knows what she is now and what she must do. Leave her a knife to make an honourable end.’
‘I gave the golden fox my oath to show her the life of the free people, and if she did not like it, to send her on her way home via the traders of the thousand duchies.’
Nurai struck a hand out towards Cassandra. ‘And how well do you think she likes that life?’
‘Do what she says,’ begged Cassandra. ‘Give me your blade.’
‘I will not. You may yet be healed.’ Alexamir glared at the witch rider. ‘This one is a base apprentice to Madinsar. If Madinsar says you cannot be healed, I will trust her judgement. But not Nurai.’
‘No … as you wish,’ said Alexamir. ‘You see, but you do not say. Is there any crime worse for a rider?’
‘Indeed there is. Being enchanted by a foreign sow who makes you forget you are a free man. Will you plant this broken thing in the ground like a root, build her a dirty wooden shack and grow crops around her body? Will you be known as Alexamir, Prince of the Farmers?’ She hooted in derision at the notion.
‘There’s none among your people that can heal me,’ cried Cassandra. ‘I’ve seen injuries like this before, pilots dragged from crashed helos. Even the emperor’s surgeons can’t make such wounded veterans walk again.’
‘She knows the truth of it, at least,’ said Nurai. ‘Though you would make yourself a fool for her. Return with this damaged flower as a prize from our raid and the clan will fall off their mounts with laughter. You will wake to find your horse stolen and replaced with a mule and a child’s saddle.’
‘My horse may yet be stolen by them, but a rider’s honour is only his own to steal, nobody else’s. She has my oath, and you, witch rider, have the only answer I shall give.’
‘A laughing stock’s answer,’ spat Nurai, turning her back on them and then flouncing away from the nook in the wreckage.
Cassandra tried to move again, yelling in frustration when her body failed to respond.
‘You can still ride,’ said Alexamir. ‘I will strap you into your saddle and you will not even think of your legs. This is how the free people cross the steppes. We do not walk like rice eaters hiking up and down their high mountains.’
‘I release you from your oath,’ said Cassandra. ‘Please.’
‘You speak with the alarm of your pain,’ said Alexamir. ‘You are not used to what you are and yet may be.’
‘I speak with a sense of realism,’ said Cassandra. ‘You would not let a wounded horse suffer like this would you? You’d say a prayer, take a knife to its throat, and put it on a spit for your people.’
‘The free people ride fine horses, yet we are not horses,’ said Alexamir. ‘I know outsiders call us savages, but that is only because they are ignorant in slaves’ chains, bending their knees to fools who have never earned the right to lead. When our elders grow old, they sit among councils of the wise and are attended by their sons and daughters. We do not push our people out on a cold night with a rusty blade and our best wishes for many good memories and the lives of those they have birthed.’
‘I am not infirm at the end of a life well lived,’ insisted Cassandra. ‘I am young. My life’s finished before it has begun.’
‘I say it is not.’
‘My mother’s enemies will use my condition against my house,’ said Cassandra. ‘The imperium—’
‘Let them bend their knee to another, then. What do I care? You foreigners would hammer a single fence pole in the mud and call it an empire, before proclaiming the closest rice-eating white-beard your king. You are alive, golden fox. Few could have survived that crash. There is a reason for your life’s gift that only Kalu the Apportioner knows. And my oath is my oath.’
‘I do not want it. I absolve you of it.’
‘Then run away,’ said Alexamir. ‘For we ride for my clan with the morning.’
‘You don’t want me, you can’t. What good am I now? Nurai spoke truly the first time I was your prisoner. I will curse your fate just by crossing it. I cannot go home now. I can never go home. You take me for your own and someone will slip a dagger between your ribs as a weakling.’
‘I am my own man, golden fox. And you are wrong, just like the witch rider.’
Cassandra sobbed. Run away. That was one thing she would never do again. What good was a fighter who could no longer fight? A Vandian celestial class who could no longer rule? She was as broken as the ruins of this once mighty carrier that had crossed the skies of Pellas. How many centuries had it drifted in the high altitude trade currents, beating a course between nations and giving a good living to its people? Like Cassandra, it had been smashed on the windless steppes, no future beyond being slowly picked apart by rodents with its wooden bones a home for snakes. Alexamir left as well and Cassandra howled in fury and vexation, cursing the fates and the barbarians for hours, ignored by the nomads until the weariness of her wounds finally claimed her.
Carter stood in one of the mayor’s chambers inside Midsburg, the room remade for a war council by Prince Owen. The city outside the grand palace-sized building showed little of the tension inside the council, but that, Carter reckoned, seemed par for the course here. Midsburg had been protected by two imposing battlements for centuries; an outer curtain wall sixty feet high, thirty feet thick at the base, that stretched for thirty miles, then a far older inner rampart half that height. Those defences and the protection of the enclosing forests and sentry tower-lined hills had bred an insular, independent-minded citizenry who found it hard to believe that anything other than peace was their lot, holding to the comforts of their wealthy city. Fed by the wealth of the Lancean Ocean to the west and the mighty Spotswood River to the south, Midsburg’s sophistication – its burghers boasted – rivalled even Arcadia’s; a prosperity that now fed close to a million mouths inside the city. They might have a point. Despite the number of grey-uniformed soldiers visible from the outlying military camps, you still couldn’t walk through Midsburg without being accosted by flower girls and street walkers, or fight off stall vendors trying to force illustrations of the city on visitors. Since being garrisoned here, Carter had grown used to the wide network of canals iced over by winter hoarfrost, broad boulevards and park promenades blown golden brown with leaves dropped by long lines of horse chestnut and sycamore trees. Sewers ran under the city so grand and wide that locals even offered boat rides through them to complement walking tours of the cathedrals and galleries. Just to reach the council he’d passed glass-roofed pavilions filled with meat and fish markets as grand as cathedrals, marble fountains where city employees cracked the coating of ice each morning to let the fish inside prosper, and a greater number of imposing monuments than any visiting soldier had the time or inclination to spend their leave visiting. Theatres and opera houses inside the city offered entertainments ranging from the commonly lurid to chamber music recitals which could only be afforded by the most affluent nobles and merchants. Saloons, restaurants, cafés and taverns by the thousand catered to every purse – even, as he’d discovered, to a cavalry captain’s meagre pay.
Inside the war chamber, multiple maps of the northern prefectures were stitched together and covered with wooden counters representing the rebels’ regiments and the best guess at where the usurper’s loyalists were advancing. Like some damn elaborate game of draughts. Except thousands of real lives are lost with every move. On paper, the royalist forces and the assembly’s army were evenly balanced. Three armies apiece were raised along the nation’s great rivers and the prefectures they streamed across, as well as named after them. The armies of the Dulany, Hicks and Boles serving the usurper in the south. The armies of the Perryfax, Spotswood and Broadaxe fighting for the north and the assembly … and the man who represented their cause: Prince Owen. The true heir to the throne stood alongside Anna Kurtain, listening solemnly to Carter’s request, just as he had promised. The very least he could do, after Carter had presented parliament with as great a gift as it had received since being chased out of Arcadia.
‘I’d like to take my company back out onto the road,’ said Carter. ‘Being in barracks here makes them itchy.’
Prince Owen suppressed a smile. ‘Makes you itchy, might be truer to say?’
‘Those marauders from the Frontier Mounted are still running merrily across our acres,’ protested Carter.
‘Not at present. They were sighted by one of our skyguards fording the Spotswood in Deersota,’ said Owen.
‘Looking to rendezvous with
a supply train from the Army of the Boles,’ added Anna.
‘All the more reason for you to send my company east. They’ll be back soon enough, with fresh ammunition packs and kindling for every town on our side of the river.’
‘We have another job for you,’ said Owen. ‘Far more important than chasing down that gang of bandits in uniform. I have a pilot ready to fly you north to Rodal.’
And that’s my reward? ‘You want me to act as a damn courier for you?’ spat Carter. ‘Send poor Tom; that’s his vocation’
‘War hasn’t rubbed the edges off you, has it, Northhaven?’ said Anna. ‘Just listen to the prince.’
‘Mister Purdell is otherwise engaged alongside Northhaven’s assemblyman,’ said Owen. ‘Parliament is acting on the evidence of the mass murder in the south and passing a bill declaring my uncle a traitor, guilty of high treason with a price on his head.’
Carter laughed. ‘Bad Marcus is going to love that. Every poacher and vagrant in the south free to stick a knife in his spine and collect a big fat purse for his murder.’
‘Sadly, the north will need every lift in spirits it can get. Our spies have sent news of worrying developments from Arcadia. Vandia’s arrived outside the capital in force and struck an alliance with Marcus. There are imperial boots swaggering about the streets and Vandian gloves spreading a fortune in silver around the bawdy houses of the south. When the Army of the Boles comes at us over the river, they will be attacking with the support of Vandian legions.’
Carter growled at the news. ‘Then you need me here!’
‘I need the Vandian emperor’s granddaughter here,’ said Owen. ‘As a hostage to blunt their assault.’
‘That’s a new tune I’m hearing,’ said Carter. ‘You told my father that taking the girl was a mistake.’
‘You don’t defeat your enemy by becoming like him,’ said the prince. ‘I still believe it was wrong to take her hostage. But I fear events have proved your father correct about my uncle and his loyalist supporters. I should have taken a blade to his throat before he realized we’d returned from the sky mines.’