by Jeff Wheeler
Far ahead, an eternity ahead, Steward Keelin Mochain—an iron wisp of a woman and the second greatest tormentor of Riona’s childhood—raised her hands for silence.
A thousand faces turned toward Riona. A thousand clanswomen and clansmen robed in white, with only flashes of clan colors visible on arms or shoulders, ever shifting, like jewels half buried in wind-driven snow.
So many people.
You think you are fit to be queen, girl?
Riona resisted the urge to swat at the voice in her mind as she might a buzzing fly. Eilis’s words had always haunted her, even in life, but since the night before—since the burning of the old queen’s body—it had been worse. As if Eilis knew her funeral had been little more than a few platitudes and a bonfire. As if she knew Riona hadn’t been able to pull back the shroud and look at her face.
You’re a coward, girl. You are weak.
Blue and violet light fell across the dais, slanting over the pedestal at its center where the tall urn containing Eilis’s ashes sat. Fitting—the fallen queen present to witness a new queen’s rise.
The air warmed with every step Riona took away from the open doors. The peeling murals on the ceiling and walls watched her. With every step, history pressed down on her. Watching, like the people.
You are nothing, girl.
No. I am Riona Brannon. The first of Frenna’s line to bear the queensmark for a thousand years. The first Brannon to wield the bone-shard sword.
Riona touched the silken fabric of her white gown, glimmering at hem, neck, and sleeves with silver. The freedom of a skirt was strange, the train cumbersome and heavy. A band of silvermask owl feathers circled her head, with more feathers and silver threads woven into her dark braid, left long down her back.
All the women of the clans wore feathers—eagle, hawk, osprey, and kite—as a sign of rank. Before today, Riona had worn eagle feathers, marking her equal in rank to the clan leaders, though the queensmark said she had no clan.
Now, she had no equal.
Riona trained her eyes on the dais. She would not look for Clan Brannon. Would not check to see if Morna, their cinan—her blood-mother—watched. If she looked proud.
Souls, how Riona had dreamed of this moment. She would rise, and the darkness that plagued her childhood would be washed away in power.
Riona reached the dais and climbed the stairs with shoulders back, head high. On the pedestal next to the urn sat a silver circlet, sparkling with a single sapphire.
Keelin raised her hands. “Today we crown Riona nich Brannon, daughter of Eilis—”
Daughter of Eilis, indeed.
“—Queen of the Wildwoods and Mountain Reach, ruler over the Wildings and the remnant of the dragonskin—”
On the wall behind the dais, an ancient mural depicted Queen Frenna, lithe and dark haired, clasping hands with a dragonskin man. Torsten, the Sleeping King. Real gold had been used to pick out the scales on the backs of his hands, to highlight his shining hair. The artist had made Frenna as tall as he was. Ha. Dagny and Eilis’s old dragonskin companion—an emerald-scaled woman called Thone—stood half a head taller than the tallest Wildings. Riona could only assume a dragonskin male would tower.
“—since the defeat of Makkah, when Frenna united the Wilding clans—”
Below the first mural, a second depicted the dragonskin king’s tomb. He lay there, still. Not in death—supposedly—but in sleep. Waiting until he was needed, carrying with him the knowledge of how to defeat Makkah.
Bah.
“—never replace Queen Eilis, glorious and illustrious, beloved from the mountainous nest of Crann Laith down to the sea—”
Under different circumstances, Riona would be making a pilgrimage to that tomb tomorrow. Tradition and superstition dictated that every new Wilding queen visit the Sleeping King, lift the crystal lid of his coffin, and kiss his lips. Disgusting. She should thank the Andrisi for leaving her no time to trek to the ruins and kiss a scaly, thousand-year-old dustbag.
Riona started when Keelin placed the circlet in her hands. She jerked back from the older woman’s clawlike grip. Tightening her fingers around the hard metal, Riona looked out at the crowd, their dark hair and pale faces interrupted every now and then by a tall, brightly scaled dragonskin.
Stop crying, girl. No wonder you are alone.
Their hungry eyes devoured her. Every single one of them. They needed her. To be wise. To do the right thing. To protect them. Their heavy stares joined the weight of those in the murals, pushing her down. The room tilted. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe . . .
There was a children’s game in the Wildwood. The daring would climb two close trees and leap from the branches of one to the other. The person who jumped from the highest, leanest, farthest apart branches was the winner. For safety’s sake, a net was strung among the low branches to catch the one who fell.
In that moment, Riona realized that Eilis had been her net. A net of razors, but still.
Eilis was gone.
I need no one.
Of its own accord, Riona’s gaze searched out the ocean blue of Clan Brannon. Each of the seafarers wore an embroidered spiral of waves somewhere on their mourning white, or a blue band around an upper arm, or a vest of azure leather.
And there was Morna Brannon. There was nothing spectacular about her. Middle-aged, medium height, weathered face, sturdy build. But in her gaze—as there had been on the few occasions they’d met—Riona saw something that Eilis had never given her.
Warmth.
Riona set the circlet on her head, perching it amongst the silver feathers, and lowered herself into a bow to the assembled people.
“Long fly, Queen Riona!” shouted someone in the crowd.
The answering cry echoed loud enough to shake down the mountains. “Long fly, Queen Riona!”
Oratory was not one of Riona’s strengths, so she skipped parts of the speech that Keelin had written for her. She glanced at the woman every time she did, watching the old snake’s frown deepen as Riona glossed over a sentence or skipped an anecdote about the greatness Eilis had instilled in her. Candied-petal speeches had never sat well on Riona’s tongue, and Keelin couldn’t take a fogwood switch to her bare back anymore.
Riona finished and stepped down from the dais. The people bowed in a wave before her. She would exit the cathedral and make her way to the keep across the square. There, she would meet with her cinan. She would turn the tide of the war.
When she was halfway down the aisle, the dais exploded.
Riona flew forward. She landed hard on her elbows and tasted blood. Dust billowed, chunks of rock shrieked in every direction. A hot, stinging pain sliced her cheek, her shoulder, the back of her hand. Shouts of shock and pain ricocheted off the vaulted ceiling. Benches banged against the stone floor.
Riona rose. In the same motion, she drew the bone-shard sword. “Up, warriors of the Wildwood! To me!” She wasn’t sure if anyone could hear her.
She took stock of what she could see. The dais had become a waist-deep crater. People clustered all around, clogging the aisle like a herd of terrified cows. If she wasn’t careful, Cravh’s blade would draw innocent blood. The skin on the back of her neck prickled. Where was the enemy?
A cawing laugh cracked the air. Riona whirled. In the center of the tall, open cathedral doors, her red-stained bare feet ten paces off the ground, a woman hovered. A woman with wings.
Riona’s hand went slack. The tip of Cravh’s blade clinked against the stone floor.
For a moment, everything was perfectly still.
“Makkah!” someone close on Riona’s left wailed. Others took it up until it was deafening. “The Crow!” “The Lady of War!”
Riona wanted to shout at them to stop, that this was a trick. There was a rope, a wire. Panic would serve nothing except to kill them all.
Then, with a thrust of those powerful, night-black wings, the woman in the door swooped inside.
Riona’s heart stopped. There was no wire, no ro
pe that could allow the apparition to move like that—she flew.
“Where have you gone, queen child?” The monster’s voice lilted so that every word was a song. It took Riona a moment to realize what she’d said, because she spoke the dead language of the ancient dragonskin empire. Hearing it out loud was nothing like reading it in books. Of the hundreds of people present, only a handful would understand. Eilis’s lessons ensured Riona was one of them.
Makkah—Riona could think of nothing else to call her—circled the vast space, weaving through columns. As old as humanity itself, the legends said. But Makkah looked no older than Riona’s own twenty years. Thick hair the color of night streamed to her waist in waves. Exquisite, feathered wings sprung from her back, black as a lightless void. Her dress was crimson, her feet and her hands stained to wrists and ankles with the rust brown of old blood.
Riona grabbed the closest fighter, a man whose face was ghostly with dust. “Go around the side. Get the artisans and children out.”
He nodded, then crouched and shuffled forward. He didn’t make it ten feet.
Makkah folded her glossy wings and slammed to the ground before him. With a glorious smile, she lifted a hand and intoned a line from “Makkah’s Rise.” “And without touch, men fell before her, dead.”
The man’s head snapped to one side, and he collapsed. A woman screamed. Riona clutched Cravh’s hilt so hard its edges bit into her palm.
“Where is the child queen?”
Souls save me.
Makkah gestured sharply. The cathedral doors slammed shut, cutting off all escape.
Souls save us all .
There was a way out, but it was too small for all these people, and Riona’s soul shrank from the memory of the stale air, of a darkness so complete she thought she could feel it clinging to her skin.
Thrusting aside the memory, Riona stood to her full height and raised the bone-shard sword. “Here I am.”
“Aha! Yes. There you are.” Makkah bent at the waist and presented both hands, palm up, in an ancient dragonskin greeting. She straightened, her terrible grin softening into something beneficent, something beautiful. The radiance of it nearly brought Riona to her knees. Beside her, one of the men did fall. Another stumbled forward. His cinan grabbed him by the collar and jerked him back. Another of the cinan—Morna Brannon, Riona thought—pulled the fallen man to his feet.
Watching how the men stared at the woman before them, eyes vacant, another line from “Makkah’s Rise” sighed through Riona’s mind: And when War came in her glory, the kingdoms of men were the first to fall. The Wildings saw, and chose from the clanswomen Frenna, and Frenna chose from them her cinan.
Makkah Bloodlust, Lady of War, Destroyer of Nations, gestured to Riona with slender, graceful fingers. “Come here.”
Fear blossomed in Riona’s heart, a poisonous flower. Anger at her own cowardice boiled through her, withering the sharp edges of the icy bloom. But it would not die.
She stepped forward anyway. Someone behind her made a sound. Morna? But it didn’t matter. This is my time. Another step. Another. Until she was five paces from the Crow. She smelled like iron—like blood.
Riona lifted her chin. “Why have you come?”
Makkah’s mouth twisted into a grimace of sympathy, as if Riona were simple, and her simpleness was sad. “You have called me.”
Riona made a noise of disdain. “Called you? You are a myth. We have no more called you than we could call the Old Men of the Forest, or the water horses, or the dead.”
“Your blood calls me. Frenna’s blood. I’ve felt it for years. Here.” She pulled aside the neck of her dress and indicated a long, jagged white scar just below her collarbone. “A gift given me by that.”
Cravh glinted in the dull light from the windows, and Makkah glared at it as if it were a poisonous snake. “So I finished my game elsewhere, and then I came here. Besides,” Makkah wagged a finger at Riona, “Your former queen thought she had conquered Mountain Reach, but Mountain Reach is mine. It’s part of my dragonskin empire. It’s where they hid Torsten and his nightmares.” Her voice dropped to a growl, her eyes gleaming and feral. “He is mine too.”
Riona almost laughed. “You want the Sleeping King? Have him!”
Makkah pouted. “There’s no fun in that. We must have war!”
“Have it, then!” Riona leaped onto the back of a bench and threw herself at the hovering woman, Cravh flashing up.
She slammed into an invisible force before she could strike. The force plucked her away from Makkah and flung her back all the way across the cathedral. Her head and shoulder struck the wall behind the shattered dais with a hollow thud. Pain split her skull. Sparks exploded in her vision. People were screaming again.
Makkah laughed, a cawing, ugly sound. Feet slapped against the floor. A presence hovered over Riona. When she opened her eyes, Makkah crouched almost on top of her. She caressed Riona’s cheek with clammy fingers. Riona flinched away, and the movement made her gag.
Makkah’s nails scraped Riona’s skin. “I like pretty things.” The Incarnation of War sighed and smiled, as if remembering something sweet. “Death will make you beautiful.”
“Why have you come?” Riona asked again, fighting the urge to vomit. “To warn me? We know the Andrisi are coming. To kill me in front of my people, the way you did Eilis?” Riona spat blood. “You missed.”
Makkah leaned close, wide eyes fixed on Riona’s mouth. “Eilis had to be punished for Mountain Reach. But you must live, because we are going to have a game. I must know who I am playing against. Opponents should meet.”
The Lady of War brought one finger to the trickle of warmth leaking from the corner of Riona’s lips. When the Crow took her finger away, it was stained crimson. She popped it into her mouth and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply, then let her hand drop. Her metallic tang stung Riona’s nostrils, her hot breath caressed Riona’s ear. “Tomorrow, I bring the Andrisi to your city, and the game resumes. Just a quick one, for old times’ sake. Greater things call me south, but I have made time for you. Farewell, Frenna’s blood.”
The Lady of War vanished, leaving nothing but a few black feathers that drifted slowly to rest on shattered stone.
* * *
The Court of Eagles was misty and chill. Like the cathedral, the largest room in Talonkeep had mural-painted stone walls and a high, arching ceiling. Four living fogwood trees forked toward the ceiling in each corner, silver leaves long gone with winter. The great table and chairs at the center of the room were made of the wood as well, twisted and bound together, the table topped with a long slab of whorled marble.
In the hour since Makkah had disappeared, Riona had changed from the torn dress into a white tunic and leggings, over which she wore the royal armor—gray leather and hardened fogwood etched with silver. On her head, she still wore the circlet and silvermask owl feathers.
When Riona approached the table, the cinan stood, the gnarled wooden chairs scraping softly against the stone floor. As one, each clan leader touched the first two fingers of her right hand to her lips, then heart. Eagle feathers gleamed in braids of bark brown and mahogany and cloudy gray. “Long fly, Queen Riona.”
“Long fly, cinan of the Wildwood.” Riona’s voice was clear. Good. She’d been having trouble with it since . . .
Makkah. Real. Souls, she was real.
Magic was supposed to be dead.
Riona shook off the numbing terror of seeing War up close and opened her mouth to speak. Before she could, Nessa Dalaigh slapped the tabletop with a sharp crack. “We must evacuate the people!”
Riona started, mouth snapping shut. The oldest woman there, Cinan Dalaigh’s dark hair had gone stormy gray, and her wrinkles were deep enough to hide coins. Unfortunately, her eyes were still as clear as the distant blue sea.
Eilis had been from Clan Dalaigh. Eilis had had those eyes.
Riona opened her mouth again, but another cinan spoke first. “Are you mad, you old bat? Let the Andrisi bea
t themselves bloody against our walls. They’ll give up and turn home once half of them are dead. Crann Laith has stood for a thousand years, and it will stand a thousand more!”
Riona clenched her teeth.
“Makkah makes them battle mad.” Brigid Cuillin was stony faced, her voice resonant enough to be heard easily from her place halfway down the table. “I’ve seen it. They throw themselves at death like fish trying to return to the sea. She doesn’t care to take our land, she cares about causing as many deaths as she can. That’s her ‘game.’ This will be no ordinary siege. It won’t end until every Andrisi soldier is dead or Crann Laith has been torn down stone by stone.”
Another woman made a sound of disdain. “Impossible. We’ll be in far greater danger if we leave. They’ll hunt us as foxes who’ve lost their holes.”
“If we stay, you will see the end of our people!” Nessa barked at the other cinan.
“It’s the end of times!” wailed one of the women who stood behind the chairs, too minor to have a seat at the table.
“You would have us give up our homes, our walls, our greatest strength,” another woman snapped at Nessa.
“Weak is better than dead!”
Heat spread through Riona’s cheeks. She must take control. “I—”
“Queen Riona is young and strong. We can beat the Crow and anything she can throw at us.”
Nessa barked a laugh. “The Lady of War can snap a neck and demolish rock without a touch. What will the infant queen do against that?”
Silence fell and all eyes turned to Riona. She should speak, but her words had gone. What could she do against that?
Souls, were the wards as powerless as she’d thought? If she had allowed the setting ceremonies, would the Makkah have been able to enter the city?
“There’s the pilgrimage,” Morna Brannon said. “The new queen has yet to visit the Sleeping King.”
“The pilgrimage?” Riona repeated like an idiot.
One setback and this is how you react, girl? I knew it, you aren’t fit to rule.
