The Queen of Crows

by Myke Cole

  Sigir silenced her with a quick shake of his head. “We’d better follow,” he said, and strode off. Heloise followed with Samson hurrying after. One of the Sindi, nearly a man grown, judging by the dusting of black hair on his face and the warble in his voice, called to them in heavily accented Imperial tongue. “Where are you going?”

  “To get the machine,” Heloise shouted over her shoulder. I hope, she finished in her mind. But Barnard was proceeding as confidently as if he had a map.

  “He’s going the wrong way,” Mother Leahlabel said, motioning the boy to join them.

  “I know the way,” Barnard called back, not breaking stride.

  Leahlabel caught up to them, hugging her red cloak around her shoulders. “He’s gone mad,” she said.

  “I’ll stop him, Mother,” the boy said, breaking into a run.

  “Onas, no,” Leahlabel said, catching him by the collar of his shirt and hauling him back. “That one looks strong enough to break a man in half.”

  She cast Heloise an apologetic glance. “My son is overeager. He’s only a male, after all.”

  Heloise stifled her surprise. She had heard that women ruled the Kipti bands, but she was still shocked to see the conspiratorial look in Leahlabel’s face, as if they were sharing a private joke that the men around them couldn’t understand. Onas flushed, but it looked to be from shame, not anger. Heloise’s heart went out to him.

  “Barnard is … he’s grieving,” she said. “He’s lost two children so far.”

  Leahlabel nodded. “Men have ever been weak.”

  Heloise felt her cheeks flush. It was a cruel thing to say, especially after what Barnard had been through. “Weak?”

  Leahlabel gestured at Onas’s narrow back. “The same loss that makes a woman into a Mother and leader of a band will drive a man mad. They shrink from pain. Could you imagine one of them having to bear a child? This is why all mothers strive to spare their sons from grief. It takes so little to break them.”

  Heloise fixed her eyes on Barnard’s back and focused on keeping up with his long strides. She glanced over at Onas, caught him staring. He quickly looked away, blushing. She could only imagine how she looked, her eye socket scarred over like the stump of her wrist, the long pink gashes on her cheek drawing her face into a permanent leer. He glanced up at her again, and she made sure she was looking away this time, catching him in her peripheral vision. She let him stare. The Sindi had saved her. She owed them a look, at least.

  Barnard angled them through the woods, no hesitation in his stride. After a while, they turned sharply and angled deeper in. Their footfalls sounded on dead leaves, snapped branches, and Heloise thought they were loud enough to be heard for leagues.

  Onas looked up at her again, no longer shy. “He’s going the right way now.”

  “He is?” Sigir asked.

  Onas nodded. “Mostly. It’s wizardry, no?”

  “No. None of us are wizards. You know it’s death for us.”

  Onas considered. “For us, too, if the Order catches us, but they never do. They stop us on the road, take their taxes and tolls, call us heretics, but they cannot see the Talent unless we show it to them. I just thought … that it was the same for you … that it was talk. You know how people talk. ‘I do this,’ or ‘I never do this,’ when it isn’t really true. The Order is full of lies, everything they say is a lie.”

  “We are not lying,” Heloise said. “We are no wizards.”

  “But your friend was a wizard, my mother says?”

  “That’s different, I didn’t know he was until…” But you did know. You knew and you told no one.

  “Will the Order hear us?” Samson cut Onas off before the boy could ask another question.

  “We must hope not,” Leahlabel said, “but if they came into the woods this far, my outriders would have brought word.”

  Onas shook his head, standing up a little straighter. “They are a league away, at least. We could scream, light a fire. They will not hear us.”

  They scrambled up a steep rise, and through a brook beyond it. The Kipti paused to dip their fingers in the water, daubing them to their lips and eyelids. “This is the sageata de argint,” Leahlabel said when Heloise stared. “It’s where we come with questions.”

  “It helps?” Heloise asked.

  “It does,” Onas said. “Once to the eyes to see the truth, once to the lips as a promise to speak it.”

  “Do you have a question?” Heloise asked. “Did you ask one just now?”

  “Of course,” Onas said.

  “What is it?”

  “I asked if we are really being led to your machine by the wizardry of your religion, or if your friend is just mad.”

  “Is he mad?” Heloise felt a chill up her spine.

  “Of course.” Onas smiled.

  Heloise couldn’t help but smile back, but she caught Samson’s concerned glance from the corner of her eye. She could tell he didn’t like her talking to the Sindi boy, and the thought made her impatient with him.

  On the other side of the brook was a long run of dead leaves blanketing a slope that stopped at two trees. Wedged neatly between them, its head and shoulders anointed with bracken, was the war-machine.

  Leahlabel stared at it, mouth open. Onas walked up to it as if he owned it, brushed some of the dust from its breast. “This is you?” He jerked his thumb at the sigil.

  “It is her,” Barnard said. “She is a Palantine, a devil-slayer. This is the instrument the Emperor gave her for the task.”

  Onas stared at Heloise until she could bear it no longer. “What?”

  Onas looked away, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. It’s just that … I’ve never met someone who’s…”

  “Killed a devil?” Heloise finished for him.

  “No.” Onas laughed. “I mean, yes, but that’s not as amazing as the rest.”

  “What rest?”

  “You warred with the Order. You laid Pilgrims low. You took their bloodied cloaks. I don’t know anyone who’s ever done that.”

  “The devil was much worse,” Heloise said.

  “You can … drive that?” Leahlabel asked Heloise.

  Heloise nodded. “I’ll have to if we’re going to take it back to the wagons. It’s much too heavy to carry.”

  “You could kill a devil in this, all right,” Onas said, eyes wide. He turned to his mother. “We should have one. It could walk alongside the wagons, Mother. The Order’d not plague us then.”

  Samson was also staring, but not at the machine.

  “Barnard, how?” he asked. “We’ve been in that camp for an entire day, and you came from the fight at a dead run, so tired you hardly knew where you were. You said you weren’t with Heloise when she abandoned the machine. How did you find your way here?”

  Barnard’s eyes were steady, calm. “You could drop this thing into the bottom of a river and I would find it. The Emperor guides my steps.”

  “Come now,” Samson said. “You remembered the way, or you followed some track. Something you know about the machine.”

  Barnard shook his head sadly, as if Samson were to be pitied. “My strength is the Emperor. It’s not the machine, Samson. It’s the relic.” He gestured to the metal box strapped to the machine’s shoulder. “A beacon to the faithful.”

  Then why don’t I feel it? Heloise wondered.

  “The devil’s head,” Mother Leahlabel said. “May I see it?”

  Barnard stiffened, looked at Heloise. “If her eminence permits, you may. It is her prize, won by right of arms.”

  Leahlabel turned to her. “May we?”

  Heloise wasn’t eager to see what three days of rotting in a metal box had made of the head, but she nodded to Barnard and he lifted an iron key from inside his shirt. The metal chest opened silently on well-oiled hinges, and Barnard lifted the devil’s head out.

  It was as fresh as the moment they cut it from the devil’s shoulders. The tiny nostrils, the lopsided cut of a mouth, the clusters of stalked
eyes. All were pristine. Heloise half-expected it to open its eyes and shriek its ear-splitting eagle scream.

  Barnard hefted it by its corkscrewing black horns. “This,” he said, “is a devil.”

  “That doesn’t look like the stories,” Onas said.

  Barnard shrugged and jerked his chin toward Heloise. “Then it is time to write new stories. No one has ever seen a devil and lived to tell about it, until now.”

  “That’s right,” Leahlabel said, looking at Heloise. “All of your sacred Palantines died in the fight.”

  Onas’s gaze had turned shy again. “How did you do it?”

  I don’t know how I did it. It had happened so fast, Heloise thought as Barnard put the head back in the box and locked it shut. But she said nothing, climbed up the machine’s leg instead, dusted the dead leaves from the seat, and pulled herself inside.

  It felt good to be back behind the controls. The machine had come to feel like an extension of her body, her most comfortable set of clothes. More important, it made her feel safe. She felt the heavy solidity of the metal all around, waiting for her commands. Inside it, she had faced the Order, killed Pilgrims. It might not have saved her eye, but it had surely saved her life.

  She slid her arms into the metal sleeves, her good hand reaching for the control strap.

  She froze.

  “What’s wrong?” Leahlabel asked from the ground.

  “Did you … did you undo the straps when you took me out?” Her stomach was fluttering, but she ignored it. Surely it was nothing. “It’s just that I never undo the straps, but the buckles are undone now.”

  Leahlabel shrugged. “Heloise, I can’t remember. It was Giorgi that took you out of the—”

  Onas was looking around now, frowning. “Mother. People have been here.”

  “Are you sure?” Leahlabel reached up for the knife in her hair. “Perhaps it is—”

  Heloise heard the rush of air before she felt the clang of boots on the machine’s shoulder.

  She looked up just as a slim blade slid through the gap between the machine’s pauldron and the frame, missing her cheek by a hair’s breadth and drawing sparks from the inside of the gorget. The man holding it had dropped from the tree trunk, and was kneeling on the reliquary box, his tight-fitting black clothes silvered by the dappled sunlight filtering in through the crowns of the trees. Loose cloth scabbards hung limp at his sides, the dagger and sword they’d held in his hands now. He was covered in sable cloth that revealed nothing, not a stray hair nor a patch of skin. It rendered him featureless, blending into the forest gloom, save the bright glint of his weapons, and the light reflecting off his eyes.

  The machine shuddered as a second set of boots thumped down on the opposite shoulder. “In the name of the Throne,” the man shouted, “you are taken!”

  The trees to either side of the machine shivered, spewed forth more black-clad men—two, then four, then six, then more, weapons in their hands, racing toward the machine, silent save for the padding of their soft-soled boots on the cold earth.

  Heloise scrambled for the salted cloth bag that kept the seethestone. If she could somehow get the machine started … The sword came sliding through the frame, piercing the bag and forcing Heloise to slip down the seat to get out of the way. She crouched low as the black-clad man pulled his weapon up for another thrust.

  She could hear her father and Barnard shouting. Onas drew his hooked knives and ran for the machine. “Get out!” he called to Heloise as he sprang onto the machine’s metal knee, as nimble as a cat on a tree branch, pushing off the slim surface with his toes and leaping up the machine’s arm to reach the men above her.

  She heard a clash of metal and finally slid out of the machine, rolling down the leg and banging her shoulder painfully on the metal foot. She scrambled to her feet in time to see Barnard, who’d picked up a fallen sapling and was swinging it in a sweeping arc, driving some of the enemy back. One of them charged and caught the trunk full in his face, knocking him on his back. Another black-clad man charged past his fallen comrade, and Samson tackled him at his waist, slamming him into the machine’s leg. The machine shuddered from the impact, and Heloise heard a splintering crack as one of the trunks collapsed, breaking the machine free from the tree’s grip and setting it rocking.

  Heloise scrambled away from it, looking up. Across the machine’s shoulders, the two enemy were pinwheeling their arms, desperately trying to keep their balance as the machine tipped forward and back. Onas danced along the swaying surface as if it were still. He spun, a dancer’s pirouette that sent his silver-handled knives blurring, a metal arc that swept across one man’s throat, sending him tumbling off the machine, gurgling blood.

  The man’s fall set the machine rocking even harder, and the other black-clad man finally lost his footing, dropping his weapons and clinging to the reliquary box. Onas somersaulted backward off the machine, turning in the air and landing on the back of the man Samson had tackled. Onas paused only to draw his hooked knife across the man’s neck before throwing his shoulder against the machine’s rocking leg. “Help me!”

  Samson and Heloise scrambled to their feet, raced to the machine’s legs, throwing their weight against them. She glanced over her shoulder to see Leahlabel, driven back-to-back with Barnard. The Sindi Mother’s knife flashed in her hand, but her thrusts were nowhere near as expert as her son’s, serving only to keep one of the attackers at bay. Another had reached Barnard, sinking his sword deep in his arm. Heloise screamed as the black-clad man swept his dagger up, sliding it into the tinker’s side just above his broad leather belt. Sigir had been tackled to his knees, and one of the enemy had his arms pinned behind his back, knee driven into the Maior’s spine.

  “Heloise, come on!” Onas shouted, and she ripped her gaze away, giving the machine a final heave. Heloise felt it unbalance, the metal feet tipping up toward them. They scrambled back as it crashed down, sending most of their attackers running. Two of them were too slow, and she heard them grunt as the weight of all that metal crushed them against the ground.

  Onas whirled, leapt at Barnard’s attacker, the momentum carrying him into an arc that ended with his knives raking across the enemy’s shoulders. The black-clad man cried out and dropped his sword, backing away, and Onas seized the tinker’s thick arm. “Come on!”

  Leahlabel was already running. Samson leapt to his feet and seized Heloise’s arm, dragging her along. “No!” She shook free of his grip. “They have Sigir!”

  Samson snaked his arm around her waist, throwing her over his shoulder. “We can’t help him now! We have to go!”

  He was already turning and running, Heloise bouncing like a coil of rope against his broad back. She beat on his spine with her scarred stump, the anger boiling in her. “We can’t leave him!”

  “We’ll come back for him!” her father panted.

  She looked up and saw that her father was right. There were dozens of the men-in-black coming out of the woods now, helping their comrades up, turning to give chase. If they returned for Sigir, they would surely be killed. Heloise tried anyway, struggling against her father’s grip.

  In the machine, she was stronger than ten men of her father’s stripe, but outside of it, there was little she could do save tighten her stomach to keep the pounding of his bouncing shoulder from knocking the wind out of her as he ran faster than she ever thought he could.

  At least twenty of the black-clad enemy had recovered from the shock of the falling machine and turned to give chase, reversing their daggers to grip them by the points.

  “This way!” Onas pelted back toward the sageata de argint, turning sharply as Heloise craned her neck to see the brook glinting in the thin sunlight. He made for a thick stand of brush that crowded the brook’s edge, growing thicker as they neared, until the water slid beneath it and disappeared.

  The men-in-black came behind them, fast runners, but not so sure of the ground, and not ready for a run through the woods over branches and rocks. One
of them stumbled on a root, went sliding on his face. The man behind him vaulted over him, throwing his dagger as he came. It fell short, a ranging throw only, but it quivered in the earth a few paces behind Samson. It wouldn’t take them long to get in range.

  Leahlabel reached the brush beside her son and threw herself into it, diving low, like Heloise used to dive into the pond outside Lutet in the hot summer. She slid along the wet ground beneath the thick branches, and immediately set to crawling. Onas skidded to a stop, waving them in with one arm. “Down! Follow Mother! Down on your bellies! Go!”

  Samson released Heloise and she rolled off his shoulder, slinking down onto her belly. She sighted Leahlabel’s receding feet and followed them, the freezing, wet earth soaking into her dress and numbing her chest. Down here, the thick, tough bases of the bushes formed a weaving path, natural columns supporting the dense thicket of thorns and leaves above them. Heloise could feel them ripping at her back as she went. She bit her lip, ignoring the pain and focusing on moving as fast she could. She risked a glance over her shoulder, saw Barnard’s massive shoulders squeeze between two bushes, get briefly stuck, then pop free as Onas pushed him from behind. The tinker reached out with thick hands and hauled himself along, his beard trailing in the mud and brook water. His face looked far too pale, and Heloise swallowed the urge to go to him, focused instead on pulling herself forward.

  She heard the brush shudder as the black-clad men reached the thicket and cast their daggers into it, heard Samson grunting as he crawled in after Barnard, and finally Onas slithering along behind them all. “Go on!” the Sindi boy called to Samson. “Keep them moving! I’ll hold them here!”

  There were shouts as the first of the enemy reached the thicket’s edge and began wading into it, slashing with their swords. Heloise risked another glance and saw Onas on his belly, slithering backward into the thicket, knives in his hands, slashing at one of the enemy who’d figured out they could make no progress standing, and had lowered himself to crawl after them. Onas drew him in with a feint, then stabbed at his unprotected face. Heloise looked away just as the man cried out.