Of fire and ash, p.19
Of Fire and Ash, page 19
That was a sobering thought. It would be just her pit-spawned luck to escape Kilmark’s ambush only to die from infection. There could be no glory, no atonement in such a death. Then again, she had no hope for glory or atonement anymore. “Stay off the leg. Got it.”
“I mean it.” He busied himself gathering the soiled bandages. “We should take it easier on our ride back. Travel slower. Rest more.”
“And let the kingdom burn?”
Finnian’s jaw tightened. She had relayed the priest’s words to him but not the words of the Voice. No one else had heard it, and she could not begin to explain. Maybe that was why she read only unease in the lines of his face and nothing to match the horror of the chill rooted deep inside her.
“We should stay, Finnian, and fight. You know that we should.”
“I know our duty is clear. The war-chiefs should hear what we have discovered.”
“You ride on then. I will stay.” She felt the heat of the words rolling off her tongue and embraced it, banishing the chill. “On my last return, I spent weeks in a cell for breaking the kasar. The war-chiefs do not want me alive. They certainly do not want me as heir. But there is a threat here and now, and I can fight to save our people. Who knows, maybe I can slow the Nadaari, give the war-hosts time to regroup.”
“All on your own?”
“Certainly not. Mindar counts for at least three.”
“So that’s how it must be, is it? Just you and your fireborn and all the world arrayed against you?” Muscles taut as a drawn bowstring, he shoved back on his heels. “All hail the final ride of Ceridwen tal Desmond as she blazes out to glory. Is that what you wish?”
Already he knew her so well.
Her fingers found the horse-head pommel of her sabre, the dip in its nose worn smooth by the rubbing of her thumb, and she did not try to deny it. “I wish to know I’ve done something to save them.”
“Then you will not ride alone, Ceridwen tal Desmond,” a woman said.
Startled, Ceridwen jerked her head up to see the tall stormrider standing over them. A thick brown rope of a braid wrapped over the woman’s head and down one shoulder, framing a square jaw around a smile that broke like a beam of sunshine stretching broad and warm over grassy plains. It revealed a slight gap between her front teeth.
“Iona tal Vern,” the woman said, holding out a hand. “Of Lochrann.”
Ceridwen made no move to take it. “You know my name?” Flames take Finnian and his ill-tamed tongue. She shot him a withering glare.
“Oh, don’t flame at him.” Iona shook her head. “I knew it already. I was there, you see, at Rysinger, the day you carried your brother across the drawbridge.”
Solid earth melted beneath her.
Ash on her tongue, down her throat, in her lungs . . .
With an effort, she relaxed her fingers from her sabre. “What do you want from me?”
“I have two sons. My sister keeps them safe in her village to the east. I had a husband.” Iona’s voice fractured, and she looked down, adjusting her bracers. Not soon enough to hide the gleam of tears. “He was . . . killed . . . at Idolas. I still have my nephew Liam. Only because I rode to save him, and once we got out, we kept on riding.”
Iona nodded at the nine warriors clustering around Hab’s skillet to eat now that the freed captives had been served. “What you see here is all that remains of four patrols from three separate units and two chiefdoms: Harnoth and Lochrann. We were all of us cut off in the rout. I bear no rank at all, yet somehow, I found myself responsible for them.”
Too easily, Ceridwen could forget that sorrow was not hers alone, that the world was full of suffering and they all rode beneath the shadow of death. “Why are you telling me this?”
Iona drew in a steadying breath. “Because our leaders are dead or fled, and I daresay there are hundreds more like us. Scattered, maybe, but willing to ride if it means protecting our own.” Her eyes lifted, and something in them made Ceridwen straighten, heedless of the ache in her leg or the crushing exhaustion she always felt after a fight. “Ride here, Ceridwen tal Desmond, and we will ride with you. You will be our war-chief, and we will be your patrol, and together, we will drive those cursed Nadaari back into the sea.”
Ceridwen’s throat tightened. “Why? You saw what I am.”
“I did. I saw you fighting atop that pit-spawned steed, and sky’s blood but I would sooner have you by my side than all the rest of the war-hosts.”
For an instant, Ceridwen breathed and did not taste ash. She looked down, and the crater did not gape before her. She closed her eyes and did not see Bair lying broken at her feet. But it only lasted an instant. Leveraging her good leg beneath her, she stood, spurning the hand Finnian offered, lest it reveal the lie in her words. “I ride best alone.”
“Maybe.” Iona eyed her flatly. “But we will save more together. Think on it.”
Together. The word hummed in Ceridwen’s ears, rattled in her bones, and pranced an off-beat rhythm in her chest as she sat beside Finnian on the outskirts of the fire, watching the others eat and talk, laugh and sing. Invaders stalked across their land, traitors devoured their own, and the slain still smoldered in their pyre, but for a time, together, they could forget.
With a breezy sigh, Iona dropped beside Finnian and kicked off her boots. She rubbed her feet, wincing. “Good to be free of those!”
“Wrong size?” Finnian asked, nodding at the boots.
Iona laughed ruefully. “Wrong feet, I’m afraid. Never yet found a pair of boots that didn’t hurt by day’s end. Anyone seen that nephew of mine?”
Nold snorted. “With any luck he’s still riding the perimeter.” He laughed at Iona’s reproachful glance. “What? I needed a breather. He kept going on and on, chattering my ears off with that wild claim he slew a stone-eye. As if!”
The bearded cook and a few others chuckled along.
Over the flames, Ceridwen spied Liam trotting up on a dappled gray riveren, spear resting casually on one shoulder. Too far to know he was the brunt of their laughter, he rode with a swagger that would have put Markham to shame. She raised her voice. “It is true, you know.”
“What is?”
“Liam killed a stone-eye.” Granted, Finnian’s arrows had helped, but the boy had attacked when any other—wiser—warrior would have fled.
Nold’s eyes widened, and he choked on his drink. “He did?” His gaze slid past her, and he leaped to his feet. “Would you look at who it is? The great Stone-eye Killer himself!”
Face crimsoning, Liam dismounted to applause and strutted over to Iona who yanked him down into an embrace. Seeing them shoulder to shoulder, the resemblance became clear. Same brown hair, long limbs, freckled cheeks, and bluff openness of expression.
Iona said, “Now you can tell your tale.”
“Aye, and spare no details,” Nold added.
“Oh, but would you believe it?” Liam’s face was aglow with firelight, and he leaned forward basking in the attention. “I’d only just been knocked from my steed by a sneaky spear swipe from a shardaar of a Nadaari—”
“Mind that tongue, boy!” Iona interrupted. “What would your mother say?”
“—when I heard the unutterable sound of a stone-eye roar!”
His was a dramatic storytelling style, full of weighted pauses and changes to volume and cadence that invited his listeners to hearken to every word. Caught up in the inventive retelling that little resembled her recollection, Ceridwen missed the moment Finnian glided away, but she noted his absence and followed.
She found him near the picketed steeds. So far from the fire’s glow, his shadower was invisible to her, but she could hear the faint creak of tack being tightened and buckled in place. “You’re not leaving tonight, are you?”
Finnian tensed at her voice. “Someone has to carry word to the war-chiefs.” His cloak brushed her as he moved to adjust the shadower’s bridle. “Come with me, Ceridwen. Ride on to Rysinger, talk with Markham—”
“I will, as I swore I would. Once I am finished here.”
“Not about the pairing. Do you really think that still matters? About the kingdom. You have a duty to the war-chiefs. Why won’t you come?”
“I have already said why—”
“No.” He shifted to face her, frustration crackling from him like energy from a stormer’s hooves. “Say what you like, but I see the truth in you. You’re afraid, Ceridwen tal Desmond. Of what, I don’t know, but I do know this: cowardice does not run in the blood of Lochrann.”
That blood boiled within her now, hotter than all the fiery streams of Koltar. She did not trust herself to speak. Would not deign retreat. So, she stood as he mounted and trotted past, shadower’s hooves falling noiselessly as always.
“I only do my duty, Ceridwen. What are you doing?”
His words haunted her long after he ghosted into the night.
TWENTY-SIX: JAKIM
Aodh restores.
“Imbecile!” Khilamook hissed, lashing out with his cane. It struck the slave’s back with a crack, and the man groaned as he bent to retrieve the shards of the ceramic sphere that had slipped from his hands onto a rock instead of into the cradle of the war machine. “Have you sand for wits and reeds for hands?”
Jakim stifled a sympathetic wince, his own back already aching and bruised. He shuffled to balance the armload of loose papers and scrolls Khilamook had crammed into his arms before leaving his tent. Some of the loose sheafs stuck to his sweat-slick skin, and he could only hope the ink didn’t start running or—
Khilamook was staring at him, eyebrows raised expectantly.
Jakim felt a flood of panic. What had he missed? The insult? He hadn’t bothered to translate it. The cane seemed to relay the message clearly enough. “Uh . . .” He racked his brain for the closest approximation in the slave’s native Soldonian and ended up making up a word for lack of an alternative.
Scrollmaster Gedron would be shocked at how easily that lie came.
He caught a hint of a knowing smirk on Khilamook’s face before the engineer darted away around the wheeled war machine with a gait that resembled a long-legged slythe. There was something of that seabird in the way he held his head too, tilted slightly and tucked forward, and in his darting eyes and sharp movements. Jakim hurried to keep up. One week in the engineer’s service had inspired ample words in several languages to describe the man, and kind was not one of them. Or patient. Jakim had served many masters but none as unpredictable as the engineer—and in a master, unpredictability was a terrifying trait.
Over that week, the army had moved sluggishly on from the valley of corpses, and the engineer had spent hours poring over manuscripts in his cart when they marched and hours more in his tent when they halted and fortified their camp against cavalry attacks, tinkering with strange cylindrical devices that he inserted carefully into those ceramic spheres. Only the engineer knew their purpose, but Jakim recalled wading through broken warriors and steeds, and his stomach upended. Khilamook had promised the tsemarc even greater victories to come.
“You on the cranks, rotate those evenly or . . . and you, sledgehammer here . . .”
Jakim caught up to Khilamook in time to catch the cane between his shoulder blades before he began translating the barked commands to the team loading the war machine. Somehow, the engineer’s tongue never broke stride.
“Careful with that, or I’ll replace it with your head!”
This at the slave muscling a ceramic sphere into the cradle. Thick neck, lean arms, jagged scar. It was the sailor. Jakim broke off his translation, but Khilamook had moved on. He seemed in a state of frenzied distraction, issuing strings of half-uttered instructions that Jakim had to interpret and translate, all while keeping up with his mad dash. Translation was challenging on its own, but the technical knowledge required here far exceeded Jakim’s skill. By the time the war machine was ready, he had a dozen new bruises from the cane.
Khilamook halted and flung open the high collar of his tapestried robe against the sun’s warmth and rolled the wide sleeves up past his elbows, revealing thin but muscled arms covered in waxy scars. Jakim blinked away, not wanting to be caught staring. “Ready the hammer. Potter, with me.” The crisp commands summoned a wiry man in a clay-smeared smock who fidgeted nervously at Khilamook’s elbow while a slave squared a sledgehammer over the trigger block.
“Hoy, Scroll . . .” a voice hissed.
Jakim turned around and spied the sailor lounging against a handcart piled with ceramic spheres. The sailor tossed a wheel chock in the air and caught it. What was he—ow! His distraction earned a sharp jab in the ribs from the engineer’s cane.
“Release the trigger!”
The hammer struck with a crash. The ropes groaned. The war machine’s arm shot up and slammed into the crossbar, and the sphere shattered overhead. It was echoed by a louder crash behind. Jakim bent over his scrolls. Stinging shards pelted his neck and something wet trickled down his spine. He freed a hand to swipe at it, expecting blood but finding mostly water.
Khilamook drew in a hissing breath and deliberately wiped his face with his sleeve. “Congratulations, potter. You have killed us all.”
Or . . . maybe . . . not water.
Jakim’s lungs hitched in panic. Was it . . . poison? He didn’t feel like he was dying. Aodh knew he wasn’t ready. Not with the lies he had told. Not with his vows unfulfilled. Not without seeing his brothers. A whack of the cane stung a stumbling translation from his lips that made the potter blanch and tighten his fists around his smock.
“Or you would have”—Khilamook’s tone was scornful—“if this were not merely a test. I believe I made my specifications for the design quite clear. It required a highly complex bit of mathematics, and I am not prone to miscalculation.” He held out one hand. “Bring out the diagram, slave, and show this imbecile his error.”
Jakim shuffled through his load, unsure which diagram the engineer meant. A sketch of the war machine and a scroll filled with strings of letters and numbers were dismissed out of hand. Nothing else seemed to fit. “Could it still be on your desk, master?”
“Only if you failed to bring it as instructed.”
If instructed, he would have brought it. But Khilamook had selected this stack, so if it was anyone’s fault, it was the engineer’s. Of course, “fair” was also not a word that described the engineer, so there was no point in protesting. “I will check, master.”
As he dashed off, papers fluttering against his chin, his gaze snagged on the handcart where the sailor had been sitting. It had tipped over, scattering broken spheres on the ground. That must have been the second crash he had heard. Should he say something?
No. Better not to be the bearer of bad tidings.
Jakim shouldered through the silk hangings, dumped his armload on the engineer’s stool, and rifled through the mass of papers on his campaign desk. More sketches of war machines, more undecipherable strings of numbers and . . . there. He lifted a single sheet containing multiple drawings of the spheres surrounded by a spiderweb of notes.
It was immediately plucked from his fingers.
“Many thanks, Scroll.”
Jakim gaped as the sailor lowered the paper to the oil lamp he had forgotten to extinguish before leaving the tent. He yelped and yanked the burning paper away, dropping it into a pile of dirty clothes and using them to smother the flames. “What are you doing?”
“Sabotage, obviously. Or you know, not helping those who enslaved me.”
“You think burning one page will make a difference?”
“Huh.” The sailor pursed his lips. “Good point.” He kicked the stool over, scattering Jakim’s stacked scrolls and papers, then reached for the oil lamp.
Jakim grabbed it, burning his fingers in his haste. “You tipped the handcart, didn’t you?”
“Of course, I did.”
“But how did you get in here without being seen?” Half a dozen overseers constantly prowled around Khilamook’s tent and the testing yard on the edge of camp whenever the army’s delayed march provided opportunity for his experiments. Their constant presence dampened Jakim’s hopes for escape. How had they missed the sailor sneaking in?
The sailor snorted. “I may be no shadowrider, but when you live on a floating tub where the work never stops, you learn how to make yourself scarce.”
Shouts broke outside, and Jakim spun toward the silk hangings. That was Khilamook’s voice, and his inability to communicate without his translator would not improve his temper before Jakim could get back. Things just kept tumbling from bad to worse. The sailor was gone when he turned around, but the burned paper still sat in the pile of dirty clothes. He retrieved it, hastily straightened the rest, and rushed out into the chaos where slaves scrambled around the toppled handcart, whips cracked, and overseers growled curses.
Khilamook’s face whitened at the sight of the singed scrap in Jakim’s hand. His bones seemed to press against his skin, accentuating the hollows in his cheeks and around his eyes. He demanded no explanation and Jakim offered none, just squared his shoulders for a beating. His stomach churned when the engineer raised his hand instead of his cane, summoning an overseer with a long black snake of a whip slithering behind him.
Maybe it was feverish to look on a lash and fear a snake, but the snake was suddenly all he could see. He had stepped on a snake once. Felt its fangs pierce his foot. Only Aodh’s mercy and Siba’s remedies had saved him, and as he lay with his leg swollen so thick he feared his skin would burst, she had whispered that Aodh’s hand was upon him, preserving him, guiding him—
Calloused hands shoved him to his knees and tore the tunic from his back. Shivering, exposed, he clenched his teeth. It was not his first whipping. Before he had endured with only anger to ground him. Now he was rooted in purpose and in hope.
Through the war machine’s frame, he met the sailor’s eyes.
Crack. Fire streaked his bare back. Gasping, he dug his nails into his palms. Crack. Crack. The third strike coiled around his ribs, blazing a stripe across his stomach. Crack. The fourth drove something hard and cold into his chest. He looked down and gold flashed. The ring. The king’s signet. Freed from his tunic, swinging loose for all to see. He caught it, hand to throat, and snapped the cord, hiding it in his fist.
