A Broken Queen

by Sarah Kozloff

  The next day their patient grew restless and feverish; she moaned more often. The burn blisters changed from red to white, puffing up high with fluid, oozing and bloody, while her breathing sounded as bad as ever.

  Late in the afternoon, Gilboy woke Mikil, who had fallen into a doze, slumped across the tiller.

  “Sail in the distance. I can’t tell what country it’s from.”

  Mikil rubbed his eyes and looked where Gilboy pointed. “It’s from the Green Isles. See the green flag and Vertia on the figurehead? A trader, not a fishing boat. Has she spotted our distress banner yet?”

  “No, don’t look like it.”

  Arlettie anxiously moved to the bow. She held her woven toppie in one hand and a jeweled cutlass they had found in the cove in the other. She waved her arms wildly crosswise—making the Shrimp jostle—and shouted, “Over here! We’re over here! Islanders, countrymen, help us!”

  “Hey! Hey! Lookouts, are you sleeping?” Gilboy joined in, angrily.

  “Lookouts get a kind of sun-blindness,” Mikil explained, but he took cold comfort from his expertise.

  The trader kept to her course.

  Soon it would be out of range.

  Arlettie screamed, “Help us!” Mikil joined her and took the jeweled sword to wave in wide arcs. After several agonizing moments the trader broke course, and after a long pause it tacked to head in their direction. The voyaging family cheered.

  As the ship drew nigh Mikil could see the sailors pointing at the Shrimp. He also read the ship’s name: Island Dreamer.

  “Now this will be the trickiest part of being rescued,” said Mikil, licking his lips. “Get ready, Gilboy. The sailors will throw down heavy lines. We must catch them and tie them off on the cleats. One line still leaves us unstable, free to crash against her side or slide under her bow—either of which could easily crush us; two lines make us secure.”

  Island Dreamer came about neatly and drifted slowly toward the Shrimp. The first rope was the light one; Gilboy caught it himself and tied it to the cleat. The second rope was thick and heavy. It fell aft from the Shrimp, but the swell brought it within reach; it took both of them to grab it and wrestle it into a knot. Now they were affixed to the bigger ship, knocking against it in a medium swell.

  Several sun-darkened male faces peered over the side at them. A rope ladder was hooked to the side and then dropped down into the little craft.

  “Let me go aboard and make sure of things,” Mikil said. “Hand me that sword.” Mikil tucked the jeweled cutlass into his belt and climbed the rope ladder. He was met by a group of gaping Green Isles seamen on a tidy vessel.

  “Well, this don’t happen every day! Rescue at sea!” said a man with a green mustache, wearing a seamaster’s hat. “And who might you be?”

  Mikil’s clothes were threadbare, his hair and beard overgrown, his skin tanned deep walnut brown, but his bearing was as regal and assured as ever, and the cutlass provided just the right touch of status, threat, and money.

  He sketched a slight bow. “I am Prince Mikil of Lortherrod. My companions and I have been shipwrecked on a small island since the sea battle between Queen Cressa of Weirandale and the Pellish many years ago. Whom do I have the honor of thanking as our deliverer?”

  The captain’s eyes went round with surprise, and his mouth fell open.

  “Well, I’ll be a rat-fucker—ahem. I am Captain Bajets of Island Dreamer out of Pilagos, homeward bound. And these are my crew. We’re glad we can be of service to a prince.”

  Mikil shook the captain’s offered hand. “Not half as glad as we are that you saw us. I have two companions waiting below: my betrothed and our adopted son. Also, there’s a mistriss whom we rescued from the sea yestermorn, who is gravely ill. Do you have a way besides the ladder of fetching her on board?”

  Arlettie and Gilboy waited for the sailors to lower down a sling. They loaded the unconscious woman on it as tenderly as possible, and the sailors hauled her up, knocking her against the ship’s side only a few times and not hard enough to do her any more damage. Arlettie climbed aboard once the patient was safe. Then the sailors threw down the sling again so Gilboy could load into it a cloak that they had bundled around their swords and the few precious items they’d scavenged from Cressa’s trunk. Finally, Gilboy cut the ropes that tied the Shrimp (who had served her purpose, and now could be unceremoniously jettisoned), and climbed up the ladder himself.

  Mikil watched his little boat, which he had spent years perfecting, bob away on the breast of the waves. The loss cut him to the quick; he wished he’d asked the seamaster to tow it along Island Dreamer, though he knew if he were captain he would have to refuse to be encumbered by such an extraneous burden. Now that his long-sought goal had at last been accomplished, a wave of depression and weariness washed over him.

  Gilboy, by contrast, was exhilarated, eager to talk with the crew, who were the first new people he had met since he was a small boy. He introduced himself to everyone in turn, savoring the new names and faces, shaking hands, chattering like a magpie.

  Arlettie worried about their castaway; she asked the captain who served as his shipboard healer. The first mate had a little skill in this area. When he saw the state the young woman was in, the mate had her moved into his own small cabin, where he coated her burns and gave her watered rum to drink. But when he listened with his ear pressed against her chest, his brows fell, and he told Arlettie he thought something had gone wrong with her left lung—something beyond his abilities to heal. They set a galley boy to watch over her and alert them should she come to consciousness.

  While Gilboy followed the sailors around like an eager puppy, Mikil and Arlettie shared a quick repast with the captain, explaining their story of being marooned and relishing the extraordinary tastes of cheese, soda biscuits, and citrus jelly. Mikil wanted to know everything that had happened since he dropped out of world events, but exhaustion caught up with him. Seamaster Bajets graciously offered his stateroom, and the prince readily accepted. Arlettie climbed into linen sheets for the first time in many seasons with a sigh of deep appreciation. Mikil first knelt at the foot of the wooden bed.

  “Lautan the Munificent,” he prayed. “You promised to rescue us and you have done so. We are forever your grateful servants. Please show your mercy too on that injured woman. If your dolphins were carrying her, might her life be precious to you?”

  7

  Femturan

  General Sumroth and the five hundred troops under his command arrived at Ingot, a hamlet that had formerly been a suburb of Femturan, two days after the start of the Conflagration.

  The ten thousand survivors of the fire had swamped the small village. Thousands of people milled about, some injured and all distraught, while exhausted Protectors sat leaning their backs against walls and cushioning their heads in their sooty hands.

  Riding up the road through this chaos, Sumroth turned to his high flamers: “First, establish a chain of command over these troops and get them off their butts. Get the men to triage the wounded and put them in whatever shelter you can find, separate the dead, and—especially—round up the orphans. My tent goes there. Picket the aurochs out of town near the river; requisition that barn over there for supplies.”

  “Yes, sir. Will you be in your tent?”

  “No,” said Sumroth, sliding off his beast. It had taken all his discipline to waste time dispensing these commonsense orders. “No. I have to find my wife.”

  His only thought was to find Zea. He ran through the crowds of survivors shouting her name. Desperate children and women saw his uniform and grabbed at him—he pushed them off. Femturan soldiers and officers saluted and tried to confer with him: “General! How should we—?” “General! Do you have healers?” “Sir, all praise to Pozhar—” Sumroth bulled them all out of his way.

  “Zea! Zee-aa!” He put his hands to his mouth and dashed into the deepest press of people. “Zee-aa!” No answer. He ran toward a cluster of more citizens in a small square; he
banged his sword against his breastplate for silence, and he screamed again, “Zee-aa!” He climbed onto a wagon and shouted. “Zee-aa! Zea, where are you!”

  Faces swarmed around him, but he recognized none of them. If he saw a woman her height, he would grab her shoulders to turn her around, but she was never the one person he wanted to find.

  He began searching the major buildings of Ingot, the tavern, the school, the livery stable. He dashed into Ingot’s modest Worship Citadel, where people too injured to stand lay stretched out on the benches. Women walked among them, trying to nurse them without any medical supplies. General Sumroth stood in the doorway and bellowed, “Zee-aa!”

  A woman halfway down an aisle turned, ran at him, and threw herself at his chest. He clasped her against himself with both arms. “Are you hurt?”

  “No. I escaped unharmed,” Zea answered.

  “All praise to Pozhar,” he whispered. Sumroth held her away from him so he could see for himself. Her sleeping shift showed singe marks, her white hair had turned gray with soot, but arms, shoulders, face, hands, feet, ankles—unmarred. Again he folded her against his body. She shook with emotion; he gathered she’d been through a terrifying ordeal. But she was alive, and that was all that really mattered.

  Once he had seen Zea fed, decently clothed, and resting in his own tent attended by adjutants who understood that their careers (perchance their lives) depended upon their making this woman comfortable, General Sumroth agreed to see the sixth-flamer who had been the highest-ranking officer at the Forge during the Conflagration.

  The brigadier standing at attention outside his tent swayed on his feet. He had burns up and down his arms and a large gash in his scalp. “Sir, I regret to report that we have good reason to believe the Magi all died in the fire,” he said to Sumroth. “The Octagon burned and no one escaped.”

  “Really?” Sumroth was astonished. “Then I’m assuming command here now—over both civilians and military. I’m sure you did the best you could in these circumstances. Get yourself tended and get some sleep. Report when you are fit to stand.”

  Ignoring the people trying to importune them, Sumroth and two fifth-flamers walked a short distance on the Broad Way east of Ingot to survey Femturan itself from a slight hill. The capital city had burnt to its foundations; the obsidian-paved streets wandered past piles of charred ruin. Small orange embers still smoldered in scattered corners. Not a building stood to represent the great metropolis that once stood there. The Octagon, the Bejeweled Gates, the Library of Reverence, the central Citadel of Flames—all gone. The stone city wall had collapsed in several places. The fire had completely destroyed the Forge Army Headquarters outside the wall as well as spread partway into the western valley. Pine trees stood as blackened fingers. Ash covered the ground, and smoke lingered in the air.

  Returning to Ingot, Sumroth soon learned that civilians had died by the hundreds from being trampled, caught in burning structures, or inhaling smoke. Sacrificing themselves, the Femturan Protectors had done their best to save the populace until they too had been overwhelmed by the billowing, black clouds.

  His first orders concentrated on establishing an organized camp and starting the funeral pyres for the dead. Protectors set up tents to shelter the weakest citizens, including the children and the elderly, and medical stations where healers could tend to hurts. They fed the civilians the soldiers’ rations they carried and sent for more supplies from the patrols in the Iron Valley and from Drintoolia. The chaos that had reigned right after the catastrophe began to give way to orderly—if lengthy—lines for information, food, or medical care.

  The next morning Sumroth convened a court of inquiry into the cause of the tragedy. This court was held in a tavern room big enough for the three judges and two dozen of the most important surviving officers and civilians as witnesses. The chairs his soldiers had scrounged together formed a motley assortment, and the table he sat behind wobbled, but in such a situation these rough surroundings hardly registered.

  When Sumroth questioned city dwellers they could recount only their own trauma trying to escape the raging flames. However, one officer offered a credible story that three strangers on horseback, followed by birds, had penetrated the city through the Bejeweled Gates. Other seemingly sober figures spoke of birds spreading fire.

  “Birds carrying fiery brands!” Sumroth shook his head. “I hear you, but I can hardly credit such a notion.”

  “Smithy will vouch for what we say,” said a man who had identified himself as the head of the Obsidian Bank. “He stayed in the thick of the city longer than anyone else. Shall we send for him?”

  Sumroth assented. Smithy, so large and so marked by his deafness, had long been a famous figure in Femturan, a figure Sumroth had known vaguely ever since he and Zea had first arrived. Although he worked as a lowly blacksmith at a forge near the central Citadel, he didn’t carry himself meekly. Sumroth believed he had some ambiguous religious function but he had no title and no other name.

  Watching the burly man now as he strode into the tavern, Sumroth’s first impression was favorable: clearly, here stood neither a sick, loon-headed Magi nor a pewling, fanatical priest. And his bravery spoke in his favor; during the inquiry Sumroth heard again and again that Smithy had dashed back into the fire to single-handedly save many children. Yet Smithy did not carry himself with the arrogance of the late (and to Sumroth, unmourned) Champion Tulsham. Perchance in this strange character, garbed in a leather apron dotted with scorch marks, Sumroth might find a much-needed, and much-longed-for, ally.

  “Smithy, I would like to commend you for your rescues,” Sumroth began. “I hear they were quite remarkable.”

  The dour man had stared closely at his lips. He responded flatly, “I didn’t do them for you. I save children for Pozhar.”

  “No, I’m sure you didn’t, but just the same they showed valor,” Sumroth replied, determined not to take offense at the man’s brusque manner. “Our purpose here is to discover how the fire started. Do you know anything about how all this happened?”

  “A Weir witch penetrated the heart of our capital. With the help of enchanted birds, she brought down a rain of fire.”

  “What!? A Weir witch?” Sumroth was incredulous, and the room broke out in surprised exclamations.

  “How did she invade a guarded city?” Sumroth pressed.

  “She didn’t invade. She was brought into the city as a captive,” Smithy stated.

  Sumroth started. He remembered sending the girl he had captured on the Iron Valley battlefield to Femturan. Surely, that unassuming bitch wasn’t— Could he actually be responsible for this catastrophe? He rubbed the open cut on his chin and shifted in his seat uneasily. Did this strange man know of his role? Might he be about to expose his blunder publicly?

  “What do you know about the birds?” Sumroth asked, changing the subject.

  “They helped the witch. She could command them.” Smithy shrugged.

  “How do you know such things?”

  “I just do.”

  Abruptly, Sumroth stood up. “Gentlemen, thank you for your time,” he said to the assembly. “We can proceed no more today. The air in here is smoky, and I tire of sitting.

  “Will you walk with me to discuss this further?” he asked Smithy.

  Smithy shrugged again as if being invited to converse with an eighth-flamer was the equivalent of being offered ale instead of water.

  Leaving the other attendees of the court of inquiry to discuss the information and reach whatever conclusion they wished, Sumroth walked out. He shooed his orderlies behind, and together he and Smithy strode the perimeter of the survivors’ camp alone. Smithy walked to the side of the general so that he could read his lips when he spoke.

  Soon Sumroth relaxed. If his companion knew that he was the one who had sent the girl into Femturan, he appeared to have no intention of speaking of it. The general couldn’t figure out what Smithy’s role had been in Femturan or how he came by the knowledge he possesse
d. But he quickly discerned that the man’s priorities did not lie in self-advancement—all his concerns were for their countrymen.

  As they discussed immediate survival, the general asked, “What do you see as the biggest issue?”

  “Food,” said Smithy.

  “Aye,” said Sumroth, rubbing his chin. “That’s been the problem for years. The granaries and storehouses are the most dire of our losses, worse than the historic buildings. All that work to send food here from the Free States, only to have it all burn to cinders!”

  He kicked a rock on the ground in front of him to vent his frustration. Smithy said nothing.

  “I have been thinking,” Sumroth continued, “since we have no food stores for the people, we must take these people to food.”

  “Where?” asked Smithy.

  “Alpetar. I marched through it years ago. The Alpies are cowards, and unlike Melladrin, their land is rich and fertile. I would lead these Femturans through the Trade Corridor and settle them in the flatlands of Alpetar.”

  “Occupy Alpetar? Farm there?” Smithy sounded reluctant, as much as his limited vocal range could express.

  “Aye. If we had tried this in earlier decades, perchance there would have been an international outcry, but I think we can count on our enemy’s quiescence now. We may not wish to settle in an alien country, but we must stay until we can lift the plagues that poison our land. Do you know how we can get out from under this curse, Smithy?”

  “Kill the witch’s spawn.”

  “How do you know that will do it?”

  “It will avenge the Initial Crime.”

  “The Initial Crime?”

  “Aye. When Weirs killed Oro immigrants for worshipping Pozhar.”