by Andy Graham
The Misrule
The Prequel and Trilogy
Andy Graham
Contents
A FATHER’S CHOICE
1. A Coin
2. Trust Me
3. Surprise
4. Aerfen's Debt
5. Tea
6. Sun-Fans & Pencils
7. Return to Tear
8. Stay Gone
9. Pig-Headed
10. Change
11. The Unsung
12. Paper Galleries & Perspective
13. Bucket Towns
14. Red Lipstick
15. Rumours & Dreams
16. No Ifs, Ands or Buts
17. The Great Trade Conflict
18. A Trick
19. Who Watches the Watchers?
20. Roundabout
21. Donarth
22. Rigour Mortis
23. Revolutions & Martyrs
24. A Handshake
25. Three Words
26. Wedding Burns
27. The Gunpowder Tower
28. Rose Franklin's Monster
29. Epilogue
The story continues in A Brother’s Secret
A map (of sorts)
The cast of A Father’s Choice
About this edition
Copyright & Disclaimer
A BROTHER’S SECRET
1. Ray Franklin's Monster
2. Hallowtide
3. The Ward
4. An Incentive
5. Left
6. The Kickshaw
7. Playground Economics
8. Tattoos
9. X517
10. White Plague
11. The Bits in the Middle
12. Captain Electric
13. Vulnerable Old People
14. Cats, Dogs & Buckets
15. Naive & Bitter
16. Everyone Should Lift
17. The Sit-in
18. Back Doors & Buckles
19. Head. Heart. Hand.
20. The Pregnancy Directive
21. The Angel City
22. A Fisher Gull & Four Horsemen
23. The Dawn Rock
24. The Disease Dog
25. Enough
26. The Northbridge
27. An Annoying Buzz
28. Greenfields
29. The Spokesperson
30. The Angel Nation
31. An Ambulance
32. A Farewell
33. Substation Two
34. Donarth Taille
35. Gwenium
36. A Subterranean Sun
37. Noise, Noise, Noise
38. A Coin
39. Good News for Some
40. The Watchfires
41. A Cowboy Hat & a Code
42. Left or Right
43. Ancestors
44. An Old Friend & a Dumb Waiter
45. Reza
46. Phoebus Donohue & Coincidence
47. Stella
48. An Unexpected Visitor
49. A Wooden Chair
50. The Wind at a Window
51. You Are a Hypocrite
52. You Know Me?
53. A Folly Tree & a Field-Marshal
54. Genes & Diseases
55. A Question
56. Finding Rhys
57. The Dead Could Wait
58. Epilogue
The story continues in A Mother’s Unreason
The cast of A Brother’s Secret
A note about this edition
Copyright and Disclaimer
A MOTHER’S UNREASON
1. Bait
2. Just Doing My Job
3. The Weeping Wood
4. Plans & Problems
5. Under the Donian Mountains
6. Smack Time (One)
7. Lesau & Melesau
8. Leadership
9. The Solution
10. The Hunt
11. The Church Above the Ward
12. More than Ugly
13. Trucks & Cages
14. Alcazar
15. A Little Girl’s Mother
16. The Morgen Towers
17. Jann Rainehoff
18. Maudlin. Definitely Maudlin
19. Return to Tear
20. The Map Room & the Husband
21. A Plastic Tube
22. The Other Twin
23. Bricks, Puppies & a Fisher Gull
24. AWT in EBT
25. Flinty-eyed Fury
26. An Opening Gambit
27. Loaded Dice
28. The Musical Graveyard
29. Smack Time (Two)
30. It’s for You
31. Frames
32. It’s All About Stories
33. Outside the Bridged Quarter
34. An Old Promise
35. Inside the Bridged Quarter
36. A Twist
37. The Hanging Urn Gardens
38. The Old Cells
39. Smack Time (Three)
40. They Shoot Dogs Here
41. The First Deceiver
42. Matricide
43. Captain Brennan’s Sister
44. An Old Man’s Eyes
45. More Than Pregnancy
46. Purple Eyes
47. Payback
48. Nervous & Suspicious
49. Three Reasons
50. The Stone Bridge
The story continues in A Lover’s Redemption
The cast of A Mother’s Unreason
About this edition
Copyright & Disclaimer
A LOVER’S REDEMPTION
1. Lesau Rising
2. Remembering Rose
3. Remembering The Past
4. Remembering Lena
5. Remembering The Way
6. Remembering The Future
7. Remember A Lover
8. Remembering Rick Franklin
9. War
10. White Coat. White Noise
11. A Twin Arrives
12. Corporal Orr's Obedience
13. The Sub-Metro
14. The Antidote
15. The Musical Labyrinth
16. Remembering Bethina
17. The Morgen Towers
18. Brooke
19. Fight For The Towers
20. Regroup. Return. Rebel
21. A Meeting. A Refusal
22. VIPER
23. Cobwebs
24. Manoeuvring
25. The Angel City
26. A Change of Plan
27. Corporal Orr's Disobedience
28. Transit
29. Remembering The Arch Trees
30. Corporal Orr's Legend
31. The Best & Worst Of Friends
32. It Begins
33. Higher Ground
34. Tradition
35. Brothers & Bullies
36. The Monster Under The Mountain
37. The Battle For The Angel City
38. It Ends
39. Lenka
40. Epilogue
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The cast of A Lover’s Redemption
Acknowledgements
Copyright & Disclaimer
A FATHER’S CHOICE
The Misrule (The Prequel)
1
A Coin
In the old fairy tale, the traveller carried his fire in his leather rucksack. It was always lit, always warm. Wherever the man stopped for the night, he would pull out the fire, unfold it and lay it on the ground. He would reverse the process the next morning and continue his journey, a crimson glint seeping through the stitching on his bag. Aerfen’s
father had told her the tale and that’s what she saw now.
The man in front of her picked up the flickers of light one by one. Colours skittered across the walls of the canvas shelter. He kissed each spark and packed the balls of fire into the bag of powder. Under the scars and burns, the fingers he had left moved with the precision of a watchmaker. Aerfen had been brought up by those hands. They’d fed her, taught her to tie her laces, to write. They’d comforted and disciplined her. They’d taught her what soap was for. Her father loved her. She had learnt so much from him. Why didn’t she have any patience for him?
She had snapped again this morning, impatient with his inability to grasp all the wireless technology sweeping the nation, frustrated because he couldn’t remember his passwords. His response? To kiss her forehead. She had felt ashamed and said, “I’m scared.”
“So am I,” her father had replied. “That makes what we fight for even more important.”
“These things you make. What they do to people. It didn’t seem real before.”
“Neither did life before I met your mother.” He had pulled her close, held her tight enough for her to feel the thud of his heart. “No one will think any worse of you if you change your mind about tonight, Aerfen.”
The tent walls cracked in a gust of wind. Aerfen’s fear spiked. She hadn’t changed her mind. She had made the journey with her father and the rest of the rebels. Just as she had promised herself she would. Carefully, her father reached for another steel ball. His fingers patted it into the grey powder, like the young saplings he planted in the Weeping Woods.
Aerfen closed her eyes. Remembered.
On the morning of her seventh nameday, she had woken to find the hands that seemed so much a part of her childhood had a finger missing. Her leathery-headed father, who had labelled each of the lines on his face after one of her misdemeanours, brushed off the questions. He had sat her on his lap and brushed her hair, humming to her until she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder.
It happened again when she was a teenager. This time she had been awake when he turned up missing a thumb. She had pestered him until he told her the truth.
Then the hands that had taught her how to live and survive taught her different things. Things she hadn’t thought one person could do to another. The things she had only heard in whispers were now words in her bathroom, being washed down the plug hole with the swirling red water.
She blinked, the cold air stinging her eyes. She wasn’t at home. Not a child. She was in a tent in the Weeping Woods. Aerfen reached into her fatigues. The metal disc was still there. She wanted to be sure. The torchlight flickered. Her fingers clamped around the token in her pocket. With glacial stillness, her father picked up a nail. It was long and rusty. He whispered something to it and pushed it into the powder with the pad of his remaining thumb.
The tent walls flapped around her. Aerfen was vaguely aware of the speech rising and falling between the tree trunks outside, of words that whipped the wind into a frenzy and scared the bright eyes of the forest predators away. For all that they were metres away and joined by the same cause, the other people could have been on a different world.
Her father had been excused from the gathering. She had slunk away, picking her way through the starlight that frosted the ground. She had heard variations of the speech many times. The first time had been while she had been dressing the stump of her father’s thumb over their chipped sink.
The words in the night reminded the listeners of the bastards who had taken everything from them: the soldiers that had ransacked homes, blitz mined the valleys and stolen their gods; the men who had demolished temples and built their own on top, reclaiming land like one dog marks its territory over another’s. They had tried to beat the language out of the young. Aerfen was one of those children; the scars on her back still smarted when she thought of it.
It was a peculiarly inventive way of eradicating language and culture. Any child caught speaking their mother tongue had a hanky tied around their neck. The knotted hanky was passed to the next child heard using the language. The child wearing it at the end of the day got strapped.
The day after Deian, her father, had given her the speech she could now hear through the canvas, Aerfen had fastened one of her mother’s old hankies around her neck. It had still smelt of her perfume, roses. Aerfen had slept in it and gone to school wearing the hanky the next morning. She had refused to take it off, even when the teacher’s cane snapped on her back. The next day three of her friends had done the same. Within a week, the entire class was wearing them. A month later, the school.
As terrified as she was, this was her cause now. Her inheritance. Not being considered old enough to be legally classified as a woman hadn’t stopped the enemy from abusing her like one. The men from Ailan had bloodied her, taken what should have been hers to give. Now it was her turn. She was going to take their crusade back to them.
Six months ago, she had followed her father to her first meeting. There had been a brief flash of anger, then he had hugged her. The tears rolling down his face had been both sad and proud. That evening, the order had come from the faceless leader of the Council to attack the castle on the border. Aerfen had wanted to be part of it.
She had begged her father while they sat on the edge of the bath. He had finished cleaning his teeth, spat the froth down the plug hole which had taken away so much filth and pain from their family, and taken her face in his hands.
There had been no tears, no attempt to talk her out of it. He had cleaned her up the day after the soldiers had defiled her. He had buried her mother. He knew why she wanted to go. Her father had just said, “It’s easier to hate someone else than it is to love yourself. Whatever happens in Castle Brecan, don’t forget that. Don’t gloat. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t even enjoy it, just get it done.”
Now she was here. Waiting. Fear and sweat creeping down her spine.
Aerfen’s thumb rubbed over the rough metal edge in her pocket. Despite his warning to her, her father was whispering the hate into each piece of metal he packed into the gunpowder.
The last ball bearing flashed its oily message around the tent. He sat back on his haunches. “Have you got it?”
Aerfen rooted in her pocket. “Yes. Here.”
She held out the coin. A Mennai crown, the old type that the villages still used. It was warm in her hand. Slippery. When their leader had sent it through the clandestine channels, Aerfen wanted the honour of looking after it. She had spent weeks guessing at its symbolism. Was it a vindictive tax payment, blood money or something else? In the end she had settled on something much simpler.
“For luck?” she asked.
Her father smiled, gun-grey eyes twinkling under milk-white hair. Squeezing her hand as he took the coin from her, he slid it between a cluster of nails. “For luck.”
2
Trust Me
Rick Franklin watched his twin moon shadows coalesce. The rifle slung low over his shoulder blurred, then shifted into focus. He murmured a hurried wish, tapped his forehead, his heart and his right hand with his left. The tradition was supposed to be performed naked but he wasn’t sure Lieutenant Chel would approve.
High above him, partially hidden by grey clouds, the constellations glittered. The Jester teased the Dancer while the Little Cleaver watched. Dotted amongst them were an increasing number of winking red dots. There was a scuff of boots to his left.