Flame's Shadow

by Anna Eluvae

  "I've heard that the kingdom of Lethant has an eligible princess," said Aviare.

  "They say that birds take on the character of whatever they eat," said the man. He had an angular face that Ros recognized from the coins. She felt a thrill go through her when she realized that he must be the king. Her father hated the king, but her father hated lots of people. "The strawberries are in season as of late. Do you think that perhaps you might be able to feed some quail on fruits? Strawberry quail with a honey glaze, I think that sounds delightful, don't you?"

  "I will see what I can do," said Aviare. "I'll speak with your chef about what sorts of flavors might pair well with that; a quail can't live on strawberries alone, not for terribly long at any rate. Just as a man cannot live on a diet of books, yes? There is a primal need for companionship."

  "I have companions," complained the king. "And I have interests other than books, it's just that the real world pales in comparison to the stories. None of the illustrati I know hold a candle to the greats of old. I often think we're in the waning days of the world. It fills me with such melancholy."

  "I was speaking of female companionship," said Aviare.

  "Well, I have you, don't I?" the king asked brightly.

  "I'm not speaking of mere friendship," said Aviare. Her mouth twisted into a strained smile. "I'm speaking of marriage."

  "I'm not daft," said the king. "I simply don't wish to discuss it. A man must be allowed to mourn one wife before he goes seeking out the next."

  "It's been four years," began Aviare. But at that moment the king went stiff, whatever interest he'd had in the conversation erased completely. His eyes were on Ros. She had been following along behind, listening in on their conversation, but they had slowed down and she had gotten too close.

  "Well hello," said the king. He turned to Aviare, though his eyes didn't leave Ros. "Look at this little angel."

  When he approached her, Ros tried to run. She was stopped by a firm hand around her upper arm from a man who she only belatedly realized must have been one of the king's men.

  "I long for the innocence of childhood," said the king. He crouched down so that he was on Ros' level. "Days of wandering without a care in the world. Do you know who I am girl?"

  "The king," said Ros. Her arm was still being held tight.

  "Such a pretty voice," said the king.

  "We shouldn't dally," said Aviare.

  "No," said the king. There was something foreign in his eyes. "No, I suppose that we shouldn't."

  That might have been the end of it, in some other world. It would only be a chance encounter with royalty, the sort of thing that Ros might have told her friends about later on. She would learn enough to know that the king's advisers would have tried to talk him out of bringing her into the castle. She would also come to know the king well enough to know that he couldn't be dissuaded from his flights of fancy. Her father was given a small sum of money for her, a bride price that amounted to a purchase. In the stories they would tell later it was forty drams, but in truth Nemm never learned what price she fetched. Two weeks after they'd briefly met in the market, Ros was engaged to the King of Geswein. He adored her in a way that caused no small amount of uneasiness. The only part of her that didn't meet with his approval was her name; once her domain was known, the bards picked something more appropriate. She was called Nemm, a corruption of the Merrkian word for glass. No one used her given name after that, to the point where she sometimes forgot what she'd once been called.

  She never saw her father again.

  * * *

  Nemm had just finished a dinner party that was more bearable than most. Her husband had taken ill earlier in the day, which meant that she didn't have to worry about what it was going through his mind. He had been both distant and jealous, which amounted to word coming to her through her ladies-in-waiting that certain men were no longer to be seated next to her during meals. A courtier had been sent away on a trip to the colonies as well, which had apparently happened because he had smiled at Nemm when the king was around to see it. The king's absence at the party was more than welcome. Nemm could demure when dessert came without worrying about what the king might say afterward. She could speak with whomever she liked, with the only worry being that someone would talk about it later.

  She was laying in her bed, thinking about chocolates, when the king's adviser came storming into her room.

  "Are you a virgin?" he asked.

  "What an exceptionally rude and —" Nemm began. She was still in her blue and purple dress, waiting on the maids to come and help her out of it.

  "Was the marriage ever consummated?" asked the adviser. "We know that you share separate rooms."

  "You may leave right now," said Nemm. "If you do so, I will be kind when I report this incident to my husband. I am willing to ascribe this to a sickness rather than some fault of your character, should you respect the sanctity of my room and depart at once."

  "The king is dead," said the adviser.

  "Dead?" asked Nemm. "But I saw him this morning." She felt faint but tried to keep her head about her. The corset she was wearing didn't help matters.

  "He suffered the stroke of God's hand," said the adviser. "Queen Nemm, you are now sovereign ruler of this kingdom, but I must know whether you are a virgin or not. They have been rumors one way or another from the day the marriage was announced. Was the marriage consummated? Or failing that, did you seek the comforts of a man outside the marriage?"

  "I …" Nemm paused, trying to fight down years of training in proper etiquette. "We did," she lied. "Only twice. He didn't favor it."

  "Do not mention that," said the adviser with a shake of his head. "They will ask for an inspection of your maidenhood, to ensure that you are telling the truth, there's little chance that we can get around suffering that indignity." He paused slightly. "Is there some man who has caught your eye in recent weeks, some man who might get you with child so that a bastard —"

  "That is quite enough," said Nemm. "I have tolerated your improper questions as long as I was able, but if my husband is truly dead then I am, as you say, the sovereign queen. I am certain that there are things which must be done, but I will not submit to any such examination, nor will I entertain the notion of, of, laying with a man out of wedlock and so soon after the death of my beloved husband."

  "You foolish girl," said the adviser. His face had fallen. "They are coming to oust you. You need every scrap of legitimacy that you can gather up, no matter the cost in dignity and lies. A sixteen-year-old girl sitting the throne would be bad enough if there were a regency council in place, bad enough if you were queen by blood instead of marriage, bad enough if you had a child by the king, bad enough if anyone liked you, bad enough if these were times of peace and plenty without enemies arrayed all around you — but I must tell you that you have precious few advantages to grasp onto here."

  "Very well," said Nemm. She adjusted her dress; it seemed as though it would be some time before she was allowed to take it off. "If the situation is dire, we will meet it head on. My beloved husband lays dead. Let us prepare to continue the royal line."

  Nemm fought hard for her kingdom. She endured an endless series of meetings, trying not to despair at the mess the king had left behind. There were debts that couldn't be paid and would have to be put off somehow. There were alliances that would need to be honored despite the sorry state of Geswein's military. The state of her maidenhead was inspected by a physician, a humiliation far greater than she had supposed it would be. Yet it wasn't enough; two weeks after the king's funeral, Nemm found herself spirited away in the middle of the night, no longer the queen, only queen-in-exile.

  * * *

  Nemm stood in the cool air of Abalon, letting the breeze touch her naked skin. One of the vaunted Hundred Nobles lay in his bed, watching her. He had told her over and over how beautiful she was, as many of them did. Perhaps he had thought that was the most significant thing about her. Few of the nobles seemed to care that
she was queen-in-exile of a large kingdom. Few seemed to care that the stories of her youth and her recent departure had made her one of the most powerful illustrati in the region. Nemm was stronger than the man she'd slept with, even though he was a minor illustrati himself. She could have pinned him to the bed and had her way with him, rather than the other way around. Either way, the pleasure was fleeting. It was the familiar rhythm of hunter and hunted that she enjoyed; the act of coitus was almost secondary to that, though it was always easier to remember that after the fact.

  "What are you going to do when you're done in Abalon?" asked the man. His name was Calrus, but Nemm had already decided that she would pretend to have forgotten it.

  "Done in Abalon?" she asked. She didn't look to where he was laying, only stared out the open window.

  "You're burning bridges left and right," he replied. "Not an uncommon strategy when an illustrati is looking to move on in the near future. People remember a burnt bridge. Especially if the bridge was beautiful."

  "That's a terrible metaphor," said Nemm. "Unless you're saying that the relationships I've ruined were what was beautiful and I'm nothing but an arsonist."

  "You're a beautiful arsonist," said Calrus. "But so much more than that. Did you know, when I met you I hadn't expected so many layers to you? They'd said you were a creature of appetites. A hungry bear foraging around in the woods."

  "A beautiful bear?" asked Nemm with half a smile that Calrus wouldn't be able to see.

  "But you're not bear," said Calrus. "You're quite austere. You take small bites at the dinner table. You refuse both mead and cake. Mead I could understand, if you were with child —"

  "Is that the rumor these days?" asked Nemm.

  "It has been floated," said Calrus. "A young woman with wanton urges and a distaste for lambskin will not long remain so slender."

  "It's not lambskin," said Nemm. "It's lamb intestine. If anyone should ask, let them know that I am perfectly unencumbered."

  The truth was that she had been expecting a pregnancy for months. It wasn't exactly that she wanted a child, but she had some vague sense that it would give her a purpose that was sorely lacking. Nemm was dependent on the kindness of the nobility for the time being; she floated from one house to another as her hosts extracted stories and gossip from her. Her hopes of getting her kingdom back had evaporated within her first month in Abalon. She was rudderless. A child might have changed that and given her something worth fighting for. As it was, there was no grand purpose in her life, no challenge set before her. For all her so-called wanton urges, no child had been forthcoming, and Nemm had begun to suspect that she would never be a mother.

  "So back to my original question," said Calrus. "What are you going to do when you leave Abalon?"

  Nemm's life had first been dominated by her father and then by her husband. Now she was as free as she would ever be. "I don't know," she replied. "I think I might make a name for myself."

  Calrus had laughed, as though it had been a joke.

  * * *

  Lexari had gone insane, or perhaps he had been insane all along. Nemm had liked it better when the search for the Harbinger artifacts was only a flight of fancy, a framing device for their travels. Secret, forbidden knowledge was a perfectly fine thing to pin a story on, so long as it was like the Numifex, an object whose purpose didn't really matter except to give motivation to the story's characters. Now Lexari had found his Numifex; he was cradling it in his hands like a proud father holding his newborn child. Dravus was the first to have his power taken, whether it was justified or not. He was almost certainly not going to be the last.

  Nemm had thought about the best way to fight Lexari. That was only natural; they were sparring partners often enough. His spear would pass right through her glass armor, which meant that she would have to fight from a distance, something that her domain had never lent itself to. Armor of light was weaker than steel, but it would be impossible to rip off and have no chinks in which to sink her daggers. It wasn't hopeless — no fight was ever hopeless — but it would be very difficult. Nemm would have bet against herself, if the dead could collect winnings. She'd thought all that before Lexari had acquired the domain of shadow. On top of that, Wenaru would almost certainly intervene. That was an entirely different matter, one she'd given quite a bit more thought to; it wasn't quite so hopeless, if she could make her armor so thick that she could barely move in it. Regardless, this was not the time nor place.

  Nemm had seen Gallieae coming up the path right when Lexari had begun talking about power falling into the wrong hands. She'd held her tongue. If Lexari had come up behind her and seen the same wandering figure, she would have given him a nonchalant remark about what the plan was, feigning boredom. Until then, she would have to hope that Gallieae would turn back, or if he continued on, that he would be wise enough to ask them questions before trying to start a fight. Gallieae was a decent man and the domain of air was one that lacked in offensive potential. Nemm would try to fight defensively against him if it came to that. If he didn't listen to their explanations, they would have to kill him. Gallieae tended towards reason though.

  But when Lexari took Dravus's power, as though it were nothing, Nemm began to feel a cold trickle of fear. Lexari had brushed off Lothaire's insinuations. He often did that when unpleasant subjects reared their head. How much loyalty did Lexari really have to her though? Lothaire's final words hung in her head. Has Lexari told you about your father? Nemm hadn't seen her father in twenty years. Wenaru had acted instantly to silence Lothaire the moment the subject had come up. Everything else that Lothaire had said was true in one way or another.

  "Spoils of war," said Lexari.

  "This was no war," replied Nemm. She listened to his justifications, trying not to feel queasy. The artifact had been frightening in the abstract before. Now it provoked something more. It was one thing to hear Dravus say that Hartwain had been stripped of her power and another to see the same thing happen so easily to Dravus. Nemm watched the supernatural confidence with which Lexari held the artifact. She couldn't imagine being so foolhardy as to stick her hand inside its maw after seeing Dravus's shadow armor pop like a bubble. When Lexari was done speaking, Nemm answered in kind, giving voice to her part of the pattern that Lexari had started. It was easy and natural to frame Dravus as the young apprentice seeking to surpass his master, no matter what the cost.

  When Lexari moved to kill Dravus, it was too much.

  "Wait," she said, before a plan had even formed. "Let me do it."

  If she could have gotten Lexari and Wenaru to leave the room, to give them privacy, perhaps there might have been something that Nemm could have done. She might have simply been able to say that she had killed him while leaving him in some other place that she could retrieve him from later. Without a skilled illustrati of flesh to knit his muscles back together, Dravus would never walk again, but there were other illustrati, if Nemm could find a way to move him. Lexari was having none of it though.

  "Give me a moment to grieve," said Nemm.

  "I'm afraid there is much to be done yet this day," said Lexari. He frowned slightly. It was the sort of frown that she had seen many times before. It was the frown that Lexari gave when the story had started to take a turn he did not like.

  "All the same," replied Nemm.

  "I'll be here to comfort you, should you need it," replied Lexari. "You make take a moment to do what you believe needs to be done."

  There had been nothing for it but to throw Dravus off the balcony. It was a drop of more than a hundred feet, not quite the incredible drop they'd done from the Ministry of Legends the day before, but not something that an ordinary man could expect to survive. Gallieae was down below, but not expecting to have to catch a falling man. What she was about to do was almost certainly the murder of a man who was, if not an innocent, then at least someone she'd confided in. Dravus had known her, past the surfaces and facets she presented to the world. They might have become true friends, gi
ven time.

  Nemm blunted her daggers before the moment of impact, leaving the tip just sharp enough to cut into the flesh of the abdomen. In all her years of traveling, she'd never had cause to pretend to stab someone. It was almost like pulling a punch, something that she'd never been terribly good at. She made three quick cuts, enough to bleed and look suitably brutal, then kicked Dravus in the chest, sending him sailing over the edge. She turned away before she could see the result.

  She had never been religious when she was a young girl. After her early marriage, she had learned the words and rituals, but her tutors were far more concerned with making sure that everything was correct and proper than instilling in her any sense of respect for gods. Later, when she had traveled the world, she saw too many religions preaching too many things; at the center of almost all of them was some monolithic figure who had claimed to speak with — or in some cases, be a physical manifestation of — a god. Praying was just a way of expressing hope; it didn't actually do anything. Yet after Nemm had sent Dravus over the edge, she said a small prayer all the same.