Ashes Slowly Fall

by Katya Lebeque

  And it was a woman. It was both Vanita and not Vanita. Her walk was different and her voice, though the same, sounded as though it had coal and a flame behind it now. Ash would have thought she was dreaming, except for the fine-looking leather affixed with ribbon that covered where Vanita’s left eye used to be.

  “It’s you, it really is you,” Vanita breathed, although that was what Ash was supposed to say. Her mouth still didn’t work. She just looked up at her sister and then at the kneeling duke, gazing at Vanita as fixedly as if he thought that she might disappear again if he so much as blinked.

  This Vanita smiled but then turned again towards the mob leader man and did not look to the right or to the left as the men parted like waves before her, stopping just short of bowing as she went passed. “These are envoys from the palace and are to be treated with utmost respect,” Vanita said sternly. The men nodded, chastised, and put their weapons down.

  Ash nodded. “Yes, thank you, kind lady,” she said loud enough to seem formal. “We have. I bring you messengers from the crown,” she turned to the duke expectantly. But the duke only stood shakily and then stood there, frozen, still staring at Vanita as if she were the only thing he could see. Then, when it seemed he had got hold of himself, he only walked the four strides between them and kissed Vanita on the mouth in front of everyone.

  Fortunately, a black head emerged to still the commotion. Everyone, even the lowliest vagabond, knew who he was. Still, he spoke anyway. Safi, eyes still full of fire, knelt in the mud.

  “I am Crown Prince Rizend, heir to the throne of all Germania. And let it be seen here today that we do not send lackeys to speak our peace. We rode out in our own name. Now,” he turned to each side and looked the men and women around him in the eye. Everyone except Ash. “Now shall we talk or not?”

  ***

  Ash’s dress was halfway up to her knees by the time she tore off yet another long strip to and tied it tight around Tarah’s leg to stop the bleeding. She looked up at Vanita.

  “There was a book that had this in, do you remember?”

  “I do. It was the same book I remembered when trying to heal my eye. Who is she?”

  “A servant from the castle. She was the one who betrayed us – well, one of the ones.”

  Vanita hesitated a moment, then nodded and tore a piece of cheesecloth off from under her leathers and got to work binding up Tarah’s leg too.

  “Is, is she breathing?” This “Rayce” sounded like a little boy as he bent over them.

  There was no movement of her chest, but the tiniest breath was coming from Tarah. Breath enough to move a single leaf of a tree perhaps, or a feather on the ground. As though the fight had never happened, Ash reached up and grabbed the mob leader’s hand and brought him down to kneeling, placing his hand in front of his dying sister’s lips.

  “Here. You should be the one there to watch her go.”

  It was not long kneeling in the blood and dirt until the two sisters sensed something shift in the atmosphere and heard the terrible wail of a man who has lost all the family and love he had in the world. What they thought they’d lost. Without looking at each other, they held hands.

  Ash stared as though mesmerised at the red, red hair lying there, which already seemed to have lost its fire somehow. Tarah Sonne. With deft hands and mischievous smile, a fiery nature and a willingness to die for change. When Ash tore her eyes from it and turned to Rayce, he was bitterly pulling the dagger from the body’s leg.

  “Safi. Have the men search for Safi’s body and burn it,” he said quietly, lifting Tarah from the floor as though she were his young bride and walking away.

  “It’s not a burial rite,” said Vanita quietly. “It’s also not the vengeful thing I first thought it was, burning to say “you cannot get into Heaven” or something. Rather, it’s a gesture, after wrongdoing is done to the mob. The burning is to make ashes. The ashes say: “it’s over, it’s forgotten’.”

  ***

  When the ashes did come, Tarah was bound tightly in good linen from head to toe, an irony she would have smirked at if she were alive. Rayce mumbled a few words through his tears, then looked up at Vanita.

  “Anything you wish to say, Pathfinder?”

  But Ash remembered now the words of the Pathfinders in their morning worship, when she had stood in their holy place trying to destroy them. So, it was she and not Vanita who spoke the words:

  “May you walk with wonder on the road that has been given you – not over, no, not at all – as it enters a new journey you do not understand. May your path rise up to meet you and may you walk with faith and confidence the steps not yet taken.”

  Rayce shuddered under the weight of his sobs then, and almost fell, but on either side of him Derrick and Rize held him up. He let out a shaky laugh at that.

  “We’re supposed to be treating and negotiating, for Path’s sake!”

  Vanita smiled at him. “Well, apart from a newly acquired carrior, who I don’t think will be much trouble, I think the church is free.”

  ***

  When some hours were over, when the sky was red with sunset as though with blood, to be wiped clean yet again with a new morning soon, when the rest of the mob including a disgruntled Stepmother arrived whom Ash threw herself at and hugged despite her squawking, when all tears were shed and dried…. only then the treating was at last finished.

  “So, full pardons?” Said the man born poor who would have killed the other a short time ago.

  “Full,” answered the man born royalty who would kill him too, just a few hours before. “But in exchange for your leadership of all the mob.”

  “And in exchange for that, you and me,” put in Vanita. “We pledge to have a spokesperson in council that is both one of your own and a Pathfinder dedicated to seeing the plights of the common people. I’ll be that person, and we will discuss with the Pathfinders when we ride for the castle, but I think I know who the new Head Pathfinder will be, and I think she knows already.” A small smile passed between the sisters at that.

  “Well, then, tha’s that,” said a much calmer Rayce. He brushed a hand over his shaven head, shaking it. “This would be time to go home, but I have no home to go to, nor any of the others around me.”

  “Well, you wanted the castle, for food and shelter and hope for your people, didn’t you? So why don’t you come to the castle? It’s time we changed the way court works, anyway.”

  “Thank goodness!” put in Ash.

  “But what about the carriors?” demanded Rayce. “It’s still the same problem as before, just with higher walls.”

  “I have some good news on that front,” said Rize quietly. “That bird over there? I kept her confined and fed her certain foods, depleted of most of their nitrogen. As a result, the Expansion Project hormone in her system could not run riot as before and she calmed, changed. When her eggs were laid, they were noticeably smaller than carrior eggs I’ve observed out in the wild, and the chicks were the same once hatched. One has still not hatched, but three prove it, it’s possible to slowly, generation by generation, both calm and shrink the birds. Not overnight no, and with no magic formula, but the same way the Expansion Project happened – slowly, in bits and pieces, then all at once. It’ll work.”

  For the first time, Rayce exposed a crooked smile. “Well, that is good news… And what about my men and women? The palace seems to want an “Expansion Project culprit’, they want a scapegoat and, I’m sure, they’ll look wherever outside themselves t’get one. And I want guarantees of their safety, but, y’see, I do think it’s a good idea to have someone the people can blame that has been punished. Even if it is a scapegoat. So, who will it be?”

  ***

  The scapegoat was standing under the stars when she found him. Next to him was the monstrous outline of the rock pigeon carrior, even though they had untied it and set it free.

  Ash gave him a moment, then came up alongside Rize.

  “Remember the stars from the conservato
ry?”

  He sounded so, so much like the old Rize, that she smiled. She could almost believe that he was the same man she’d fallen for. Almost.

  “I remember, but I think your flowers were just as beautiful.”

  “I’m going to do it, Ash, I am. Head Pathfinder, she taught me enough, and I brought my supplies with me, I’m going to fix the ground.”

  “Rize you know how I feel about you…”

  “Do I?” He half turned to her in the fading light.

  She pressed on. “But what you did… I was foolish, and rash, and someone died because of it. Your life is changing because of it. There must be consequences, there has to be. For both of us. You know that.”

  Somehow, the Duke had slunk up alongside them silently in the dark, as was his way. “I agree,” he said softly.

  Rize carried on as if he hadn’t heard him. “What will yours be?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think it’s for me to decide. Hopefully something that will make amends. I don’t want all I’ve done for this country to amount to making a few crossbows and killing the Head Pathfinder.”

  “Well, what Saphira did with her death – it was very generous. She took the blame. So now there has been a scapegoat. At least that is taken care of.”

  “Is it?” The duke’s voice was so fiery with a tone near anger but closer to passion that Ash looked up. What had happened to the smooth-tongued glib talker she had first met at that ball a hundred years ago?

  “What the Head Pathfinder did was noble, but it’s a lite,” the duke said fiercely. “You cannot build to last on a lie, it is not a true foundation. And we are building Germania again, from the ground up. If I am to have a family here, children even, how secure are their lives if their history and culture is fiction?”

  “But if they find out it was Rize who started the Project, Crown Prince or no, they will kill him.”

  “True. If we are to say that it was in fact the prince’s fault, he must go away.”

  Rize’s face was white, and something in his eyes reminded Ash of Mary Faireweather. “You would banish me, Cousin?”

  “I… no… I don’t know.”

  Rize lowered his head. “I will do whatever I have to do to fix the damage of the Expansion Project. Anything. That’s why all the experimentation, all the kneeling in the mud with plants that always die. And I have made headway, Lorin. The birds, kept in cages and with the goldfish nutrients, they will get smaller and smaller generation by generation. But –”

  Ash’s heart cracked in two as the prince suddenly began sobbing like a little boy. “To, to leave my home, all that work, my father, and you, and you…”

  “I just don’t want to be remembered forever as the villain who started the Expansion Project.”

  “You won’t be. If we’re to protect you – listen, you rode out today to right the wrongs of the Project and face the mob. You rode all alone, though you could have stayed behind the castle walls, that much is true. And all the people who saw you fight today are loyal to you… I can tell him, Rize, I can tell him that you, that you –”

  Ash was the one who finished it: “That you died a hero. That’s how you’ll be remembered.”

  A gasp of pain escaped the duke then, hearing the words out loud that he’d already thought. Lorin hugged his cousin who was more like a brother hard. Then, in the growing darkness, he walked away.

  There was a semblance of silence after that for a while, Rize with his muffled sobs and Ash with her own tears who didn’t try to stop him.

  “I tried so hard,” he said at last. “When I was a boy, there were endless stories of princes who frittered their lives away in an endless string of ponies and ladies and jewels. I didn’t want to be that way.” He laughed mirthlessly through his tears. “I thought that was the worst thing that could happen to me, the worst crime I could commit. And if I’d instead just wasted years on girls and ponies –”

  Ash wouldn’t let him finish. She lifted his chin and kissed it. “If you had, then we’d never have someone qualified enough to heal the ground. You can save us. You just can’t do it from the palace.”

  He looked at her hopefully. “With you?”

  Ash didn’t trust herself to speak. So, silently, as her answer, she took the dried flower stem fashioned into a ring off her finger and pressed it into the palm of his hand. Through her tears, she kissed him again.

  “I finally know what I must do.”

  ***

  When the new morning came, a new day had arrived in many ways. Birds wheeled overhead but they seemed smaller, somehow, now.

  A broken, former rebel leader looked up to the sky. Next to him, the broken former lady did the same. A broken beauty, now a Pathfinder, who was somehow more beautiful, shared the sunrise with her mother, whose secrecy had been broken. The broken former duke looked only at them and took the love of his life’s hand. A former servant boy and a broken former prince stood side by side after them and, behind them, what remained of a broken former nobility and broken former mob.

  Together, they all walked into the sun.

  Epilogue

  Six months later:

  The Throne Room was packed, more crowded than Ash had ever seen. Now that they were being scrubbed again, the walls shone brightly against coloured banners in the crisp morning breeze.

  Castle Blindé had seen many things. It had seen the limping remains of the brave force that had ridden out to face the mob come back with a duke, two munitions experts and a new Pathfinder, and a tale of how the country’s prince had died as a hero while slaying the mysterious man in the wilderness that had been found to be the true culprit guilty of starting the Expansion Project. Documents had been produced to confirm and, amongst them, one written in the prince’s own hand and signed by the Duke of Novrecourte. It had read:

  ‘I, Crown Prince Rizend of all Germania, hereby bequeath in my own name and of my own will inheritance and heirship of Castle Blindé, all its contents, as well as the country and governing of Germania and its treasures therein to the bearer of this, named Lorin Novrecourte of House Novrecourte, Duke of the Novrecourte lands and second in line for the throne at the time of this writ.’

  That was why they were here today. The castle had seen many things, but arguably none they were more excited about than this one.

  Everyone had expected the duke, of all people, to look absolutely resplendent in his coronation outfit. But he had kept it very simple in a white outfit that had been Rize’s, the very one he’d worn when Ash first met him. By design, Rayce, standing nearby, had a new white outfit of his own.

  Instead, the clothing that outshone the room was on his radiant bride-to-be, who sparkled in pearl-studded silver and a train so long no one could remember the last time they had seen one like it, except in her sister’s dress at the ball of course. Like her sister before her, she looked like water as she came streaming in. Thanks to her standing with both the Pathfinders and the mob (those that had not returned to rebuild the manse of one Rhodopalais that had been pledged to them as a safehouse) it was her duty to place the crown on her betrothed’s head.

  “Ashling?”

  Derrick was looking fairly dashing himself, in a doublet of blue silk that Naomi had teased him roundly for ordering.

  “Ready?” he said, holding out his arm.

  Ash nodded to him. They had rehearsed this half a hundred times. She could be up there in a pretty dress herself, but it felt right to be in the crowd. Within the crowd, noble-born and common mixed together. Because now they had seen the birds, and the drought, the death and the pain. Each one had lived starved and had been on the edge of dying, each one had been master of their own life.

  “The struggle is still very real, and it is not over,” Vanita was saying. “But we have found a new lease on life, we have found our strength as a country. And even from here, we can rise.” A small gasp came from her lips, and she looked up. A cloud had moved in over the new rose window while everyone was watching, engrossed
in Vanita’s speech. She looked out to the people and smiled beatifically. They could not see it inside, but she smiled not at them, just as the bright splashes of the first rain in years hit the ground.

  Water for ashes, Ash thought to herself. Ashes into beauty.

  Within the crowd, Derrick’s hand found hers, and squeezed it. It felt like coming home.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Katya Lebeque is a twenty-something South African with an incorrigible writing habit that was started young, but certainly not helped by the fact that she has been a journalist and professional writer for the past nine years. She burst (okay, tripped and fell) onto the writing scene way back in 2010 when she won ELLE magazine’s Best Short Story competition and, later, a Writer’s Digest “Dear Lucky Agent” contest in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy category.

  She lives in Sandton with her husband, a fairly entitled Maine Coon, a car called Eva Marie-Saint and a motley crew of Lindt slabs that never seem to last long.

  Katya is undecided as to whether Ashes Slowly Fall is the last or the middle instalment of the Ash book series. She is a little in love with Vanita and it is clouding her judgment.

  One last thing…

  If you have read some or all of Ashes Slowly Fall or Ash Rising, please leave a review of your honest thoughts on Amazon. Or simply rate it. Word of mouth and sincere reviews are vital to any author and can mean the success of failure of a book. One or two sentences is plenty, no need for more.

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