by Edward Nile
But it was my choice, to do it or not. My choice. Samuel couldn’t help but wonder why he shouldn’t be swinging from a rope beside his dead enemy.
“Darling? We should go inside.”
Samuel nodded. “I’ll catch up.”
Leanne kissed his cheek, and he watched his wife walk toward the Presidential House along with the others.
Davids climbed from his podium with the help of a pair of officers. His hand shook as he took hold of his cane.
When he reached Samuel, Davids waved his guards on ahead.
The two old men stood in the rain, alone with the hanging corpse.
“Sam,” said the president with a nod.
“Nathaniel.” Samuel knew he should say something in a moment like this. With no idea what that something was, he asked the question plaguing him the most. “What happens now, old friend?”
Davids heaved a sigh. “I’ve hardly been cut out for my position these last few years. Even less so, now.” His eyes took on a faraway stare. “Things were simple, Sam. Back when our enemies were clear to see and our people unified against them. But there are rifts within our own ranks, now. Wounds I’m not equipped to heal. Wounds I created when I signed that damned Appeasement pact.” The president spat out the last words.
“I didn’t help matters.”
“Not right away, no,” Davids agreed. “But you came through when it counted most, and one day even your detractors will remember that Samuel Mutton, while firmly entrenched with the Appeaser South, stood staunch against Imperial bastards like him.” Davids jerked his chin toward Salkirk. “And that’s the best we can get for a leader, right now. We need a true soldier at the helm.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Yes, you do.” Davids put an arm on Samuel’s shoulder. The move lost him his balance, and Samuel reached out to steady his friend before he could fall.
He found the president locking gazes with him, eyes sharp for all the fog of age. “Samuel Mutton,” Davids said. “I am going to inaugurate you as Provisional President of Arkenia. To serve as leader during this war, until we can have a proper election again.”
Samuel shook his head. “Nathaniel, I’ can’t…”
“That wasn’t a request.” Davids pushed away from him, his voice half a growl. “I’m making the announcement in the morning. This time it is an order, Sam.”
Samuel wanted to argue, knew he should argue. He didn’t. Davids was right.
Samuel saluted. “I won’t let you down, Sir.”
Davids’ laugh turned into a cough. “Damn right you won’t,” he said when the fit ended. The president walked past Samuel and, joining his guards, headed toward his house.
Alone, Samuel looked to the rain-soaked body. Salkirk’s bulging eyes looked right back at him.
I’ll have to join you some other time. Cretin.
*
Lytan flags burned in the Talenport harbor.
So did the ships that flew them.
Swathed in rags, Edmund Paulson leaned against a rough wall and watched the violent festivities he’d helped to foment.
Talenport citizens filled the dockyard, pelting retreating trade boats with homemade firebombs, bits of stone, and anything else they could get their hands on.
Lytan troops who’d failed to flee the city in time shouted themselves hoarse from cages hung on gibbets erected along the docks, their naked skin already pealing from the summer sun after just a couple days.
News of Elliot Salkirk’s conviction and swift sentencing had reached the city three days before, along with official confirmation of the terrifying truth. That Arkenia was once more at war with the most powerful nation in the world, the Lytan Empire. That Lytan had wielded Xang as its military puppet in order to carry out the second Bay of Rust assault.
Needless to say, things weren’t going well for Imperials oblivious or unlucky enough to be here. There had been murders in the streets, the looting and destruction of shops and apartments.
Even now the poor souls moaned for food and water from the gibbets as the rioting mass -the ships they targeted now out of throwing range- took to those goods the Imperials left behind and hurled them into the sea.
Pity, Edmund thought. Arkenia would need all the food it could get, now that two of their largest trading partners were revealed as enemies. God knew how trade with Quar would go when the Dao of Xang once more tightened his grip on the smaller islands.
Someone screamed to Edmund’s left. An eastern family cowered against the side of a building, beset by the fists and boots of the mob while a lone constable tried to fend them off.
For all the attackers knew, those people could be Quarish, or simply uninvolved immigrants from Xang. Another pity, one for which Edmund didn’t have an easy solution. The assaults on easterners in Talenport had started the moment it was known that Xang was on the warpath. Many an innocent from Quar had had their home or business destroyed. Many had been assaulted, some killed, all because Arkenia’s allies looked and sounded so much like their enemies.
Edmund pushed himself from the wall. He wasn’t sure what he intended to do. With the press of angry bodies what it was, he doubted he could even get to the poor wretches in time.
A tug on his sleeve stopped him short of trying. Edmund looked down into the begrimed face of one of his hired urchins.
The boy wordlessly lifted a folded newspaper.
“Good work,” Edmund slipped a few coins into the lad’s hand as he took the paper. “Tea, now. You know the way I like it.”
The boy scurried off. When Edmund looked back, it was to see that more constables had joined the first, swinging their clubs as the family rushed off up the street. A rare win for justice.
Less rare every day, Paulson thought as he looked at the paper. Splashed in huge letters, the front page proclaimed: PRESIDENT STEPS DOWN FROM OFFICE. SENATOR MUTTON TO BE INAUGERATED.
Edmund chuckled. Bet you’ll like that, Sam, he thought. More responsibility, less action. Though he supposed it was possible that Samuel Mutton had had his fill of the latter, after the second Bay of Rust.
That thought earned its own laugh.
Another bit of text caught his attention, and Paulson flipped to the corresponding page to see Elliot Salkirk’s black and white form standing on the gallows, a rope about his neck.
Didn’t even make the front page of your own paper. I hope you choke on that, down where you are. Yes, today was a day for justice.
“You have it,” Edmund said, waving off the boy when he returned with his steaming tea. “I’ve got a train to catch.” He’d missed the execution. Technically, Edmund was a civilian and a criminal. There were those who wouldn’t allow even the president to let what he’d done to Darian Gaul and tried to do to the craftsman Meskal Karov go unpunished.
But he’d just have to risk being spotted, for this occasion.
**
“I know my boys,” said Beatrice Mal, sniffing and dabbing at her eyes. “And I always knew Yanny had to be on to something. He’d have never done anything he didn’t think was right.” She leaned her head on Aldren’s shoulder. “And neither would you.”
“Aw, Ma.” Aldren wrapped his arm around her shoulder and held her close. She’d doffed the furs in exchange for bright summer silks.
Nearly matching Beatrice’s clothes, flowers sprouted from Yannick Mal’s grave, as colorful and vibrant as a Xangese fireworks show. Apparently fire and explosions were all Aldren could think of now. Still, that was miles better than where he’d been before, jumping in his skin every time a car backfired, afraid of anything that even resembled a Warsuit. That fear was still there, but it didn’t rule him anymore. The monsters had been dragged from his nightmares and made real, made commonplace. They were monsters he knew he’d face again, so they couldn’t be that scary. He wouldn’t let them be.
“My boys have both done so much good for their country,” his mother said, her voice thick. “It can spare you now, can’t it?”
“Got that right, Ma,” Aldren agreed. “I’ve given Arkenia a hell of a lot more than I owed it. But this isn’t something I’m doing for our country, or for Sam Mutton. I’m doing it for me.”
Beatrice smirked, glancing over his shoulder. “Don’t you mean for her?”
Aldren followed her gaze to Mayla, who leaned against a tree, smoking a cigarette as she kept a respectful distance.
“May put her life on the line for a country that’s not hers,” Aldren said. “She helped Yanny when he fought his fight, and she saved my life, fought with me when everyone else ran.” He shrugged. “What kind of man am I if I don’t help her defend her home?”
“You’re the best man there is to me, no matter what you do.” His mother delivered a wet, sloppy kiss to Aldren’s cheek. “And I’ve never been more proud of you.”
Resisting the urge to wipe the wetness from his cheek, Aldren hugged her. She squeezed him tight. “I support you. Just promise you’ll come back to me again.”
“Always, Ma, always.” Aldren dared to believe it, this time. He’d lived through impossible odds, survived where no one should have. If none of that had killed him, what else was there?
Maybe Yanny thought that too, after he lost his leg.
“Let’s get inside,” Beatrice said, forcing a smile and wiping at her face. “I’ll cook up some dinner. I’ve been working on new recipes.”
“Sounds good. You go on ahead, Ma. I just need a minute.”
Nodding, she gave him another tight hug. “Love you, brave boy,” she murmured.
Aldren watched his mother drag Mayla into a hug. The eastern woman’s uncomfortable look as she awkwardly returned the embrace was almost worth everything they’d been through.
“This is a nice place,” Mayla said, approaching Aldren while his mother walked over the grassy rise toward her house. “Really want to leave it?”
Aldren breathed in fresh the country air. Then, he pulled out a cigarette and held it out for Mayla to light with hers. “Farming’s not my thing.”
“I thought it was soldiering that wasn’t your thing.” Mayla cocked an eyebrow. “Shearing sheep and churning butter sounds better than what we’re going toward, don’t you think?”
Aldren exhaled and looked at his brother’s headstone.
“No,” he said, surprised that he meant it. “I would have said so, once, but no. This is who my brother was. Now it’s who I am. Why are you smiling?”
Mayla’s grin widened. It was the most genuine expression Aldren had ever seen cross her face. Not a sardonic sneer, not a bemused smirk. A full, toothy smile. She masked it by puffing on her cigarette, if barely. “Because I’m happy, Aldren Mal. Happy to be heading home. And happy not to be doing it by myself. The only thing worse than dying alone is living that way.”
***
Tessa rubbed her thumb against the Industrialist pin in her hand as she watched the ceremony.
Seeing it, James leaned over and touched her arm. “Wish he could have been here with us, Tess.”
“Uncle was so much like my father,” she murmured. “With him around, I felt like I had a piece of Dad with me all the time, someone who could understand. Now he’s gone, and I don’t know how to tell Dad, when I see him. I don’t know how to tell him I failed to save his brother.”
“No one could have saved him, Tess. Ivan knew what he was doing the second he brought the Dread toward that machine. Not one of us thought we were safe. Your father’s just going to be happy you’re alive.”
“No one would have had to die if my father had had Retribution on that beach,” Tessa’s hand clenched into a fist around Ivan’s pin. “And now, that bastard still won’t let him go free.”
James looked over toward the dais, where Nathaniel Davids was drawing Samuel Mutton’s ruby-streaked saber.
“Theodore will go free, Tess,” James said. “Things are just… complicated.” Around them, among the gathered soldiers standing in file to observe the inauguration, no small number of men in the red and brown scowled toward them and their comrades, a small group dressed in black and gray.
Those Industrialist rebels who’d fought in the second Bay of Rust were given pardons. Others, those who’d signed the surrender pacts in exchange for their freedom at the end of the Civil War, were being offered the reinstatement of their military statuses. But for Theodore Kolms and others incarcerated for war crimes, trials were being scheduled to decide where their places in society would be. The Northern cause was shown to be right, but that didn’t make everything done in the name of that cause fair game.
“Trials,” Tessa squeezed James’ hand, pressing the Gearsword pin between their palms. “Bullshit,” she seethed through gritted teeth.
“It’ll work out.”
“You really believe that?”
James thought about it for a moment. Arkenia was enduring another war now, with two powerful nations united against them. Two nations they’d defeated before, but still a formidable coalition. And with Arkenia’s strength just now being raised from almost nothing, the prospect was anything but certain.
But where the world was not certain, the best James Edstein could do was be certain for it.
“Yeah.” He squeezed her hand back. “I do.”
****
Arkenian red and blue flags flapped and rippled in a warm breeze. In the field a crowd was gathered, holding small flags as they watched the dais in rapt attention. Well, some of them surely watched the dais. Most gawked upward at the three Warsuits standing in a row behind it.
Ironshield, Iron Wrath, and Redstripe had all been extensively repaired and cleaned for the inauguration ceremony, their carapaces gleaming in the sunlight. Wrath most of all, with its gold fittings still intact. Tessa Kolms had supposedly decided she liked it, keeping the gold while leaving the rest of the Warsuit a dull, black iron hue.
Only these three Warsuits were present, the Dread having been destroyed in combat. Virtue’s pilot, Isaac Renalds, was in prison for desertion. Three Warsuits whose pilots had risked themselves to hold back the Taisen. Right now, the Xangese beast was being disassembled, its metal smelted to be used to create new Arkenian weapons. When Arkenia next fought Xang they’d throw their own damn steel back at them.
If the Kaizers themselves didn’t provide enough for the onlookers to wonder over, the flags Ironshield and Iron Wrath flew would. Redstripe, in the center, bore two Arkenian banners jutting from either shoulder. Their red and blue colors were bright and crisp in the daylight.
On either side of Samuel’s machine, James Edstein and Tessa Kolms’ Warsuits sported the black and white Gearsword flags of the Northern Industrialists.
Samuel frowned at the sight. A reminder of the nation’s division during a ceremony of unity. He still didn’t approve.
“Samuel Mutton,” said the president, dressed in his old red and blue Revolutionary War uniform across the dais. “Approach.”
Samuel did so, his sheathed saber held before him, balanced on his palms. His own uniform was perfectly pressed, each medal polished and precise. Striker Crimson’s red leathers were retired for good. Part of him considered removing the red streak across his Warsuit, but Samuel knew better than to try and erase history entirely.
No, I will own what I am, and what I did. Every bloody detail of it.
Nathaniel Davids accepted Samuel’s sword. “Kneel.”
Samuel wasn’t ashamed to admit he was getting old. As a young man, no one warned him how much the knees suffered with age. He bore the pain with grace as he lowered himself onto his creaking joints. As he did so, Samuel caught sight of a spot on the vertical benches erected between the Warsuits and the dais. It wasn’t hard to spot James Edstein’s people. A gray and black smudge against the sea of red and brown. If that weren’t enough to remind Samuel that all was no
t yet healed between the North and South, Tessa Kolms’ murderous stare would be. The girl could be outright frightening, when she had a mind.
A direct contrast to the Northern woman, Leanne stood beside him on the dais, a parasol shielding her from the sun as she beamed down at her husband. A reminder that some things could be healed, even when it seemed impossible.
Samuel’s saber sang as Nathaniel Davids drew it from its scabbard. He laid the flat of the blade on Samuel’s left shoulder. Any chattering that had been going on among the onlookers was hushed in an instant.