Unclean

by A. M. Manay

  She concentrated on taking out the wizard knights. They presented the greatest danger and were easy to pick out of the crowd as they fought on horseback. She smashed one magical shield after another, knowing that without them, the knights’ own wards would soon fail. Most knights rely overmuch on protection forged by others. They focus too much on attack rather than defense. Shiloh remembered the words of Edmun’s instruction, heard his voice ringing through her head as she strengthened her own protections.

  A few of the birds tumbled, broken by curses from the ground, but most Shiloh directed back aloft to make another pass. Shiloh was grateful to soar so far above the fighting and the dying, and she was ashamed of her relief.

  She was tempted to seek out Lord Blackmine himself, but Silas had impressed upon her the importance of not getting too far ahead of their lines, lest she be knocked from the sky and captured. “We can't let them take the queen, Shiloh,” he had insisted.

  “The queen.” Will those words ever feel like they aren't nonsense?

  The birds, on the other hand, could venture as far ahead of her as she could see them. With them, she sewed panic behind the front lines. Many of the hexes she chose to send through them were incapacitating rather than fatal. She was hoping to recruit as many of the survivors as possible. Feralfolk usually took no prisoners, but Keegan had agreed to make an exception in this case.

  As Blackmine’s men turned to run, fighting their own officers in their desperation to escape, she used the birds to hamper their retreat, penning them in between the narrow pass and the Feral army below. Blackmine struggled to keep his horse from throwing him as pandemonium enveloped the rear guard.

  Sooner than she could have dreamed possible, white flags rose to replace the standards next to Lord Blackmine, who had removed his helmet in surrender. His fury was obvious enough that Shiloh could see it from high above the fray.

  Those of Blackmine’s men who were still on their feet, upon seeing the white banner, dropped their weapons into the grass and knelt beside them. Danger seeming past, Shiloh turned her attention to looking for her husband. Her heart began to slow its pounding only after she had picked him out of the crowd, aided by the pink plume on his helmet.

  The whole ordeal had lasted a mere hour.

  She descended. A wide circle opened in the crowd beneath her. No one wished to get too close, it seemed. Her birds, still hovering, sentry-like, around the edges of the battlefield, landed as well, becoming nothing more than statues perched in the dirt.

  Shiloh stood up in her saddle and pointed her wand up to the sky, sending three bursts of pink light up to the clouds in celebration of their victory. The Feralfolk cheered and stomped the curse-blackened ground. Blackmine’s men merely stared in fear and shock.

  Mosspeak stepped forward and offered her a hand down from her unusual mount. “Your Grace, my congratulations,” he greeted her.

  “My lord,” she replied with a grin. She pulled off her helmet, revealing the sweat-darkened hair plastered to her head.

  “Casualties?”

  “Very few of ours, Your Grace. Our injured are already being transported to the hospital tents,” Mosspeak reported.

  “And their wounded?” she asked.

  “I will have them carried next, Your Grace,” he assured her. “Lord Northgate has gone to disarm Lord Blackmine, that you may accept his surrender, and Chief Keegan will supervise the movement of the common prisoners into the stockade. If you will come with me this way . . .”

  Surrounded by guards, Shiloh followed Mosspeak through the crowd of kneeling prisoners.

  “Wait,” she ordered, holding up a hand.

  She had spotted a young boy lying in another’s lap, his chest soaked with blood but still rising and falling with labored breath. She picked her way through the kneeling men, ignoring the protests rising behind her. She knelt next to the boy to examine his wound. The dead, black land was hard beneath her knees. The young man cradling the fallen soldier pressed his own shirt against the injury, trying to stop the flow of blood.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “He took a beak right to the chest . . . one of those metal birds,” his companion explained. Shiloh’s heart beat in her throat at his words.

  Gently, she pulled his hands away, pointed her wand, and began to hum. “That should hold him until the stretchers come,” she assured the friend a long minute later. “You keep him warm, all right?”

  Mosspeak pulled her to her feet, and herded her back to the task at hand. They arrived to find Blackmine and two of his sons staring daggers at Silas, who smiled with a dangerously pleasant expression. The third son mumbled prayers under his breath.

  “If you think I’m going to bend the knee to some filthy, hexborn piece of Teethtrash, you have another thing coming,” Blackmine shrieked. “You fight alongside Feralfolk again? I knew Rischar was an idiot to trust you, Hatch, you son of a whore!”

  Shiloh laid her hand upon Silas’s arm as he twitched with the obvious desire to smash Blackmine’s face in.

  “Your predecessor lost his head for loyalty to my mother,” Shiloh pointed out. “Do you really want to lose your own for Gerne? Honestly, I don’t really care what you decide. If you don’t want to fight under my banner, well, it’s no great loss to me. You’ve been a sorry excuse for a lord, abusing your folk and lining your pockets. Maybe one of your sons is less useless. If you stay out of my way, my lord, perhaps we’ll have the chance to find out.

  “But if you raise your wand against me one more time, no progeny of yours will have so much as a star to his name, I assure you. I’d also advise you to keep a civil tongue in your head, as I am the only thing standing between you and some very angry Feralfolk. Not to mention Lord Northgate, here, who is probably meaner than all of them put together.”

  Blackmine’s face had turned various shades of purple throughout her speech, only to change abruptly to white when the eldest of his sons fell to his knees, the other two quickly following suit.

  Shiloh smiled. “What intelligent sons you have. Must take after their mother. I knew we could come to an understanding. We shall talk later. Gentlemen.”

  Silas bowed, and several guards led Blackmine and his sons toward some tents that had been erected for them.

  “You should rest, Your Grace. Then, this evening, you can address the prisoners in the stockade,” Silas urged. “You can heal the land after you eat and lie down.”

  She nodded and placed her hand on his sleeve, squeezing his arm in thanks. “Agreed. Get me out of here, please. I’m tired of the smell of blood.”

  Silas let Mosspeak escort Shiloh to her tent, well away from the site of the battle. He wanted to attend to Blackmine’s boys himself.

  “Separate the sons from the father,” he instructed the guards. They took Blackmine off to the side; he railed loudly against Silas until one of the guards knocked him into a tree trunk. Silas followed the sons into a large, comfortable tent.

  “What are you doing with our lord father?” the eldest one demanded.

  “Nothing,” Silas answered. “I simple wished to talk with you without his interference. I fear that today’s insult to his pride may mean that he does not have your best interests at heart. You are Robben, yes? Twenty years old, give or take?”

  The young man nodded. “Yes. Zenn and Jerr, here, are fourteen.”

  The twins eyed Silas with a touch more fear than their elder brother, who mostly looked mortified at their loss.

  “Please, make yourselves comfortable,” Silas urged them. He removed his own helmet and mail, then unbuckled his jacket. He poured four goblets of wine and set them on a low table where fruit, bread, and cheese lay waiting.

  Hesitantly, they followed suit, and they all took seats upon cushions around the table and drank deeply of the cool wine.

  “Lord Redwood isn’t coming for us, is he?” Robben asked.

  “No, he is not,” Silas confirmed.

  “I tried to tell father, Daved’s sweet o
n the fr—” A warning look from Silas made Zenn reconsider his choice of words. “On Her Grace,” he finished begrudgingly.

  Silas smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Lord Redwood knows that his loyalty belongs to Bryn, not to Gerne,” he countered. “He has thus chosen not to participate in treason against the rightful heir.”

  “What happened to Princess Loor, then?” Jerr asked, voice soft. “Did you kill her?”

  Somehow, though their features were nearly identical, Jerr had a gentler look about him than did his twin. Silas recalled that the boy had a reputation for sickliness, kindness, and bookishness that did not make him terribly popular with the rest of the lads at Greenhill, but, evidently, he was braver than his reputation suggested. Silas was only slightly insulted by the fact that the boy thought him capable of child murder. After all, he was planning to trade on his terrible reputation in this very conversation.

  “Esta had her poisoned,” Silas replied. “She feared Westan would leave her for her sister if she failed to produce an heir. We have the written confession of her agent as well as letters in her own hand providing payment, and the witness of Queen Penn, who we would all agree is unimpeachable.”

  “Babe in a bucket!” Robben swore.

  “Indeed. At any rate, let us come to the point. Your father is done. His reaction to the queen just now sealed his fate. If you wish to be Lord Blackmine, my lord Robben, you will pledge fealty to Queen Shiloh and assist us in the liberation of the kingdom, along with Lord Redwood, Lord Mosspeak, and their men,” Silas informed them.

  “I can’t betray my father,” Robben protested. It didn’t sound much like his heart was in it.

  “I’m not asking you to kill him, for the Elder’s sake,” Silas countered. “He can live in a fine house with your lovely mother the rest of his days, as long as he keeps his nose clean. But if I hear a whiff of scheming or treason, he dies either on the block or with a knife between his ribs.”

  Robben hesitated.

  “You can accept the queen’s generosity, or we can exile the lot of you to Gerne. And I don’t think your mother could survive such a journey, do you? With her weak lungs and her having just survived surgery for a growth in her abdomen?” Robben’s face darkened. “Her Grace may be too good to make unseemly threats, but I am not,” Silas assured him.

  “Even I, however, would prefer to focus on the positive,” Silas continued, “on the opportunity you have before you. The queen intends to lift up the Teeth, her home province, so that your lands may be the equal of the others in wealth and in strength. You can be the lord who stands beside her as she does so, who reaps the benefits, in gold and in power, of her investment in the mountains. Or you can be an impoverished exile. It’s your choice. And then there is the fact that the queen will be in need of an heir. She’ll have to adopt one. That presents another opportunity for families who make their loyalties known by word and deed.”

  “While you make yourself king?” Robben demanded.

  Silas smiled slowly. “Certainly not. The queen has no intention of elevating my station. Given my low birth, well, it would be quite improper. I’m sure you would concur. Her Grace will reign alone. Besides, my qualities are not particularly regal, and they are better employed in service to the throne rather than sitting upon it.

  “After all . . . every queen needs her hatchet. Don’t you think?”

  They had erected a little stage for Shiloh but hadn’t had time for steps. Silas knelt and offered a knee, and she stepped up onto the platform, which was surrounded by the meanest looking guards Keegan could come up with. She wore the clothes of the Citizens of the Teeth: leggings, knee skirt, tunic, and hair covering, all in purple. She wanted them to remember that she was one of them in spite of the ways she wasn’t.

  “I know you were conscripted,” she began, her voice ringing out. “That is why I was able to persuade the Freefolk not to slaughter you for threatening their homeplace. Now you have a choice to make. You can run home to your villages and await the boot of Gerne to be planted more firmly upon your necks, wait for the ruinous taxes that Westan will levy, that will take the food from the mouths of your children. Or you can fight with me and drive the Gernish into the Cold Sea and back to their own land. You can fight with me and put me on the throne that should have been my mother’s. You see that I did not try to take it while Rischar’s heirs remained. I did not seek it out until Bryn had no other choice. I did not court war for my own gain.”

  “Unclean!” someone screamed back in the crowd.

  “Yes,” she confessed. “I wear the purple. I do not try to hide what the church claims I am. I am not ashamed of being hexborn and Unclean any more than I am of being Teethtrash like you. So, yes, they call me Unclean. They call me Godkiller, too, for fighting back against the Patriarch and his vile order of torturers and rapists. They took some of your children, too, did they not? Your sick of mind, your freethinkers? Some of your prettiest girls as offerings to his lust, all never to be seen again? But the ones who saw me fight back that day at the Citadel, who saw me free the innocent and heal all the Deadlands in one go, they don’t call me such things, do they? They call me ‘Reverend Mother.’”

  Murmurs swept through the crowd.

  “And the common folk of the Frontier, what did they call me, after I healed their fever, after I turned back the Gernish raiders who sought to steal their women and their livestock? They called me ‘my lady,’ even though I’m filthy, hexborn Teethtrash from Smoke Valley.

  “Do you want to know why there are so many of you locked up in here? Because I tried my best not to kill you, though you marched here to help Gerne murder me. I tried my best to protect you from Lord Blackmine’s mistakes because I am your queen and your sister, not your enemy.”

  “She saved me brother!” someone cried. “After the battle, she saved me wounded brother with ‘er own wand! She dinnae have ta do that!”

  Shiloh smiled, her teeth bright white in the moonlight. “So, you decide. You decide if you’d have one of your own in Greenhill Palace, or if you’d rather run home and be slaves to Gerne the rest of your days. You have until tomorrow to make up your minds. While you do that, I’m going to go heal the land we killed today.”

  A silence fell over the crowd. Silas helped her down from the platform, and she walked through the gates of the stockade. Behind her, she heard voices begin to rise.

  “Long live the queen! Long live the queen!”

  She allowed herself a sigh of relief.

  Songs and Stories

  “How was your war?” Silas asked Jonn, passing him a drink. He’d been back at Greenhill several months, and their friendship had picked back up right where it had left off.

  “I spent it in Rischar’s hospital tents throwing countercurses, brewing potions, doing amputations, cutting people open, sealing them back up. It was gruesome, but I was in no danger, and I learned a lot,” Jonn replied. “What about you? How was your war, before you ended it?”

  Silas shook his head. “You saved people. I killed people. And I helped Edmun with all sorts of nefarious things. It was ugly.”

  Jonn bent in and whispered, “Were you really working for Mirin and Rischar the whole time?”

  Silas knew he should lie, or refuse to answer. Someone could have put Jonn up to it, someone like Fenroh, who’d love to get rid of him. But the loneliness of the secret was more than he could bear.

  Silas shook his head and looked away.

  “Then why did you kill Alissa?” Jonn asked, his voice gentle.

  Silas thought of the baby he had saved. That would be one secret too far. “She was never going to stop. Even Edmun admitted that, after.”

  “He knew it was you that slew her?” Jonn asked.

  Silas nodded. “He’s the one who cut off her head and told me to bring it to Rischar, so I could have a future here.”

  “Father on a ferry,” Jonn swore. “You still keep in touch with the old man? I heard a rumor he’s up in the Teeth someplace.
”

  “No, I haven’t heard from him. I don’t know if I ever will,” Silas answered. He felt a pang and hoped that one day they might meet again.

  I wonder if the baby is still alive.

  Shiloh trembled with fatigue as she crawled into her bed. She had barely managed to take off her boots.

  Keegan had gifted her his own campaign tent, desiring that she be housed in a manner befitting her new position. It was quite a long way back to her apartment in the Great Cliff, and there would be no time to waste before departing in the morning to traverse the pass. This tent would be her home until they took Greenhill Palace, which Shiloh found strange to contemplate.

  Thick rugs imported from Vreeland covered the ground, and heavy blankets on the bed kept out the breeze of the mountain evening. A proper prayer cupboard, borrowed from Gret, sat near a camp stove. Her portable altar lay beneath her pillow. A table covered with maps and pages of notes stood opposite the bed. Shiloh could still smell the pipe smoke that had hung over the meeting held the night before.

  Most of the Feralfolk who had fought that morning would remain behind in Freehold, as they did not feel any obligation to fight to put Shiloh onto a throne they despised, but a few had chosen to accompany her, Barr and Keegan among them. Henrik, too, was to come along. Silas and Keegan wanted to keep him in sight, and possibly to use him to mislead Fenroh.

  Their hope was that Westan and Fenroh would believe that the men about to descend from the Teeth had succeeded in their mission. Daved was to send a message to Westan that Silas had been killed, Loor rescued, and Shiloh captured. He even had a prison carriage for show. Penn had offered to sit inside it to support the deception; Hana had colored her hair blazing pink.

  They had to hope that no agents on Westan or Fenroh’s payrolls would realize the truth and slip away to communicate it. Of course, all of Lord Blackmine’s men had seen Shiloh, so keeping the truth from them, as they hoped to do with Daved’s men, was impossible. To that end, the few surviving Gernishman had been rounded up and stripped of their uniforms to be marched down the Teeth in chains. Every trusted Brynish officer was to keep a close eye on his men in search of moles. Every man had been searched for mirrors, pen, and paper.