by Evan Winter
“Yes, I see she has. Don’t think to use her faith to bind or bend her will. It won’t go well for you.”
That was a step too far, and Tau gave himself over to the man he was in the underworld. He locked eyes with the vizier and spoke with the same intensity with which he fought. “Are you threatening me, Vizier?”
She stepped back. “I will protect my queen.”
“Is that what you think you’re doing now?”
“She worships Queen Taifa and Champion Tsiory. You can tell that, can’t you? She reveres the Dragon Queen’s courage and idolizes the love that existed between her and Tsiory. She sees them as a model to be followed. You’re not too foolish to see that, are you?”
Tau said nothing and Nyah nodded, as if he’d admitted guilt in a hanging offense.
“Queen Tsiora has been isolated her whole life. Every decision has been made for her, guiding her to these moments, and now, finally, she’s come to power, and finally, she can make choices for herself. She’s a good woman and she’ll prove to be a great queen. She will because we’ve spent every day of her life getting her ready for what we knew was coming.”
“Vizier, I’ll help her win the fights to come, but—”
“But we didn’t know you were coming.”
“What?”
“A Lesser who fights like the Goddess Herself blessed him? A man who resurrects the legend of Champion Tsiory in a new image? We didn’t expect you, Tau Solarin.”
“I’m no Tsiory.”
“No, you’re not, and that’s all I’m asking you to remember,” Nyah said, walking away from him and into the stables.
“Are all Gifted and Nobles insane?” Tau asked under his breath, following her.
He wasn’t a step past the doors when Kellan came over and placed a hand on his shoulder. “The vizier warns you away from the queen?”
“It seems I have my answer,” Tau said to himself.
“Beg pardon?”
“Nothing, Kellan, nothing.”
“You are the queen’s chosen champion,” Kellan said. “Out of everyone, she chose you, and that means she wants you to defend her queendom as well as be her—”
Tau put his hands up, palms out. “Kellan, listen to me. The queen chose me because she wanted me to fight. That’s where I can give my all, and it’s the only place I can. There’s nothing else in me worth giving or taking.”
Kellan squeezed his shoulder. It was meant to be comforting, but Tau had to hold himself back from shrugging Kellan’s hand away.
“Champion Solarin,” Kellan said, “don’t give in to the lie that you honor the dead or Gifted Zuri Uba by closing your heart forever. Grief, anger, they’ll hold you for a time. They must. But if you let them root and fester, they’ll become a hate that will consume you.”
Kellan patted him on the shoulder again, opened the doors wider, and walked into the stables to join the others as Tau seriously considered turning around and going to get some badly needed sleep.
“Champion Solarin,” the queen called from across the stables. “Will you join us? We have something for you.”
FURY
Feeling suspicious, Tau made his way to Tsiora and the others. The queen, dressed in an ocean-blue something that looked like a cross between a Gifted’s robes on top and an Ihashe’s pants below her waist, was brushing down the enormous horse Mirembe had stolen. It was the same animal that had smashed Tau’s demon to ash. Though, in the time since, Tau had come to wonder if the memory was a true or false one.
“Where are they now?” Tau heard Tsiora ask Nyah.
“Riding hard for us,” Nyah told her. “Don’t worry about the handmaidens, my queen. They can take care of themselves.”
The queen’s hand, the one holding the brush she was using on the horse, hung in midair. She did not appear reassured. “Are they pursued?”
Nyah shook her head. “Lelise did not think so.”
Tau wondered at handmaidens who could ride and who could create so much worry in the queen.
“Then the Goddess watches over them,” the queen said, turning to Tau and gracing him with a smile. “Champion,” she said.
Like Hadith, she had a gift with people. Tau couldn’t deny that, but he also had no interest in playing the obsequious Kellan to her Hadith. Queen Tsiora had promised him more than smiles and sweet words for his loyalty.
“We lost our father to the war when we were young,” she said, the conversation’s sudden weight putting Tau off-balance. “At the time, it felt like his pyre’s ashes hadn’t even had the chance to cool before our mother’s sickness returned her to the Goddess.” The queen’s smile fell away. “There were days we didn’t think we could keep going. There were nights we thought it better if we didn’t.”
The vizier had looked away, as if she had no desire to remember or share in the queen’s recalled pain.
“Nyah helped us through that time with her care and compassion. She could see the thread holding us to this life unraveling and she gave us something to keep that thread strong.”
Aimed at Nyah, the queen’s smile returned. The vizier met her queen’s smile with one of her own, and for once, Tau had no doubts about intent. The two women cared for each other.
“Nyah told me that life, like love, is meant to be shared and that we are least linked to our own selves when we have no one with whom to share what we are. None of us are meant to go through this life alone.” The queen continued brushing the warhorse. “When our mother died, Nyah brought us to the royal stables in Palm City and we walked its length, stopping at the last stall. Inside was a tiny foal, newborn.”
“Foal?” Tau asked.
The queen’s eyes crinkled at their corners. “A baby horse.”
“I see.”
“Nyah opened the stall door and we went inside. We sat with the foal until we were exhausted and hungry. We asked Nyah if we could come back on the morrow and she told us that we’d better, since the foal had lost its mother and was now ours to raise and shelter. We thought less about leaving this life after that.”
Tau began to worry about where this was going.
“This is Fury,” she said, patting the side of the coal-black horse.
“It has a name?”
“She does, yes.”
“Fury?”
“Fury.”
“Uh, does she live up to it?”
“You’ll have to find out for yourself.”
Tau’s stomach dropped. “My queen?”
“Fury is yours.”
His first thought, though it shamed him, was that he could trade the animal for enough rations to feed himself, his mother, his sister, and his mother’s husband for the rest of their lives and the lives of all their children. But he was no longer Tau Tafari, the boy who needed to worry if he’d have enough to eat. For good or ill, that boy was gone.
“My queen, the gift is too great and I am not worthy,” Tau said. “I have some sense of how rare these animals are and I have no knowledge of them or their care. I don’t even know how to ride.”
That smile from her again. “We will teach you,” she said.
Tau shot a look at Hadith. His sword brother, allowed to sit on a straw bale due to his injury, mouthed the words “thank you.”
“Thank you,” Tau said to the queen.
“It pleases us to do this, Champion Solarin,” she said. Then, turning to the rest of the women and men gathered before her, she sighed. “Now, gift granted, we must deal with less pleasant tasks.”
Tau missed most of that. He was eyeing Fury, hoping the thing could continue to be housed in the stables, wondering what it ate, and worrying over how much it had hurt to ride a horse the one time he’d done it.
It could be, he thought, that most of the pain had been because of his injured leg, but that didn’t account for why his ass and back were still so sore. Shaking his head, Tau surrendered the issue of the horse to another day and brought his attention back to the queen.
“Nyah will g
o over the rest,” the queen said.
Bowing her head, Nyah spoke. “The Omehi have been split and the traditional ruling structure benefits the traitors. They sit in our capital city with the support of almost all the Royal Nobles, and we, a small group lacking experience and any authority but that which flows from our queen, hold council in relative exile. With every day that passes, the loyalty of the Nobles and Lessers who still call Queen Tsiora their monarch will weaken.”
“You want to move quickly,” Hadith said.
“It’s not a want. It’s a necessity,” Nyah said. “Odili asked General Bisi to leave the front lines and march to Princess Esi’s defense in Palm City.”
The queen’s face was stern. “This is a mistake we made. We should have requested the general’s aid before Odili had the chance. To ask it now would give Bisi the chance to choose which command to follow. It would give him the chance to announce to all Omehi which side he views as the legitimate one without appearing partisan. He’d simply be following orders.”
Never having had much patience for political maneuvering, Tau watched the faces of those around him. Of the queen, Nyah, Gifted Thandi, Hadith, Kellan, and Uduak, the oldest among them was the vizier. And out of the seven of them, three were Lessers, with one of those Lessers being their grand general.
The queen’s hopes rested on the shoulders of a group comprised primarily of the inexperienced and the young, brought together by circumstance and plotting to retake a queendom from a stable.
Just once, Tau thought, he’d like to know what it was like to be on the side that wasn’t being dragged to slaughter.
“Earlier today we received Bisi’s response,” Nyah said. “He sent the same edification to Citadel City and Palm, letting both Queen Tsiora and Guardian Councillor Abasi Odili know that he cannot leave the front lines because he must defend the paths into the peninsula.”
“So, he’ll wait for us to spend our might on one another before marching in to pick up the pieces?” Tau asked, thinking he needed to say something to show he was listening.
“Respectfully, Champion, I don’t believe so,” Kellan said. “General Bisi is a true soldier. He’ll do what he believes is right to secure the future of our people.”
“Yes, but what will that be?” asked Hadith.
“We cannot know,” the queen said. “Perhaps we need not know. If the general comes to neither our nor Odili’s aid, we have a chance to finish this without bringing the larger might of the military into the conflict. It will be a single battle instead of a true civil war.”
“You still mean to attack Palm City,” Hadith said.
The queen nodded.
“My queen, we don’t have the soldiers to win that fight,” Hadith said.
“We’ll call upon the fiefs to honor their allegiance to us,” the queen said. “We’ll ask them to send their Ihagu and we’ll commandeer the remaining Ihashe from the Northern and Southern Isikolo. With those forces, as well as the ones in this city, we can take Palm City and free our sister.”
Hadith bowed his head to the queen. “If we can gather these forces, we’d have enough to defeat Odili in open combat, but it’s still not enough to successfully siege the capital.”
The vizier looked to the queen, as if asking for permission. Tsiora nodded, granting it.
“There is another way,” Nyah said. “What was told to Mirembe and Otobong in the council chambers was true. We have agents inside Palm’s walls who are loyal to Queen Tsiora.”
“How can you be so sure they’ve remained loyal?” Hadith asked.
Nyah looked very much like she’d have preferred not to say, her mouth twitching before she managed to get the words out. “There is a group among the Gifted who are specifically chosen for their loyalty to the queen and the greater cause of the Goddess. We call them the Shadow Council and they have existed in one form or another since the time of Queen Taifa.”
“Shadow Council?” asked Hadith. “Created by whom and for what purpose?”
“This is Royal Noble business and not something discussed beyond their circles, but Queen Taifa’s rule ended when the Royals determined that her aims ran counter to theirs,” Nyah said.
“Like us, Queen Taifa was betrayed,” Tsiora said, “but the Goddess told her what was to come, and in preparation, the queen formed the Shadow Council.”
“For what purpose, my queen?” Hadith asked.
“For our purpose,” Queen Tsiora said, her words running a chill through Tau.
“The point,” Nyah said, “is that we can communicate with the Shadow Council through edification and they can help us take the city.”
“With respect and deference, how does it do that?” asked Kellan.
“We’ll have them open the city gates,” answered Hadith. “Then we can walk right in.”
“You know the city, Buhari?” asked Nyah.
“On maps I’ve studied.”
“On maps you’ve studied …” Nyah pressed her fingers to her temples and gave the queen a look.
Hadith turned to Kellan. “Odili’s army will be at the main gates because Palm City sits between the two estuaries of the Amanzi. He’ll probably destroy the bridge crossing the rivers when he learns we’re on our way, but all that does is slow us down. The southern fork of the river is shallow and thin enough to be forded. So, he’ll position his men behind the main gates because the main gates are the only ones we can attack.”
“But then there’s no way for the Shadow Council to open the main gates if the whole of Odili’s army is standing behind them,” Kellan said.
“That’s not the gate they’re going to open,” Hadith said, and Tau saw Nyah’s eyebrows lift. Hadith was putting the pieces together faster than she’d expected. “The northern fork of the river is the wider and faster-flowing one, but it was partially dammed so that a section of its waters flow through the city itself, yes?”
“That’s right,” Nyah said.
“And the waters that were redirected to run through the city, they enter it by way of an opening in the city’s walls, an opening that faces away from the city’s main gates.”
“It sounds like you’re speaking of the Port Gates, General.”
“I am, but you already know this, because you’ve already come to this plan and wish to see if I can as well.”
“Have I?” Nyah asked.
“We’ll split our force into a main army, water army, and reserves,” Hadith said. “Our main army will move on the city’s main gates, ensuring that Odili and his fighters remain focused there. Our water army will be made up of Ihashe from the Northern Isikolo. Most men from the North know how to swim. They’ll get to the Port Gates, which the Shadow Council can, I assume, open.”
Nyah’s eyebrows went from slightly lifted to fully arched. “The Port Gates are a massive bronze portcullis that a child could not slip through, and they can only be raised using the mechanism inside the city.”
“And?” asked Hadith.
“And the Shadow Council can overcome the guards protecting the mechanism,” Nyah said. “They can raise the gates.”
Hadith nodded. “The water army will enter the city and make their way north. Their destination will be the much larger gates facing the northern fork of the Amanzi River. The water army will fight the few sentries Odili is bound to leave at the Northern Gates, and then …,” Hadith said, opening his hands in Kellan’s direction.
Kellan was grinning. “The water army opens the Northern Gates and our reserves can invade the city.”
“Exactly,” Hadith said. “In the days leading up to the attack, the reserves will build rafts large enough to hold every fighter with them. When we attack the west-facing main gates, they’ll ford the river and enter through the ones in the north.”
The queen was smiling at Nyah in a manner Tau might have called smug, if it weren’t the queen doing it.
“We’ll rip half the city from Odili’s grasp before he even realizes it’s gone,” Hadith continued, “and
then we have the choice to continue hammering against the reduced strength behind the main gates or we can march our main army around to the north side and flow into the city like a river of bronze.”
Nyah inclined her head. She’d underestimated Hadith and was admitting as much to the queen.
“But,” Hadith said, “there’s still a problem.”
“Yes, there is,” the queen said.
“To make this work, we need Odili’s forces concentrated at the main gates, and the best way to make him do that is to attack them. To stop us, Odili will have his Gifted call down their Guardians, and our men will die in dragon fire.”
“Which is why we’ll call to the Guardians as well,” the queen said. “Some of them will fight for us, some for Odili. It means the Guardians will have to turn their fire on each other instead of on our soldiers. The risk in drawing so much from the underworld is grave but necessary. We must pray to the Goddess that the Cull won’t notice.”
Nyah shot the queen a look at her mention of the Omehi’s ancient enemy, and Kellan cleared his throat, seeking permission to speak.
“Yes, Ingonyama Okar?” the queen asked before raising a hand to forestall him a moment. “Excuse us, in this company we have little need to be so impersonal. Yes, Kellan?”
Having Tsiora say his name seemed to make Kellan forget what he’d wanted to say. “Ah … well … ah,” he said, stammering, “don’t Odili’s Gifted outnumber our own?”
Nyah answered, but Kellan, Tau noticed, kept his eyes on the queen. “Our numbers are evenly matched, but, by and large, the Gifted in Palm City are better trained. They’ll be more efficient with their powers and able to call to the Guardians for longer.”
Hadith, sitting, leaned back and grimaced. He’d forgotten his injury. “This is where we fail, then,” he said, placing a hand over the bandages beneath his loose-fitting shirt. “If Odili’s Guardians outlast our own, we’ll lose too many soldiers to dragon fire, and once our main force is decimated, he’ll use his army to crush our reserves.”
Perhaps the queen’s talk of prayer had put him in a faithful mood, but for just the second time in his life, Tau felt as if the Goddess spoke to him, showing him the path forward. “Explain it again,” he said.
