But something had happened. Talon didn’t recognize it as quickly as he did, but she finally understood what she wanted. And when she did, she realized he wanted the same. And from that moment on, the two were one, inseparable whether together or alone, whether in quiet conversation or in ruling a nation.
For his part, the Hezzan Shul Dramm discovered he had never understood—had not been prepared by his culture or his position or his experience to understand—what it meant to care so deeply for a woman. And he did care for Talon. She was unique. She was unlike any other woman he had ever met, certainly unlike his other wives, mere servants, now relegated to catering and catfights. She did not seem interested in making him feel like a god; she was truly interested in him. She was interested in his success, and she was interested in the success of his kingdom. She would not let him err in vanity. She was more insightful than any three men on his court. She was better with a sword than he was, better than any man he knew, and judging by her success with the Vast swordmaster, perhaps better than any man in the world. Her mind was worthy. Her willpower was worthy. She was valiant. She was cunning.
And given all this, it gave him great satisfaction to know that she required his protection, and that she had accepted it.
CHAPTER 8
Prey
“You have called us here in the Hezzan’s absence to speak treason?” Daon Dendada, the Chief Minister of the People, launched the question from his seat at the huge, triangular table. Winter was over; spring had come. And though the preparations had taken months longer than had been hoped, the Drammune Armada had finally sailed. The politician’s face was a wrinkled mass; he looked like an old bulldog. He held up both hands. “This was the Hezzan’s decision. And the thing is done.” He let his hands fall heavily back to the polished wood.
“I speak no treason. This thing is done, yes, but I propose to you it was not done by the Hezzan.” Sool Kron’s bony finger poked the air, his creaking voice uncharacteristically resonant with conviction. The group shifted uncomfortably in their seats. They knew what was coming.
“The entire Drammune Armada is one-hundred-forty warships,” the Chief Minister of State continued. “The Hezzan has sent more than a hundred of them to war across the sea, leaving less than forty in reserve. And he has sent more than half our army along, packed into the belly of our troop ships. This, gentlemen, is madness! We are all but unprotected here on our own shores, in our own capital. Does that sound like the Hezzan’s wisdom?”
Kron spoke to the entire Court of Twelve, whom he had summoned at this late hour to the Great Meeting Hall of the Hezzan. Marble floors glistened, and triangular vaults peaked fifty feet over their heads, flickering with lamplight from the floor below. “A defeat at sea puts an end to us. We must act.”
“I don’t see the crisis,” said the Chief Minister of Justice, Zan Gar, a gruff cannonball of a man, in physical characteristics a younger version of the old bulldog Dendada. “Wisdom often demands secrecy. We are not unprotected. And even if we were, the Urlish and the Martooch could not possibly know it. The Hezzan’s own Court did not know—how could they? We have destroyed the Vast Fleet. Why not attack them? The sooner the better, I say.”
“Destroyed their Fleet? The Vast are not stupid,” Kron said, turning on Gar. “Lazy and selfish, yes. But not stupid. If they could afford to send sixty warships for a parley, what did they hold back? Twice that number? Three times?”
“But our intelligence indicates—”
“Intelligence? Because a dozen spies cannot tell us the location of the remaining Vast warships, we call this intelligence? Where is common sense? The woman Talon has beguiled it from us all. And how do we know our dear friends to the east have not planned an attack on us, wholly ignorant of our designs with the Vast? The Urlish line our borders day and night, waiting for a sign of weakness. No, I do not speak treason, Ministers. I speak duty. I speak patriotism.”
No one responded. Their triangular table was cut across one tip so the Hezzan could sit comfortably at the head. Four men sat at each side of the table, the Prefects of Justice to the Hezzan’s left, the Prefects of State to his right, the Prefects of the People across from him. But tonight, their leader’s seat was empty.
“Duty and patriotism,” Dendada finally muttered. “But I must ask if you are not motivated by zeal for the Rahk-Taa.”
“Zeal?” Kron was genuinely surprised.
“Yes. Speak plainly. You echo the charges of the Zealots, who day and night denounce the Warrior Wife as an abomination.”
Kron looked at Dendada with a disarming smile. “Do not let your own fears obscure your vision. We are not speaking of taking away your seat at this table, Minister. That is the Zealots’ desire, not mine.”
Dendada looked like he’d been slapped. His greatest fear was, in fact, that the Zealots would win favor with the Hezzan, and then he would replace the four Prefects of the People with their own four leaders, the Quarto. The Zealots actively and publicly campaigned for this.
But Kron had no intention of letting this debate slide down the slope of domestic controversies. “Dear Ministers,” he said soothingly, “we stand to lose much more at the hands of this one woman than at the hands of all the Zealots combined. They, at least, are men who seek to join with us in power. She is a woman who seeks to take away our power. They do not have his ear. She has…much more of him than that.”
Wry smiles. “You have proof of her intentions?”
Kron closed his eyes, impatience furrowing his brow. “The Hezzan has sent more than half the Glorious Drammune Military across an ocean to attack the full strength of the Vast on their own soil. But has he consulted us together at this table? Did he consult any one of us separately or privately?” Kron paused and waited. Silence reigned. “He has ignored the Twelve! Certainly he speaks to us of taxes and bridges, of commerce, even of Vast spies caught and imprisoned. But of the greatest war effort of our lifetime? No! Silence! When has this been done? It is not his way; it has never been his way, nor the way of his father before him, or his before that. The Hezzan rules with the guidance of the Twelve! It has ever been so. Until now.”
“The Rahk-Taa commands it be so,” Zan Gar put in.
“So what do you recommend?” asked Daon Dendada.
Kron nodded. “The Hezzan, and the nation, must be freed of the Mortach Demal. Our great leader is utterly in her sway, and will not willingly part from her. So she must part from him.”
“And how can she be made to do that?”
Kron shrugged. “We are at war, dear Ministers. The spies of Nearing Vast are among us. We know that she has killed their Minister of the Sword deep within their capital. I am quite sure the Vast have sent their assassins to return the favor. Quite sure.”
“Do not speak in riddles. What do you propose?” demanded Gar.
“A well-aimed musket ball. Or an arrow. A knife between the shoulder blades.”
“You suggest we kill the Hezzan’s wife,” Dendada said evenly.
“She is a warrior!” he countered fiercely. “Warriors die.”
Silence. The wick of one of the great lamps popped twice, then a third time. “I concur,” Zan Gar said, and every head turned. “The death of the warrior will rid this nation of the curse of that woman. The Law must be followed, if we are true Drammune.”
Daon Dendada rolled his eyes. “Yes, well, let the Law kill her then.”
Gar’s eyes were ablaze. “You are a fool.”
Dendada looked like he wanted to spit his disgust. “And you are a Pawn.”
“How dare you—”
“Ah!” Kron clapped his hands, interrupting the suddenly murderous exchange. “Now this is how it should be,” he cooed, opening his palms. “The Council, the Twelve, at one another’s throats, determining the fate of our nation. And yet, gentlemen, while Talon lives, our quarrels do not matter. While she lives, we have no power. She has castrated us all. Dear Ministers, let us plot with one accord today, so that we may tear one
another to pieces at our leisure tomorrow.”
The nods, the grim laughter that punctuated Kron’s final appeal told all. They would talk, they would debate, they would scheme, but the conclusion was foregone. The thing was done.
The Hezzan Shul Dramm rushed through the halls of the palace to his wife’s aid. He did not need to know the nature of her concern to understand the depth of it. If she had sent a messenger asking him to join her in her chambers at this time of the month, something was badly amiss.
When he entered her rooms, he was attuned to danger. She was not. She was standing in front of the darkened window, moonlight streaming in on her shoulders, on her robe. She was not wearing her usual leathers, but soft crimson silk, tied at the waist. When she turned to look at him, her expression was impossible to read. It was not fear, but it was fearful. It was not joy, but it was joyful. She looked as though she were on the very precipice of some great step that would take her out into the infinite. She looked, he realized, altogether beautiful. Her great strength was there, but in repose, without its hard edge, without the knife’s edge. She had hope in her, and promise streamed from her.
She put a hand to her belly.
And he knew. He smiled.
Then he heard a small click, like a twig breaking underfoot far away. The noise came from beyond the open window.
All his instincts shouted danger. “Step aside,” he said quietly.
She did as he commanded. He waited a moment, then went to the window and spread his arms wide, taking hold of the wooden shutters to close them. As he did, Talon heard the faint hiss, and then three soft knocks, like knuckles rapping a melon. The Hezzan stood up straight, as though surprised. Then he closed the shutters, and held them shut. He looked down at his chest. Then he sank to his knees.
Talon knew before she saw the arrows, before she heard his last breath ease from him like a sigh, before she caught his slumping body, that he was dead. The arrows had hit him square, had buried deep into his chest. She knew from the sound of the impact, from the motion of his body, that they had struck him where no knowledge of the healing arts could save him.
His heart was pierced.
Talon held him close, his head to her breast. She felt the warmth of his body, which she knew would last but minutes more, and then would be gone forever. She trembled at the glassy stare when she turned his eyes a final time to hers.
“Not now. Not now,” she said. “Oh, not yet.”
But a desolate chill had engulfed the world. It caused her to tremble. The tremor turned to a quake, her chest heaving of its own accord, her breaths uncontrollably sharp, her mind darkened as if by a thundercloud. She did not understand; it seemed to her she was dying, as though her body were tied somehow to the soul of her king, her emperor, her lover, her husband. Only when she felt the cold wetness of tears on her cheeks did she realize she was sobbing.
She knew she should rise. She should fight. She was Talon, and enemies had killed her husband. But she could not. The training, the discipline that had saved her again and again was no help to her. The anger, the rage that should move her to vengeance did not come. All she could think was that these arrows were meant for her, and that she wished, she longed, she desired only in all the world that they had been shot true.
She could see the instruments of his death clearly now, ugly and short and black, fired from a type of Vast military crossbow that was now obsolete. She knew the weapon well, and so her mind could not help but calculate that with six inches still visible, six inches were buried, which meant they had been launched from more than thirty yards away. The assassins were not on the balcony, but on the rooftops. She knew that from thirty yards at night, the Hezzan would have been no more than a silhouette. He would never have been expected to be in her rooms, not now, not during her time.
He had known the danger, had sensed it, had heard it approach when she had not. She had been swept up in the moment. He had guessed her secret and had moved her to safety, had moved their child to safety. He had taken her place at the window. He had spread his arms wide, and had accepted a death that was rightly hers.
And suddenly she understood the strength of such an act. Dying of one’s own volition, sacrificing oneself. He could not have known with certainty that he would die in this act. But he was willing to risk it, for her. And it was not an act of weakness, not at all. It was an act of great strength. It was an act of great power. It was an act of great love.
She touched the cheek of her husband and wished she could bring him back. Perhaps the God who sacrificed Himself, who rose from the dead, would bring her husband back to her as well. So she asked Him. She begged Him, then and there, to put breath back into her husband. She put her lips on his lips, and breathed. But the air came back cooled into her nostrils, into her mouth, and no amount of effort, no prayers, would ever warm it again. His life was gone.
She held him close, racked once more with sobs. Deep anger was bound up in her tears now. This had been what she had fought against all her life. Her rage had been all, and always, against this. She had built a dam against this, brick by brick, to protect her from the ravages of this moment, of this madness, of this horrible vulnerability, the excruciating power of this powerlessness. This was what she had feared, and now it had come upon her.
It had sought her out. It had hunted her through Packer, and then through Panna. It had stalked her through Senslar Zendoda. She had hated him with an intense hatred; she had tracked him down and killed him, and yet he had spoken only words of gentle affection…My little child! How I have missed you!
And finally, it had conquered her. Love had arrived whole and complete, created in full form and power, in the Hezzan. Her husband.
And now it had crushed her. It would leave in its wake, she knew, precisely the desolation it had left one generation earlier. She could not rise, and she could not dry her eyes, because it had happened all over again. In spite of all her efforts, a child would once again not know its father. A father would not know his child. A mother would never again hold the man she loved, the father of her only child. And a mother would be left to bring her child into a hostile, ugly world, an outcast, alone.
Talon stayed on the floor below the window, holding the body of the Emperor of the Kingdom of Drammun, rocking it gently, until her tears stopped flowing and her body ceased shaking.
When the madness finally ebbed away, when her mind began to function again, she considered the danger she was in. She was now a widow with no protector, a soldier with no commander, hated by the powerful, powerless in herself. And she was alone in her own rooms with the body of the slain Hezzan.
They would twist this around. Sool Kron and the Twelve had missed their target, but now they would find a way to blame her. Talon has killed the Hezzan. That would be their cry, and it would be the end of the Hezzan’s child, the end of Talon, the end of everything.
She laid her husband’s head gently on the floor. She kissed his forehead. She rose and went to her dresser, unlocked it and, blood staining her hands, her breast, she removed the tattered pages of Vast Scripture she had hidden there. The Hezzan’s library held few books of any sort that were not about the arts of building, healing, or war. Those on the subject of philosophy and morality were few, most of them either copies of the Rahk-Taa or books written by later Hezzans who had interpreted the Rahk-Taa to their own ends.
Talon knew the Rahk-Taa well, as did all Drammune. It read like orders from an invisible authority, shot through with the plainest statements of right and wrong, good and bad, but with no origin other than the hand of a single man millennia ago. Its moral authority was of the most basic, iron-fisted, and despotic kind, almost as barren as the dry descriptions of the Dead Lands to which all were destined.
But the library had copies of several books from the Vast Scriptures. Talon had learned about some of them as part of her schooling, and had read more on her journeys. Compared to the Rahk-Taa they were rollicking histories, stories of great dangers, g
reat defeats, great victories, deeply flawed heroes, and complex villains. Now she had in her hands two books: one written by a disciple of the Christ, a man named Matthew, and one written by another named John.
She had found Matthew’s book astounding as she had read it these past months. If she assumed it to be a fable, as she had been taught to believe, she had to grant Matthew the Disciple a place among the world’s greatest spinners of tales. Who but a genius could dream up a character like this Jesus? He was a hero who did no heroic deeds. He slew no enemies, fought no wars. Who but the most imaginative writer would have conjured a story in which one man had all the unstoppable power of an omnipotent God, and then did not use it except to bake bread for crowds and calm seas for fishermen? What writer would put the very Son of God into human history, insert Him into the most turbulent times of His people, and then refuse Him the right to shake off the yoke of His oppressors, to slaughter either His nation’s enemies or His own? What writer would create a hero with such absolute power, and then not allow Him to wield it?
Yet in the entire yarn, first page to last, this Jesus never once slew even one enemy, not even when they killed His prophet. Instead, He died without overcoming His foes. And then, He came back from death with greater power yet and, amazingly, did not even then wreak His vengeance. Oh, He promised to. But it was as though the story ended in the middle, the beginning told, the climax almost reached…but then nothing. What writer would have the nerve to withhold from His hero, even then, the chance to destroy His enemies? And yet, this hero all but ignored them. Not even a taunt. It went against all reason.
And yet the tale resonated. It seemed to touch people in places no heroic tales of strong men defeating strong men with strength ever could. To create such a compelling tale would be a feat of fiction without parallel in history. If it were known to be written by the greatest poet, it would be a work so brilliant as to cause suspicion that God had indeed inspired it anyway.
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