by Patty Jansen
Milleus finished talking and a good number of bystanders cheered, before moving back to packing their tents.
Milleus, Jevaithi and Isandor went to do the same. Milleus put his jacket back on and changed back into a farmer.
Isandor rolled up the tent. Milleus rounded up the goats, chased them up the ramp onto the trailer. Jevaithi packed away the dishes.
When Isandor carried the tent to the van, he found Mileus leaning on the trailer’s railing, scratching goats between their ears. He looked deep in thought.
“I thought, Milleus, when you were talking to those people. I thought you said that really well.”
Milleus sighed. “Yes,” he said, patting a goat’s furry back. “I think they liked it. That’s the trouble.”
He stood silently for a while. No, he wasn’t going to say anything; Isandor would have to ask.
“Milleus?”
“Yes.”
“Were you ever an important person, when you were younger?”
“Don’t know that you’d call it important.”
Guess that meant yes.
“What happened?”
“It doesn’t matter. What happened was that for all the work I did and the lives I saved, I wasn’t wanted. I was discarded. That’s when I went to the farm, and I wanted to ignore people. I guess . . .” He shrugged, and fiddled with something in his pocket that sounded like paper. He blew out a heavy breath. “That time can never come back. I made mistakes, bad ones. I can never take those back, either.” He lifted his head and met Isandor’s eyes with his clouded brown ones. “I want you to remember, if you have a passion, and you believe you can make life better for everyone, don’t wait until someone comes to ask you to fix it. Because by that time, it’s too late.”
By the skylights, fleeing the City of Glass had been the biggest mistake he made in his life. Taking Jevaithi, handing the power to the Knights, who only abused it, who seemed to have used it to unleash the biggest disaster the City of Glass had ever seen. They’d been looking for a reason to kill the Queen, and he’d just given it to them. And they were now doing something that could be felt even in Chevakia.
“I know,” Isandor said, the truth on the tip of his tongue. Nila is Jevaithi, the Queen of the City of Glass. He felt like he wanted to say it, because he was sick of hiding.
“You can’t know. You are what you are, Isandor. What have you been, other than a teenager who ran off with his girlfriend?”
Actually . . .
Isandor hesitated, but the moment for confession slipped.
Chapter 27
* * *
SOMEWHERE IN a place between life and death, there was a voice that said, “Tandor.”
It was a female voice, and one he knew well.
He turned around on the chair; his head was the only part of him he could move.
She was coming into the room behind him, a mere ghost of a form, barely visible. Everything about her was white, from her dress—which he recognised and definitely wasn’t white in real life—to her hair to her hands.
“Tandor, some Chevakian soldiers just came to the door. They wanted me to come and speak to a large group of refugees that are at the station. Apparently, these people have fled a large explosion and destruction in the City of Glass. I thought your stupidity had harmed only you, but now it seems you have taken down the entire country with you. Why did that happen?”
“I don’t know, mother.” He’d done all the calculations, and should have been able to control the Heart with all his children there. Why had it possessed them? Why had icefire taken their corporeal beings and turned them into evil beings of light? Why had Ruko stopped listening to him?
He added, “Because the Knights meddled with things they did not understand.”
“You should have seen what they were doing. Compensated for it.”
“I couldn’t!” Without his children, he hadn’t even been able to get into the palace until it was already too late.
“I am not happy,” she said. “You are stupid and incompetent.”
Ruko laughed somewhere in the room. “I’ve always said that.”
Lady Armaine gave him an irritated glance. “You have destroyed everything we have worked for all these years. Now I have Chevakians accusing me, and if I were to show my face amongst those refugees, they would surely rip me to pieces. Tandor, these people were meant to see the splendour of what can be done with icefire, not its deathly force.”
Tandor wanted to say, Maybe you cannot have one without the other, but he kept it to himself.
“If you’d only used your brain, we could have won already. We would have been on our way to show the people the glories of the past, show them how the Knights repressed all that was wonderful in our land. Because of you, people will now be saying that the Knights were right in trying to stifle icefire, that it has to be used for evil. And as we all know, it does not.”
“I couldn’t—”
“You have caused this to happen, son.”
“But it wasn’t possible . . .” He thought of that moment when he’d stood there watching the enchanted children walk from their prison towards the Heart. He’d yelled at them to listen, but they couldn’t. He’d known what the Knights had done, and he had been unable to do the only thing that could have averted the explosion: kill them. He couldn’t kill the children. He cared too much for them. Because it was too dangerous to show affection for his own two children, he cared for the ones he had saved.
“You’re the biggest failure of my life. I don’t understand how the Thilleian royal family could have birthed such a weakling. All the conditions were right for us to take over. People loved Jevaithi, people hated the Knights. We had support from the Brotherhood. Think of it, Tandor, the biggest and richest independent organisation in the entire world. Not just in the City of Glass, but I’ve worked hard for their support right here in Tiverius. And what can they do now? What can we tell them? They cannot continue to defend the good of icefire when people start to die. The Knights have arrived in Tiverius. The doga will trust them, because we cannot give them anything positive. It’s all your fault, Tandor. We spent years planning this. There will not be another chance.”
Tandor had nothing to say to that. She was wrong. It was not his fault, and he was sick of her continuous taunts. But, unless he was released from this in-between world, there was nothing he could do about it.
“I think we’ll take over from here. We are lucky that at least the hybrid child is safe. We must have the child, Tandor. If you cannot control its mother, we will be forced to send someone who can.”
“She is Pirosian. You can use all the icefire in the world on her, and it won’t have any effect.” He felt victorious saying that.
Dear Loriane, good, down-to-earth, Pirosian Loriane, the Pirosian princess his mother’s minions had exchanged for the baby Maraithe. He saw her smiling face, the crinkling skin around her eyes and his incorporeal body flooded with warmth. He’d loved Maraithe, of sorts, out of duty to his family. He’d been young and at that age, any beautiful woman would have captivated him. Loriane was different. She was neither pretty nor impressionable, but for that, she owned his heart.
“There are ways to control Pirosians that don’t involve icefire.”
“Don’t you dare touch her, mother!”
She laughed. “You are giving me orders?”
“She is innocent. She doesn’t know anything.”
“Ah, I think we’ve found your soft spot. Keep an eye on this lady, Ruko.”
“As you wish, mistress.”
“No, Ruko, listen to me. You’re my servitor. Keep your hands off Loriane!”
But Ruko approached him from behind, and the cold of his touch froze his movements. He ret
urned to the crowded platform amongst the press of people. He was on the ground and Ruko was holding his head in his lap, stroking the ravaged skin on his forehead. What a mock gesture. The very person who kept him imprisoned. Tandor wanted to scream but the icefire that flowed from Ruko’s fingers made his muscles stiff.
Chapter 28
* * *
LORIANE SAT DAZED, crammed on the platform amongst the press of stinking bodies. The Chevakian leader had come and gone. He had spoken with some of the soldiers, gesturing as if telling them what to do. He had gone upstairs, where she could still see him through a window. He took off the helmet that made him look like a bug. Underneath, his hair was curly, short and greying at the temples. Loriane liked his face; he looked like someone who would care.
But now he was gone, and one of the Chevakian soldiers yelled, and some semblance of quiet fell in the crowded hall. It looked like something was about to happen.
A suited Chevakian came up the stairs in the company of two young men without suits. One was tall and lanky, with long black hair hanging down both sides of a narrow face, the other was broader and shorter, and wore his hair short.
Someone seated close to Loriane muttered, “Who are they? Were they on the train?”
“No way,” someone else said. “They’re too clean.”
“They’re Knights,” someone else said, and someone else made a shushing noise.
“How do they dare to show their faces? The Knights caused this trouble. They should hide in shame,” Dara said, a bit too loud for Loriane’s liking.
Ontane said, “Shut your trap, woman, if you want to survive.”
For once, Loriane agreed with him. Because surely, the Knights had fled the City of Glass on their eagles, and they only had to wait at the end of the train line for all the city’s surviving citizens to show up, and they would look very carefully for supporters of the old king. Who knew how many of the Knights had survived?
“I don’t care who they are. I just hope this means we can get out of here,” Myra said, patting little Beido on his backside.
Beyond her, Ruko cradled Tandor in his lap, his hand stroking the ravaged skin. There was something eerily mechanical about the gesture. Loriane didn’t think Ruko had ever done something like that before. His eyes were distant, focused on the two southerners, and the expression in them chilling.
“Ruko?” Loriane said.
He turned towards her, and she thought she saw a glint of fire in those black eyes, something that said, don’t interrupt. He went back to staring at the two men, one of whom was now clambering on a chair which a Chevakian guard had brought.
“Citizens!” he called out. “Citizens, listen to me.”
There was more grumbling in the audience. Citizens was a word most often used by Knights when speaking to the public.
“I have a message from the Chevakians.”
“When will they let us out of here?” someone at the front yelled.
Someone else added, “We don’t want speeches. We want food!”
People close to Loriane stirred. Someone muttered, “We were hoping to get away from the Knights, not to be bullied by them again.”
A number of people agreed with this, so Loriane couldn’t hear what the man at the front said.
“. . . The Chevakian army is setting up a camp for everyone here. They have food. They have medicines. They will take care of you. Shortly, they will send some vehicles and will need us to divide into groups of about thirty people each so they can be transferred in orderly fashion. Please give consideration to the ill and feeble first, to wounded, elderly, pregnant and the very young. Any of you who have places to go to in this city, relatives or friends they can stay with, let us know. The Chevakian authorities have informed us that resources are stretched and that they will do their best to help us, but the fewer of us need help, the better.”
“Who do you think you are?” a voice sounded from the back of the audience. Everyone turned around.
One of the men who identified himself clearly as Brothers of the Light had risen.
Someone closer to him yelled support.
“We’ve come here all the way to be free of the tyranny wrought upon us by the rulers of the City of Glass. We don’t need the Knights to tell us what to do. Think for yourselves, people, and accept what you think is fair. The Chevakians are providing tents for us, but they don’t know who we are and who our leaders are. This is the chance, do you realise, to get freedom from the dictators who have ruled us for so many years. They . . .” He pointed at the two young Knights, who were making their way towards him. “They want us to obey. They want everything to continue as before. They want us to meekly submit to their regime of secrecy and mis-information. Do you want that? Don’t you, like most of us, think that it is time the Knights came clear about what actually happened back there in the City of Glass? Don’t you think it is time for the people to have a say in how the City of Glass is governed?”
Most of the grumbling had died down. The people were staring at him. Someone at the front yelled, “I don’t care where it comes from, as long as we get food.”
A woman close to Loriane said, “You mean, he thinks there is a chance we’ll be able to go back home?” She was a noblewoman, in her middle age, who had somehow ended up caring for a group of six adolescents who couldn’t possibly all be her children.
Loriane had wondered if Tandor had been the only Thilleian descendant to have collected children with abilities to see and bend icefire. He might have been the most proliferous one, but not the only one. Were they organised through this Brotherhood? She had thought that all they did was collect books and educate orphans.
On her other side, Ontane muttered, “They be quiet, there be trouble, I tell you. If they go ’gainst the Knights—”
The noblewoman turned to him. “Maybe then it’s time to go against the Knights and tell them we won’t stand for this anymore.” Her expression was fierce.
“I agree,” Dara said. Her voice was determined.
“But . . .” Ontane turned to his wife, an astonished expression on his face. “Dear, don’t you think . . .”
“Don’t you ‘dear’ me, husband. You’ve been calling me ‘woman’ all these years, and I’ve had to come with you all the way to Chevakia to see what a selfish coward you really are. Back home, when they came to our door, I wasn’t allowed to give any of our food to these people. We had to hide. We had to get out so they wouldn’t follow us. And you know what? Here we are, surrounded by them anyway. These people are our family. The Knights have ruined the lives of all of us, and I’ll no longer stand for it.”
“Dara!”
Myra stared at her mother, her mouth open.
“The man is right. We should do something, or the Knights will just treat us like they’ve treated us before. They will not speak to the Chevakians on our behalf.”
“And you want to make an example of your family?”
A man in front turned around and said, “Look, I really don’t care about politics right now. I rather hear what the fellow is saying so we can get food.”
Many others agreed with him.
The two Knights were making their way through the audience, but people were deliberately getting in their way.
The man in black still stood there, defiant. He yelled, “Remember, you do not need to do what the Knights tell you to do. This is not the City of Glass. Demand to see the Queen.”
“Yes,” someone yelled. “Where is the Queen?”
“Show us the Queen,” a woman yelled at the Knights. “If she is safe, we’ll believe you.”
“The Queen, we want the Queen.”
Other voices took up the chant. “Jevaithi, Jevaithi.”
The Knights
gave each other a nervous glance.
“Jevaithi, Jevaithi!”
One of them reached for his crossbow. The other put a hand on his arm to stop him.
“Jevaithi, Jevaithi, Jevaithi.”
A couple of refugee men rose, much closer to the Knights. The crowd was chanting so loudly now that Loriane could no longer hear what they said, but the Knights backed away, first slowly, and then faster as the men followed. Under loud jeers and chants, the two disappeared down the stairs.
People cheered, including Dara, who rose and jumped around with the noblewoman and her six foster children.
It took a while for the crowd to calm down, but eventually, some Chevakians in suits came up the stairs and moved onto the platform. They pointed and waved, stepped over legs and luggage, and picked people out of the crowd and helped them towards the front. A couple of people with injuries, a few elderly nobles, all dirty and dishevelled, the young woman Loriane had seen on the train who was also pregnant. Many people needed to be carried.
“Get out of the way,” someone yelled. “They’re taking out the people most in need.”
People shuffled aside so that the Chevakians could walk between them.
“You go sit at the front with the sorcerer, Mistress Loriane,” Ontane said, while pushing Loriane in the back.
Soon enough, a soldier approached the area where Loriane and Ontane and the family sat.
He took one look at Tandor and flinched.
He said something, which sounded funny inside the suit, and beckoned forward.
Ruko rose, and picked up Tandor.
Ontane rose as well.
Dara hissed at him, “It be jus’ the injured they want. Can’t see anything wrong with you.”
Ontane pointed. “The others are bringing their families.”
That was true.
“We’re not family,” Myra said.
“He be my brother,” Ontane said.
