Ember

by Anna Holmes

  He must be feeling better. I grab the cloth and head to the opening of the cave, letting the rain soak into it, wet blots growing among the red brown stains. I wring it out before bringing it back to him. I clean his smooth, bluish white leg of blood only to find that the red doesn't leave. An ugly, sunken, angry valley snakes its way down his calf, cut across by the new river of a wound. "She knew right where to cut," he laughs through a tense breath.

  "You knew her."

  "In the most tangential of ways. She fought with another unit, but I think she suspected." His chest shudders again as I give the ravaged skin another careful dab. "If they find us again, they'll not let up."

  I know. Especially now that Tressa's helped us. They doubt Alain's loyalties, and mine have always been in question. I am distracted, and not as cautious as I should be. I must press too hard. Alain bites back a snarl of pain and clenches the fire in his fists.

  "Sorry, sorry," I say quickly.

  "You're…doing fairly well, actually."

  I regard the wound again. I've never seen anything like it. The flesh around it is raw and red, as though it's just healing, though it's smooth, as though it's been this way for some time. No simple weapon has made this. "How?" I ask.

  "I don't talk about the leg."

  "I've just spent the entire night taking care of the blasted leg."

  "No."

  "Yes," I counter, blotting the last bit of blood away.

  He sits up abruptly, scooting out of my grasp and propping himself up against the cavern wall. "Damn it, Caelin, leave it."

  I lift an eyebrow. No one calls me that. Not even the people I ask to call me that call me that, except Riley, and even then…well, it doesn’t feel wrong.

  "Oh, come off it," he snaps. "You're not much of a princess anyway."

  It's true, but it doesn't mean I'm happy about it. "Princess or not," I return, my voice marble, "You're going to hold still so you don't bleed all over everything again, and let me bandage your ruddy leg."

  "I'll do it. Here."

  He reaches out for the roll of bandages, which I am tempted to throw at him. I yank them out of reach and set to work, perhaps a little less gently than I should. He glares at me now, the hatred back, the fire both in his palms and in his eyes. "You really want to know what happened to my leg."

  "Not anymore."

  "Well, too bad," he rumbles, his words spiked under the quick hisses of his breath. "You asked. I came into the Legion Army because the rebels—your rebels—slammed my little port village with attack after attack. It ruined us, Caelin. The people who held the country together for the past seven years told us this was the best way to defend ourselves. They made a weapon out of me and hundreds of others, all in the vain hope that somehow, we could fight off the fanatics that kept burning our ships and destroying our homes and the peace we thought we had the right to elect. And the one good thing…" His voice breaks, and I know this look. I've seen it so many times on so many people.

  "What was her name?" I ask quietly.

  "Jori." As soon as he says it, his face twists in rage, like he's furious with himself for having let it sound. "Her name was Jori, and she was brilliant. She was my commanding officer for a time until she convinced them to give me a magic evaluation. We weren't allowed to fight together until the siege. I watched her as closely as I could. I saw the archer take aim—" he cradles his eyes in a blood-caked hand and squeezes as though trying to get a hold of himself, like it would keep him from falling.

  I let the bandage drop. "You don't have to tell me, Alain."

  Slowly, he lowers his hand, holding me with his gaze. "No. You need to know. You need to know what I did. You were right. I am no soldier. I tried to stop the archer, but I couldn't make myself kill him. I had to do something, so I tried to take his leg with a spell they told us was only for dire situations—and what could be more dire?" He laughs, a bitter, mirthless sound ricocheting off the stone around us. "Do you know any magic?"

  "No."

  "It always takes something even as it gives. A leg for a leg." His throat bobs and he swallows. "It didn't matter. I took too long. She turned in time to see me fall. The arrow caught her in the one spot her armor left bare. It was a perfect shot, but I did that. I destroyed three people instead of one, and for what?" His eyes burn through me, through the fire in his still upturned hand. "I protected nothing, saved no one. I couldn't save my government and failing that, I couldn't even kidnap you properly. I hope the throne is worth it."

  There is nothing I can say. I could argue with him, tell him the Resurgence took no civilian targets, but then, I'm not even sure of that. I could try to explain why his government was a plague on this island—that I am certain of. But there's nothing of him left to listen to that. Loss deafens him. I can't stay silent, though. "I am sorry, Alain."

  He laughs, bitterness and grief pushing the sound from his chest. "Are you, now?"

  "I am. I know loss and what it is to be lost. If you like, I'll tell you how sometime. But not now. Now I'm just sorry." I tuck the end of the bandage in and let his leg settle down. He stares back at me, and the fire goes out. In the dark, I find his hand. It's clammier than mine, even with the flame that was just in it.

  Maybe the fire doesn't burn the same.

  Chapter Twelve

  Alain

  I've not slept like this in well over a year. I feel as though my body has become part of the rock on which it's lain, but strangely, it's not bad. I'm heavy and stiff, but my head feels clearer and the leg doesn't throb as much. Until I sit up.

  "AHH," I yell involuntarily, grasping my knee.

  "AHH," someone answers behind me. Not Caelin. It's a huskier voice, less bright.

  I jump. "Who the hells are you?"

  I vaguely remember someone else in the cave with us the night before, but I'd thought it was the product of my feverish mind, especially considering her appearance. I'd seen centaurs before, but none clothed, armed, and yelling. She collects herself and laughs. "She said you were rude, but I didn't expect the screaming."

  I struggle to pull myself up. Caelin's cloak slides off me, and I frown. "Where is she?"

  "Went for a walk or something. The rain's let up for a while, but it might start again."

  I rub at my head. She's got to be cold. Summer has officially left. And then it occurs to me in a sudden clench of my whole center.

  "She went for a walk? Alone?"

  The centaur sizes me up. "You try and stop her. Don't worry. The Legion vagrants have moved on."

  "And you'd know that because…"

  "Tracking their type is what I do."

  Ah. A bounty hunter. "You stuck around, though."

  "I did." Her eyes narrow. "I have some questions for you."

  "Southern Island colony. I escaped. I'm not about to go back, though, and she's not about to let me, so you try and stop her."

  I should be unnerved. The bounty hunter is holding an arrow, sharpening the point of the head—the same head, in fact, for a good while. "I don't get it," she says at last. "What's a Legion patsy like you doing with her?"

  That's an excellent question. I must start the answer about twenty times, but I find that I don't really have one. In the end, I settle on, "She doesn't know about the colonies. She wanted to see."

  The centaur sets down her arrow, folding her hands neatly and looking at me. "I'm fairly good at you people by now. What was it? A captain? A proxy?" When I don't answer, she frowns deeply. "No…a prince?"

  I reach for the small rocky shelf behind me to pull myself up, reaching for my boot. "I'd rather not discuss my former designation. It doesn't matter anymore."

  She snorts, finally sounding a bit like her kin. "I should say it does."

  "I never quite got around to issuing many orders, so you wouldn't be interested."

  "I've never seen you on any posters," she concedes.

  And that's a good thing. A few of the prisoners I knew had been brought in by bounty hunters. They had bec
ome infamous for their acts during the war. Those were the people the guards were hardest on. They didn't sleep or eat or breathe as much as the rest of us. "Even if you had," I grunt, hoisting myself to my good leg, "I wouldn't be coming with you, so you can keep your questions."

  "I've never lost a mark," she tells me, sliding the arrow into the quiver slung over her shoulder.

  "Should I be impressed?"

  "You should be warned."

  My name is almost certainly on a list somewhere. Hopefully news of my escape hasn't made it this far north. With any luck, it hasn't spread at all. The guards let their slip-ups fade into the passage of time. "Then it's only fair," I say between clenched teeth, trying to ignore the pain coursing through my shin, "that I tell you I'm never going back into slavery, and it'll take more than a few arrows to send me."

  She scoffs. "You lot are so dramatic. I don’t deal in slaves."

  She doesn't know, either. Even the hunters tasked with taking us in are unaware of what we are made to do. I don't feel like educating her at the moment. It takes a few tries, but I manage to fasten my boot around my calf, leaving the straps irritatingly loose. I don't know where Caelin's gone, but I should find her. Quickly, so I’ll need…I pause. "Where's Maribelle?"

  "The princess could only keep control of one," she says. I try to keep my face neutral, but sadness settles in. My delicate mare likely couldn't withstand the storm.

  Navigator grazes in the corner, and his eyes flick up to me as though he knows what I'm thinking. He huffs and paws the ground. Today is not the day to try.

  The centaur seems almost amused as she watches me fight my way to the cavern mouth. "Where do you think you're going to go?"

  I sling Caelin's cloak over my arm and don't answer. The centaur's got four legs. She's got no business laughing at my one and a half.

  The going is slower today than usual. Every step sends a shot directly up my scar, and I have to stop and rest every few steps, but I am not about to leave Caelin a lightfolk without a cloak in an unfriendly, stormy mountain pass.

  The path is narrow, twisting, but with only scrubby trees here and there, there’s little cover. There are no footprints in the mud, which makes me think she's taken the rocky path spiraling up to the top of the hill in which our cave is embedded. It takes me a moment to come to terms with climbing it. Even if the wind didn't shriek as it does, I don't want to shout the name of a princess when there are thugs around looking for a fight. In the end, I have to brace myself and limp up.

  She sits in a patch of grass which whips around her, reaching for her and pulling away again, her back to me. I call out so as not to startle her, but my voice is lost to the wind. I stump forward and the movement catches her eye. She drops something into her lap and covers it in the folds of her skirt. "What are you doing?" she shouts to me. "You need to stay off that!"

  "You shouldn't have come out here alone," I call back.

  "Do you remember me laying you flat in about thirty seconds?"

  I force myself the last few paces and lower myself to her side. "I still don't like the odds of one you against six trained Legion soldiers. If they see you…"

  She sighs, suddenly seeming much older. "I know. I've been a target since the day I was born. I have a good handle on how that feels, thanks."

  "There are pockets of them all over," I tell her, gathering the energy from my core to disguise her again. "All it takes is one of them to spread the rumor that you're sneaking about the countryside unguarded and suddenly, it's not six, it's sixty, and then six hundred."

  "Why would that bother you?"

  An excellent question. I don't know. It should enthuse me, the idea of a Legion uprising, a move back in the right direction. So where have I been going? At last, I say, "Like it or not, if I want the slaves freed, I have to keep you alive to get there and back."

  "Yeah." She doesn't smile, and even without my intervention, her glow seems stifled. Her hand toys with the fabric of her skirt which folds over whatever it is she doesn't want me to see. I hide a grimace. After all this, what could she possibly want to hold back?

  It's simple enough to push away the fold and make it look like the wind plays tricks. Inside is a braid of flowers fashioned into a ring. She blushes furiously, and I can't help a laugh. "That's what you hide?"

  "Shut it." But now there's a smile, and I feel a little easier. She lifts it. "My father taught me; of all people. He would take me to the garden when he didn't feel like meeting diplomats or brokering trades, and we gathered flowers. He told me that a good ruler is one who knows when to appreciate the blooms and when to set them aside for a sword. His sisters taught him when he was little, and he told me he wanted me to grow up to be the sort of queen they'd been."

  I'd nearly forgotten that her father had come by the throne after the death of the sister queens, twins. It had been one of the reasons we were told that the monarchy of lineage was false—all suspected the king of murder. I can see by the burn of Caelin's eyes that she knows what I'm thinking. "He loved them. He loved me. I adored him. And then he was gone, my mother’s useless, and the Legion was waiting."

  It takes a moment to break through, but I do manage to remember that now is not the appropriate time to discuss the political climate at the time of her father's death and keep silent.

  She's not done talking, either. She looks at me. "I thought that maybe the time had come for the sword. I thought that by winning his kingdom back, I could be the sort of queen he'd wanted me to, to ensure that everything he worked for wasn't lost and rewritten and slandered over and over. I was wrong. All these people dead and dying and worse. This isn't what he would have wanted at all."

  I stumble about for words for a while. All I can come up with is, "You didn't start it."

  "But I finished it. Without me, I doubt the Resurgence would have had the recruiting power to overcome you lot."

  "And the war would have gone on longer," I have to admit. Whatever the outcome, at least it's over, for the most part. In the back alleys and the tunnels and the minds of those who lived it, it rages on, but the citizens of Hole and much of Elyssia can have their celebrations freely now, and for that, I'm at least a little happy. "The Legion would have won in the end, but at what cost and after how many years?"

  She stares at me. "Why are you trying to console me?"

  "It's just like you," I snap. "Take an international conflict and make it about you. We did not fight an entire war over you."

  "No, we didn't," she says, as though returning to consciousness. She looks around the hill now, eyes tracking the movement of the grass in the gusts with a sharpness that she's been missing.

  "So be queen. You won. Just—be the sort of queen I can live with, who respects the desires of her people. That's all I fought for."

  "My father cared more for his people than for himself," she spits, poison in her words.

  "But do your rebels?" I rake my hand through my hair. She keeps her eyes to the valleys of her blue linen skirt. She knows the answer. I lower my head to try to see her face. "Will you?"

  At last, she lifts her head. "Yes," she answers, and I believe her now.

  I lift the circlet of flowers and set it amongst her softly glowing, violently blown-about hair. "Then you'll be a queen worth fighting for."

  She looks baffled for a moment by my touch, then by the extra weight on her head, and then by the fact that my hand still lingers, tucking her hair behind her ear. A flash of something—shame, frustration, disgust—courses through me, and I pull my hand away, face hot.

  Jori.

  I think of Jori, and I can't anymore. "We need to go," I say, turning her shining hair dull and her face Plain so I no longer have to look at it the way I just did. She just nods.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Caelin

  I have said or done something wrong, I think. Alain says nothing to me, not even when I speak to him directly. It's like he's pulled inside himself, like a turtle. And it's pissing me right off.
>
  He's never hesitated to tell me when I've wronged him before, sometimes even when it's not really me who's done something, and now I want to know and he won't bloody tell me. He's just sitting against the wall of the cave, alternating between staring at the same spot on the ground and the same spot on the ceiling.

  Maybe it's not me. He didn't fight over me, after all.

  I stop for a moment and look at him. Now he covers his face with his hand. Should I check his leg? Maybe there's an infection. Even when I sit beside him he pretends I’m not here.

  My hand reaching for the straps of his boots gets him to look at me. "Don't touch it."

  "We should change the bandage," I argue.

  "I don't think that's—"

  The sound of multiple sets of hooves against the ground sets his back rigid, and he throws out an arm across my chest, pressing me against the wall. A ball of fire starts in his hand, and he waits. My hand hovers over the hilt of my sword.

  It's only Tressa and a familiar dappled mare. Alain pulls himself to his feet with no small labor, the fire snuffed out. "Maribelle!"

  Tressa smiles, her open face beaming. "Found her running about on the trail. Looks like she's a little turned around."

  Alain's arms wrap around her wet, muddy neck, getting dirt all down the front of his white shirt and on his forehead. "I thought you were gone," he tells her.

  Oh. He was angry about the horse. "It was my best bet," I say lamely.

  He seems to realize that he looks ridiculous, as he steps back and with an impatient flick of his hand and some magic, the muck dissolves and he has himself and the horse clean. Maribelle whuffs, looking around in confusion. Tressa turns to me. "Now you can carry on."

  "Thank you," I tell her, and I wish that I had some way of turning that thanks into something she can use. "Is there anything…"

  She waves me off. "A listening human ear is reward enough. Thank you, Princess."

  "What will you do?"