In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  “What’s one, if not a dozen more, if not a hundred more, if not every single one?”

  36

  A burst of air shocked my lungs.

  I gasped awake, startled into myself and the world though I was sure I was still dreaming as I picked my head up and rested my chin on Jack’s shoulder.

  The mountains towered against the dark sky, their tops hidden by the heavy storm clouds that cast more shadow than the lack of sun. A cold breeze and silence brushed past me as I stared up at them, and then the twinkle of lights in the distance nestled in the valley turned my heart to crushed velvet.

  The glass tower of Redbird.

  “What did you say?” Jack whispered.

  I startled again. There was silence in the air, no sound of the quad's electric rumbling, no rebels charging after us. Silence. The quad was shut off, and Jack sat impossibly still in front of me.

  I sat up and frowned. “What? I didn’t say anything.”

  “You did, you… You were talking in your sleep, weren’t you? I thought you were awake.” He shrugged and tapped my knee, waited until I slipped off the vehicle, and then swung a leg over. He stayed sitting sideways, his elbows dug into his knees, and dropped his head to rough his hair with both hands.

  “What did I say?” I questioned, stepping back, concerned as I flushed red. “Was it… bad?”

  He looked at me quickly, shaking his head with a soft laugh. “No, no, it’s not you, it’s that.”

  I looked past him, lower than the mountains this time, and searched the darkness for a hint of what he was talking about. The shadows gave way to the silhouettes of Fitz, Roam, and Pucks, carefully searching through a ghost of Conleth—but we weren’t in Conleth. We were a day away from dawn to whatever time it was now, at the foot of Redbird, in the farmland.

  It was burned to the dirt, the fields barren. A grave of a farm.

  The Talon farm.

  I’m dreaming, I thought, I must be dreaming.

  The world felt lopsided.

  After Finn died, I had stood on this same spot at the end of a long gravel driveway. I remembered it like a dream—a wisp of colour, mostly silence. There was a field of tall green corn on one side and a short crop on the other that I didn't recognize—carrots, maybe, and just beyond those were raised box beds of strawberries, herbs, tomatoes. It was a cacophony of colour that I wasn’t used to coming from white marble and black uniforms.

  The house was large enough for a family with as many children as the Talons.

  There was a slight lean to the building, evident in the lines of the weathered white siding against the corners, but it was well kept. Solar shingles made the roof dark and covered the porch where bare bulbs hung evenly spaced to light the early morning. It was quiet, when the other farmers were already wide awake.

  It was quiet now, without so much as a creak in the wind. The soil was dry and seedless. The box beds were charred, and the few closest to the house spilled dirt to the pebble pathways. Dried husks of old plants were broken and limp without care.

  I didn't smell charred wood and paint and melted glass like there was in Conleth—none of it was new. It had been rubble for so long that they hadn’t had the chance to sow the fields or plough it after the frost left.

  “Jack, get that thing off the road!” Fitz jogged up the driveway, the gravel crunching loud under his step.

  He shouldered past me, despite there being enough room, and hooked a hand around his nephew’s shoulder as he leaned in to whisper something.

  I started toward Roam and Pucks.

  A white house stood before me in my memory, a part of the fog that filled the field in the night.

  I let it flood my vision rather than the old battlefield it had become.

  It took courage to step foot on the farm, courage being a deep breath and a count of three, but each crunch of the gravel underfoot was an assurance that I would get there. I would get there, I would pay my respects as I did any other noble death, and I would leave.

  But each step quickened my pounding heart and tightened my hands around the stems of the two yellow daffodils I had plucked from the garden behind the Manor on my way out.

  The front door cracked open and a wave of voices crashed out. I halted, and then jumped when the screen door burst open and two men tumbled onto the porch. The largest of the two gripped the other’s shirt with a raised fist. He shoved him—just a boy—against a porch pillar.

  “You’re a disgrace to this family!” The man spat at him, and I stared at them, wide eyed. “You let your brother die and you’re going to stand in this house and—”

  A pair of green eyes landed on me, a snarl of lion’s teeth fading as he took in this girl in a black dress with black curls and Beckett blue eyes who stared back, a pair of daffodils in hand.

  He was sloppily dressed in a worn t-shirt, one suspender up and one hanging down, his pants stitched in various places. His old leather boots had the laces undone and loose. He let go of the boy and stumbled to the side, running the back of his hand under his nose as he walked down the porch steps two at a time.

  “Dad, don’t—”

  The man threw a look over his shoulder at his son, grumbling, “Go join the Emperor’s damn legion, for all I care.”

  I stood still as the man came to a stop in front of me, and I didn’t know what came over me—the words were calm and entirely not what I had planned out in my mind to say to them.

  It was supposed to be I’m so terribly sorry for your loss, and instead it came out, “He would have to be eighteen to enlist, sir.”

  A bright red blur appeared next to him before he had a chance to say anything. Clary’s braid swayed against the back of her own black dress as she slipped an arm around him and turned him back toward the house.

  She avoided making eye contact with me, leaned in to the man to hold his weight up.

  “Dad, you’re drunk.” She informed him. “Come back inside before anyone gets hurt.”

  I wanted to hug her, to tell her I was so damn sorry, but all I could do was watch her as she walked away.

  Her brother stood off to the side on the lawn, hands in his pockets, a red mark covering one cheek. His eyes scanned the road behind me for Lumen, for soldiers, but there weren’t any. I came alone. I didn’t think I would have to.

  I held out the flowers. “These are for… for Finn.”

  “Thanks,” he nodded, and then silence filled the air of the farm again until he took a half step forward and then back again, gesturing over his shoulder. “I can show you where—if you want to put them—I mean, I can just—”

  “Yes, please, if you don’t mind,” I tried to smile but it was fleeting.

  I followed him further down the driveway, around the house, deeper into the farm where a barn sat with a cow paddock to the side of it. Two cows reached over the fence with short necks to steal some corn from the field, cow bells around their necks clanging against the metal.

  The boy shooed chickens from the dirt path he led me down, between two fences that held back separate crops. Fruit trees occasionally dotted the sides.

  “My mum thinks yellow flowers are insulting,” he told me suddenly.

  I looked down at the ones I held. “Oh, yeah, I’m sorry.”

  “Just because of… But they’re daffodils. Daffodils are her favourite. It’s okay that you brought them. It’s… good. Not that the need for it is, I just…” He trailed off, looked at me quickly, and then turned his eyes back to the dirt ruts in the grass that we followed in a straight line from the house.

  At the edge of the fields a run-off river from the lake separated the farmland from the forest and the rougher, rockier terrain that rose steep with trees. There was a grassy area where four crosses sat, two of them worn and two of them new. Names were carved into the wood—Elise Roy-Talon, Sammy Talon, Grey Talon, Finn Talon.

  Now, in the dark in the night after the heat of the Wastes and the fires that burned Conleth and this farm, the names were harder
to read. Worn down, hidden by the shadows of wildflowers and yellow daffodils and yellow-bellied daisies that overtook the graves and the grass.

  “You were remembering something,” Jack murmured behind me. I startled, turning to face him in the dark. “I know what you were remembering. I didn’t want to interrupt, but I didn’t want you to go alone. There are night patrols now.”

  I shifted my weight between my heels, the petals of a dew-covered wildflower caught between my fingers. I brushed them off on my pant legs.

  My voice was lighter than a petal on a daisy. “It’s strange. We’re back where we started and in a little while we’ll be back where we started again, just… in Redbird, not the Embassy.”

  He nodded, slipping his hands into his pockets as his eyes fell on the grave markers behind me. He was quiet, and then a soft smile crossed his face, pulling lines at the corners of his eyes. “Do you remember—I told you my name here. I shook your hand.”

  “And I told you mine and you looked at me like I was crazy. The whole Empire knew who I was well before I had any clue of it. Still. That’s still true.” I looked toward the quiet of the babbling river and the sway of the pine trees on the other side.

  The boy held his hand out to me. “I’m Jack. Jack Talon.”

  I rarely ever touched anyone—I was the princess who stood statuesque next to her parents with her hands clasped behind her back and her mouth firmly shut. No one was allowed to touch me and even in the parades when the people handed flowers to me with kind smiles they took care to not put their skin too close to mine. So I shook his hand and blinked at the strangeness of what a handshake was, murmuring, “And I’m Soren Beckett.”

  “I know that,” he frowned, a tilt in his chin. “Everyone knows that.”

  Jack tilted his head like that then. “That’s not how I looked at you.”

  There was a shift in the clouds overhead, just enough to let a faint glow of moonlight cast the angles of his face in polished silver. We were walking into a storm, into a fight with rebels trailing behind us, and he stood there with that same stupid look on his face—his world was turned to the earth and it was clear in the pitch of his brow with the line set above a slightly crooked nose, but he looked at me with a soft smile that pulled the corners of his eyes to lines and left the green glistening and I remembered what he said to me by the lake.

  You aren’t looking at the stars, Jack. You have to learn where your home is in this universe.

  I already know.

  “Oh, hell,” I whispered.

  I strode across the dew-damp grass, hands reaching up to rest against the sharp corners of his jaw and the heat of his neck. The rise and fall of his chest against mine was quick, the beat of his heart a steady drum, a stutter echoed in mine when the petal-soft and sweet taste of his lips met mine cautiously at first.

  Cautious, and then absolutely certain that it was right and good—if I was a pillar of salt then he was the ocean and I was doomed to collapse under the pressure of his mouth on mine.

  He pulled back and left a kiss of warm sunlight on my forehead, sighed long and hard, his arms wrapped tight around me, as if he could hold the salt of me together. As if the warmth of a honeyed sun could be enough to keep me from vanishing with the waves that grew in me.

  I closed my eyes as a rumble of thunder in the clouds over Redbird reminded me of the world. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to look at it. I wanted to stand there in a quiet moment for the rest of this century, against the warmth of a man who was more farmer than soldier for the first time in as many years as I couldn’t remember, but the crack in the sky was echoed through my bones and the flash of lightning was a spark against the static in my blood.

  He was a farmer. He always was. He was softer than the harsh edges of his uncle, a field of green and sunlight at the end of a rifle—he wasn’t made for this.

  “What are we going to do? With Roam and Pucks? I mean, the farm… And Tiger? What’s going to happen when they get here? Rabbit can only do so much to help.” I stepped back, the earth tilted on the weak knees that held me up. I drew in a deep breath that didn’t fill my lungs wholly.

  “Most of the barn is still standing. It’s made of metal, after all. They’ll be fine.” He threw a glance over his shoulder, running a hand through his hair. “We should rest, Soren. It’s been a long ride to get here.”

  The friction of the brewing storm was like rain on my skin. “I slept.”

  “We haven’t,” he took a step back, offering a hand out to me.

  I breathed shallowly. “Jack, I—the storm is messing with me. With my Sceptre blood. I just, I’m just going to stay here for a bit, until it calms. I don’t want to hurt anyone accidentally. I’m a walking lightning rod. Is that okay?”

  He looked at me for a moment. A flash of lightning highlighted us, and then he nodded with a breath. “Yeah. Sure.”

  The storm didn't bother me that much. I breathed it in and held it like a whip coiled around me, my grip on it tighter than his arms had been around me.

  That grip didn’t belong on a rifle. He didn’t belong in the way of danger the way that I allowed Percy to be, the way that I allowed Arden to be, or how I left Clary in Conleth. I wanted him safe. I wanted him home, even though his home was just rubble between two fields at the foot of a mountain range.

  My heart ached as he turned.

  “Jack!” I blurted, without meaning to, without trying to stop myself.

  He turned back to me, an eyebrow raised in question at the urgency in my voice. I wanted him to stay here, but I didn’t want to leave him.

  “Kiss me again. Please.”

  37

  The forest outside the Manor was heavy with shadow and difficult to navigate if you weren’t familiar with the trails, but muscles stored memory as much as a brain and mine guided me through the trees.

  I felt dawn creeping closer with each second, and despite the early morning hours it was still hollow and empty and quiet. Even so, I expected the soft footed step of soldiers on the perimeter.

  Each sound was loud in my ears, each shake of a leaf was someone sneaking up next to me. I flinched when the wind came. I rushed when it left.

  At the edge of the trees on the shore of Black Sky Lake, I crouched low, my breath caught in my throat. It was a small inlet hidden from the main part of the lake that the city skirted.

  On the opposite shore, a girl with red hair tied back in an elaborate braid skipped stones along the surface, and sitting back with slender arms wrapped around her knees was another girl with curly black hair escaping from a sloppy braid.

  A memory that floated before me like a mirage.

  Static gathered heavy in the air above me, a flash of white lightning bursting across the sky. I closed my eyes and breathed it in, felt the tingle of it rush through the marrow of my bones in pin pricks.

  In the dark behind my eyelids I searched for the static of soldiers hidden in the woods—the shape of a man snaked between the trees and the bushes.

  I turned slowly, holding my breath as I scanned the shadows.

  A twig snapped, a rock rolled across the hollow roots under the topsoil, two quick steps pounded against the earth, and then a grumbled curse followed.

  Fitz. It was only Fitz. No nephew followed close on his heels.

  “Fitz?” I murmured, watching him maneuver off trail. “You know there’s a path, right?”

  He stumbled with heavy footsteps through the brush, and came to a stop a few feet from me, panting hard. “And you know all about this path, then? Just a convenient path between my brother’s farm and your Manor. How the hell long has that been there?”

  “A long time,” I told him, searching for more electric signals hidden in the woods. “Where’s Jack?”

  He waved me forward and followed close behind as I picked my way around the shore, guided by flashes of lightning and the rumble of thunder overhead.

  He spoke as softly as was possible for him. “Right now, he’s the las
t member of my family I have contact with. I didn’t tell him you snuck off because I don’t want him in the middle of this.”

  “I’m sure he’s capable of handling himself in this situation.” I knew he was—my father would never have called him my shadow if he wasn’t.

  “Then why didn’t you bring him?” Fitz mused.

  I breathed out slow. “Because I don’t want him in the middle of this.”

  He chuckled low. “So we have something in common.”

  I lifted my chin and marched through the trees, the tall glass tower in the corner of my eye.

  We weren’t going to the Manor. There was nothing there for me.

  It was the tower that rose like a spike in the earth, some smooth crystal that reached up to a point and scraped the low ceiling of the mountain sky. It tried to rival them in height, but even on the highest floor you never came close to peering over the spiked backs of the range that wrapped around the city.

  I was never quite convinced that these mountains weren’t made with the intention of the city nestled into them, that the glaciers that turned the highest peaks white and blue weren’t created by a Sceptre with thoughts of us in mind.

  They were created by Sceptres, in the Fraxinus war, but Redbird wasn’t a thought in their minds. It was just that it seemed like a perfect fit.

  The tower was the sparkling glass beast that cast its long shadow across the shorter buildings of the city from the edge of the green field where the soldiers trained. That was the destination, and it was like it knew. It was like it watched the two shadows slinking through the forest as they came to tear it down.

  “What’s your goal here?” Fitz wondered. “Where are you standing in all this?”

  “Percy.”

  We neared the cabins the soldiers slept in. I stopped short of the bend in the trail and turned to face him.

  “I’m doing this for Percy. I am trying to get Percy back to me and away from that maniac and maybe, in the way of things, I will sever the rope that ties Astra to the throne. Maybe I don’t know where I stand, but it is against anyone who hurts the ones I love. Right now, the list is short, it is the Empire and the rebellion and Vulta, but it is long enough that I am left to stand on my own two feet against them.”