by Terry Brooks
Wiping her hands on her skirt, Clare walked away. She was late for another meeting.
“What is the pattern?” Gerald asked. And no one answered. They were down to four.
Ildie had tried to cause a scandal by prompting a divorce between the RLP Premiere and his popular wife. No matter how similar attempts had failed before. “This is different, it’s not causing an affair, it’s destroying one. I can do this,” she had insisted, desperate to prove herself. But the targets couldn’t be forced. She might as well have tried to cause an affair after all. Once again, too direct. Clare could have told her it wouldn’t work. Clare recognized when people were in love. Even Republic Loyalists fell in love.
“What will change this path? We must make this better!”
She stared. “I just built a well.”
Marco smirked. “What’s the use of that?”
Fred tried to summon enthusiasm. They all missed Major even if she was the only one who admitted it. “It’s on the army now, not the government. We remove the high command, destroy their headquarters perhaps—”
Marco said, “What, you think we can make earthquakes?”
“No, we create cracks in the foundation, then simply shift them—”
Clare shook her head. “I was never able to think so big. I wish—”
Fred sighed. “Clare, it’s been two years, can you please—”
“It feels like yesterday,” she said, and couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t been just yesterday, according to the clock her body kept. But she couldn’t trust that instinct. She’d lost hours that felt like minutes, studying dust motes.
“Clare—” Gerald said, admonishing, a guru unhappy with a disciple. The thought made her smile, which he took badly, because she wasn’t looking at him but at something the middle distance, unseen.
He shook his head, disappointment plain. The others stared at her with something like fascination or horror.
“You’ve been tired. Not up to this pressure,” he explained kindly. “It’s all right if you want to rest.”
She didn’t hear the rest of the planning. That was all right; she wasn’t asked to take part.
She took a piece of charcoal from an abandoned campfire. This settlement was smaller than it had been. Twenty fires had once burned here, with iron pots and bubbling stews over them all.
Eight remained. Families ranged farther and farther to find food. Often young boys never came back. They were taken by the army. The well had gone bad. They collected rainwater in dirty tubs now.
And yet. Even here. She drew a pattern on a slab of broken wood. Watched a young man drop a brick of peat for the fire. Watched a young woman pick it up for him and look into his eyes. He smiled.
Now if only she knew the pattern that would ensure that they survived.
When they launched the next plan—collapse the army high command’s headquarters, crippling the RLP and allowing the PTP to fill the vacuum, or so Gerald insisted—she had no part to play. She was not talented enough, Gerald didn’t say, but she understood it. She could only play with detritus from a kitchen table. She could never think big enough for them. Major hadn’t cared.
She did a little thing, though: scattered birdseed on a pool of soapy water, to send a tremor through the air and warn the pigeons, rats, and such that they ought to flee. And maybe that ruined the plan for the others. She’d nudged the pattern too far out of alignment for their pattern to work. The building didn’t collapse, but the clock tower across the square from which Fred and Marco were watching did. As if they had planted explosives and been caught in the blast.
Too direct, of course.
She left. Escaped, rather, as she thought. She didn’t want Gerald to find her. Didn’t want to look him in the eye. She would either laugh at him or accuse him of killing Major and everyone else. Then she would strangle him, and since they were both equally out of history she just might be able to do it. It couldn’t possibly be too direct, and the rest of the world couldn’t possibly notice.
Very tempting, in those terms.
But she found her place, her niche, her purpose. Her little village on the edge of everything was starting to build itself into something bigger. She’d worried about it, but just last year the number of babies born exceeded the number of people who died of disease, age, and accident. A few more cook fires had been added. She watched, pleased.
But Gerald found her, eventually, because that was one of his talents: finding people who had the ability to move outside the world. She might as well have set out a lantern.
She didn’t look up when he arrived. She was gathering mint leaves that she’d set out to dry, putting them in the tin box where she stored them. A spoonful of an earlier harvest was brewing in a cup of water over her little fire. Her small realm was tucked under the overhang formed by three walls that had fallen together. The witch’s cave, she called it. It looked over the village so she could always watch her people.
Gerald stood at the edge of her cave for a long time, watching. He seemed deflated, his cloak worn, his skin pale. But his eyes still burned. With desperation this time, maybe, instead of ambition.
When he spoke, he sounded appalled. “Clare. What are you doing here? Why are you living in this…this pit?”
“Because it’s my pit. Leave me alone, I’m working.”
“Clare. Come away. Get out of there. Come with me.”
She raised a brow at him. “No.”
“You’re not doing any good here.”
She still did not give him more than a passing glance. The village below was full of the evening’s activities: farmers returning from fields, groups bustling around cook fires. Someone was singing, another laughing, a third crying.
She pointed. “Maybe that little girl right there is the one who will grow up and turn this all around. Maybe I can keep her safe until she does.”
He shook his head. “Not likely. You can’t point to a random child and make such a claim. She’ll be dead of influenza before she reaches maturity.”
“It’s the little things, you’re always saying. But you don’t think small enough,” she said.
“Now what are you talking about?”
“Nails,” she murmured.
“You have a talent,” he said, desperately. “You see what other people overlook. Things other people take for granted. There are revolutions in little things. I understand that now. I didn’t—”
“Why can’t you let the revolutions take care of themselves?”
He stared at her, astonished. Might as well tell him to stop breathing. He didn’t know how to do anything else. And no one had ever spoken to him like this.
“You can’t go back,” he said as if it was a threat. “You can’t go back to being alive in the world.”
“Does it look like I’m trying?” He couldn’t answer, of course, because she only looked like she was making tea. “You’re only here because there’s no one left to help you. And you’re blind.”
Some days when she was in a very low mood she imagined Major here with her, and imagined that he’d be happy, even without the games.
“Clare. You shouldn’t be alone. You can’t leave me. Not after everything.”
“I never did this for you. I never did this for history. There’s no great sweep to any of this. Major saw a man with a weapon and acted on instinct. The grenade might have gone off and he’d have died just the same. It could have happened to anyone. I just wanted to help people. To try to make the world a little better. I like to think that if I weren’t doing this I’d be working in a soup kitchen somewhere. In fact maybe I’d have done more good if I’d worked in a soup kitchen.”
“You can’t do any good alone, Clare.”
“I think you’re the one who can’t do any good alone,” she said. She looked at him. “I have saved four hundred and thirty-two people who would have died because they did not have clean water. Because of me, forty-three people walked a different way home and didn’t get mugged or presse
d into the army. Thirty-eight kitchen fires didn’t reach the cooking oil. Thirty-one fishermen did not drown when they fell overboard. I have helped two dozen people fall in love.”
His chuckle was bitter. “You were never very ambitious.”
“Ambitious enough,” she said.
“I won’t come for you again. I won’t try to save you again.”
“Thank you,” she said.
She did not watch Gerald walk away and vanish in the swoop of his cloak.
Later, looking over the village, she reached for her tin box and drew out a sugar cube that had been soaked in brandy. Crumbling it and licking her fingers, she lifted a bit of earth, which made a small girl trip harmlessly four steps before she would have stumbled and fallen into a cook fire. Years later, after the girl had grown up to be the kind of revolutionary leader who saves the world, she would say she had a guardian angel.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I awoke from a vivid dream that involved a barren, rocky shore bursting forth in a profusion of roses. The image haunted me, and I incorporated it into a short story titled “The Martyr of the Roses.” Although the story failed to find a home at the time, it sketched out the rough beginnings of a complex theology and a map of the world that I went on to explore in detail in Kushiel’s Legacy, the series of alternate historical fantasy novels that launched my career.
At some point, I fully intended to capitalize on the success of Kushiel’s Legacy and put the story back on the market, but as I continued writing the series, I made creative decisions that rendered the story noncanonical. It became a literary curiosity, the spark of inspiration that no longer fit within the framework of the narrative it engendered. And while I wanted to share it with my readers, I didn’t know what the right venue for it might be.
When Shawn Speakman contacted me regarding this anthology, I knew I’d found it. Over the years, Shawn has done so much to connect fellow fantasy writers and fans. Donating this literary curiosity is the perfect way to give thanks to Shawn for the wonderful service he provides with The Signed Page, and to give my own readers a never-before-seen glimpse into the origin of Terre d’Ange.
Just don’t ask me how House L’Envers ended up on the throne, because I honestly don’t know.
— Jacqueline Carey
THE MARTYR OF THE ROSES
Jacqueline Carey
Chrétien L’Envers sat on a window ledge in an empty tower room in the ancestral home of the House of Drozhny. From this lofty perch in the estate of the longtime governors of the city of St. Sithonia, the Dauphin of Terre d’Ange contemplated the quality of the light, which was unlike any other he had ever seen. Such things made travel worthwhile. In the south of Caerdicca Unitas, where he and Rikard Drozhny had spent two years together at the University in Tiberium, the sun sometimes beat like a hammer upon the hard-baked earth. This light was as intense, yet vaster, far vaster; no hammer, this, but an anvil. It flattened the harsh terrain and rendered the whole of St. Sithonia, with all her crags and crevasses, oddly two-dimensional.
They said in Vralia for three months a year the sun never set.
“Angelicus?”
Chrétien turned his head, smiling at his friend’s usage of the old nickname. “Yes?”
With two glasses of wine forgotten in his hands, Rikard Drozhny stood in the doorway and blinked, struck dumb for the thousandth time at the sight of his D’Angeline comrade, whose pale hair in Vralian summerlight shone the precise hue of gold reflected on a drift of winter’s snow. “I brought wine. But we should leave soon, unless you want to ride.”
“I’m sorry. Is it customary to walk?”
“It is, actually.” Trust a D’Angeline to be sensitive to nuance even in the midst of a reverie. “The Prince-Protectorate himself walks when he comes to make his pilgrimage. With,” he added, “a very large, well-armed escort.”
“Ah.”
“Yes, well. Rumour has it that this year’s will be the largest ever.”
Chrétien raised his elegant brows and swung one booted foot. “What will your father do?”
Rikard shrugged, thrusting a wineglass toward Chrétien. “What can he do? He’s the Governor of St. Sithonia, he’s sworn to uphold the Prince-Protectorate.” Their eyes met in silence as Chrétien accepted the glass. “Think what you will,” Rikard said softly, “But my father will stand or fall with Janos Vraalkan because he can do more for Vralia as the Governor of this city than he can as a dead man.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He laughed without humor. “Angelicus, how could you possibly understand? You’re the first D’Angeline to even set foot in Vralia in my lifetime.”
“I know you. And you’re the first Vralian to attend the University in its lifetime,” Chrétien said equably, smiling at him. “So.”
“I know, I know.” Rikard’s mouth twitched in a reluctant answering smile. “So. And here you are.” No one, he thought, was going to mistake Chrétien for a devout Vralian tradesman paying his respects to Sithonia today.
“I’m trying, Riko, truly.” Chrétien sipped his wine. “I do my best to understand. Vralia is very different for me.”
“My father thinks you’re a spy.” The words came out blunt and unexpected, and Rikard flushed a dull red from his hairline to his throat. Faint frown lines appeared between Chrétien’s brows.
“Does he, then?” His eyes, which were in shadow a violet so dark as to appear almost black, held Rikard’s. “Do you?”
“Of course not.” Rikard’s tongue suddenly felt thick and stupid. “No.” His heart pounded, as it always did when Chrétien looked directly at him like that. “If Terre d’Ange wanted to send a spy, it would hardly be you.”
“No?” Chrétien murmured, his tone mild. “Why not me?”
Rikard shook his head in denial and looked away. “The Dauphin? No. It’s too much to risk. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” He took a long draught of wine. “There’s nothing to be seen here that I haven’t told you a dozen times over in the cafes of Tiberium.”
“But it’s getting worse.” Chrétien lifted his goblet, examining the workmanship. Light flooding the window behind him shone through the red Caerdicci wine and stained Rikard’s face incarnadine. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Rikard said, “it is.” He was silent, thinking even an outsider had to notice the Prince-Protectorate’s troops swarming in St. Sithonia, countermanding his father’s orders, reacting with excessive force to any display of dissent.
And there was dissent; oh yes, indeed, there was dissent.
“Well.” Chrétien drained the last of his wine and set down the glass, vaulting from the window ledge with customary grace. “I know you won’t accept it,” he said, touching Rikard’s face with his fingertips, “but there will always be sanctuary open to you in Terre d’Ange nonetheless.”
Rikard’s cheek burned where Chrétien had touched it. He closed his eyes as Chrétien moved past him, curbing the familiar surge of resentment and desire. What do they expect of us, he wondered, what do they expect? Ichor runs in their veins even after a thousand and more years. So many centuries they’ve lived for beauty in Terre d’Ange, they’ve even bred for beauty in the Houses of the Night Court—what good is it except to make the rest of us miserable?
“We should leave, then? I do want to walk.”
Rikard opened his eyes and stared blankly in Chrétien’s direction. The fair brows arched again, the beautiful lips smiled.
“To the shrine. Remember?”
“Yes.” He finished his own wine. “I remember.”
Outside, with the vast sky stripping away the intimacy of enclosed spaces, it was easier.
“Come here,” Rikard said, halfway down the Governor’s Hill, leading Chrétien off the paved road. They clambered up a promontory of rock that scraped their hands but afforded a northern view. “I’ll give you a history lesson they don’t teach at the University.” He pointed to a narrow pass still filled with snow, etched in white between the fir-green and g
ranite peaks of the mountains. “The Pass of Sithonia. That’s where she came through the mountains.”
“Name of Elua! Alone and on foot?”
“With a dinner plate wrapped in rags under her arm. No one expected her to get so far.” Rikard hunkered down and pitched a flake of rock, listening to it bounce and rattle down the crags. “It worked, you know. The Profaners thought it was the Wheel of Vral. They tracked her for twenty leagues.”
“All the way to St. Sithonia.” Chrétien gazed southward at the distant blue mirror that was Lake Khirzak, on the stony shores of which Sithonia had danced her way to martyrdom.
“It wasn’t called that then. It wasn’t called anything, there was nothing here but a fishing village with no name. That was over four hundred years ago.”
“I know.” He crouched on his heels beside Rikard, adjusting the battered scabbard that hung at his side with the ease of long practice. “I still say she went to a damnable lot of work, dying to protect a lifeless chunk of bronze, Riko.”
Rikard tossed another chip, eyes crinkling with amusement. “Yes, well, you wouldn’t much care for it, Angelicus. It’s not very pretty.”
Removing the wide-brimmed hat that Rikard had lent him to disguise his D’Angeline features, Chrétien shook out his fair hair, damp with heat and exertion, thinking how little his friend understood of the true nature of beauty. “The House of Drozhny has Vraling blood, doesn’t it?”
“My great-grandmother was a Vralsturm.” Rikard considered the distant pass. “Tadeusz Vral believed he and his bloodline were appointed by God to unify and rule this nation. He made a covenant, Angelicus, and the Wheel of Vral is a symbol of it. The Profaners wanted to oust the Vralings and destroy the secular influence of the Church. How better to do it than by destroying the very symbol of that covenant?” He shook himself, glancing sideways at Chrétien. “Primitive stuff, eh? Come on, let’s go. Lesson’s over. Put your hat back on.”
