The Queen of Crows

by Myke Cole

  She realized that her father was grunting words. “You. Killed. My. Wife. You. Killed. My. Wife.”

  Mother. She jerked upright, shrugging off Leahlabel’s hands and scanning the room wildly. Her chest and face screamed at her, but she ignored them.

  At last she found her mother. Leuba was gray-faced and cold. Samson had rolled her onto her back and arranged her hands across her chest, one atop the other. If not for the pallor of her skin, she would have looked like she’d fallen asleep while praying.

  Heloise felt the same sense of unreality that had accompanied the assassins in the first place, the same numbness. She couldn’t even bring herself to be angry with Sigir. It wasn’t he who’d killed her mother. The man who did that was somewhere in that bloody pile of black-wreathed limbs at Barnard’s feet.

  She turned, and Leahlabel wisely backed away, eyes wide with worry. Heloise stalked toward Sigir and gave her father a shove. Surprised, Samson fell away, releasing Sigir to let the Maior’s head rebound off the stone, leaving a wet smear. Heloise seized the metal collar and pulled him back up, bringing her knife’s sharp point up to his throat. Her wrist throbbed where the collar had chafed against it as she parried the assassin’s blow.

  “Don’t kill me!” the Maior burbled through his split lips. “I didn’t want any of this. I didn’t kill Leuba!”

  “You did,” Heloise said, “even if it wasn’t your hand on the knife. You killed her and you would have killed me.”

  He tried to open his swollen eyes, but couldn’t manage it. “Heloise … you’re alive.”

  “Which means you failed,” she said. “All of this … betrayal and murder. Turning your back on those who loved you. All for nothing.”

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “You were supposed to tell them you wouldn’t take their coin, or their titles, or whatever they promised you.” Heloise could feel grief building behind her cold rage. “You were supposed to keep that door closed.”

  She stopped speaking for fear that words would fail her, that she would weep before them all. The shock of Sigir’s betrayal was fading already, leaving her with the greater shock that, even now, the sight of his battered face pulled at her heartstrings.

  There were so many questions. There was so much she wanted to say, but the grief was like a swamp in her chest, and her throat struggled to force out enough air to make the words, “You said that you knew the Order was evil.”

  “They are,” Sigir croaked, “and it doesn’t matter. Good and evil are stories, Heloise. I had thought you old enough to be past them, but you’ve only gotten worse since you got in that blight-touched tinker-engine. You think bloodying your hands makes you a woman grown, but only time can do that.”

  The rage came roaring back into her. “Only a woman grown can tell that betraying your own people is evil?”

  “I didn’t betray us, Heloise. I tried to save us.”

  Heloise patted the pink scar where Leahlabel had healed the wound in her chest, wincing at the pain. “And this is how?”

  “Yes!” Sigir roared, his voice finally clear. “You cannot win, Heloise! You can be as righteous as the Emperor himself and still they will kill you, and with you, all of us. Have you not stood on the walls and looked at the army below? You are a girl, Heloise. I have fought in a war. We cannot beat them. We can only hope they will spare us.”

  “They won’t spare us,” Heloise said, so quietly she wondered if Sigir could hear.

  But Sigir did hear. “That is why I followed you,” he said, “that is why I was willing to fight for you even here. Because I thought it was the only way I could keep us all alive. But now they have offered me another way.”

  “And their price was me.”

  Sigir said nothing, and it stole the last of her strength. She sagged on her feet. She felt her tongue listing into the gap created by her missing teeth. First her eye and now this. The Order was whittling her away, killing her piece by piece.

  Sigir cried into the silence. “I had to make a choice! You or the village!”

  “And what of the Kipti?” Heloise finally asked. “Surely the Order did not promise to spare them.”

  “I am the Maior of Lutet, Heloise. Not some heretic band.”

  “They are people, Sigir,” Heloise said, grateful that he had said something that would allow her to hate him. “You’re no different from the Order. You want a world for just one village, and not any others. These people can live because they pray to a throne instead of a wheel. These people can live because their homes are on the ground and not in a wagon. And someone always has to die, so everyone else can live. As if there were no other way.”

  It was all so … stupid. Basina, Clodio, Gunnar, her mother. None of them had to die.

  “I want to live in a world where everyone, no matter who they are, dies from growing old, and not because someone else killed them for their own good.”

  “Everyone wants to live that way, Heloise,” Sigir said, “but that isn’t the way the world is. And you cannot make your dream real when you’re dead.”

  “But I am not dead.” Heloise leaned in close. “In spite of your treachery and your knife I am very much alive. What does that tell you, Sigir? What does that tell you about how you think the world works?”

  * * *

  Sigir tried to speak to her again, but a few short strokes from Samson relieved him of more of his remaining teeth, and he was silent. When the dawn crested, her father cradled her mother in his arms and brought her out to the town common. Barnard and Wolfun had piled wood in a bed of stones, scavenged from one of the many abandoned houses. Leuba looked tiny now, drained of color, and Heloise realized she had always seemed that way to her. The thought made the grief worse, because Leuba had done so much, and had asked for so little in return. You are dear to me, she had said to them all, Sigir included. She had been so worried when Heloise had folded herself into the cart to take the gates of Lyse. It had never occurred to Heloise to worry for her, as if Leuba were somehow too … gentle, too kind for fate to take notice of her.

  The chapter house doors opened wide to admit the sun’s first rays, flashing orange and yellow as they topped the town walls, falling on Sigir’s swollen face and making him blink. Like her mother, he was scarcely recognizable, both eyes bulbous, purple and slitted, his gap-toothed mouth curling inward. That was good, Heloise didn’t think she could bear to look on his old face, the one she had loved for so long. “Time to go, Master Maior,” she said. The machine shuddered as she took a step toward him, reaching out with her knife-hand.

  “Wait!” His voice whistled through his missing teeth, trying to scramble away from her. Xilyka and Onas held him fast.

  “Wait! Heloise, you don’t have to do this … you…”

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby, Sigir.” Samson’s voice was dead. He’d laid Leuba on her bed of wood and returned to stand in the doorway. “You’ve known Leuba too long to miss her funeral.”

  Heloise hooked the front of Sigir’s shirt with the back of her knife point, and the machine’s strength lifted him easily. He sagged against the filthy cloth, legs kicking. “Wait!”

  But Heloise did not wait. She carried him out to the common, where the villagers and the Traveling People had gathered. They stood around the pile of stone and wood, heads bowed, as if looking at Leuba would somehow sully her. Heloise recognized it as a gesture of respect, and she appreciated it. But like her mother’s death, it was useless, needless. Leuba was dead. She didn’t care if anyone looked at her or not.

  But needless gestures were what people needed, and what they expected of a Palantine. Heloise would at least keep them short. “My grief is too great for words,” she said, “so I will use few. My mother is gone, killed by a traitor.” Sigir was screaming something, a denial, a plea. Heloise raised her voice to be heard over him until her father’s fist bludgeoned him into silence. “I could remind you of what happens when we die, of the purpose and joy we know at the Emperor’s right hand. But
instead I will ask you to tell me, what does the Writ tell of the Emperor’s holy hands?”

  “That they are cleansed,” the few villagers who had the words of the Writ memorized responded, while the Traveling People kept a respectful silence, “that they are washed in the blood of righteousness.”

  “His hands are cleansed that they may, in turn, cleanse,” Heloise recited from memory. “And how has the Emperor told us to cleanse? What manner is most clean?”

  The heads came up now, eyes fixing on Sigir. “Fire,” Samson’s voice rang out over them all. “The flame cleans even as it lights the way. It warms as it scours. It feeds us as it drives our enemies into the dark.”

  Barnard produced a torch, thrust it into the wood pile. Sigir had begun to kick again, but feebly. He chafed his wrists against the twisted bit of rope that bound them. He was done shouting now, done weeping. It seemed to take forever for the wood to catch, but once it did, the flames leapt hungrily up, rolling over her mother and folding her into their embrace. Heloise straightened her knife-arm, turning Sigir so he could look. He didn’t, of course, craned his neck back, lifting his chin away. For a moment, Heloise was enraged, but then she realized it wasn’t her mother he was avoiding, it was the heat of the fire.

  Good.

  “My mother is dead.” Heloise had to raise her voice to be heard over the roar of the flames. “She is dead because this man, our friend for years, our leader, killed her. He killed her because he was frightened.

  “I’m frightened too,” Heloise went on, “we all are. But Sigir was a man grown, and what does the Emperor say of men grown?”

  “That he forgives them,” the more pious in the crowd responded, “that he is merciful.”

  “And that,” Heloise finished for them, “they must pay for the things they do. Two go into a fire as easily as one, once the flames are kindled. Cleanse and burn, Master Maior.”

  The machine’s long, metal arm thrust him out over the fire and he danced, comically, trying to lift his legs as the flames licked at him. “Samson,” he gasped, his words garbled by his broken mouth, “please! Just kill me! For the love you bear me, please end it!”

  “For the love I bear you,” Samson’s voice was brushed steel, “I will not.”

  Sigir said more, but the flames were catching now, and his words ran together into a long, high wail. The fire crawled up him, making his clothes smoke and flap, his skin shrivel and bubble. He caught much more quickly than the wood had, as if his fear were a combustible thing, dried tinder laid in for this moment.

  “Does it hurt?” Heloise whispered, knowing her words were drowned by Sigir’s screams and past caring. “It is my mother. It is her vengeance made fire.”

  His hair caught with a whoosh, and Heloise was amazed at how quickly it was gone, crowning him in greasy, orange-gray gold. The machine’s arm held him a good distance away, but even so, Heloise could feel the heat against her face. Even when it became painful, she didn’t look away. She kept her eyes on Sigir until his shirt had burned away, and the shriveled blackness of him dropped from her blade and into fire, kicking up a cloud of embers that did their firefly dance over her head.

  “Can you fish him out of the fire?” Heloise asked Wolfun. The Town Wall nodded, reaching into the coals with his spear. “And your mother, your eminence?”

  “Let her be,” Heloise said. “She’ll need another round of cleansing after sharing a pyre with that. Bring the Maior up to the wall, and the assassins, too.” She turned without looking and made her way toward the rampart, the crowd parting to admit her.

  She heard the enemy before she saw them. Music was playing somewhere in their camp, and the sergeants were mustering troops into formation, no doubt expecting the gates to be flung wide at any moment as the assassin’s bloody work was concluded.

  She felt the smile growing on her face as she mounted the rampart. The buzz of voices was punctuated by shouts as the soldiers saw her, and then immediately settled into stunned silence as she crested the battlements and they realized it was Heloise, alive. A few more cuts on her than she’d had before, but alive.

  She drank up their shock, imagined the satisfaction spiraling away from her to her mother’s soul, standing beside the Emperor’s golden throne. For you, Mother. It won’t make you live, but it is something.

  Heloise could feel the expectant hush below her, rippling out to silence the muttering of the sentries on the wall, of her own friends and family mounting the rampart to join her. The quiet was broken only by the squeaking axles of the handcart Barnard was pushing up to her, piled high with the assassins’ corpses, Sigir atop it, twisted, black, and still smoking. Tone and the Emperor’s Song were pushing their way to the front of the throng below. Tone was gaping openly, and while the Song’s mask covered his mouth, Heloise thought she could see the shock in his eyes.

  No, it wouldn’t bring her mother back.

  But it was still good to see.

  “You seem busy,” Heloise called down to them. “I hate to interrupt.”

  “We are busy,” Tone gestured at the town, furious, “preparing to put this pile of kindling to the torch.”

  The Song settled a hand on Tone’s shoulder, and the Pilgrim stiffened and went silent.

  “Have you come to accept our terms?” The Song’s voice was as confident, as beautiful as it had ever been, but Heloise thought she could detect an undercurrent of uncertainty.

  “Thank you, no,” she replied. “Rather, you seem to have left some things in my chapter house, and it wouldn’t be right of me to hold them. We villagers try to be kind to our neighbors.” She gestured to Barnard, and the huge tinker upended the cart with a grunt. Heloise could hear the wet smacking of the bodies as they bounced off the wall on their way to the ditch at its base.

  The Song’s eyes never left hers, but Tone watched the tumbling bodies come down. When he finally looked back up at her, the fury on his face took her breath away, but she forced herself to smile wider, as sweetly as if the corpses were a festival gift. “We figured you’d be hungry. Such a big army must have foraged everything there was to eat in a night or two. Did our best to carve them up for you, so you can share them out easier. Your traitor-spy,” she gestured to Sigir’s blackened corpse, seamed now in red where the charred skin had split during its fall, “we tried to cook for you. Apologies, I’m afraid he’s overdone.”

  She glanced at her father out of the corner of her eye. His eyes were locked on Tone, his mouth set in a fierce grin. It lifted her heart. After all that had happened, she could at least give him this.

  “You are less than animals,” Tone called up to them.

  “That’s no way to talk to a friend who is trying to feed you. There’s enough there for a night at least. More, if you’re careful with sharing it out.”

  “We will not need it.” The Song made no effort at beauty now. “We are through waiting.”

  He turned, rattling his sword out of his scabbard and holding it over his head. Trumpets sounded, and the silence splintered as the army sprang into action, scrambling to their siege engines, rallying to their companies, sounding the advance.

  Heloise turned to her father. “They are coming.”

  Samson nodded. “I love you, my dove. And I wish … I wish it could have been different.”

  Heloise felt her heart swell, tears pricking at the corner of her eye. She fought it down. The enemy was coming. She stretched her ripped cheek into a smile that must have looked horrifying.

  “No, Father,” she said, sweeping her knife-arm out to indicate the massing enemy. “Things are different.” And then the first shouts rose from her archers on the wall, as the enemy skirmishers advanced into range.

  13

  BREAKING STORM

  I can say it now, I suppose. I was at the Battle of the Bend. I saw the Red Lords checked and driven back. I went to the end of the march and back again, stood my post until the disband sounded and I could go back to my Leuba. The Captain-General gave us a rousing
speech. Told us how proud we could all be that we’d brought the Red Lords beneath the shadow of the Throne. We may be levy, but we’re no fools. The Red Lords and their “free peoples” are outside the shadow, not beneath it. They worship as they will and do as they will, so long as they keep to the Gold Coast. Barnard thinks they’re just biding their time to make another go, but it’s been winter after winter now, and I’m betting they’re just as keen to keep their border as we are.

  —From the journal of Samson Factor

  The enemy’s skirmishers were a mixed bunch. Some were levy, boys and old men wielding bows and slings they normally used to hunt rabbits or pheasants for their table. Others were professional soldiers in mail or quilted jackets and steel helmets. Their bows were longer, their arrows scrawled with words from the Writ. They shot singly, probing range and angle.

  Wolfun raised a hand, calling to his men to wait. “We have precious few arrows. Mark your targets and do not waste a shot.”

  When one of the younger boys let his fear get the better of him, loosing an arrow to quiver uselessly in the dirt at the base of the wall, Wolfun admonished him with a stream of curses that would have made Samson blush.

  The enemy had no such worries. Their quivers were full to bursting, and Heloise could see wagons among the tents, piled high with sacks of stones and sheaves of arrows bundled in white cloth. Their ranging shots came closer, and Heloise began to hear the twanging of the bowstrings and the pattering of arrowheads as they drew sparks from the stone wall, higher and higher as the archers adjusted their aim.

  “Your eminence,” Onas said, “we should get you to safety.”

  She did her best to ignore the nearness of him, to treat him as his role—her bodyguard—required, but the conversation between them in the boneyard still curdled in her belly. She could feel his gaze on her, did her best to avoid it.