The Providence of Fire (42 page)

Fulton's lips tightened, but he didn't speak.

“Well, for a religious man, that's just downright inhospitable,” Birch said. The joke was typical, but the words came out weak, as though rusted, corroded.

“I've tried to get him to relent,” Adare said, speaking fast, trying to drown out the guilt and shame with the sound of her own voice, “but he won't. His people, the Sons of Flame and all the rest, they want you burned, and he won't refuse them.” She fell silent. The words were useless. Worse than useless. Insulting.

“Without the Sons, I've got nothing. Il Tornja wins. Even if I refused Lehav—”

“No,” Fulton said, voice still as a stone. “You will not refuse him.”

“Ah, fuck,” Birch said, glancing away.

“This is what we are
for,
Alin,” the older guardsman said, turning to his companion. Adare had never heard anyone use Birch's first name. She hadn't even known it herself. “Our lives for hers. If she refuses this, there's no saying what the zealots will do to her.”

“There's no saying what the zealots will do if she
agrees,
” Birch pointed out. “We can't save her if we're
dead
.”

“That is a risk that the princess will have to assess for herself. Our duty is to serve.”

“I thought service meant fighting,” Birch protested, but the anger had gone out of him. Resignation thinned his voice.

“Sometimes, Alin,” Fulton replied, nodding. “And sometimes it means dying.”

Adare had Intarra's irises, but the guardsman's gaze burned. Adare could argue, fight to save them both, but she knew already that she was not going to argue. She had known, even as she spoke of confronting Lehav, that Fulton would refuse her offer, known that his duty would weigh heavier in the scales than her guilt, known that her suggestion was empty as air even as she spoke it. She had watched it all coming from a long way off, watched it just as she'd watched the black storm move in. She'd seen it all coming except for the sick pit of self-hatred that gaped inside her, that ate at her guts, that would never, ever heal.

*   *   *

For just a moment, the sight of the Everburning Well distracted Adare from the killing that had to happen there.

Over the last few nights of the pilgrimage she had stared at the column of light bisecting the horizon, white and pale as a thousand moons, blotting out the meager pinpricks of the stars to either side. For sixteen centuries, the Everburning Well had been a beacon for the faithful and a warning to unbelievers both, an eternal symbol of Olon's sanctity, the origin of the faith, and the reason Annur's pilgrims had chosen this crumbling city over a dozen others.

Despite Adare's flaming irises and the alleged ancestry of her own family, she had always been skeptical of the gods. Divine favor was too easy to claim, too difficult to disprove. Anything could be the work of the gods—a fallen sparrow, an unexpected flood, a single tree flowering earlier or later than the rest. The stories were all too old, the evidence too scant.

It had to be admitted, though, that the Everburning Well was no fallen sparrow. It was an actual hole in the earth, maybe a dozen feet across, and the light gushing forth from it, light so bright that to stare directly into the depth for any length of time would blind the observer, could not be denied. Even the surrounding stone bent to the brute fact of the Well, having sagged and crumbled in a circular crater, as though the earth itself were trying to funnel all that came near into that astounding brightness. Adare had heard tales of Intarra's devout hurling themselves in, hoping to unite with her prophet. There were the other stories, too, of men and women shoved into the blazing depths as punishment for their heresies.

Even from just inside the round wall ringing the site, with the Well still a good thirty paces off, Adare had to squint, half raising a hand to block the heat radiating from the column of light. Then, realizing how such a gesture might look to the assembled mob, she lowered the hand and straightened her back, her neck, forcing herself to stare directly into the brilliance. Driving rain streaked through the light, a thousand falling stars. The stabbing lightning over the water looked wan, weak, beside that inexorable radiance.

According to the tales, the light had burned day and night for over a thousand years, fueled by the piety of Intarra's first prophet. There were variations to the myth, but all agreed on the basic facts. When a virgin named Maayala appeared in the city—then the capital of an independent Kresh—Odam the Blind had her seized for peddling a new faith. The Kreshkan kings, Odam very much among them, worshipped Achiet—their name for the lord of war—while Maayala insisted on the primacy of the Lady of Light, arguing on the streets and in private homes that all light, that of the hearth, of the stars, of the sun, was one, and that one given by Intarra. She claimed that Intarra's light animated all human souls, giving blood its heat, bodies their warmth. According to Maayala, mortals need not fear death, since the dissolution of the body frees the fragment of the divine hidden within, allowing it to join with the greater lights of earth and the heavens. Maayala absolved the Kreshkans of their martial duty, claiming that everyone, even the weak, even the crippled, so long as their skin remained warm to the touch, carried the divine spark inside. No fighting was necessary. No heroic feats in battle.

Odam declared the woman a liar, a heretic, and an impostor. He had her dragged to the courtyard of his fortress, tied to a stake, and, in mockery of her unflagging worship of light, he had her burned.

“If the Lady of Light loves her,” he famously said, “the Lady of Light can take her.”

And take her Intarra did.

Maayala burned, fitfully at first, with a great deal of smoke, then more readily as the fire below her truly caught. Her flesh turned to flame and that flame burned brighter and still brighter, red, then yellow, then purest white. The fire consumed the wood, then the stake itself, and yet Maayala still stood, incandescent, bright as the noonday sun, so bright that Odam and his soldiers were forced to look away, and when they looked away, they realized the flagstones of the courtyard were glowing, too, first red, then yellow, then white, burning, melting to slag, the entire ground sagging around Maayala the Undarkened as she bored into the earth, her heat and light creating the Everburning Well.

It destroyed Odam's fortress, and, according to the chronicles, nearly destroyed Odam himself. The king barely managed to escape through a sally port as his walls folded inward, malleable as softened butter. The rock didn't cool for a month, and when it did, the terrified and curious began to come, tentatively, to stare at the amphitheater of melted rock, at the column of light issuing from the Well at its center. Odam himself walked to the very edge of the pit as penance for his sin, staring down into the light until it blinded him.

“Ill-served I have been by these eyes,” he said when he returned. “Without them I can see at last.”

Adare envied the long-dead king his blindness and his clarity both. She could make out little more than shapes through the torrential rain, but she could see enough to know that the walls around the Well were filled to bursting. The Sons of Flame stood closest, but the faithful of Olon pressed up behind their ranks, faces fearfully bright but smeared by the rain to a nightmare of open mouths and eager eyes, all fixed on her, waiting for the promised justice. A justice that was starting to look terrifyingly like sacrifice.

Fulton and Birch were bound at the wrist but able to walk. Behind them half a dozen grim-faced Sons with long spears stood at attention. Before the prisoners, a cleared pathway ran straight into the Everburning Well.

“When the march begins,” Lehav said to the two men, “I suggest you move. One way or the other, you will be fed to the flame. Better not to have a spear in your side when you die.”

“We will walk,” Fulton said, fixing the man with his sunken-eyed stare, “without being prodded like pigs.”

Lehav shrugged. “Bold words are easy at this distance. You might feel more reluctant as you approach the Well.”

“With this rain?” Birch quipped. He seemed to have passed through his anger and reluctance and emerged once more into his customary jocularity. “I'll
jump
in your 'Kent-kissing hole just to dry off.”

The crowd was growing restive, a few of the bolder members hurling insults into the driving rain. Thunder rumbled just overhead, drowning out the voices while the flash illuminated faces twisted with fury.

“It is time,” Lehav said, gesturing.

“Let's get this over with,” Fulton growled. “I grow tired of listening to the bleating of these sheep.”

Get it over with
. As though he were talking about a tedious imperial audience rather than his own life. Adare nodded, trying to steady herself, trying to see straight in the rain.

“Wait,” she said, raising her voice just high enough that they could hear over the rain. “I'm sorry.”

Worse than useless, those words, a threadbare cloak to cover her own horror.

“Do one thing for me,” Fulton said.

Adare nodded eagerly, pathetically. Even at this distance she could feel the heat from the Well. Her robes were steaming, her hair, her hands. The crowd had taken up some sort of martial hymn. “Anything,” she said.

“Win,” he replied grimly.

“I'll second that,” said Birch.

Adare stifled a sob. She tried to speak, but found her throat closed as a fist.

Sweet Intarra,
she prayed,
forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

Fulton watched her for three or four heartbeats, until Birch nudged him with his elbow.

“Come on, old man,” he said, face slick with mingled rain and sweat. “You getting tired right here at the end?”

Forgive me, Intarra. Forgive me
.

And then the two men, the guards who had watched her door since she was a child, who had flanked her when she left the palace and stood behind her chair at state dinners, who brought her soup when she was ill, and listened to her complain about her brothers, her parents, the two men who, in some ways, knew her better than anyone alive, began their march toward the flame. Despite the heat of the Well and the fury of the crowd, they held their heads high, and even when the mob started hurling stones and dung, they refused to flinch.

Forgive me, Intarra,
Adare begged, but the whole miserable bit of theater was not Intarra's idea, not Intarra's fault, and when the two soldiers had marched into their grave, it would not be Intarra who bore the awful weight in her chest day in and day out. It was all well and good to pray to the goddess, but Adare was the one with the hands, with the voice, and suddenly she realized she was screaming, lurching forward toward the Sons of Flame. With clumsy hands, she seized a spear from the nearest of the soldiers, the long shaft heavy and wet, unwieldy in her grip.

“No!”
she bellowed, charging down the open path in the wake of the Aedolians. It was a foolish gesture, beyond foolish. She couldn't save the men, and the simple act of defiance would see her burned as well, but, suddenly, it didn't matter. She would die here, in the miserable fucking miracle of a well, but she would not be part of the murder of these men who had watched over her so long.

It's on you now, Kaden,
she thought grimly, brandishing the steel pointlessly above her head.
On you, Valyn. And as for you, Intarra, you can fuck yourself, you miserable bitch.

And then, as if in response, Intarra spoke back.

Blinding light. Perfect black. Ringing like a million mouths, screaming, singing. Body instantly and utterly gone. Gone the rain. Gone the mob. Gone her own mind and will. Gone everything but a single voice, Fulton's and then not Fulton's, deeper, higher, fuller, broader, broad as the wide sky, broad as the stars, a woman's voice but greater than any woman, as great as creation itself, uttering a single, ungainsayable syllable:
Win.

 

21

Eight.

Or nine.

Valyn had lost track of how many times he, Pyrre, and his Wing tried to escape during the endless ride west.

Which made them zero for eight.

Or zero for nine.

In the last attempt, Valyn had dislocated his left shoulder in order to win free of his restraints, Pyrre had strangled two Urghul with her belt, and the rest of the Wing managed to steal half a dozen horses. Valyn had refused to include Balendin in the planning, but the leach was tied up right next to the rest of them, and when the time came to fight, he managed to rip out the throat of a
ksaabe
with his teeth and kick another one half to death. A reminder, if Valyn needed a reminder, that even drugged, even half starved, the leach was as dangerous as the rest of them. Not that it mattered.

There were thousands of Urghul, more joining the group every day. Even if the Kettral managed to break out of the constantly moving horde, which they hadn't, there was nowhere to run but empty steppe. It was a bleak situation, no doubt, and their defiance earned them little more than busted faces and bruised ribs, but it was fight or die, and while Valyn had no illusions about the odds, he didn't intend to be led to his slaughter like a sheep. When the ninth attempt to break free failed, he was already plotting the tenth.

Huutsuu, however, had other ideas. The woman rode up, surveyed the carnage, barked a few orders, and in a matter of moments the prisoners were separated, each dragged off by his or her own
taabe
or
ksaabe
. Old knots were retied and new restraints added at the elbows and knees, which meant an end to all walking and stretching. From that moment on, numbness alternated with screaming pain in Valyn's legs and shoulders. He had to beg his
taabe
to pull down his pants whenever he needed to take a shit.