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Authors: Katya Reimann

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BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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The Prince turned ashen. One hand reached to touch the whirling barrier of spell—then he snatched it back, wringing burnt fingers. Delcora laughed, but many among the other witches shifted uneasily.
“What kind of a kingship would that make?” Tamsanne asked softly. “An unwilling sacrifice. Tielmark’s throne baptized by blood tyrannically shed. What sort of king would rule us then?”
“A King—a line of Kings—never again beholden to Bissanty’s cruelties.”
Tamsanne shook her head, but several of the other witches looked uncertain.
“A vote,” Gabrielle broke in. “We’ll take a vote. That at least will show our thinking.”
“All right.” Richielle nodded forcefully. “Who stands with me, for Tielmark’s lasting freedom? For
Queen Corinne
ruling over us?” Delcora was already at her side, vibrating with excitement.
Marie Laconte, the Countess of Tierce, shot Gabrielle a resigned, almost apologetic look, and stepped up to Richielle’s other shoulder. “We can’t fight Bissanty forever,” Marie said. “Not with these odds. Sooner or later, one of Bissanty’s plots will succeed. Our ruler will marry wrongly and the Great Twins will return our land to Bissanty and our people to oppression.” Proud warrior Marie bent her knee to no one but the Princess, and her expression clearly showed her dislike for following old Richielle’s lead. But when it came to measuring strategic odds, she had a pragmatic turn of mind. Gabrielle could not be surprised by her choice.
“And those against?” Tamsanne ignored Marie and looked directly at the young duchess. Little Julie was already at the border witch’s shoulder.
Which left only two votes uncast.
Gabrielle glanced over to Melaney. Melaney returned her glance, her expression somber. The two women had been friends since childhood. Children of privilege, born to high Tielmaran houses, both had suffered much under the reign of the Bissanty traitors.
“Well?” Melaney asked.
“We have to leave some choices for our children, and we have to trust that they will make good choices,” Gabrielle said. “Fifty years from now this choice will come again. We have to trust that Tielmark will be
stronger then, that there will be better choices.” She stepped to take the place at Tamsanne’s other shoulder. “I don’t want to take this man’s life,” she said. “Not if he won’t offer it freely.”
Richielle let peal a mocking laugh. “Looking for the easy answer, highborn missy?”
Gabrielle felt her cheeks flame, but she refused to rise to the bait. “It’s down to you, Melaney,” she said. “Choose wisely.”
Melaney hesitated between the two little groups. She was a passionately beautiful woman, and her heart was a match for her beauty. When she made her decisions, she seldom changed them, but she was wise as well as passionate, and careful in her choices. Even knowing that the spell that protected them from the Great Hall’s mêlée was fading, she did not want to rush her vote. Gabrielle wished she could say something—anything—to sway her.
Melaney turned to study the Bissanty Prince. “Ighion Pallidonius,” she said, almost mockingly, tasting the outlandish name as if it coded its own answer. “How would you advise me now?”
Fear was plain on the Prince’s face. His lips worked, but no sound came out. He had assaulted Melaney rudely more than once in the week leading up to this moment, when she had been powerless to speak against him. His lack of nerve now that the tables were turned made Melaney shake her head.
“You are worse than a coward,” she told him, disgusted. “Your father sent you—the choice you made to come here was not even your own. Can you be surprised that the price for your actions may be your own blood, when you have meddled in our God-pledge so cravenly, so destructively?”
The prince dropped his eyes before her passion, her beauty. He had no answer.
Richielle, smelling triumph, cackled.
But the herder’s very glee made Melaney shake her head. “The Bissanties choked us with the bitter taste of tyranny,” she said. “I can’t believe oppressiveness on our own side will taste any sweeter. It is beneath us to slaughter a helpless enemy, however craven.” She paused, trying to follow her own logic, her own duty, through. “And yet my own life is pledged to sacrifice. I could live with the personal dishonor of killing an unwilling victim, if it would make Tielmark free.”
Tamsanne shook her head. “Lady,” she said. “You would sacrifice your honor vainly, if keeping Tielmark stainless were your hope. By our pledge
to the old Princess, we are tied to the land. Our dishonor would rebound through the soil—”
Whatever Tamsanne intended to say, no one would ever know. Richielle, seeing Melaney nodding, darted toward the Bissanty prince and slashed downward with her knife.
In the general start of horror, Melaney alone moved to act. She obstructed the herder-witch with her own body and scrambled, fearless, for the blade. The old witch tried to sweep her out of the way, but Melaney refused to back down. By the time Richielle understood this and turned her weapon against Melaney, the others had acted. Marie Laconte seized the old woman in a powerful headlock and wrestled her to the floor. “Gods’ honor!” Marie said, her warrior’s sensibilities shocked. She twisted the dagger out of Richielle’s hand and flung it away. “Not that way.”
Melaney was bleeding, her hands and arms cut in many places. Tamsanne rushed to swaddle her wounds, while Gabrielle, recovering herself, moved to assist her. Delcora, moving as if in a dream, picked up the fallen dagger and tucked it within her robes, where Richielle could not hope to reclaim it.
“We won’t be shedding this man’s blood.” Melaney gasped, pale but decisive, the cloth that swathed her hands crimsoning. “That’s my vote.”
“Melaney!” the young Princess called, the scuffle drawing her at last from her reverie by the altar. “Goddess-Twins! You’re hurt! What have they done?” She leapt up and ran to the woman’s side, almost slipping and falling in the smear of Melaney’s blood.
The Princess’s path war running red
, Gabrielle thought grimly. Would it be for the last time?
She rather fancied not.
A
s twilight dropped over the mountains, the mist lifted, revealing a shattered landscape of white stone. Day faded quickly in the high Lanai massif, but there could be no rest for the Dramaya. Their pursuers had pushed them away from the watchtowers’ trail onto this rocky side-path; now all that was left was this insane retreat, ever higher up the hardscrabble into the mountains, following the line of the thin—and in some places nonexistent—trail.
After so many hours of climbing, Vidryas had come to accept that this retreat could end only at the edge of an impossibly high cliff, or huddled at the back of a blind canyon. Either way, there would be no escape.
Listless with fatigue, the young warrior stumbled on, near the back of the war party. More than a quarter of the Dramaya were dead or abandoned, picked off by their Lanai pursuers during the first hours of climbing. It had been dawn when they’d left the safety of the main Bissanty camp. Now, at twilight, they were adrift in this desolate limestone valley. There was no question that even the small glory of finding—let alone destroying—the Ocula-Koinae watchtowers had eluded them. They were too high now, too lost.
For hours, the nothingness of cloud had enclosed them. How Ochsan had managed to keep them moving through the featureless mountain
limbo no one knew; whether he had truly managed to keep to any trail no man dared question. All anyone knew was that retreat, which had begun miles down the valley, had to continue. If the Lanai tribesmen caught them, they would mercilessly cut them down to their last man.
This was Vidryas’s first campaign, his first chance to prove himself. But he could no longer conceal his tiredness, no longer hide his fear. He was going to die, and die badly, every man around him recognizing his cowardice, his weakness.
The man in front stumbled, then pulled to a halt. Vidryas, distracted, walked into him.
“Llara’s Eyes!” the aggrieved man snapped. “Do you want to kill us both?”
“Sorry,” Vidryas muttered, craning even as he spoke to see what called this halt.
“’S all right. Just watch yourself,” the man muttered back. Then, “What can you see?” somewhat more politely.
Vidryas, half-Bissanty, half-Dramaya, was tall enough to see over every man’s head to the front of the line. The deference the man gave him for it a little revived him. “Ochsan’s stopped. He’s looking for the way on.”
Up ahead, the Dramaya leaders stood with their heads together, shuffling sheepskin scrips and arguing in soft voices. Vidryas despised his uncle. If not for Ochsan, Vidryas would not have been assigned to the Dramaya detachment. He would have been back at the Bissanty camp, readying himself to fight in a real war, with proper lines of men and battle and glory. Not running up an empty mountain, his hopes of honor crushed.
“What else?”
“Markal is with him.” Markal-the-daggerman was Ochsan’s wizened second. “They’re taking readings from their scrips.”
The man nodded, satisfied. “They’ll see us through,” he said confidently. “The gods smile on Ochsan, and he’ll take us to glory with him. Don’t you worry, first-timer.”
Vidryas, staring up to the head of the line, pretended not to hear. To the Bissanty, the Dramaya were barely human figures of ridicule. The rich Dramcampagna land supplied the Empire with huge reserves of grain and fat beef cattle, but it had been ruled for so long as a subservient Princeship, its people had lost their pride along with their independence. Melancholy
swept through him, thinking on the ill-fortune his birth had dealt him, forced to plod with cattlemen when he could have marched with real soldiers.
Livening wind touched the boy’s upturned face, and with it fresh rain. Ahead, beyond Ochsan, the mist continued to dissipate, exposing more bald rock and an ominous ceiling of storm cloud. The way onward was a horrible traverse on slick, rain-wet stone. Where Ochsan and Markal stood, the track dwindled to a crack that cut at a rising angle across a massive, tilted slab of limestone.
Vidryas leaned against a boulder, easing the weight of his pack. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, trying to remember what it was to feel safe.
A slap to the ribs shocked his eyes open. Advey, Ochsan’s point man for the end of the Dramaya line, had come up behind him. Vidryas remembered him cheering Ochsan the night previous, back when they were all happy and drunk, nested in the safety of the Bissanty camp. Unlike Vidryas, who could have passed for pure Bissanty, this man looked every inch full-blood Dramaya, and unlike Vidryas, he had volunteered for this detachment. He was short and bull-throated, with wiry, close-cropped hair and a muscular barrel of a chest. His temperament, equal parts stoicism and hardheaded zeal, was also typically Dramaya.
“They’ve moved,” he told the boy. “Push on.”
“The fog won’t cover us much longer,” Vidryas said, doleful. “Why don’t we make our stand here? We’re finished, either way.”
Advey laughed. “Finished? Not while Ochsan lives. The Lanaya missed their chance in the lower vale.” Vidryas could not help but notice that Advey called the enemy by their old name, as if Dramcampagna was still a free nation, and their equal. “If they didn’t catch us below, they’ll never reach us here. There’s not a commander alive who can marshal numbers across terrain like this, and Achavell will take their arrows in this wind. The sky’s shifting. Can’t you feel it? There’s a big storm coming up.”
“Is that what’s making the mist rise?”
“The mist isn’t rising. It’s running. Can’t you smell it? Llara Storm-Queen has followed us into the valley.”
“A storm?” Vidryas’s heart dropped.
“They’re moving!” someone interrupted. “Twelve alive! Don’t stand there as if night and Llara weren’t coming!” Ochsan and Markal were
already across the limestone slab. Now they were urging the others over, almost at a run.
Too soon, it was Vidryas’s turn. The rock he faced was sheeted with running water. He hated the slick limestone, so alien, so harsh, with its rain-carved funnels and treacherous surface.
Ochsan waited at the far edge, his jowls set in an expression that he might have intended as encouraging. “Move faster, Viddy,” he called. “Don’t leave time to fall.”
Vidryas took a tentative step. Then another and he slipped. Both hands windmilled against the rock before he caught his balance.
A flash of lightning lit the valley walls, followed by a crack of thunder. Then a second flash came, almost on its heels, the crack of thunder almost on top of it. The Storm-goddess, Llara Thunderbringer, strode below them in truth, hurling her white-fire spears. Boxed between the towering limestone cliffs, the lightning clashed off one wall and then bounced back again off the other.
“Move, boy!” Ochsan shouted. “You’re not the last one!”
Hating his uncle more than ever, Vidryas forced another reluctant step. The rain was falling hard now, creating thin waves of water on the slab’s surface. It pooled in the trail-crack, then washed on downward. Where the crack was deepest, the water took on a faint whiteness. His heart leapt at the discovery—those whitenesses would show him where to put his feet. He took one step forward, then another. It was better if he did not look up, better if he did not do anything but focus on the white.
He stumbled off the stone and fell against Ochsan’s burly chest before he even knew he had reached safety.
“Go on then,” the war-leader said gruffly, pulling the boy past with a pat of approval. “Make room for Advey.”
Advey was quick. Ochsan gave him a short nod, then pushed along to the front of the party. There he scrambled onto a plinth of rock and turned to make an address.
“Llara will be with us soon,” he said solemnly. The rain had lumped his hair into odd-looking knobs on his temples, but his dark gaze was intense, even compelling, as it settled on the exhausted men. “If we meet her tonight, we will surely die.” A flash of lightning momentarily illuminated his stocky figure.
“But for the green hills of Dramcampagna, I swear on Llara’s great name, I have not brought you here for death.
“There will be shelter ahead. Where vale meets crag, there will be shelter. We must reach it before the storm catches us. The Bissanty sent us here to find our deaths—but we will show ourselves men, and return safely to camp with unexpected glory. We must move to shelter—at a faster pace than any we have yet put forward in all today’s toil. But follow me, and we will persevere. Dramcampagna lives in our bravery!”
A single man dared groan.
But to the last man, at Markal’s whistle, they clapped fist to chest, and shouted Ochsan’s name. Vidryas, fear almost gagging him, joined them.
Ochsan jumped down from the stone plinth, and then there was no time for thinking. He set a new, brutal, reckless pace, jumping forward from stone to slippery stone, almost at a run. Vidryas, riven with fright, tears mingled with the rain on his cheeks, had no choice but to hare after him, along with the others. The pace—it was faster than the wind that swept around them.
Turning a hairpin corner, Vidryas glanced downward. The cloud parted and he caught sight of the great limestone slab, gleaming whitely, already far below.
In the split second of his hesitation, a spear of lightning jabbed to earth, shattering the stone to a thousand pieces, destroying the trail’s thread. The wind howled, a great horrible howl like laughter, and once again the cloud closed in.
Vidryas ducked his head, pretending he had not seen the death of their last hope of retreat.
In his terror, he almost wished for the Lanai archers and a swift end.
F
lash upon flash of lightning, clash upon clash of thunder, shook the tall trap of the valley below her. The old woman, standing at the cliff edge, studied the Dramaya soldiers in their scrambling flight: the squat, bullock-bodied leader and his men, spread behind like frightened sheep.
Her features were impassive, but her eyes were ablaze with triumph. Fifty years of wandering had passed and gone. At long last the stars were near aligned to reform the future; at long last, Tielmark would be free of Bissanty chains. In a final cruel justice, it would be the Bissanty themselves who supplied the tools and means for doing it.
She had planted five men with the vision, knowing that only one would be destined to fulfill it. She had never expected it would be the
Dramaya-man. When she had last seen the Dramaya leader, he had been a dark and ornery calf, troubled by dreams of rebellion, barely capable of comprehending the vision of crushing victory she set before him. But perhaps—perhaps where wiser men had questioned her augury, he had lowered his head and stuck it eagerly in her noose.
Far below, the bullock leader glanced skyward—was he canny enough to sense her? No—he was gauging the storm clouds, judging where Llara Thunderbringer would next strike.
She allowed herself to smile. It would not have been surprising if he had sensed her. The cattleman had surprised her in so many ways, following the path she had laid for him.
A crack of lightning crumbled a stone just below the scattered warriors.
“Quickly now,” Richielle murmured. “Quickly, or Llara will have you.” She glanced tensely at the thunderclouds. So many things could still go wrong. Perhaps, if little black bull and his men did not run, the Grey Goddess would shatter them, and with them her plotting. There were branches still in the prophecy, despite all she’d done to close them. In just one month it would be Midsummer, and God-King Andion would rise in the sky over Tielmark. She had to be ready, and she had to ensure that Tielmark would be ready. If these soldiers did not crush the Lanai here, driving the tribesmen to retreat into Tielmark for a season of war, the seat of Tielmark’s power would remain in the midlands, where Richielle’s power to act would be limited. No—she needed this war in Tielmark’s western outlands, drawing the Prince himself away from the center. She had followed the omens, the cards, the auguries. Surely even Llara could not stop her now! Staring down at the men, she willed them to run faster.
The Dramaya leader, bless him, redoubled his pace and crested the last rocky saddle. From there he would be able to see the black line where the cave mouth lay, promising safety—
The storm, ruthless and unmerciful, swept upward, obscuring the rest.
The woman stepped back from the edge of the cliff, satisfied. Though fog-blinded, her footsteps were secure and steady—she had prepared the path before the vigil began.
The Dramaya bull at least would reach the cave, and perhaps some of his men with him. In the morning, whatever were left would rise and follow the path she had laid to the edge of the great gorge.
There she would meet them, and offer the choice.
For decades, she had prepared for this moment: the beginning of the end for Bissanty. No longer would it be an Empire of five bound Princes, five subject peoples. Tielmark would be free. Great fruit had grown of little seeds, great changes would be wrought by these ignoble Dramaya cattlemen, subject for so long to Bissanty’s rule. Perhaps their own freedom would follow.
By the Rhasan cards of prophecy, by the ruling Gods, by the Dramaya-man’s own bellicose nature, she was certain that Ochsan’s choice would be the right one.
BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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