A Word From the Author
This little collection of stories came from a variety of places: the account of Romana’s ascension to the Imperial throne started out as the epilogue to Spirit of the Sword: Faith and Virtue, the novel of the First Sword Chronicles that preceded this quartet of tales, and although it turned out not to quite fit there, I find that I liked the pageantry involved too much not to do anything with it. All the Trees in the Forest came about as a result of a desire to close off Fiannuala’s story from Spirit of the Sword, as well as a sense that it would have been very uncivilised of Michael to have left Fiannuala’s kin to stew in ignorance about her fate.
I am indebted to Darren Bailey, of the Wrekin Writers group, for giving me the idea that became Summer’s Leaving. The characters of Summer Phoenix and Dawn Starfall have been with me for some time, but it was Darren who provided the crucial element of structure for the tale of Summer’s departure from Dareth.
Hunted, and I do apologise for the lack of a more poetic title, began life in some form back in my days as a fanfiction author. Having written a scene of a character burdened with regrets, being confronted by the Furies over their past misdeeds (and the lack of punishment for same) seemed so tailor made for Miranda that I didn’t have any choice but to write it down and present it to you all, my readers. So this seems as good a time as any to thank A J McGough, for having proofread the original version of that scene and found it good the first time around.
As for The War Cry Sounds…I’m afraid that that is such a shameless set-up for the next book in the First Sword Chronicles that I am amazed at my audacity, and can only beg your indulgence for my bad behaviour.
If you have somehow managed to pick up this collection unaware that it is book 3 (I would have called in book 2.5 in tribute to its slightness, but sadly Amazon insists upon integers) in a series, please consider going back and picking up the two meaty novels that preceded it, and introduced the characters of Michael, Miranda, Amy and Princess Romana.
Spirit of the Sword: Pride and Fury (First Sword Chronicles book 1)
Spirit of the Sword: Faith and Virtue (First Sword Chronicles book 2)
If you enjoyed this particularly quartet of little stories, if you admired the pride and pomp of Princess Romana or sympathised with the thwarted ambitions of Summer Phoenix, then please consider leaving a review of the work on Amazon, so that future readers may know that you enjoyed it, and perhaps consider enjoying it themselves.
Michael, Miranda, Princess Romana, Summer Phoenix and Iriali will all return in the as-yet untitled Book 4 of the First Sword Chronicles. Although the work is currently without a title it is not, however, totally without content, and a sneak peak follows on the next page.
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Thank you for reading, and I hope you will continue to follow Michael and Miranda throughout all the trials that await them in the future.
Many Thanks,
Frances
I
The Phoenix and the Shy Maid
Summer Phoenix was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the Empire was a bit of a dump.
Alright, maybe that wasn’t entirely fair; but, Summer thought to herself as she trudged down the dirt road with the heat of the sun blazing down upon her and the weight on her back threatening to bear her down into the ground, at this point it was hard to care too much about being fair.
She had to scramble onto the little verge of grass along the roadside, pressing herself against the fence that stopped the goats and the sheep from getting into the nearby field, as a column of soldiers marched the other way down the road. The sunlight glinted off their armour enough to half blind her, dusty though it was and getting worse all the time what with the dirt they were kicking up as they marched. Still, it didn’t seem to affect them at all, as they kept on singing as they marched down the track. Summer found it hard to make out all the words of the song – the dwarven world-needle she’d used to get here appeared to have cast some kind of spell that enable her to understand the language in theory, but she was still getting used to the accents of the people here, and she found them hard to understand when they talked fast, which they often did – but it seemed to be a song about hills. Over the hills? Or was it Or the hills? Drums came into it as well a couple of times. It was a marching song, anyway, without much substance to it.
The troops were led by an officer on a butternut mare, and he touched his hand to his forelock as he passed her by. Summer was beginning to understand that that was some kind of courtesy, a gendered one if she was understanding how this all worked correctly, though of course if he had wanted to be really courteous then he wouldn’t have made her scramble off the road, would he? The soldiers themselves, following on behind, didn’t seem to notice her at all. They just kept marching along, heads looking straight ahead, kicking up the earth as they went, singing about those hills that were so far away. Summer didn’t know what was so special about the far away hills; there were a few hills right in front of them, and behind her. They weren’t particularly big hills, but Summer hadn’t had much fun trying to climb up them.
There were times, she reflected as she set off down the road again, when she wished that she’d nabbed a green crystal as well as a blue, and then she could have gone home if this all got a bit too much for her.
She shook her head, and swiftly dismissed the thought. No, she would not go home. She would not. Even if she could, she would not. No matter how bad things were here, no matter how tough it was, no matter how hard she was gasping, no matter how much her legs ached, no matter how badly she was sweating, no matter how much she wanted to lie down, curl up and go to sleep it would always, always be better than going back home, crawling on all fours to Lady Aurora and confessing that she couldn’t stick it anywhere else. That would look fine, wouldn’t it? After all her talk of destiny and greatness, to come back and confess that it had all been a bit too much like hard work and could she have a room at the Academy please? And Summer could only imagine how much mockery she would come into from Dawn about it. Too much by half, she was sure.
No, there was no turning back. There was only moving forward: forward to greatness, forward to glory…forward to civilisation with any luck and sometime soon, too. Summer didn’t think she was cut out for the country vagrant life.
Certainly this experience was making her think that perhaps she had made the wrong packing choices. This violin was heavy and bulky for example, and it kept on banging against her leg as she walked. It had almost knocked her down twice.
On the other hand it had also given her a roof over her head, a warm fire and a decent meal more than once, so she might have been worse off without it, in the final analysis. The books, on the other hand…what had she been thinking to take books with her? It was like carrying rocks around in her knapsack, and she was always too tired for reading anyway. She must have been mad.
Mad, or inexperienced. Perhaps I should have said yes when Dawn asked me to go camping with her two summers ago. She took her friend Faith in the end didn’t she? Or was it Holly? Or both of them? Anyway, I seem to remember that they had a good time.
Yes, Summer remembered that quite well. They had insisted on talking about it where Summer could hear them, just so that she would feel jealous about being left out. Summer hadn’t felt jealous at all, of course.
Just like I don’t really feel exhausted now.
Summer took a deep, gasping breath, and immediately started coughing. Her throat was dry and her mouth was filling up with gunk, but she didn’t dare take a drink of water in case she ran out far from a well or anywhere she could refill it.
I just need to stop focussing upon the negative aspects of this new world, that’s all. I need to look for the positives. Positive thinki
ng will make the whole world brighter.
Ice and cold that sounded nauseating. Like the kind of thing that one of Dawn’s ghastly friends would say.
Still, positives. Positives, positives, positives. Positives.
Well, to start with no one was lying to her. Nobody was trying to use her with promises of great fame and destiny only to finally turn around and say ‘sorry, I was lying all this time’. Nobody, in fact, had tried to take her in at all.
The other good thing about this place, this Empire – or the Divine Empire, it was a little confusing how they kept on using interchangeable names for the same place – was that the people were of the kindly sort, for the most part. Not too clever, not too sophisticated, but decent and kind, salt of the earth types. When she had come to this world from her own, Summer had ended up in what seemed to be one of the many, many middles of nowhere that littered the Empire. It seemed from what she could gather that it was a big country, much bigger than the Sacred Union, and mostly rural in some form or other. Summer had, quite frankly, never liked the countryside very much, never liked rural people either, they reminded her too much of the past she wanted to escape from. But the people here…they hadn’t been half bad. On her first night in the Empire she had been caught in a rainstorm and got soaking wet. On her second night she had stumbled to the door of a nearby farmhouse, sick with fever, and the farmer and his wife had put her to bed with a bowl of hot broth and let her stay there for a few days until her fever subsided. Lady Aurora had done as much for her more than once, but unlike Lady Aurora these people weren’t rich, and Summer was a stranger to them. She had been so at a loss to explain their behaviour that she had straight up asked them why they had done it.
“The gods would be angry to see a guest treated with any less care than we’ve treated you, young Filia,” the old man had said, by way of reply (that was going under the negatives, unfortunately).
“And besides,” his wife had added. “We may not have much, but we’ve enough to do right by those who need it most.”
And so it had proved on the rest of Summer’s eastward journey through the rolling pastureland of – if she was remembering properly what they had called this particular part of the country – Astarac province. As many nights as she had slept under hedgerows or crept into barns to rest her head upon a bale of hay, they were outnumbered by the nights when she was offered a place for the night and some supper by some kindly farming fellow she came across on the road. Oftentimes Summer would sing for her supper, as it were, playing her violin for the farmer and his family and slaves (another negative to return to). It seemed that they didn’t have anything like a fiddle in the Empire, the closest thing being a lyre, and the strange music that Summer could play captivated them. It wasn’t the most sophisticated music in Summer’s repertoire, mostly folk songs and country jigs that you could dance to, but it got her fed and got her a place by the fire, so who was she to complain about lowbrow tastes?
They had also been very obliging in answering her questions about this land in which she’d found herself. It was from people she had stayed the night with, or met on the road, that she had learned that she was in a country called the Empire – or the Divine Empire – in a land called Pelarius, and that this particular part of the Empire was called Astarac province. It was from them that she had learned that the capital was called Eternal Pantheia – Summer found that rather arrogant, but then she came from a city called Liberation City so who was she to talk? – and that it lay to the east of here. And so, thanks to the kindness and patience of the people of the Empire, Summer had found her destination.
And of course, there was the general peace of the country as well. One thing that Summer had been wary of when coming to a new world, not that she would have ever admitted it, was that she might end up in a war-torn wasteland and get subjected to all the indignities to which women were subject in Dawn’s trashy fiction. But, in fairness to the Empire, not once in several weeks had she been robbed, assaulted, raped, threatened with rape, molested by poor drunken yokels or chased through the night by rich drunken aristocrats on horseback. Which you might think was nothing much to be excited about until you heard Dawn describing the plot of the latest potboiler set in Most Ancient Quagga and realised how many of them included one, some or all of the above happening to the heroine at some point in the first hundred pages. So far Summer had gone about safe from all of that, and all without going anywhere near anything like a town either. It spoke well of the Empire’s commitment to law and order that the countryside was so safe, not even Lady Aurora could do as much to curb banditry outside of the market towns and the big cities. Though Summer suspected that the Empire spent rather more on soldiers than Lady Aurora did, judging by the number of them that she saw.
No, so far the worst that had happened to Summer was a man touching his forelock to her as he rode by. She had had a tumble through the hay once or twice with a farm hand, but that had been quite fun really. In many ways, the arduousness of the road aside, she seemed to be taking part in one of the more light-hearted adventure stories.
Of course, as much as it did make Summer feel a little bit better to think about some of the positive aspects of her story so far, it wasn’t quite enough to blot out all the negatives, and Summer wasn’t just talking about how tired she felt right now. There were still a few things about the Empire that just didn’t sit right with her.
Religion, first of all. Summer’s wolf-shifter ancestors had been godly folk, to be sure. They had worshipped the dragon gods of the Dominion, and what had it gotten them? To be slaves to those self-same gods and the griffon-shifter lords who spoke with their voice, to be made into soldiers, to be forced to couple with beasts to produce abominations, to be driven off to endless wars against the Qaggai Empire. It had been Lady Aurora and her sister who had defied the dragon lords, as their power had waned and winter had closed in, just as it had been Lady Aurora who had broken the chains from all slaves in Werolon and offered freedom to all who wished it. Since then there had been no gods, just as there had been no slaves, and Summer was inclined to look askance at too much pious talk. After all, the servants of the dragon lords had certainly been pious folk, so pious that they had burnt slaves every day as offerings to their gods. By the time the old world had finally come tumbling down the daily death count had reached hundreds. Obviously religion had done right by Summer on at least one occasion here, but still, it made Summer a little uneasy. If you were willing to help a stranger because a god asked you to, might you not also kill for the same reason?
One thing that it suggested you might be willing to do was keep another man as your property, and that was something that bothered Summer even more than the religious faith. The first time she had stopped at a farmhouse and been introduced to the farmer’s slave she had nearly screamed in disbelief. It had been all she could do not to run out of the house and into the night. The very fact that she had benefited from slave labour had made her feel so unclean that she had had to strip naked at the nearest stream and dive in to wash herself down. If there was one thing that had made her ill so far, it was that she had not been able to free the slave. Lady Aurora would surely have been ashamed of her.
And then there were the gender roles. This was certainly not the Sacred Union, where anyone could do or be anything. To be fair, it wasn’t Qagga or the Dominion, either, but being not terrible didn’t make it perfect. Women couldn’t join the army or serve in the civil service? Summer had hardly been able to believe it. Now they could be elected to whatever kind of government these people had – it seemed like a hodgepodge of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, but without the thoughtful philosophical blending that would have produced the ideal constitution and appeared instead to result in near-constant infighting between the three – as well as wielding great power if they were born to the right class, but that didn’t make it right to exclude them, especially since no one could give her a reason for it beyond the fact that it had always been that way. She he
rself had even gotten some askance looks for wearing her rapier, though if she had ever thought of taking it off, the idea that someone else thought she should would have been enough to make her keep on wearing it.
No, this was certainly not a perfect society. It wasn’t awful, all things considered, but it could be better. Perhaps she would make it better, once she rose to prominence. That would be something to tell Lady Aurora, wouldn’t it? I did the same thing that you once did; only I did it with a bigger country, hah!
Now there was a thought to cheer you up. The thought of what that would be like, of how ashamed and contrite Aurora would be, of how much it would impress Dawn, was enough to put a smile on Summer’s face as she trudged down the road, pack banging and rattling behind her, despite how heavy it felt or how the sun beat down upon her.
Judging by the position of the sun, and making the assumption – which had not yet been contradicted by the evidence – that it worked more or less the same as it did back in Dareth, Summer guessed that it was about midday when she came across someone else coming the other way down the dusty road. As they approached one another, all that Summer could really tell about the stranger was their size, which was considerable, and the fact that their head was bowed down, looking at the ground.
They were walking straight towards one another. Summer, who found that the weight on her back was easiest to balance if she kept going straight ahead, was loath at first to get out of the way and risk unbalancing herself into an ungainly reel that might end up leaving her in a roadside ditch as like as not, so she kept on walking, like a ship staying the course, in the hope that the stranger would do the courteous thing and make way for her. However, as the two approached, the less and less likely this seemed. As they came within a few feet of one another, like two riders playing a very slow game of chicken, Summer realised that the other had probably not seen her at all, and would certainly not be making way for someone of whose existence she was, as yet, unaware. So she scrambled to make way before she got trampled underfoot by the hillock coming towards her.
Short Swords: Tales from the Divine Empire (The First Sword Chronicles Book 3) Page 18
