The Queen of Crows

by Myke Cole

  He looked up as Heloise puffed and clanked her way to the wagon’s side and came to a stop. “What, in the shadow of the Throne, is that?” she asked.

  Danad smiled at her, hefting his load. “Winter’s coming on, your eminence. Going to need these for warmth. Other one’s got food, and the last…”

  “Put them back.”

  “But, your eminence…”

  “I said put them back!” she shouted. Even the Hapti stopped their arguing and stared at her. “We came to Lyse for walls, not to steal. Put it all back and let them go.”

  “Begging your eminence’s pardon,” Poch nearly spat out her title, “but Danad and I both fought in the Old War.”

  “Why should I care about…”

  “If you had fought in the Old War, your eminence, you might know that we’re about to stand to what’s commonly called a siege.”

  “I know damn well what a siege is.”

  “Then no doubt you know a siege is more than walls. It’s food, and clothes and wood and water and everything else you need to live day to day. You let these wagons go, you’re doing the Order’s work for them.”

  “You do the Order’s work by plundering them. You make a liar of me.”

  “Make a liar of you?” Poch bit off every word. “You already made a liar of yourself, the moment you claimed to be a Palantine.”

  “I never claimed that.”

  Poch folded his arms across his chest. “Now, you listen to me. I have followed you this far against my better judgment. You may have amazed Barnard and your parents with your pious talk, but this is one arena where you have to trust your betters.”

  He jabbed an angry finger at the wagons, biting off each word. “We. Need. These. Supplies. I’ll man the walls, but I won’t starve to death behind them because you want to play the saint.”

  The rage rose in Heloise, but not the hot fire of her anger with the Order. This was cold, quiet, and much, much worse.

  “You will do whatever I tell you.” Heloise’s voice was barely more than a whisper.

  “Or else your mother will scold me again? Because you’re touched by the Emperor? You just said yourself that you’re no—”

  “No,” she cut him off, “you will do what I tell you because if you don’t, I will carve you into pieces and feed you to the ravens.”

  Heloise took a step toward the sentries, motioning with her knife. “Stand aside or die.”

  “You … you’re just a little girl!” Poch said.

  “It’s not the girl you need to fear, Poch Drover,” Heloise said, “it’s the war-machine she’s driving.”

  Poch’s eyes ran over the machine’s metal surface, taking in the point of the curving knife, the heavy shield. “I’ve known you since you were a babe in arms,” he whispered.

  “As you can see,” Heloise said, “I am a babe no longer.”

  “They are heretics!” Danad shouted. “How can you choose them over your own kind? They don’t hold to the Writ. They don’t even believe in the Emperor…”

  “We are heretics, or didn’t you notice when you were killing those Pilgrims? Do you think we are somehow more pure in the Emperor’s sight because our houses don’t move? There is a devil’s head on my shoulder, Danad. We didn’t burn it. We didn’t cry out to the Order. We cut it off and put it in a box and we carry it with us everywhere.”

  “It’s not the same thing!” Danad shouted.

  “We are not plundering them. We are freeing them from the Order. Why are we fighting if not to be free?”

  Danad looked at her as if she’d sprouted a second head. “To live, Heloise. We just want to live.”

  * * *

  Heloise made her quarters in the old Order chapter house. It was the closest thing the town had to a keep, with strong stone walls and only two entrances, iron-banded front and postern doors, much like the walls of the town itself. The Pilgrims lived simply, sleeping on wooden benches laid out in the nave before the shrine.

  The stone walls were plastered over on the inside, painted with scenes of the Emperor’s battle and martyrdom against the devils. The final painting was the scene of the Emperor seated on the Golden Throne, immortal eye bent on the shimmering veil, the devils clawing and snarling on the other side. The painting stood over a stone altar, on which stood a golden eye, flanked by small silver statues of Palantines in the standard pose, palms outward, wings outstretched.

  She turned to Barnard, who stood, arms folded, jaw set. “This is a shrine.” She gestured to the golden eye on the altar. “Will it serve for Gunnar?”

  Barnard nodded at her. “It will, your eminence.”

  They brought Gunnar’s shroud-twined body up from woods. It felt lighter than before, as if Gunnar had shrunk inside, but Heloise still carried it into the nave and set it before the altar.

  “Will you say a word for him, your eminence?” Guntar asked, and Heloise caught her breath. What words could she say? What difference would they make? Gunnar was dead because he had followed her.

  As her father’s apprentice, she had transcribed the Writ at least a dozen times, and knew much of it by heart.

  The last blow thou strike, strike for Me.

  The last step thou takest, take it nearer My Throne.

  The last breath thou sighest, be it My holy name.

  Strivest thou in My service unto death, and I will keep faith,

  And thou shalt be drawn to my breast, and dwelleth in My sword arm.

  Thine strength to Mine, to the confusion of the enemy,

  Forever.

  Chunsia wept openly, and Barnard looked up at Heloise, expectant.

  She looked at Barnard, somehow managed to keep her voice even. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him, but he is where he would want to be now, Master Tinker. He is beside the Throne, at the Emperor’s very hand. He’s still fighting, and he will keep on fighting, for all of us, forever.”

  Barnard nodded, snaked an arm around Chunsia’s shoulders, clapped his free hand on Guntar’s shoulder, and squeezed so tightly that Heloise thought the boy must be in pain. She felt sick with guilt. She was the reason their son was in a shroud, and yet they turned to her for comfort.

  She wanted to climb out of the machine, kneel at Barnard’s feet and beg his forgiveness, but the thought of leaving it terrified her.

  “I will make them pay.” Her voice was scarcely more than a whisper. “I swear it. I will make them all pay.”

  Barnard’s eyes widened, then narrowed. He gripped the machine’s metal forearm, his huge hand looking like a child’s against it. He squeezed and nodded once, firmly. “I am with you, your eminence,” he whispered fiercely.

  The silence stretched while the huge tinker stared into the golden eye on the altar, as if the intensity of his gaze could somehow make sense of the loss of his children. At last, he shook his head, cuffed a tear from the corner of his eye. “Thank you, your eminence.”

  “Should we lay him to rest in the boneyard?” Heloise motioned toward the chapter house’s postern door.

  Barnard shook his head. “I’m glad of the Emperor’s blessing and the final rite, but I won’t lay him to rest in a false boneyard sowed by brigands. I would send him on in the old manner. That boy was a fire-forged tinker. Let him end in fire as well.”

  “I’ll summon the village,” Sigir said. “We can do it on the common.”

  “No,” Chunsia said, her voice flat and hard, “boy’s been seen enough since the fight on the road. The boneyard won’t do for a burial, but it’ll be enough for a burning. We’ll go now, and quietly.”

  “Of course,” Heloise said. She carried the shroud out the postern door and set it in the small grid of earth, weed choked and surrounded by a tumbledown bit of iron fence. The sun was bright after the gloom of the chapter house, and Heloise blinked up at it, thinking that she was glad it was the last thing that would touch Gunnar before the fire took what remained of him. Barnard smiled up at her as he knelt beside his son, and Chunsia rested her head on her husba
nd’s shoulder. Heloise nodded, reentered the chapter house, and shut the door behind her, letting the shadows rush in and claim her. She stood in silence with Sigir and her parents, who stood with hands clasped before the altar, eyes on their feet.

  “Come out of that thing, Heloise,” her father said at last. He leaned in to the machine, wrinkled his nose. “My dove, you are … you are starting to smell.”

  “No…” Heloise said, struggling for a way to make them understand. “It’s … it’s not safe.”

  “It’s a dangerous world,” Samson said, “but you’re safe enough with us.”

  “Was I safe enough when the Order came to Lutet?”

  Samson flinched, and she immediately regretted the words. She wanted to apologize, but all she said was, “It is not safe. The villagers hate me now.”

  “Nonsense,” Leuba said. “No one hates you.”

  “Poch does,” Heloise said. “Danad too. A few others. They think I’m a heretic for letting the Hapti go.”

  “The … who?” Samson asked.

  “The Kipti,” Sigir said. “And she’s not a child, Samson. She can reckon with the truth. Yes, Heloise. Some of the people are angry with you.”

  “We are fighting the Order so we can live as we choose!” Heloise said. “How can we deny that to others?”

  Sigir and Samson exchanged a long look before Sigir turned back to her. “I’m sorry, your eminence, but I don’t think that is so.”

  “Danad … Danad said that he just wanted to … live,” Heloise managed.

  Sigir nodded. “That is what most of the village wants, Heloise. They do not follow you to be free. They follow you to survive.”

  “No,” Heloise said, her stomach turning over.

  “Is wanting to live so bad?” Leuba asked.

  “It is if you have to climb on another’s back to do it,” Heloise said. “That’s what the Order does. The Writ says we are to lay down our lives—”

  “The Writ also says we are to be obedient,” Sigir interrupted. “It says we are to know our place. The Writ is a snake turning on itself. You can take a passage from the third chapter, and find one to contradict it in the tenth. It is, in the end, what men make of it.”

  “And what are we to make of it,” Heloise asked, “now that we have the chance? Are we to throw off the Order while standing on the Traveling People?”

  “Your eminence,” Sigir sighed, “you have done great and incredible things, but you are still young.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Because age tempers you,” Samson said. “Getting old’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But it’s taught me that … that life is like being a mouse caught in a river current. So much of living is simply trying to keep from going under long enough to ride the water to its end.”

  “Think kindly of your own, your eminence,” Sigir added. “They are frightened and only trying to protect their families, as you seek to protect them.”

  The thought of a mouse made Heloise think of Twitch, and anger surged in her, sudden and hot. “I was frightened and I drove a war-machine out against a devil.”

  Samson stared at her as if he’d never seen her before, and Sigir only shook his head sadly. “Not all can be so brave, and if you expect them to be, they will fail you again and again.”

  Heloise pictured Basina’s face, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, sight fading from her eyes. I’m not brave like you, Heloise.

  “Try to think kindly of us.” Leuba reached inside the machine’s frame and touched her foot. “If you can.”

  Heloise felt suddenly cruel. Poch, Danad, all of them were here because of her, whether she had planned it or not.

  “It was the same for you, Heloise,” Sigir said. “When you fought the devil, were you reaching for freedom? Or were you just trying to survive?”

  Heloise looked down, easier to take in her toes than the Maior’s sad eyes. “Something changed … along the way.”

  “What changed, Heloise?” Samson asked. “It has only been a few days since we were safe in our homes in Lutet.”

  “We were never safe,” Heloise said. “I didn’t know what hung over us, but I was just a girl. You all knew.”

  “And what would you have us do?” Sigir asked. “You have seen for yourself the power of the Order.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Heloise said. “If the Order were to ride in here now and offer to forgive us, to send us back to Lutet and put everything back the way it was, I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t.”

  “Let us say you get your freedom, that we throw off the Order for all time, what will you do then?” Sigir asked. “Where will you go? Who will you be?”

  Heloise stared at the tops of her feet and thought it over, but when she tried to cast her mind over the days ahead, she could see no further than the walls of Lyse, and how she would defend them when the Order finally came.

  But something stirred deeper within her, something hotter and more urgent than Sigir’s question. She looked up at last, meeting the Maior’s eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I only know that I want to find out, and the Order will never let me do that.”

  “My dove,” Samson said, “is it not better to live, and know some small measure of the world, than to die and know nothing?”

  Heloise swallowed tears. Basina was gone. Clodio was gone. They had died trying to save her, to ensure that she could go on living. It dishonored them to waste that gift. But she pictured returning to Lutet, being married off to Ingomer Clothier, or some other young man from the village. To lie beneath them while they grunted and put a child in her. She remembered Clodio’s hand disappearing into the shadows beside the fire in the roundhouse on the night she’d fled into the wood. She remembered what he’d said of love. It is worth any hardship, it is worth illness. It is worth injury. It is worth isolation. It is even worth death.

  The Order would never let her live as she chose. They would never let her love as she chose.

  “No,” she said, “it is not better.”

  They were silent for a long moment, until Samson, at last, shook his head. “We’re not nearly enough, even with the townsfolk who’ve agreed to stay and fight.”

  “I know,” Heloise answered, “but I can’t think of anything else to do.”

  “Might be,” her father pursed his lips, eyes thoughtful, “with the veterans among them, that Wolfun fellow knows what he’s about, we might be able to make a stand of it. Depends on how many the Order sends, and what they decide to do when they get here. We’ll have to watch our own, Heloise. Especially Poch and Danad.”

  “They’ve had plenty of chances to run. They could have left with Sald. They’re staying for a reason.”

  “Aye,” her father said, “and that reason is they’re betting that getting caught behind walls is smarter than getting caught out on the road. A man loyal to his own skin is apt to change his loyalty the moment his skin seems safer elsewhere. If the battle goes ill, there’ll be more’n a few looking to open a gate in exchange for mercy.”

  “The Order is not known for mercy.”

  “Aye.” Her father nodded. “For once, we can thank the Throne for that.”

  9

  RABBIT IN THE SNARE

  The Emperor is a mighty fortress, a shield that guards us. Yea, though mine enemy is vast beyond counting, 10,000 before me, and 20,000 behind. Yea, though my foe bears a glittering sword, and his countenance is terrible to behold. He shall not come nigh to me, or to my family. For a mighty fortress is my Emperor, and none shall pierce His walls.

  —Writ. Ala. IX. 4

  It didn’t take long.

  By nightfall, the first outriders were circling the walls, just beyond bowshot, their gray cloaks clinging to their shoulders, sodden by the cold rain that had begun to fall just after Wolfun set the watches. Heloise could see the sentries racing along the parapet from the front to the postern gate, long before the alarm was raised.

  “What in the shadow of the Throne a
re you doing!” Samson called up to the tower astride the front gate.

  “Keeping an eye on them,” Sigir snapped back. “Or would you rather have them put up a scaling ladder right under our noses?”

  “I’d rather them not see our garrison scurrying around trying to keep an eye on them, and assuring them we don’t have enough beating hearts to cover our own walls!”

  “When you are the Maior,” Sigir shouted, “you can call the tune. For now, it’s me and Wolfun up here, and you resting your fat ass below.”

  Samson cursed and looked up at Heloise, but she only shook her head. “Let them lead their men.”

  The horn sounded a moment later, and Samson followed Heloise up the ramp to the parapet walk atop the wall. The walls seemed pathetically low now that she stood on them. Wolfun’s men were busy building out wooden embrasures over the battlements to add height, but Heloise still thought it would take little more than a fire ladder to mount them.

  More gray cloaks were emerging from the woods, until twenty or thirty sat astride their horses just beyond the treeline, flails across their shoulders, looking up at Heloise and whispering to one another.

  “The Order aren’t armed for a siege,” Samson said. “They’ll have to send for the army.”

  “It won’t take long,” Sigir said. “Until then, they are enough to invest us here.”

  Wolfun leaned on his spear, grunted. “Worth a sally? While there are still so few? You made short work of the brothers here.”

  “The brothers here,” Heloise said, “were surprised and on foot. These are mounted and ready. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Heloise Factor!” Tone’s voice drifted up to them. “How in the Emperor’s holy name did you manage to get that monstrosity up on the wall?”

  “She is a Palantine,” Barnard shouted back. “The Emperor reached down His hand and lifted her up!”

  The Pilgrims laughed at that, a soft patter that blended with the raindrops. “Well, no matter,” Tone laughed, “we’ll have you down soon enough. I must say, you have surprised us all. Taking an Imperial town is a bold strike, indeed. But I suppose I must thank you. You have put the rabbit into the snare, and let us bottle you up. Now, we can cleanse you at our leisure. Shall we storm the walls and have the pleasure of cutting you down? Or shall we wait out here until you eat one another? I must admit, I’m having trouble deciding.”