The Eternal Kingdom (The Children Trilogy Book 3)

by Ben Peek

  If her mother only had more. If only she had not been so diminished. If only Eilona did not feel a responsibility to her. If only she had not begun to feel as if she owed not just her mother, but Mireea, this act.

  10.

  Beneath the starlight, Aned Heast sat on the back of a stationary cart and sewed Refuge’s insignia onto the arm of the heavy shirt he wore under his leather armour. It was his third shirt, but his final shirt. It marked the third cold camp that he had made since leaving Vaeasa. There would be another two, he suspected, before he and the others reached the camp of Refuge.

  He had no complaints to make. The carts had made good time and Heast had spent most of the time talking to the soldiers who rode alongside him. He learned their names and listened to their histories. He had spent a night with Ko Dtnaa, packing and firing one of the lances. Heast’s own limited experience with the weapon meant that the pair were learning it together. But it was a simple weapon for all its brutality, one that did not require the finesse of a sword, or the targeting of a crossbow. On the second night, Dtnaa began organizing the other soldiers into small groups to learn the weapon. Watching the soldiers, Heast had to admit that the First Queen and her Eyes had chosen well. In the absence of either, he was not surprised to learn that the soldiers were fiercely loyal to the newly minted Lieutenant Lehana. In the last few days that he had ridden beside them, he had listened to them talk, had seen how they interacted with each other, and had watched as they stowed the insignia of Refuge into their packs or pushed them into their pockets. They were Ooilan soldiers, still. They were the Queen’s soldiers, not Refuge’s, not yet. When they died, they would die in the old service they believed they were in.

  It was entirely likely that they would die, as well.

  How many armies had been raised against the Innocent? Hundreds? There was no way to know exactly. In Sooia, generations had fallen to Aela Ren, and each time, a new rival, a new hope, had risen from the survivors. In Sooia, Heast had once met a young woman whose hands had been horribly scarred by burns. She had been the head of one such hope. But when she asked Captain Denali to ride with him into the heart of the deserts in search of Aela Ren, the Captain had told her no. He said that she should instead look to resettling her people.

  Heast could not tell the First Queen’s Guard they would survive the upcoming war. They had already seen what the Innocent could do, and he would not lie to them. But he did not want any soldier to believe that she was going to die. Such thoughts made a soldier careless. Heast had seen it many times: when faced with the inevitability of death, a soldier forgot the lessons she had learned in the battles she had survived. She would take risks that she knew she should not take. It did not matter if she was part of the First Queen’s Guard, or if she was from the back alleys of Gogair. Once she decided that her death was inevitable, she would search for that moment, and in doing so, she would take others with her.

  ‘My grandmother always said you had fine needlework. I thought it was a metaphor for your skills with a sword.’ Anemone approached him with a tin cup of water. ‘It surprises me how literal she was.’

  Heast took the cup. ‘I have probably sewn more flesh together than cloth.’

  The witch eased herself onto the cart next to him. ‘I will forever think of you as a seamstress then, sir.’ In the dark, the tattoos that showed beneath her collar and wrists lent her the illusion that she was, in part, made from darkness. ‘Do you marvel at how easily they sleep around us?’

  She meant Lehana and her soldiers. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Some of them could have been at Illate. Or at their parents’ houses. You would think it would make things harder.’

  ‘Your grandmother was in Illate as well.’ Heast set the cup down. ‘Also, you should remember that Refuge lost.’

  ‘It does not feel it tonight.’

  No, he supposed it did not. ‘We all have moments in our life where we must redefine who we are. What the soldiers around us go through is no different to what you went through in Vaeasa.’

  ‘Or you after Illate.’

  ‘Your grandmother tells you too much.’

  Anemone smiled. ‘She did not need to tell me that, Captain. I have watched the title settle on you since Maosa. It has been like watching a person pull on a shirt after winter. It fits, but it is tight. As the days wear on, as the rituals of the summer return, it fits more naturally.’

  He thanked her, but was not sure that he believed her, not now. Before he left Vaeasa, he would have agreed with what Anemone said: he was becoming more the man he used to be, the man who had been the Captain of Refuge. But after Lehana had told him that Onaedo had organized the crates that they carried, he had begun to feel a strangeness about him, as if he was not entirely within control of what happened around him. It was a feeling of insignificance, unlike one he had felt before. He had felt that he was but a small part on a larger board – that was, after all, the nature of being a mercenary, and the way in which war felt to the individual – but he had before been able to see the board in its entirety. To be unable to see it, to feel as if something was being kept from him, but that he was still being pushed towards a final conflict, was not an experience he enjoyed. It was similar, Heast thought, to the games he and Samuel Orlan had played in Mireea. They had been the games of old men who knew too much and who had wanted to test what the other knew. Heast had often felt that the cartographer played the game on a different board to his, one larger than the one Heast saw, and quite often he felt that Orlan played a much more complex game than he did.

  It was a thought that he could not resolve easily and, as the morning’s sun rose, he put it aside as he had done every other morning. His immediate concern remained the soldiers around him. Before any of them rode out against the Innocent, he wanted to dull the certainty of their own deaths. He did not yet know how, but he had to give them a future, had to offer them a world that did not end with the Innocent.

  When they came across tracks on the fifth day from of Vaeasa, he still did not have an answer to that question.

  They were close to Celp and, instead of making camp for the night, they had pushed onwards in the dark. The tracks appeared as slivers of shadows and were made by horses, more than Heast could count, but one of Lehana’s soldiers – a tall, slim black woman she called Fenna – said that it was three distinct groups, days apart. The second, she insisted, was the largest. She told him that the first and third groups were about a hundred each, but that the second was about three hundred strong, though not all were mounted. She stopped in the middle of her explanation when smoke began to drift across them from the east.

  ‘Break open the crates,’ Heast said. ‘The Leerans have found Refuge.’

  A Baptism of Fire

  ‘It was a powerful statement,’ Aelyn Meah said. ‘It has also been proven true. Se’Saera has healed our world.’

  None would deny that: a single sun shines above us. The weather has patterns that makes sense. The moon is gone. The ocean is no longer black. The mad coast is safe, a grand swamp no longer changes its paths, mountains that once floated do not, and rivers that strangled communities and were as still as ice now flow.

  ‘All my life I had worked to fix the damage the War of the Gods had done. That was to be my divinity. That was to be my proof to the world that I was a god. How could I deny that to the world in another?’ Aelyn asked me. ‘If my life, my continual living, was part of what ensured a healthy, stable world, how could I do anything but live?’

  —Onaedo, Histories, Year 1029

  1.

  The smoke revealed itself not to be isolated strands, but a thick, dark cloud, one that Heast and the First Queen’s Guard prepared to ride into. It began to form around them while the carts were taken off the road, the horses unhitched and the crates unpacked.

  ‘Leave the fire lances,’ Heast ordered. The night’s light was obscured by the smoke, but not enough so that he could not see the fires ahead in his spyglass. ‘Bows only.’r />
  Lehana, who stood on the back of the first cart, nodded with grim satisfaction when she heard him, but the soldiers who had moved towards her, who had come to collect the weapons she handed out, did not share her agreement. Heast understood that: they had looked at the tracks, had heard the conversation he and Fenna had had, and they had looked for themselves. They knew that the numbers ahead were not in their favour. Still it would be foolish to take the fire lances, Heast knew. In the worst of the heat, the black powder would be a threat. It would be waiting to catch the flames around them, waiting to explode on their hips, or in the long tube.

  At his horse, the Captain of Refuge pulled out a faded black cloth from his pack. Before him, Anemone wrapped a white cloth around her nose and mouth, but Heast kept his in his hand while he grabbed the pommel of his saddle.

  ‘Leerans,’ he said, after he had pulled himself awkwardly up. ‘Leerans aren’t all like us,’ he continued to the soldiers around him, to the soldiers who had begun to wrap dark red cloths around their faces after they had mounted. ‘Some are. Leera had a small army. They were well trained, but Leera was not a nation with expansionist plans, and their military reflected that. They did not have the soldiers you will see here. Se’Saera made the force you see here when she emerged. When she began her war, she drew all the people of Leera to her and told them to break apart their towns. She told them to tear down their homes. She told them to destroy their history. She told them that they were her Faithful and that they did not need their old lives. The first of Se’Saera’s soldiers filed their teeth into sharp ends and ate the flesh of the people they killed.’

  At the carts, the former Captain of the Queen’s Guard paused. She held the last of the bows in her hand.

  ‘The Faithful have given up everything to fight for Se’Saera,’ Heast said. ‘For them, there is no home to go back to. There is no land to defend. There is just the word of their god. That is how they will fight when you meet them.

  ‘If we meet them on open ground before Celp, we will meet them in a wedge. The point of our wedge will be Saelo, Beilase, Zvae and Oya.’ He nodded to the four soldiers who, one by one, returned his nod. ‘It may be that we won’t need to do that. It may be that we will fight in Celp. We will have Anemone scouting as we ride, so we’ll know before we hit the town. But what we can be assured of is that we will be fighting in a burned landscape. Your horses won’t like it. You won’t like it. Use the bows to clear what you can from a distance. The quicker we can find Refuge and finish this, the better.’ Heast pointed to the imprints on the ground, the three groups Fenna had identified. ‘I know that what is there is not a small force, but it doesn’t matter. We leave no one behind.’

  Lehana approached Heast, a bow and arrows in one hand, and a small, curling bone-and-brass horn in her other. She handed the latter to him. ‘Fight the way you were trained to fight,’ she said, after she turned from him. ‘Remember who you are. Remember where you are from. That is how we will survive. How we will win.’

  ‘One last thing,’ Heast said. ‘You might come across a warrior that we call an ancestor. It’ll be bigger than you, it’ll look deformed, and it may even have extra limbs. Se’Saera pulled these soldiers from the Plateau. They were the ancient spirits that were imprisoned there, but she has tied them to the bodies of her Faithful. They are bad news. If you see one, you let Anemone deal with it.’ He paused. ‘Any questions?’

  There were not.

  Heast wrapped the faded black cloth over his nose and mouth. As he did, Anemone began to unwind the strips of cloth that covered her scarred palms. She had slipped a knife into the edge of the saddle. If things went badly, or if the battle went on for long, her hands would lose their strength, would become slippery with blood, and she would be forced to wrap the reins around her arms and hope that the horse she rode did not bolt or try to throw her.

  Heast turned to the thickening smoke and nudged his horse forwards, into it. Was it a Leeran trap, this fire? He doubted it. The tracks were too obvious, too rushed, and the fire too wild, too unconstrained.

  The fire had been allowed to grow. Heast was certain of that. The red tint of the skyline revealed how established it was. What he didn’t know was who had set it. If the fire was restricted to Celp, Heast could imagine the Leerans around the ruins, awaiting for Refuge to emerge; but the fire was not localized. In his spyglass he had seen it in trees, the tops burning wickedly. Did that mean Refuge had started the fire? If so, it would be an act of desperation, a suicide tactic, for it had destroyed any secure retreat that they could have made.

  What would he find in the smoke? Would it be small parties, or a large force? Would he reach Celp and find a ragged, angry battle, with soldiers half suffocated, or already dead? Would—

  The Captain of Refuge stopped his thoughts. He would not get ahead of himself. He would see what caused the fire and he would deal with it, just as he would deal with the Leerans.

  2.

  The path that Samuel Orlan charted through the empty landscape of Leera was one watched over by the dark shapes of swamp crows. They flocked in the hollow remains of towns and turned the branches of trees dark, like a hangman’s noose, in the winter.

  It was a lonely, unsettling world that Bueralan rode through, further emphasized by the silent company of the god-touched men and women around him. In the camps, they set their rolls away from each other and rarely spoke. Frequently, before sleep claimed him, Bueralan would turn to gaze at the shadowed shapes of the immortal men and women, and he would see figures who had been stripped of all their humanity. He recalled, in those moments, how he had been told that, in Sooia, the bones of the dead had been sown into into the soil, and he wondered if he had made the right choice in leaving Ranan.

  At least once a day, both Bueralan and Samuel Orlan were presented with an opportunity to leave the Innocent and his soldiers. It did not matter if the morning’s sun was high, the afternoon’s just rising, or the midday’s sun riding low. There simply came a moment when he and Orlan could stop their mounts, where they could turn and ride to the east. Bueralan never took the chances seriously, but on the third day out of Ranan, he thought that the cartographer meant to do that. He and Bueralan had drifted far enough from the Innocent and his soldiers that they were but a shadow in the distance.

  Next to him, Orlan leant over in his saddle and spat into the grass. ‘I hope whatever plan you’ve got is a good one,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not,’ Bueralan said. ‘It’s desperate and half formed.’

  The other man nodded and, without another word, nudged his grey forwards and closed the distance between him and the others.

  Later, on the third night’s camp, Bueralan thought of telling Orlan what Ren had said to him about Onaedo, but he didn’t. On the fourth, he almost returned to the earlier conversation that he and Orlan had had on Glafanr. He thought about repeating what Kaze had said. On the fifth night, he realized that he wouldn’t. It was not that he did not trust the cartographer – such a question no longer remained between the two of them – but rather that he did not truly know what he was doing. All he knew was that he was involved in a last-minute, last-chance, desperate leap, and he did not know where he would truly land, and what he would have to do, once he did. He only knew that he could not remain inert within the tragedy unfolding around him.

  That was why, before he left Ranan, Bueralan had visited Aelyn Meah.

  He had done it after he said goodbye to Taela. She lay in their room, her stomach larger than it had been only a day before, but she said nothing to him after he explained to her that he would be gone for a few weeks and that Kaze would look after her. He crouched beside her, wanting to reach out with his hand, to hold her, to tell her that everything would be fine. But he couldn’t.

  When he left her, he walked into Aelyn’s room. The door was open, and he did not knock. The Breath of Yeflam sat on the bed against the wall, her back against it, her legs folded beneath her. She wore clean white linen clothes, whi
ch made her look like a prisoner in a cell, despite the fact that she could have walked out of the room at any time. But there were prisons, Bueralan knew, not built out of walls and doors.

  Aelyn did not say a word as Bueralan entered. She watched him as he opened the window and looked out at Ranan, at its dark splendour, at the horrific creatures that sat on the flat roofs.

  ‘I have a favour to ask,’ he said, turning to face her.

  Aelyn was silent for a long time, so long that Bueralan thought he might have to continue the conversation without her involvement. ‘What makes you think you can ask anything of me?’ she asked, finally.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She waited.

  ‘I would like you to watch the woman down the hall,’ he continued. ‘Her name is Zi Taela.’

  ‘I will not stand guard over her, if that is what you are asking,’ Aelyn said. A breeze drifted through the window. ‘There are others to continue that crime against her.’

  ‘I do not want you to stand guard,’ Bueralan said. ‘I want you to make sure no one hurts her more.’

  The air fell still. ‘The best way to do that is to take her away from here,’ the sitting woman said. ‘She will never be free while she is forced to stand beside her tormentor.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you?’ Aelyn Meah unfolded her legs and rose. She was a slight woman next to Bueralan, but she had, within her, a grace, a sense of confidence, that was intimidating. ‘I have had another man in my mind for nearly a thousand years. He was a friend before the whispers began, before the nudges and promises, and I suppose that is why I let it happen. I have so few friends I forgot that it is they who betray you most. But for a thousand years he was there. His control was gentle, but it was still control. He took all the dark thoughts I had, all my fears and resentments, and he twisted them in me, made me question, made me doubt, and made me betray who I was. Can you possibly imagine how that feels?’