Author: David Estes; G. D. Penman
Date: 2023-08-15 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Fantasy; General
Description: Artemio Volpe has been crowned king of Espher, restoring his ancient line to power—and inheriting the worst crisis the kingdom has ever faced. The Arazi Dragon Lords descend from the north. With flame and blade, they will purge all in their path to see the shadebound witch Orsina destroyed and their prophecies fulfilled. From the south march all the armies of the God-Emperor of Agrant, legions of soldiers backed by the unfathomable power of the living god himself. Between them, at the point where hammer and anvil will meet, stands Artemio, his twin sister, an exiled Arazi prince, and a peasant
Publisher: Wraithmarked Creative, LLC

Thronebound

The Last King

Book 3

David Estes and G. D. Penman

Thronebound

Book Three of The Last King

Copyright © 2023 by G. D. Penman & David Estes. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product
of the author’s imagination or used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locals,
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this
publication can be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
without expressed permission from the author.

Editor: Taya Latham

Cover Illustration: Anastasia Bulgakova

Cover Design and Interior Layout: STK•Kreations

Art Direction: Bryce O'Connor

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-955252-62-1

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-955252-63-8

Worldwide Rights

1st Edition

Published by Wraithmarked Creative, LLC
www.wraithmarked.com

1 - A Crown of Burning Venom

2 - Grim Counsel

3 - The Spring of Discontent

4 - The Price of Peace

5 - Neither Threat nor Promise

6 - Blood Mirror

7 - The Man Who Would Be King

8 - Shared Passions

9 - The Distant Drums

10 - The Last Wife

11 - No Man’s King

12 - The Devil’s Bargain

13 - The Piper Paid

14 - Visitation Rites

15 - Gods of War

16 - The Weight of a Heart

17 - The Last Siege of Covotana

18 - War of Gods

19 - The Spoils of Victory

20 - Let Loose the Wyvern of War

21 - The Wake

22 - Dragonfall

23 - The Last King

24 - The Remains

1 - A Crown of Burning Venom
Gemmazione, Regola Dei Volpe 1

On the day that they crowned Artemio Volpe, there were omens aplenty.

The heat was unseasonably high for so early in the year. Some said it was the factory forges of Agrant, burning night and day to arm their forces for the war to come. Others said it was the lingering effect of dragons having roamed the lands, the fire of their breath still lingering in the air. When the ladies of court preened and teased their hair, it wilted under the heat. Pressed suits drooped. The farmers’ crops broke from seed almost as soon as they could replant their fields after last season’s chaos.

A storm brewed upon the horizon. The city of Covotana seemed to be under the eye of some vast tempest. The sky directly above it and the surrounding land was open and blue, but dark clouds could be seen from the top of the palace no matter which way one turned. As far as omens went, it was far from subtle. Of course, anyone with the slightest bit of sense would have realized that the unnatural weather was due to the intervention of some Shadebound assigned to keep the sky clear during the new king’s procession through the city, but for the superstitious, it was just another sign that something supernatural was afoot.

It probably was not a good omen that the very throne on which the king was to sit had been sundered in half during the battle with Agrant for ownership of the city, nor that the one who had sundered it and nearly brought the whole palace tumbling down was now to be king.

A more insidious omen being discussed by the common folk rather than nobility, who believed themselves above such pettiness despite all evidence to the contrary, was the matter of the king’s arm. It had long been believed that under a healthy king, Espher prospered, and under a sickly one it waned. Some part of this was based in truth, of course; when a ruler was elderly or infirm, it left the upper echelons of society without someone to watch over them and ensure that their behavior remained honorable. Some of the worst disasters in Espher’s history had been during such periods.

To have a king ascending to the throne while bearing so obvious a wound was unprecedented. If the land reflected the ruler, would this mean that Espher, too, would be crippled? That it would lose some portion of its territory?

Overshadowing all these lesser superstitions and concerns was the worst of the omens, the persistent rumor that the old king had died under Artemio’s hand, and that they were placing the reins of Espher into the hands of a usurper.

Some argued that the Cerva had been the usurpers and this was a return of the true king’s line, some argued that Volpe’s ascent was based upon the will of the court and the high opinion of the Cerva before they passed, others still made sly comments about his position being a temporary one until the current crises had passed Espher by and a less strategically competent but more pliable noble in good standing might be convinced to take the throne. It was said that the old queen had been his lover, and that was why he had her killed. It was said that he’d murdered his own father when it suited his purposes. So many things were said, but nothing was known.

The court gossips were delighted.

Yet despite all of these ill omens, the procession began midmorning with the king, draped in all the finery and jewels that had not been destroyed in the destruction wrought upon the keep, being rolled through the town in an open-topped carriage so that all of the common people who would likely never cross paths with anyone so elevated again in their lives might lay eyes upon him and judge his worth. Most often this was a time of great jubilation and cheering to accompany the marching band that followed in formation after the king’s carriage and the riders of the highest noble houses, but even the good-mannered jeering that had been reserved for particularly unpopular new royalty was absent as Artemio was taken through the streets alone.

Tradition would have had his parents with him, his bride-to-be by his side, all of his house assembled about him in that same carriage, the highest moment of all their high living, to see one of their own made the master of all that they surveyed. Artemio had no one. The rumor mill had little to say about that. His sister he had sent off on some mission to barbaric lands and was not expected to return. The Shadebound girl that there had been hopes he’d wed to foster powerful heirs was absent too, though only those who had fought the Arazi knew whence she had departed, and they were tight-lipped about her.

When the people on the street looked up at him, there was fear in their eyes but also awe. The streets of Covotana were cracked, and it was by their new king’s might. The enemy who had seized the city were routed, and it was by their new king’s wit. He had given his own flesh so that Espher could be free. Few sights could have been more worthy of awe.

For his part, Artemio could not have asked for a better response. There were always conspirators in the wings, just waiting for a sign of weakness so that any king could be brought low and replaced, the disdain of the common man the foremost sign among them. He had something better than the love of the people. He had their worship. What some duke had done on a distant battlefield meant little to a butcher or baker, but this mythic figure shining in gold and glory on the same streets that they walked every day had worked his miracles here, in plain sight of them.

The clothes were stifling in the awful heat, layer upon layer of finery that had been hastily hauled together from various wardrobes after he’d utterly ruined the official robes of coronation that had been made for him. For those who read into clothing, he was presenting a kaleidoscopic clash of influences. Cloak clasps from a period when his own ancestors had a tenuous grasp on the throne, boots from a brief failed dalliance with a Teatro of the commons, an ermine cape lifted directly from the Cerva’s garderobe. The twin kings had doubles of everything, which made life somewhat easier, even if the difference in build between them and Art was like that between a willow and an oak.

Yet within the mixed messages of his garb, there were some constants. Everywhere they could be secreted were pouches of medicinal herbs, surrounding him in a swampy miasma, hiding the aroma of decay that clung to him. A wound hastily closed by fire on the battlefield was not a clean suture. It leaked. It ached. Some days it felt as though it were burning all over again, though he felt certain that he’d seared away all the nerves in his panic. The only advantage he could see in his ridiculous costume was that it concealed his arms from sight, and he did not have to worry about anyone gawking at their mutilated king.

There had been discussion among the courtiers about a false limb, something gaudy and golden or porcelain-cast, to set the minds of those meeting him at ease. He had declined. Let them be uncomfortable. He’d given his hand for them, the least they could do was look at it and remember the debt he was owed. It was much like the repairs on the palace. The cracks that had been set in the stone had to be filled, and masons had come out with all manner of clever ways to mask the damage and make it appear that the place had never been through so much as a knock. Artemio had declined. People needed to remember that the heart of the kingdom had been struck at, that they could not rest on their laurels and trust to fate that all would be well. And they needed to remember what he could do when he was pushed.

It felt like the procession took hours, and with the sun beating down on him from on high, it was all Artemio could do to remain upright and stern. He did not care that all eyes were on him, life as a pariah had ensured that they always were, but he would not show human weakness. Not today of all days.

In all the years that he had been Shadebound, there were few times that he had spent his life frivolously. A second here or there to make life easier perhaps, but never the way he was doing now. Pulling the shade of his dead grandfather Bisnonno Fiore into his body so he could bask in the chill of the grave the dead man brought with him.

“This is how it should always have been. You were always destined to rule. Kingship is in your blood.”

The only downside of the old king’s presence was the constant litany of praise he rained down on Artemio. From the moment they were bonded, the old man had been trying to protect Artemio, his sister, his family. He had exerted all the power available to a shade to keep them alive, and it had all been for this purpose: to see the Volpe line returned to the throne of Espher.

“You will be a great king, a just king, one who will not waver at the words of self-serving advisors or the frivolity of morality in the face of truth, one always aware of the dangers of being ruled by another.”

It was a distraction that he truly did not need, because every once in a while he would cast his glance out into the crowd and there would be eyes meeting his. A familiar face among the strangers. They did not look at him with awe. They did not stare at him as though he was their savior. They did not adore him. They observed with hardened, closed-off expressions. As though he was betraying their cause.

He did not know at which point the cult of the Last King had come to know his identity. Some of them always had, as it was necessary to inveigle himself into their good graces. Others had probably learned of it from them or when he had been too casual in their company. Not to mention however many the deceased queen Cadence had informed in her attempts to play all sides. Every one of those peasant rebels held blackmail material against him now. His involvement with them would not be believed, of course, and only the Cerva kings had known of his father’s involvement with the rebels after the fact. Yet it meant that he could not do the obvious thing to a king who was attempting to consolidate his power and have them all rounded up. An individual speaking his name to inquisitors could be discounted, but with the weight of numbers and the application of pressure on those held captive, a firmer picture of his involvement and use of the cult for his own purposes might very well come to light.

“A new Volpe dynasty, stretching on through eternity. Guardians of Espher’s sovereignty against any who would seek to harm her.”

In a few years, when the wars were won and his position secured, it would not matter that the story came out. He would be able to spin it into his own legend without overmuch effort, but right now, things were tenuous. Those noble houses that had been in receipt of generous stipends from the Agrantine Empire had now found the golden teat had run dry despite all their decades of loyal service to a foreign power, and without Cadence to serve as a voice of reason to them, there were already erupting rumors reaching his ears about some great houses of Espher that would not bend their knee to him. The time for such things had not yet come, he was not even crowned yet, but even a suggestion that his ascent was not by the will of the Cerva but through some treachery of his own would add fuel to such fires of insurrection.

If Cadence had lived, everything would have been different, that faction would have been placated. If the Agrantine ambassador had lived, she might have told the story to all and sundry about her desires for Artemio to be king, poisoning those who hated Agrant against him, while also placating the faction that currently looked to be a problem. Both women were dead, and the promised peace either one could have offered died with them.

“You do not need support from lesser men or the soft words of women. You do not need the approval of foreign kings to rule. You will make Espher a force to be reckoned with again. A power that empires dare not cross. I know that you will.”

If it had been any other shade, then Artemio would have forced it away from him long before now. To hear one talking freely without the information being demanded of them was a clear sign of loose control and a poor contract. Speech with a shade meant they were touching upon your mind. Avoiding the influence of shades upon your patterns of thought was the first lesson of the House of Seven Shadows. Or near enough to the first that it made little difference. Furthermore, it was a poor idea to keep a shade around when it could feed not on the energy it was being deliberately given, but on abstracts.

“Beneath you lies a mountain of flame. But we silenced it. We made it serve us. We set the first stone upon its crown and built from nothing the greatest city in the world. Look upon that city, built by your ancestors, a gift from the past to you. Generation after generation, building atop the work of the last. It will be yours; it will be your children’s; it will be your children’s children’s.”

It had been a subject long debated how some shades persisted even without feeding, how their form was changed as memory of them changed and the belief of others transformed the freshly dead into creatures of legend. Initially it was assumed to be a direct result of their absorbing lesser shades, yet there were shades that cohabited rather than feasting upon one another. Shades distinct enough in their nature, it seemed they could not consume one another. Their nature could be defined by abstract ideas attached to them, and some theorized that the more belief that there was in those abstracts, the more strength the shades could gather. Instead of tapping the life from the living directly, they could filter-feed on the ambient life of the world, when it was close enough in nature to the shade.

“To be king is to be the envy of all men and the enemy of all men. All will seek you, demand of you, prey upon you, but it is you who has the power. You whose will is writ as law. To be king is to be alone. To be king is to be beset at all times. Not a moment of your life shall you be unattended, and not a moment of your life shall you be able to trust those who would attend you.”

In life, Bisnonno Fiore had been a great many things, but the thing for which he was best remembered was being king. Having him here, when all minds were turned to kingship, when a new king was being crowned, he was gorging. If not for the fact that Fiore had always maintained himself barely upon the edge of starvation due to his refusal to accept fair payment from Artemio for his services, then it was likely he could have gained such power from a gorging like this that it might have put Artemio’s control over him at risk. Given how tenuous that control had proven to be, it was a legitimate concern.

With that in mind, he forced the shade from his body and mind with a grunt of effort and rose to his feet as they reached the bridge to the palace. It had survived the chaos with minimal damage, and so too had the pools and fountains beneath it. What the castellan jokingly called a moat. This would be the last opportunity for most of the people of Covotana to see him, possibly in their lives, so he made certain to wave graciously at them all as he descended to the cobbles. Hundreds of faces stared back at him. Some mustered cheers, others waved little flags, but most were still and silent. Robbing the day of any hope of joy. Artemio cared nothing for frivolity. He did not need their love. Just their obedience.

Yet it was that awkward silence that made the screams cut through all the more clearly. Starting from the walls to the north of the city where laborers had not even been spared this single day from their repairs for the coronation and carrying closer and closer as the shadow filled up the sky.

The beating of wings echoed down onto Covotana. A dragon in flight. Burning death from the skies.

There were watchtowers being raised all across the north. Patrols scouting out the ashen ruins of the farms and forests destroyed by the Arazi on their march. If the enemy had returned, then there would have been an alarm raised. This made no sense. They would not send a single dragon to die, not with the way they worshiped and adored them. They would not waste the life of one against Covotana’s Shadebound defenders, not again.

Yet there was no denying that there was a dragon in their sky, dropping from the blind spot of the sun directly into the heart of the city. Artemio cast off the ermine cape and was wrestling to loose his hand from the tangle of other silks, but before he could even prepare himself, he found himself surrounded. Of all the nobles who had been in the train behind him, no small portion were the Shadebound who had fought alongside him in the north. Men and women whose trust he was not being granted by virtue of his new station but that he had earned with his prowess. They, too, were dressed in finery, but they were there to make a shield of their flesh to defend him, without a second thought.

For all that he doubted the nobility of Espher, it seemed that far more than he could have realized were still valorous. Or at least wanted to make a show of their valor before their new king and sundry. Shades were called and bolts of ice and lightning leapt up into the sky. For all the fire of their breath and the power of their body, a dragon had no defense against the powers of the dead.

The valorous defense of the king was wiped away, as though some great invisible hand had smeared it aside. The power of it set every hair on Artemio’s body prickling.

There was no foreign magic at work here, his spiritual senses did not sing for the power of another land. A Shadebound had cast their might aside, a Shadebound of such power that a half dozen of Covotana’s finest could not best her.

“Stand down!” he bellowed to be heard over the sudden chaos. “If it were an enemy, we would already be ash. Stand down, I said!”

There was no reluctance from his honor guard. They had felt the same power when their attacks were dissolved.

The dragon descended, the slow, steady beats of its wing blowing everyone back. His fine ermine cloak tumbled across the bridge as though the rodents it had been had returned to life and now fled from this apex predator. The crowd that had fled at the first sight of it now came creeping back.

As its claws touched down, he was at last at an angle to see who rode atop it, and he could not stop the childish grin that touched his face before he could master himself. “Dear sister, so kind of you to join us.”

She was dressed in the garb of some northern savage, bones and feathers dangling from her, but beneath the dust of the road, or sky as the case may have been, there could be no mistaking the shining red of her hair as she slipped down from the dragon’s back and ran over to embrace him.

She stopped short, just staring at him. Eyes raking him up and down. Taking in all that had changed in their brief parting. When her voice came, it was surprisingly soft.

“Oh, Art, your hand.”

Once more a smile came unbidden. She had always been there to look out for him, and the moment that they parted, he lost a limb. It was hard not to draw some connection.

“A small price to pay, all things considered.”

Her brows drew down. “Who did this to you, I’ll…”

Before she could work herself into a rage on his behalf, he cut her off. “Already attended to, dear sister.”

The crowd had pressed back in around them, as close as they dared to get to the dragon. One brave or profoundly stupid small child had escaped his mother’s hold and darted across to pet the thing as though it were a horse. The dragon didn’t seem to mind, but the crowd was pinned in place with tension.

Some courtiers, mindful of the time and deciding that little details like returning sisters and the arrival of dragons in the city mattered less than maintaining the careful schedule of the day, had begun inching forward towards Artemio, as if they might be able to hustle him along to the next stage of the process of coronation through willfully ignoring what was going on. There was the nobility of Espher that he had come to know and loathe.

Harmony let one of her dirty hands trail down the silk robes draped over him. The embroidery of the Volpe colors matched with the flag of Espher. She would not need genius to parse what was going on, but she had not been witness to the intermediate steps, so he could understand her confusion. She spoke barely above a whisper, as though worried the attendants would suddenly notice the trick Artemio was trying to pull.

“What have I missed?”

Awareness of the ears all around them had not escaped Artemio’s notice either, the difference was that he would not blunder on into dangerous territory when there was a simple solution. “This evening we can trade tales. I imagine there is quite a story as to how you came to be riding a dragon too.”

“Oh, my manners.” Artemio’s heart swelled as she said that, every bit the child she’d always been, even now, dressed in the bones of her enemies. “Sorry. Yelena, this is my brother Artemio. Artemio, this is Yelena.”

He stared up into the face of the dragon, and he did not flinch. He could not afford to with all eyes upon him. It was as fearsome a beast as any they’d faced in the war. Quite a bit bigger than the majority of those too. He gave a stiff bow, and to his amazement, instead of lunging forward and biting him in half, the dragon’s head dipped in answer.

He did his best to address the creature as though it were a person, as Harmony was giving him the sideways look that had always meant, Be polite and play nice. It was an all-too-familiar expression.

“I’m afraid that my lessons in etiquette did not extend to the correct way to greet a dragon.”

“Just say hello,” Harmony whispered. “She’ll answer through Kagan, if she’s got something that needs saying.”

“Greetings, Yelena.” The dragon went on giving him its implacable stare, and he became increasingly aware of how flammable he was. Registering Harmony’s other words, he let his eyes drift to the other dismounting riders with no small amount of gratitude. “Welcome back to you also, Master Kagan, and to you, Orsina. I am beyond delighted to see that you are well.”

Whatever had occurred in the Arazi lands seemed to have changed the girl. Gone was the wilting wallflower playing at being a noblewoman. The imperious tone in her voice was icy cold. “Better than ever.”

He tried to meet her gaze, to read her expression, to understand whether her ire was reserved for him or if she was simply overwhelmed by the presence of so many people, all peering at her, but for all that he was the man who would be king, it seemed he was of less interest to her than smoke rising from the city’s chimneys.

He cleared his throat and drew their attention back to the situation at hand. “I’m afraid you’ve caught me at a rather awkward moment. I’m just about to be crowned king of Espher, would you care to attend?”

Harmony reached out and took his hand, but Kagan’s rumbling voice ruined the moment. “Yelena doesn’t think that she’ll fit.”

“You’re quite right, it may be something of a tight squeeze.” Artemio hoped that his forced smile did not look too manic. “Perhaps I could make her acquaintance more thoroughly when the coronation is through?”

The dragon let out a rumble. Not a growl, certainly not a word, but a sound that Artemio felt in his chest. He carefully wet his lips, then asked, “Was that a yes?”

Kagan seemed like he was trying to contain a smile. “She said… bring meat.”

To think he’d been barely less rude the first time he was in the company of royalty. “I’m sure the kitchen staff will have something to her tastes. We’ll get her anything she desires. Any friend of my sister is a friend of mine.”

“Going to regret saying that,” Kagan chuckled. “She hasn’t had a decent meal in a few centuries.”

“Then the castellan will be delighted to hear that all the money he spent on the feast will not be going to waste.”

A million questions burned in Artemio’s mind, and he dared not seek a single answer. He had to remind himself each time he opened and shut his mouth that there was no hurry. There was no ticking clock between them and oblivion, there was no panicked rush to gather every answer before the executioner’s blade fell on them, but after the past year, he was so conditioned to crisis that it was impossible to convince himself that they had the time now.

The dragon Yelena launched herself into the air, knocking the children gathered around her from their feet and setting their parents wailing. It was only the steady rumble of Kagan’s laughter that stilled the panic and stopped the guards darting in to be inevitably slaughtered by the monster.

Turning on his heel, Artemio headed for the palace, his sole living family member trailing along behind him reeking of smoke and death, some peasant girl and foreigner toddling along after that. It was hardly a suitable honor guard for a king, but as Art had to keep reminding himself, he was hardly a king. He was being thrust into power because there were no viable alternatives, because war was coming for Espher and without competent leadership they all faced extinction. He did not make the mistake of considering for even a moment that anyone wanted him to rule, that anyone wanted his children to sit the throne after him and inherit Espher as their birthright. He was not a fool. The only one who seemed fool enough to believe any of that was the old, dead king still lurking in his shadow.

If it were any other coronation, Artemio Volpe would have been fascinated from start to finish. Observing every intricacy of procedure and ceremony, digesting the speeches and their implications. Eyeballing the new king for any sign of emotion or favoritism. But today he was not atop a distant hill watching a storm unfold, he was at the eye of the tempest, and it was all that he could do to let it wash over him without knocking him from his feet.

Tradition would have had his oldest living relative place the actual crown upon his head. He had tapped Duchess Granchio to fill the role in the absence of any family, but now that Harmony had returned, the stout country lady who’d served so well during the siege of Covotana had very deliberately taken a step back.

Forced into the limelight despite the grime clinging to her, Harmony had done her even best to do what must be done. She did not know the words to say, or the stations she was meant to stop at with the crown, or any of the nonsense about anointing. She had never troubled herself to learn, assuming that her life would be spent far from court and even farther from kings and queens. Some courtier or another popped in and out to whisper in her ear, and though she was blushing and stumbling over her words the whole way, Harmony managed to make it through to the end.

She stood at her brother’s side as he stared out into the waiting crowd of Espher’s finest, lowered the circlet onto his brow, taking care to rest it on his ears so it didn’t slip, and then, with that done, bent lower still to plant a kiss on his cheek. The last part was not traditional, but Artemio had to admit that it had a nice flair to it. If anything were to be carried forward from this farcical event, he hoped that it would be that rather than the crowning family member being garbed in thunder lizard bones.

Hours followed after the crowning, people that he had to meet and greet. Dignitaries from foreign lands who wanted to be here and show their admiration while wilting away at the slightest indication that they might offer actual support to Espher in this time of crisis. The head of every great house, and the head of every other house that still considered itself to be great despite all evidence to the contrary.

The only one that Artemio took any particular pleasure in was the visit of the Prima of Septombra. He needed to make no pretenses with her, as though they were strangers and had no history. When she came to the dais upon which he was enthroned, he sprang up to embrace her. He could feel her chuckling into his robes, though her face was back to a restrained smile by the time she returned to her upright position. “Thank you for granting me the honor of bearing witness to this glorious event, your Majesty.”

“Glorious event indeed. I only know half these people, and what I do know I’d rather not.” She tittered politely, unsure of her place with him now that he had ascended. He would do all he could to put her mind at ease. “And what nonsense is this about granting you the honor? Were it not for you, I’d still be sitting in a library while Covotana burned down around us.”

“Your Majesty, I highly doubt that.” There was a familiar sparkle back in her eye now. “You do not strike me as the type of man to sit and do nothing while crises arise.”

“It is easier to strike a dragon in flight than to pin you with a compliment or thanks.” He found he was genuinely smiling despite all the pomposity of the day. “You certainly put me where I could do the most good. Will you accept that at least?”

“I will concede that point, your Majesty,” she answered drily.

“Do not ever want for anything, Prima.” He laid a hand on her shoulder before she could drift out of reach. “Just ask, and it will be yours.”

Her eyes widened in surprise, but she kept her voice level. “Thank you, your Majesty.”

It was not that he was offering support to the only person he knew he could trust in this den of vipers, it was that he was doing so publicly. He was setting the standard by which the Prima was to be treated, lest the king’s ire be brought down. When he said he would grant her anything she asked for, what he truly meant was that everyone else in the room should grant her whatever she asked for. This was the weight of a king’s words. This was why he could not misspeak again for so long as he lived, lest the misinterpretation tear lives apart.

He was startled to find Orsina at his elbow when he sank back down into his throne. She had not numbered among the great many nobles that he was due to greet that day, perhaps an oversight, given the importance of her personal power, but he had fallen into the trap of familiarity with her, assuming that she was his without any need to politick for her. It may have been true, thanks to her relationship with Harmony, but it would not do anyone any good to think he was snubbing her.

She just stood there staring at him for the longest moment, eyes trailing up the length of him to take in the crown nestled on his flaming locks. He cleared his throat, and she blinked. “I truly meant what I said earlier. I could not be happier to see you alive and well. I only wish that I could have escaped from the war at home so that I might have devoted myself to your rescue too.”

There was an odd lightness to her voice when she smiled at him. “Harmony did fine.”

“Of that I have no doubt. My dear sister was ever the more competent of us.”

A breeze seemed to be blowing through the chamber, a chill wind passing over the back of his neck as they spoke. He almost glanced down to see how many shadows showed around her feet, but that would have involved standing up again, and whether he wanted her seen as valued or not, if he were to spring to his feet the moment she came close, it would certainly start rumors he could not afford at this juncture.

“We’ll need to talk about what’s coming.”

With the loss of Cadence, he was now confronted with the unenviable task of finding a wife for himself. One that would unite Espher under one banner or solicit the involvement of some foreign power in the impending invasion by the Agrantine. To have anyone think that he was dallying with some lesser noblewoman just because of a friendship would be disruptive to that purpose. He’d have to ensure that they always had a chaperone or a full war council present in the future when the two of them met and ensure that he kept all kindness towards her in check.

“I’m sure we can arrange a meeting after the feast? Perhaps in the…”

She finished his sentence for him with words he’d never have chosen. “The gardens. On the roof.”

“I have no fond memories of that place.” He tried not to wince as the heat in his stump grew unbearable for just a moment as his thoughts turned to the gardens, to the battle, to the pain.

“It’s where Yelena’s roosted.”

Just one word was all it took to snap him out of it. “I’m sorry, roosted?”

He found once more that he could not catch the girl’s eye. It was less like she was disinterested and more that she was simply looking at something else that he could not see. It was unsettling, to say the least. “Suggest a better place for her. She’ll move.”

Whatever semblance of manners they’d managed to drill into this peasant girl seemed to have been wiped away by her time in the company of savages. He was careful not to let his fixed smile slip, but he would definitely have to have words with Harmony about the respect it was necessary for her pet to show to the king. Beneath his breath, he grumbled, “A few ripe suggestions come to mind.”

Orsina’s head cocked to the side, but it was apparent that she wasn’t listening to him. “She needs to discuss… papers? No… treaty. Alliance. She wants to discuss terms of alliance.”

Once again, Artemio found himself blindsided. “The dragon wishes to form an alliance with Espher.”

“All that dwells on the earth shall be yours, all in the sky hers. Hunting rights…” Orsina began reciting terms by rote before Artemio cut her off.

“I suspect it would be best to have this conversation in person.”

She shrugged. But it was an odd gesture. Like she had forgotten how it was done and was repeating it from a distant memory. “Kagan is with her, when you’re ready.”

“I assume that you and my sister will be in attendance also?”

The mention of Harmony seemed to break through whatever clouds surrounded Orsina’s head. She blinked, and then a soft smile appeared on her face. “Of course.”

“Then perhaps I shall give you both some time to bathe first?” He offered her a small smile of his own in return, the kind that any king might offer in polite conversation, no more.

“Huh.” She truly seemed to return to herself in that moment, looking down at her tattered rags and noticing the crusting of filth that yet clung to her. “You know how you can’t smell something until someone points it out?”

“A servant will be happy to guide you to the baths.”

A blush began to spread across Orsina’s cheeks. “Thanks.”

“Oh no,” Artemio chuckled as she departed, “thank you.”

Alone once more he looked out across his throne room. His palace. His people. He had chosen this. It had been the best choice for Espher, and that had driven the decision, but it had still been his decision. He had chosen to be king. He had chosen this incredible burden of duty. He had no need of old, dead kings whispering in his mind about how difficult everything was going to become as a result of that choice.

Because of the choices he had made, Espher would survive, and that made any cost worth paying.

2 - Grim Counsel
Gemmazione, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Two weeks passed by as though they had never been there at all. Harmony found that her duties as sister to the king were many in number but very low in excitement. Some awkwardness of formality meant that when a female noble wanted to bring something to the king subtly, it was typically done via the queen, and in lieu of one of those, it seemed that she was being forced to fit the bill. All day long, she received a veritable forest’s worth of invitations, requests for audiences, and, most troublingly, notes of admiration from suitors.

She did not know if she was considered a weak point in Artemio’s defenses to be exploited or if all of the young men of Espher had been secretly bubbling over with lust for her for years, unable to express it due to her social station. She’d wager it was the former. Regardless, there were enough important people, or sons of important people, in the mix that she was obliged to at least meet with the majority of them and hope that her personality was sufficient to convince them to stop their pursuit.

Thus far, she had been unsuccessful in dissuading anyone, but she was at least allowed to put the majority of them off with excuses since yet more of her time was eaten up in Artemio’s company, serving as his chaperone whenever there was anyone vaguely feminine in the vicinity. It got her closer to the action of court, but as it turned out, the action of court was also heartbreakingly boring.

If she had known that Artemio becoming king would have led to this perpetual state of boredom, then she probably would have tried to remain a social pariah. She had all the good graces of her lessons in childhood to fall back on but found herself to be rusty in matters of manners, and when conversation turned to the weather for the fifteenth time in the day, she felt like screaming. How was she meant to know whether it was a beautiful spring day with a delightful breeze when all of these people kept demanding her time in the palace. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d seen sunlight except through stained glass. For all that she knew, the whole of Covotana could have been blown away.

The rooftop gardens had been commandeered by the First Dragon of Espher, converted into some sort of raggedy nest, so she could not even escape up there to get some fresh air. Not unless she wanted lungs full of venom and for Kagan to come running from wherever he spent his time to serve as translator. The two of them may have found a polite equilibrium with each other after their travels, but it was difficult to carry a conversation when you were missing out on a third of it.

Worse yet, it seemed that as many people as were courting her, an even number were making overtures towards Yelena. To be a prized social commodity could have been a nice ego boost if she weren’t competing with a lizard and coming up short. The only comfort she had was that Kagan, serving as the dragon’s chaperone and translator, was suffering as much as she was.

And so she was left with but a single comfort in her life. Those precious moments when she could withdraw from public life to the suite of rooms that had technically been set aside for the king’s mother when the palace was under one round of reconstruction or another. When she could be alone with Orsina at last.

Even that was not as simple as she had expected it to be.

The door shuddered shut behind her, closing out the watchful eyes of the guards that trailed after her everywhere. What few servants spent their time scurrying around this wing she had summarily dismissed as swiftly as possible, making clear to them that she never wanted to see them while she was in her chambers. Given how much of her days were spent elsewhere, it did not put undue pressure on the staff. Though even if it did, she did not think she could bring herself to care.

“I’m home.”

Her voice echoed out through the chambers to no response, but in this, nothing was unusual. Orsina was always there, at least when Harmony came back, but where before the conversation between them had flowed like wine, it seemed to have been stoppered.

It was difficult not to take it personally. She had confessed her love to Orsina, kissed her, done everything that she knew to do to make her intentions clear, and now the girl who had been so overwhelmingly warm that it had defrosted Harmony’s heart had turned cold.

She did not push, wouldn’t be so crass even if circumstances were different, but in particular because she still did not fully understand all that Orsina had suffered while captive. There had been no signs of harm on her, no torture or torment beyond the discomfort of confinement, but nonetheless something had changed.

Something that had started from the moment Yelena had come into their lives.

To be jealous of a dragon was ridiculous. She knew that. Yet all of the free-and-easy talks she’d once had with Orsina now seemed to be interspersed with an unheard commentary from the beast above them. She could only imagine that it was this newfound connection that had prompted Orsina’s transformation, that the dragon was constantly a presence in her thoughts, even when it did not speak. That was the only thing that had changed. So it must have been the cause. Why else could it be that Orsina no longer met her eye unless prompted? Why else could it be that she was not welcomed home to her beloved with open arms?

There had been a small library in her quarters, given over mostly to genealogies and biographies. It had rapidly expanded as all of the books that Artemio had abandoned in her quarters back at the House of Seven Shadows had been stealthily shipped over without anyone asking her anything or saying a word. It was here that Orsina seemed to spend most of her time, so far as Harmony could see.

Strictly speaking, Orsina was still Shadebound to the crown, having been granted the royal station by the Cerva. There had been no replacement selected in her absence, so all of the duties that the job entailed were hers.

While Harmony and Artemio were bound by their positions to entertain all parties to ensure the peace and stability of the realm, it seemed that Orsina felt no similar obligation. She had declined easily as many meetings as Harmony had attended, sometimes not even deigning to give answer to requests for an audience. Some of those attempting to reach her had begun filtering through to Harmony now, adding to her workload and carrying muttered complaints about the arrogance of the young lady from some country estate that nobody had ever heard of.

It was known that Orsina had the king’s favor, that her personal power was incomparable, but that did not make her invincible. Quite the opposite in fact—a target was squarely painted upon her back, and while nobody would be foolish enough to call her out directly, it would not take long before the scheming began. Many would already have been scheming, simply because she had the king’s favor and power. All that her absence from court was achieving was to grant them ammunition and turn those who would have preferred to be her allies into the arms of those seeking her downfall.

Harmony had told her all of this in no uncertain terms, but what followed could scarcely have even been considered an argument. It was as though Orsina didn’t even care. After all of the hard work they had done to disguise her and teach her, now that she was in a position that all of Covotana’s nobility envied, it was as though she had given up entirely.

Within the library, the air was chill and crisp. All the heat that was blanketing the rest of the city had been pushed back, and when Harmony eased herself inside without knocking, she could see her breath. She could also see the reason why.

Orsina sat cross-legged in the center of the room, books arrayed around her in every direction, like the blast radius of some bibliographical explosion. The ones she was currently reading were not on the floor. They drifted in a slow orbit about her, held up by invisible hands, pages fluttering as they passed behind her and only stilling for those moments in which they passed in front of her blank stare.

So far as Harmony could tell, she was reading the books. Though how one person could read a half dozen books at the same time, switching every two pages, Harmony couldn’t even begin to grasp. Art had always been a swift reader, so perhaps it was something to do with being Shadebound, the way that they had to split their attention. One thing that Art had never done was spend his life so freely for such a bizarre convenience. Every shade that was circling Orsina was being paid in the moments of her life for performing their task, and though it seemed that the font that Orsina could draw on was bottomless thanks to her connection with Yelena, it still seemed a ridiculously frivolous application of her power.

“Orsina?”

She did not turn, but Harmony could make out the quirk of a smile tugging at the corner of Orsina’s lips.

“Orsina. I’m home. Tear yourself away from your terribly exciting books and come talk to me.”

“They aren’t all that exciting.”

Harmony caught the book orbiting closest by her, barely even feeling a tug before it came away in her hand. She flipped it shut and looked at the spine. “Political Upheavals of the Early Volpe Dynasties. How could that be any less than riveting?”

“If you’re worried I’m having too much fun without you, you needn’t bother.”

The orbiting books cycled slowly down towards the ground, as though the air beneath their wings had been snatched away. They settled amidst the debris of the previous session’s reading, just another concentric circle within so many others. The chill began to ease, and Harmony breathed easier. “I’m more worried that you’ll start citing historical precedent in every conversation like Art does. I love the boy dearly, but he is a shockingly dry conversationalist.”

Orsina still wasn’t all the way back to herself. Her eyes still stared out blankly. Her lips still moved, as though she were reading something. At least she’d finally stopped needing to follow her finger along the pages. “Showing off everything I’ve learned isn’t really the point.”

“Then what is the point, precisely? You lock yourself in here, night and day, I barely even get to see you.” Harmony had not meant for the last part to sound quite so like a petulant pout, but the truth of the matter was that she would have been more than willing to overlook all of her love’s other eccentricities and the abandonment of her duties if it had meant that they were spending the time together.

Orsina blinked hard, and Harmony couldn’t help but wonder if it was the first time she’d done so all day. Then, in something more like her own voice than the dry and crackling simulacrum that had been created to answer questions, she said. “I need to understand what is happening.”

Harmony resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She had thought they were past this sort of wavering in the girl’s resolve. “I’ve told you that I’m more than happy to take your audiences with you if you’re worried about slipping up when talking to the nobles. It would be my pleasure, honestly. And if you’re worried that you’ll slip up and not understand something that they’re saying because you don’t know the whole history of everything, I can assure you that the fact you’ve even troubled to crack open a book makes you among the most educated nobles in Espher.”

“It isn’t about that either. There are… there are things happening.” She allowed Harmony to help her to her feet as she fumbled her way through her words. There were big thoughts bubbling inside her head. Too big to squeeze their way out from between her lips. “Things that could change the whole world, and I’m in the middle of them all, and I feel like… I feel like I’m a little girl again. Like I don’t know why anything is happening or where it might lead to. I need to understand.”

Harmony led her out of the library by the elbow like she was some invalid elderly aunt and let out a sigh of relief when she kicked the door shut behind them. There was absolutely nothing otherworldly about that place, except that it was where Orsina spent so much of her time. Even so, it felt haunted to Harmony. “You really don’t need to understand everything. Art’s king now, we can just go along with whatever he’s saying, lean back in the saddle and relax a little. We aren’t in charge. We don’t have to carry the burden of making every decision.”

“And what if Artemio chooses wrong?”

In any other place within the palace, that would have been considered sedition. If anyone else had heard it, then it would have provided all of the ammunition and more to see Orsina stripped of her role in court, if not her title itself. But Harmony was not any other person, and she, too, was struggling with the supposition of her brother’s newfound omniscience. The idea that Art was infallible when she had been the one to patch his torn trouser knees when he fallen and taught him how to achieve some of the most basic behaviors of a normal person was laughable. He would always be her little brother, her burden to protect, and a little ring of metal on top of his head wasn’t liable to change that any time soon. “Then that’s his prerogative as king, and we’re all meant to just pretend it was the right choice anyway. Don’t you remember our lessons? The king’s always right. Even when he’s wrong. Especially when he’s wrong.”

“I’ve got… this thing that I can do. It means that I can change things. I can… if I decide something will be one way, I can make it that way.” Orsina still seemed to be struggling to say what she meant. To put all of her muddled thoughts into a line and spit them out. “I can make everyone accept that is the way things are going to be. If I don’t… if I just throw up my hands and say it’s somebody else’s job to decide for me, then what’s the point of having that power at all?”

Letting her hand trail down from Orsina’s elbow to her hand, Harmony interlaced their fingers. “Well, the point is that you get to lounge around very comfortably and give me all of the love and affection that I’m clearly craving.”

It had been a joke, but Orsina was struck by it as though she’d been hit with a hammer. Her shoulders slumped, and there was a shine to her eyes that had nothing to do with unblinking hours and everything to do with sorrow. It was so immediate that Harmony wanted to curse herself and snatch her own words back.

Orsina squeezed her hand. “Forgive me. I’ve been… distracted.”

“Well, of course you have.” She squeezed right back. “It sounds as though you’ve been trying to understand the entirety of human history and use it to predict the future. That’s enough to get anyone’s head turned around. I feel a little dizzy just talking about it, and I haven’t been staring at books all day.”

They settled themselves upon one of the many couches scattered through the apartments, next to a fire that had been set but not lit, mostly because the additional heat might have actually resulted in everyone present melting. Orsina stared at the unlit logs for a long moment, then her brain seemed to catch up to current events. “Uh, yes. How did your meeting with the horse people go?”

“The Duchy of Brunelleschi would be delighted to provide us with all the horses we need to reestablish our cavalry at the price offered, provided we can wait the two or three years to foal them.” Harmony leaned back on the sofa and was quietly delighted to find Orsina sink back too, tucking her head into the crook of Harmony’s arm.

She glanced up at Harmony, and the older woman could swear that she felt her heart stop for just a moment as she looked down into Orsina’s eyes. “We don’t have two years.”

“No, we most certainly do not. Art is reaching out to some merchants that trade farther east, hoping that someone somewhere has enough horses just lying around unused. Although of course, if we do happen upon them and they’re so far afield, they still may not make it in time.”

The moment seemed to be fading. Harmony’s heart was beating steady once more, if a little swift. Orsina cuddled herself in closer and looked back at the dead fire. “So I guess we just won’t have cavalry?”

“The one advantage that we held over the Agrantine army was their lack of mobility, and now it is gone.” Harmony tried not to sound too much like Artemio, even though she did find herself to be entirely too much like him sometimes. For instance, her refusal to let things pass even when they were doing no harm. “Also, the meeting with the Duchess of Brunelleschi was yesterday. Today was mostly domestic affairs.”

Orsina gasped. “You’ve been cheating on me, in a house?”

Harmony squeezed her closer, and for a moment it felt like everything was back to the way it should have been. “So all that sharp wit hasn’t been blunted on books then?”

“I still have my moments.”

That was a little too close to the truth to bear. There were moments throughout the day when Orsina seemed entirely herself again, when she would smile and joke and laugh. When she would blush as Harmony drew her in for a soft kiss and her heart would beat faster. But most of the time, it was as though she were absent from her own body, lost in her thoughts, and kissing her was like Harmony pressing her lips against one of the statues of the palace.

She changed the subject. “Would you care to join me for some dinner? Perhaps a glass of wine?”

“I suppose that I could be tempted.”

Harmony reached up to unfasten the top button of her dress. “Oh, well, if temptation is the name of the game, then I’m severely overdressed for the occasion.”

Orsina reached up and refastened the button, giggling all the way. “It’s a wonder that you haven’t got a dozen scandals to your name already.”

“Oh, we’ve only been in power a few weeks, I’ve got plenty of time to rack them up.” She leaned down to kiss Orsina, at last. “Poor Art will be pulling out his hair.”

Orsina did not blush, her eyes did not flutter shut. She stared blankly at Harmony, as though they were strangers, though their lips were only a breath away from touching. “He wants to see us.”

“When?” The words was more growl than not.

“Now.”

She looked around the room. “I’m sorry, did a messenger just deliver something while we were talking and I missed it?”

Orsina untangled herself from Harmony’s arms and rubbed at her own temples. “They’re having a war council.”

Harmony got to her feet and smoothed out her dress. It would have to do for one more meeting. “That seems a little premature when we haven’t even got a war yet.”

“They’ve set up some big table by Yelena’s nest.” Orsina winced. “She’s… fussing about it.”

“Oh, I see, the message is by dragon mail.”

Now a blush appeared on Orsina’s cheeks. Long overdue. “Artemio said… I couldn’t ignore his message this way.”

It was Harmony’s turn to press her fingers against an impending headache. “Please tell me you haven’t been ignoring royal summons the same way you have all the dinner invitations and suitors?”

Orsina cast a guilty glance to the stack of unopened notes on the table. “Not that I noticed?”

“Oh, Orsina.” Harmony’s mouth snapped shut as she realized just how like her mother she had sounded in that moment. Not angry, but disappointed.

“I don’t have time for all these… people.” Once more, Orsina seemed to be losing her ability to string her words together coherently. “They all want… I don’t even know what they all want. They all want a piece of me. To lay claim to me and say I belong to them. To use me.”

This was an old refrain that Harmony herself could remember singing back when she was first coming out into the world of nobility. The complex interconnections of alliances and enmities, hinted at through conversation but obscured from plain sight was a frightening, stifling, and amorphous thing. “This is the nature of life in court, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t want to belong to anyone else. I’m so tired of being… caged.” Orsina’s stare had turned blank once more. Chill air blew through the chambers again, setting both of them shivering for a moment before they could recover their composure.

Harmony tried to shrug it off, straightening out her clothes and heading for the door. “We’d best get going.”

It seemed that Orsina wasn’t quite done.

She stood staring into the unlit fire, cold radiating through her as she whispered, barely loud enough for Harmony to hear, “I won’t submit again. I won’t be a prisoner. I will not go back into the dark.”

The pain in her voice, the fear, it was frightening.

Harmony wet her lips carefully, then said. “Orsina?”

“Yes.” She did not meet Harmony’s eye, but she did move. Reaching out a hand so that a cloak leapt from where it had been dumped upon another chair to sweep around her shoulders. “We should go.”

There were so many questions that Harmony was almost frightened to ask, and none of them could be voiced in front of the guards. Every whisper in the halls of a king became a rumor, and every rumor grew legs and took off running. Just a fragment of the things she should really have been asking Orsina about could make it around the world and back by morning, carrying with it the most awful change. In a way, she could perfectly understand why Orsina was avoiding being heard at all.

The abrupt change of plans for the evening came with only one real benefit. The small horde of hangers-on, secretaries, and dignitaries that had attached themselves to Harmony’s coattails had dropped off so she could breathe as they hiked up the stairs to the roof without almost choking on perfume or insipid conversation.

Most likely she should have taught Orsina about perfumery, the meanings of the different floral scents and how it could be used to convey a message, but she couldn’t bring herself to. The honest scent of soap and sweat had always been all that had filled Harmony’s nose when they embraced and depriving herself of that felt like too great a cruelty. They’d been parted for so long, and even now that they were together again, Orsina was so different that there were moments Harmony couldn’t even understand how she had traveled so far from who she used to be. When Orsina was a hollowed-out stranger in Harmony’s arms, and that scent was the only thing keeping her heart from breaking.

The gardens atop the palace had changed rapidly since the coming of Yelena. Everything had been cleared off the flat expanse around the dragon by some truly terrified laborers. All the rubble and soil that had been all that was left of the decorative roses swept away. All the remaining structures hauled down before they could be knocked down by an accidental twitch of the tail. Now the gardens had become a flat stone table protruding from the keep’s side, the farther half filled with scaled flesh, the intermediate area dotted patches of soot and bones from the many whole carcasses Yelena gleefully roasted and devoured. The table by the door had been the latest addition, set as far forward as the courage of the servants carrying it out would allow, which was scarcely enough to get it away from the wall far enough to squeeze chairs in.

Shadebound might have had power enough to face off against a dragon, but the servants were not Shadebound. Nor were the vast majority of the nobles. They lived in terror of the beast that now dwelled among them.

Initially, plans had been made for the gardens to be reconstructed as they had been, as a sort of memorial to Queen Cadence, who it seemed had died in some sort of meaningful sacrifice amidst the chaos in the palace.

There had been much to concern Harmony during her adventure to the north, enough that her mind had scarcely turned towards her brother at all, despite her having been raised to serve as his protector. The fact that the Agrantine had laid hands on him at all, let alone lopped one from his body, served as clear evidence of just how badly she had been needed in Covotana. Evidence that Art really couldn’t be left alone to fend for himself, no matter his many protestations.

He was already seated at the midpoint of the table, Duchess Granchio at his right hand, and the seat to his left open for Orsina. There was only one chair on the other side, double the size of those where kings and lordlings stiffly sat. Kagan was the only one with courage, or knowledge, enough to sit with his back to the dragon, and as he served most often as her mouthpiece, it was a fitting arrangement.

Harmony could not help but note that no seat had been set aside for her. She supposed that as the sister of the king she now qualified as a princess, and princesses rarely seemed to find themselves on war councils. Queens, certainly. Duchesses, apparently. But a princess was some delicate waif that fainted at the thought of blood. The title fit Harmony so poorly it was laughable.

They proceeded in tense silence to the table with all eyes upon them, and with horror Harmony realized what was about to happen a moment before it did. Orsina arrived at the chair by the king’s side and pulled it out to offer it to Harmony.

Already tension had the air thrumming, but now it was palpable. Harmony had not been invited to this council, and now it appeared that Orsina was rebuking the king for the oversight, offering up her own place at the table. Overruling his judgement. For those jackals just waiting for her to make a faux pas, it was as though all of their birthdays had come early.

Harmony stepped behind Artemio’s shoulder and forced her body to relax. Brother and sister they may have been, but that was not their only relationship. She was his impresario, and it would do well for others to remember that she was his bodyguard, and this was her rightful place. She glanced over at Orsina only briefly, hoping that she might take the hint.

Orsina was not taking the hint. She was staring at Harmony with mounting confusion, forcing her to speak.

“Very kind of you to offer, Shadebound Royal, but I have been sitting in meetings all day, my legs could use a stretch.”

There were some chuckles from around the table, and Orsina slipped into her allotted place without further comment. All Harmony could do was hope that whatever was discussed this day held enough excitement to keep this moment from the memory of those gathered.

“We are at war, ladies and gentlemen of the court. Though there are no soldiers marching upon us and no soldiers yet on the field, it has been declared.” Artemio must have been practicing his royal voice; it brought abject silence to the whole table. Even the rumbling of the dragon’s breathing seemed to fall silent as he rose.

“Agrant spat in our eye with their little visit, that’s true enough, but is that enough for us to be calling it a war?” Duchess Granchio had never shied away from speaking her mind. It was why she had always done so well on the battlefield and so poorly in court.

Art’s shoulders lowered ever so slightly, the layers of capes thrown about him shrinking down by his ears by so little it was almost comical. “The emperor’s wife died here, by my hand. It is not a slight that he will let pass.”

“Hasn’t he got a hundred more where that came from? You’d think you’d done him a favor thinning the herd.” Duke Cigno was thick in waist and beard. Easy to spot in any room. It was a small mercy that he was not surrounded by his usual blue cloud of pipe-smoke.

Some lord that Harmony didn’t know took up the same scoffing tone. “Agrant is in land wars across a dozen fronts to the south. There’s not a chance that they’d march on us in force.”

Duchess Ragna, Harmony knew all too well. She was always ready with the kind of sharp-tongued comment that filtered down to its intended target days, if not weeks, after she’d uttered it. “The emperor has always been a reasonable man. If he knew that some of his forces went rogue and invaded an ally, then…”

Art did them all a favor and cut the woman off. “He gave full sanction to the invasion.”

Duke Anatra was a less common sight around town than his wife, always more of a merchant or bookkeeper than a proper lord, by the estimations of his fellows. He wore small, round eyeglasses and was pleasantly rotund but seemed to have all his clothes tailored just a little too tight, giving him the faint appearance of a jovial beetle. “But was it truly an invasion? There were a few saints here, no denying that, but it was hardly the full force that the Agrantine could bring to bear, was it? More like an expedition gone awry. Diplomacy taken too far.”

Art managed a small smile for the man who had become one of the first allies to the Volpe’s return first to court, then to power. It was becoming increasingly apparent that all of that had been the work of his wife. Regardless, it behooved him to treat the man like he was on the right side of the argument, even when he was not. “I’ve heard it said that war is the final permutation of diplomacy.”

Ragna picked up on the shift in conversation and attempted to press her advantage. “So would it not serve us best to send envoys to the emperor, explain what happened here…”

This time Artemio actually raised his hand to bring her speech to a halt. “During the rout, no shortage of saints fled. He will have had a full report by now. I see no need to waste further time reiterating the finer points.”

Of all the assembled lords and ladies at this table, the only one that had ever been directly antagonistic in the past was Duke Cavalla, but his disdain had been directed almost exclusively towards Kagan and those who sought to protect him. The fact that he now had to sit across the table from the Arazi as an equal clearly stung him. “But if we are to marshal our forces, it will serve as clear provocation to him.”

“He is provoked, Duke Cavalla.” Artemio let out a huff of breath, almost a sigh. “That is done. What we need turn our attention to now is the means by which we shall survive the aftermath of that provocation.”

“They’ll march at the end of Gemmazione.” Granchio piped up so swiftly it made Harmony wonder if Art had coached the woman before the meeting and run lines. “Agrant has a standing army, no need to raise levees or banners. But with all their wheeled contraptions, they’ll favor the dry season.”

“Assuming they mean to march on us at all,” Ragna snipped back.

“Let us work off that assumption for now, shall we? Call this situation hypothetical if you must. What I need to know is can we be ready for them come the season’s end?”

There was a great deal of muttering and grumbling from along the length of the table. Nobody in their right mind wanted to use the word no when addressing their king, but reality had an unfortunate habit of overpowering the whims of royals and peasants alike.

“The fight with the dragon-lords depleted our numbers. Our cavalry are in tatters. Our footmen in not much better shape.” Some lesser lord was speaking, one who had made himself useful enough to be invited to meetings such as this, rather than born to such power that his attendance was mandated. It was the sort of role that Art probably would have sought out, if things had gone differently. “All of the conscripts have been returned to their farms for the planting season. To raise them again before season’s end, we’d see starvation. Widespread starvation.”

Granchio leaned forward to drag a bowl of olives into easier reach. “And hungry men don’t fight.”

“Two options present themselves. To purchase the grain needed for the coming year from foreign merchants and be at their mercy.” Anatra tilted his hand from side to side with the palm down, as though balancing the fate of the kingdom on its plump back. “Or to leave our peasantry where they belong and to spend that same coin on mercenaries instead.”

Once more Artemio seemed to resist the urge to sigh or wilt where he could be seen. “Mercenaries are not an option. Agrantine pockets run deeper than ours by far, and I’d rather they weren’t bribed out from under us when the time for fighting comes.”

Anatra slapped his wobbling hand down on the table. “Then we must open negotiations to trade, begin rationing, seize all that can be had from our lands now, and let the fields lie fallow for the year.”

Artemio glanced to Granchio, his right-hand woman. She was sitting where Harmony had always assumed that she would sit. “Will it be sufficient?”

“The treasury will empty before our neighbors run out of grain to sell us, if that’s the fear.”

Artemio’s lips drew tight. “Will there be sufficient supply to support the populace?”

“Most of them, certainly. It’ll be a lean year for them, but they’ll live through it, unless they were already going hungry.”

With a nod to Anatra, Art made his decision. “Make the necessary inquiries.”

There was no physical list in front of Artemio. He had never needed one when his memory was so very efficient. Yet Harmony had the sense that item one was now ticked off. “In terms of replenishing the cavalry…”

There was a momentary silence, then Harmony realized that the question was being directed at her. “We won’t have it. Nobody has enough horse to hand over even for ready money, and foaling and raising, they all take time. If they were coming next year instead of this, we might be back to half strength.”

Granchio grumbled, “Without full strength, they aren’t liable to leave a mark on the bloody Agrantine. They’ll just be a distraction. Easy pickings.”

“And of course, we do not have a year.” Artemio leaned back in his chair and let his crown knock on the graven wood.

“What about the dragon?” Lord Cavalla pointed across at Yelena where she sat, unmoving, like some vast serpent on a sun-soaked rock. Her eyes did not move, nor did she blink. It was unsettling, to say the least. And having spent some small amount of time in the dragon’s company by now, having messages relayed to her through Kagan and Orsina, it seemed like exactly the kind of thing that Yelena would do specifically to unsettle people she did not like. It was less that she was a spiteful creature and more that she had the heart of a jester beating within that great, scaled chest. “We could not ask for better mobility than flight.”

Kagan leaned forward and set his elbows on the table. Despite the age and sturdiness of the oak, it creaked. “Yelena can’t carry your troops. She can’t replace supply lines. Dragons aren’t horses. One can’t replace the other.”

Cavalla scoffed. “But I suppose that at some point she will serve some purpose beyond culling our livestock?”

Yelena slowly turned her head to focus one great, golden eye upon the lord where he sat near to the end of the table. Smoke drifted up from her nostrils, floating to form a cloud above them. Her serpentine neck extended, just ever so slightly, so that she was moving towards the man. So that there could be no doubt at all that when Kagan spoke his next words, they were coming from her. “You can rely on that.”

Artemio was forced into the role of peacemaker once more, and it suited him poorly. Nothing was revealed in the carefully schooled expression that he showed to the gathered council, but Harmony knew her brother all too well. Knew the tightening of his shoulders and the grimace that used to accompany it before he’d learned better. He thought that those who ruled should have been above such petty arguments. That they should be ruled by reason. The reality seemed to be a constant disappointment to him. “Both our Shadebound and new ally can be relied upon to counter the more esoteric tactics that the Agrantine bring to bear, but they cannot replace the necessity of an actual army.”

Duchess Granchio let out a little huff of what might have been laughter. “With respect to your Majesty, I was at the battle of Selvaggia, and I’d wager our girl there could stand toe-to-toe with any army in the world.”

Not all of the gathered lords and ladies had fought the Arazi. Most of them had been mysteriously busy with more pressing concerns when the time came to lay down their lives for Espher. But even among their cowardly number Harmony could see heads nodding.

Some of it may well have been the all-too-familiar abdication of responsibility. Passing the burden of waging war and raising armies to but a single girl of twenty years probably appealed to them greatly because they could not grasp the existential threat hanging over them. They still thought only in terms of the advantages that the coming days could bring them. Still failed to understand that all the gold in the world could not be spent from beyond the grave.

Others would have seen Orsina facing the dragons that came to strike at Covotana herself, seen her flying like a dragon herself, rending scale and wing by the power of her shades. They might have had some inkling of what she had proven herself capable of. On the one hand, it was a terrible burden to place on anyone, but on the other, Harmony could not help but feel pleased that Orsina’s worth was known. It would keep her safe from their treachery if they all viewed her as invaluable.

The only one who did not benefit from someone else being seen as omnipotent was the person who was actually meant to be in charge. “I am certain that everyone here has at least a passing grasp upon the limits of Shadebound. Potent as Lady Aceta had proven herself to be, she is not limitless. And we are aware that despite their own rejection of an arcane tradition, the Agrantine field preternatural forces of their own, drawn from among their vassal states. Bogging our own Shadebound down in the grind of direct conflict is liable to leave us vulnerable to such measures. If this does not prove to be the case, then they can be dispatched to where they will serve best with some degree of haste.”

There were some exchanged glances among the council. Some rumor they thought was being confirmed. “If his Majesty wishes to keep the Lady Aceta close, I’m certain nobody can fault him for that.”

Artemio did not stiffen or pry at that comment any further. He had more sense. “The cavalry, my lords and ladies. Does anyone have a proposal to resolve the problem?”

If he’d wanted to silence any whispers, there could have been no more effective bludgeon to the quiet waltz of conversation than that. Perhaps some of them did have ideas, but none would take the risk of putting one forward and leave themselves open to criticism if it failed. So Espher’s leadership remained stagnant, as it always had under every king.

The silence stretched out for so long that Harmony herself was almost ready to jump in and give them her limited overview of the situation, even though she had not been invited and was not meant to be here at all.

“Archers.” Kagan’s voice cut through the long silence.

Duke Anatra startled at the sudden rumble. “I beg pardon, Arazi?”

“Horse archers. You haven’t got enough beasts and bodies for lancers, but a season’s long enough to train archers to ride.” Kagan leaned back a little. As though realizing he’d overcommitted. “Well enough to fight at least. If your Agrants are as slow as you say, you could pepper their lines with no problem. Hit and run.”

Cavalla scoffed once more. Doing what all these lords and ladies had always done, tearing down any idea but their own. “How could anyone loose arrows from the back of a horse?”

“Steppes-men manage it fine.” Kagan cast a bored gaze in the lord’s direction. “Maybe you should ask them.”

Artemio was not so quick to dismiss the suggestion. “And what do we suppose it will take for them to part with such knowledge?”

The huge man shifted uncomfortably in his seat now that he was the center of attention. “Steel most likely. To trade. Dead men don’t make good teachers.”

Duchess Granchio was the one to shoot him down now. That was a surprise to Harmony, who’d thought the woman was firmly in Art’s pocket. Perhaps her views really did simply align with his most of the time. “So you’d have us arm the barbarian raiders on our doorstep?”

“I wouldn’t have you do anything.” Kagan crossed his arms. “You asked a question, I answered you.”

“They would be trading their most valuable tactical advantage to us, so it seems a relatively even trade to me. Besides, even if you plated every man of the steppes in steel, they don’t have the numbers to pose a threat.” Artemio was still weighing the thought, examining it from different angles. The fact that he did not already have an argument against it prepared suggested to Harmony that it was a new idea even he had never considered. Which in turn made it all the more likely that he would latch onto it.

Still, Granchio was displeased at the idea of putting decent weapons into the hands of a people that had spent generations preying on the northern reaches where her lands lay. “Not yet, but a generation from now…”

“Is a problem for tomorrow. We need to survive today.” Artemio did not intentionally cut her off, it was not meant as a snub, and Granchio likely wouldn’t see it that way either. But Harmony could see the eyes of the other lords darting. They thought they could see a gap to wedge themselves into between Granchio and the king, and they would do their damnedest to squeeze into it. Art didn’t give them a second thought, giving his command to one of the secretaries lurking back against the wall. “Send out whoever we have that the steppes-men will talk to. Make the trade. Begin retraining those riders who will learn. Part the rest from their horses and distribute them to the best archers we have.”

There was a moment of dull silence, then Duke Cigno added his two coppers. “Cavaliers won’t be happy to lose their horses.”

“Then they can study the bow. It is not as though I am giving them no choice.” Artemio waved the concern away. “Half of them probably already hunt from horseback. They can consider it good practice for chasing down forest fowl.”

Kagan piped up again, though he seemed reluctant to be seen, let alone heard. “The horses will need training too. Warhorses charge for the enemy; they don’t strafe them. They’re built wrong for it too, but fresh horseflesh isn’t coming, so we’ll need to make do.”

“Let rider and beast learn together then.” Artemio settled back for a moment, sipping on his wine. “At least they will not be lacking company.”

Cavalla, it seemed, had been bubbling with enmity throughout this entire conversation and now at last it boiled over as he barked, “I cannot believe that you plan to turn the finest heavy cavalry in the north into…”

Artemio halted him with a raised hand. Harmony startled at the sight of all the jeweled rings he was wearing. There must have been a half dozen rings among the crown jewels, and he had half the space to display them as his predecessors.

“Whatever it takes to win the war, Lord Cavalla. Whatever that might be.”

“At the word of some reptile?”

There was the reason for the simmering resentment finally rearing its ugly head. If it had been the suggestion of one of his fellow nobles, then Cavalla would have fussed over it as surely as this. But the vitriol was coming from his loathing of the Arazi. Not simple distaste for a plan.

Once more the table fell silent, the only sound the screeching of Kagan’s seat over the flagstones beneath them as he rose to stand and glower down at Cavalla. With all the time they’d spent together, Harmony had forgotten just how much bigger he was than a normal man. It wasn’t just his girth and height, but the way he carried himself. He was garbed in simple robes, borrowed from somebody or other within the palace so that he was not striding about in his Arazi bones, but despite that, just the set of his feet and shoulders announced him as a warrior. Where Cavalla’s voice had been raised in anger, his grew softer. Barely more than a rumble felt through the bones.

“My blood’s warm as yours. Warmer. Since I’ve got some fire in me, and all you’ve got is piss.”

There could have been no more obvious a challenge, and a duel would have been in the offing were it anyone else offering those words. As it was, little lord Cavalla looked up at the giant of the man without even a knife in his belt, and he wilted.

Artemio came to Cavalla’s rescue. “My lord, if you can present a solution to the problem of cavalry, then I’d be more than happy to take your advisement instead.”

A flush crept up Lord Cavalla’s neck, spreading up his cheeks as he spoke. Hot enough to cook an egg on. “Well… I… that is to say… this course is simply unacceptable. It breaks with… You cannot take a man who has spent his entire life training to be one type of soldier and expect him to become another in a season. It will be chaos. You will destroy what confidence the cavaliers have in their own skill.”

Artemio did not allow him that out. “An alternative, Lord Cavalla?”

Thoroughly defeated, Cavalla seemed to shrink back in on himself. “I… have none at present, your Majesty.”

“Thought is not instant, there is no shame in taking time to ponder a question. Should inspiration strike later, please come to me with suggestions.” Art turned his gaze from his least-loved lord to politely include the others in his next demand. “This goes for all of you. Though I am now your king, I am still but a single man, with only a single man’s knowledge. I may not always follow your advice, but I shall always give it the weight due to leaders of your experience.”

That statement clearly gave the assembled body of leaders some food for thought. There had been kings who were easily led in the past. Kings who would refuse any idea but their own and insist that the world reshape itself around their words. Artemio was not one of these. He was not either of these. Harmony could almost see the mounting horror on the faces of those who’d meant to manipulate him as they became aware of that fact. He would listen to their thoughts? He would make decisions based on what he thought was best, using what information they provided to him? It was both a blessing and a curse. Gone were the days of tricking the king into supporting whatever pet project his lords felt the need to pursue, and so too were gone the days of allowing the full burden of guilt for every decision to fall on the king’s shoulders.

Art wet his lips and tried to carry on as though he had not upended their whole world of petty squabbles. “Then might I suggest that we break for some refreshment, and time to consider…”

It was only then that Harmony realized what wasn’t being said. What had been forgotten about entirely, and she found herself forced to blurt out, “What about the Arazi?”

Duke Anatra gave his fellows a little smirk then said, “The Arazi have been defeated, Princess.”

She did not want to punch him in the face. Punching him in the face would be counterproductive. Nobody would listen to what she had to say if she became known as a face puncher. “They’re coming back. We may have lost them during our escape from their dominion, but they know where we are, they know where Orsina is. They will be coming for her.”

Duchess Granchio laughed. Actually laughed. Harmony couldn’t believe the rudeness. “After the beating they took the last time they set foot upon our soil, I should think they’d be reluctant for a repeat performance.”

Her own response came clipped with anger. “It’s a religious matter for them.”

Cavalla piped up in something like support to quip, “And nothing makes a fool of men like a god.”

Artemio finally turned to look at her. “We have positioned watchtowers in the northern reaches. If and when the dragon-lords begin scouting, we will ready ourselves to face them once more. The Agrantine Empire is more than enough of a problem as it stands.”

Ever the bean-counter, Lord Anatra swiftly announced, “We do not have coin enough in our coffers to miss another harvest. The granaries are already low after all the conflict we have faced. If they come next year, then…”

Kagan added his voice in support of Harmony. “They won’t be coming next year. They won’t be coming next winter. They’re probably already on their way.”

Art’s head snapped around, as though he were surprised that anyone else was indulging his sister’s foolishness. “They took massive losses. It will take them time to rebuild their army.”

Harmony did her best to keep her voice level, but she was becoming increasingly frustrated as the conversation went on. Why were they ignoring her? Why was Art turning his back on her? “What we faced was a fraction of the forces they have at their beck and call. Barely half of their full numbers. They could mount an assault of the same strength again tomorrow.”

Duchess Granchio grunted. “But they will not, because they have seen it is fruitless to attack with those numbers.”

Harmony silenced her with a glare. “Which buys us days, not years.”

Cavalla scoffed once more. It seemed that the man loved the sound of his own voice too much to consider not wading into conversations where he was not wanted. “What army can mobilize in days?!”

“You were the one saying how fast dragons move.” Kagan may have settled back into his seat, but he clearly had not forgotten the insults from the man. “If they take only the flights of aslinda, they could be upon us tomorrow.”

Anatra paled at the thought. As though his tight clothes had cut off blood supply to his head. “Tomorrow?”

Artemio could not help himself. Even if he wanted to pretend that the situation was hypothetical, it was still a puzzle to be solved. A set of information to be processed. “They will not send only true dragons. It would be too much of a risk to have them unsupported. They’ve tasted the might of our Shadebound now. They’ll understand their better gamble is not precision but overwhelming our positions.”

“He has the right of it.” Kagan gave a respectful nod to the king. “We’ve got the season, likely enough.”

Duchess Ragna was already pale with all of the makeup she caked on, but even she looked sickly now. “So we can anticipate the arrival of both Agrantine and Arazi armies simultaneously?”

Anatra whispered, “All is lost.”

“Hardly. The likelihood of both forces taking the field within a week of each other is infinitesimally small.” Artemio was trying to calm his lords and ladies before panic could begin to spread, robbing them all of reason entirely, but he had to contend with both their moods and the facts of the situation.

Granchio tried to help. In her way. “Assuming that the Arazi come at all.”

Kagan let out a disgusted little huff. “Oh, they’ll be coming.”

“I’m unclear why you are doubting my word, my lords.” It was the closest Harmony could come to openly questioning her treatment, a treatment clearly inspired by the way her own brother was dismissing her.

“It is not a matter of trust, Duchess, but of perspective.” Duke Anatra’s voice had a sharpness to it now, one that seemed entirely out of place coming from his little pink mouth. “In all likelihood, your retrieval of a captive prompted a response from the Arazi, but it does not follow that they will be attempting a full-scale assault to retrieve that single prisoner. But I do not believe that they’d be willing to wage another war of conquest so soon after having their noses bloodied.”

Harmony looked to Orsina for aid, expecting the one who’d told them so much about the Arazi ways to weigh in and force people to understand the situation, but she’d remained eerily silent throughout the whole debacle. Kagan was the one to speak up. “They’ll come for her. It’s pride for their leader. It’s cause for their crusade.”

Harmony managed a tight-lipped smile at Anatra. “They aren’t rational men like you, my lord.”

“When we see evidence of this impending invasion, we shall give it due attention.” Artemio once more tried to dismiss all that they had said.

Anger began to creep into Harmony’s voice despite her best efforts. “Evidence? Orsina was in captivity, listening to their every word. Kagan grew to maturity among them. They know what the Arazi are planning.”

“With respect to both of them, the words that men say and the actions that they take are rarely so closely aligned as to even overlap, let alone serve as sufficient proof of action. All warriors beat their chests and talk of how they will hunt their enemies to the edge of the world, yet the streets are not blocked with their gradual stalking from one end of the continent to another.” Artemio swirled the wine in his glass slowly, savoring the aromas rising from it. He’d always been overly fond of wine, but now that she thought back, Harmony couldn’t recall him consuming more than a few sips throughout the whole meeting. Perhaps becoming king really had changed him in ways other than making him even more of a pompous ass.

Kagan growled in symphony with a rumble from his dragon. “Arazi don’t brag.”

It was Art’s turn to laugh. “Are you certain? I seem to recall you doing a little chest-beating down in the dungeons not so long ago. Your kind are forged in fire?”

There were lanterns spaced along the table so that any papers laid in front of the council could be read clearly. The evening had not yet darkened enough for them to be necessary, but they were there nonetheless. Or at least, they were there until that moment. At which point the glass of every lantern shattered, and the flames leapt up a foot in the air. Every one of the nobles flung themselves back at the sudden eruption. Artemio included. Orsina’s voice came to them as if from a great distance, loud enough to be heard like a hiss in each ear, but so soft that the startled secretaries and servants didn’t seem to notice it. “Enough.”

Kagan was among those flinching back. There was something beyond surprise on his face when he locked eyes with Orsina. Harmony had rarely seen it in his expression before, except when they ran into his father back in the Arazi lands. Fear.

The pyrotechnics display had the desired effect. All of the infighting, backbiting, and irrelevant muttering had been brought to a complete halt. And now Artemio, who had felt so confident with her sitting in silence beside him, had to give Orsina his undivided attention. “You have something that you wish to say, Shadebound Royal?”

When Orsina’s words bubbled up out of her, the voice might have been hers, but the manner of speaking was guttural. Like she was some peasant farmer yelling at cattle. “Doesn’t matter what you believe. Don’t matter what you say. They’re coming, same as your saints from the south. Pretending won’t do nothing but make you blind.”

“So eloquently put,” Duchess Ragna tittered.

“Pissing about with pretty words won’t stop them. Fiddling with coffers and grain stores won’t stop them. Nothing will stop them. Nothing but me. So why do you keep going in circles pretending otherwise?” If Orsina heard Ragna’s little jibe, she paid it no mind. She only had eyes for the king. Only had words for the king. It was as though the rest of them had been forgotten.

“What precisely is your proposal?” Artemio looked nonplussed. The girl he was accustomed to dealing with was quiet and retiring, a little country mouse. The fact that country mouse had dragged a serpent back to his doorstep still hadn’t dissuaded him of that impression. To hear that mouse now roaring like a lion was understandably surprising to him. But not to Harmony. She had always known Orsina was a lion. From the first day they met and the girl had snapped back at her, she’d known there were claws hidden somewhere, but it was the first time she’d ever seen them bared at anyone else.

“I’m what they want. Give it to them. Me and Yelena.”

This seemed to be safer ground for Art. He leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “One dragon against a flight…”

Orsina cut him off, and the sputtering remains of the lanterns roared back to life, sending the seated nobles scrambling back once more. “We’re more than one dragon.”

This time, Artemio had steeled himself for the explosion. As though he’d been expecting more dramatics. He may have been surprised at Orsina’s behavior, but he’d adapted to it while the others still floundered.

“Perhaps, but as I already mentioned, I have no intention of spending you upon a common army when there are more serious concerns to face.”

Harmony didn’t know what to make of Orsina’s outbursts any more than her brother did. If she was making a display of power and ill temper to scare off any more suitors or petitioners, then she was greatly underestimating the allure of such boundless power. Like moths to the flame, the more destructive her demonstrations became, the more these power-hungry fools would be drawn to her. Hungering all the while for more.

“More serious than all the dragons in the sky?”

At last, Artemio met her gaze, and while the sardonic grin he showed her was all too familiar, it did not reach his eyes. There were creases around them that had not been there before. Some a sign of aging from the power that he had spent in her absence, some a symptom of the pain that he was struggling so hard to conceal from everyone. “You really are not familiar with the Agrantine, are you?”

Even Granchio seemed taken aback by his cavalier attitude. “You’re more concerned about the Agrantine than the dragon-lords?”

“Do you believe that the God Emperor of Agrant is so named simply because he is of noble birth? That creature has lived centuries, accruing powers a mortal man cannot conceive of. From nothing, he built an empire that spans the globe, and you ask me if I have more concern for him than some barbarian princes rutting atop larger-than-average lizards?” He glanced over to Kagan in the midst of his rant and realized his mistake. “Present company excluded, of course.”

Kagan looked more amused than angry. “Hard not to take some offense there.”

Yelena on the other hand expressed enough rage for both of them, spreading her wings and rearing up behind Kagan with a rumble deep inside her that sounded like nothing less than a house tumbling to arson.

Art turned back to address the rest of the table, glancing up to his sister to include her in a way that it had not occurred to him to do until now. “I have faced the Arazi and found them wanting. Only to return home and find that the Agrantine had snatched my kingdom out from beneath me in my absence. Is it any wonder I consider them a greater threat?”

Kagan broke the silence that the question left. “The Arazi had gods once.”

“Let us guess, something dragon-shaped?” It seemed that Cavalla had been emboldened by the multiple times that he had not been murdered by Kagan thus far and now considered him to be fair sport after the king’s slip-up. “Lived in the sky? Are you about to share some folksy wisdom with us?”

“We killed them.” Kagan rose to his feet, stalking over to Yelena and laying a hand upon her neck to calm her as the rumble of flames in the deep still rolled. “Bonded the dragons, came home with their power, slaughtered our gods. Burned them away to nothing.”

Yelena threw back her head and let loose the great gout of flame that had been boiling its way up through her. A beacon of blazing orange ten times the size of the little display that Orsina had put on at the table. From horizon to horizon, anyone might have looked in the direction of the city and seen it. A dragon laying claim to her territory.

When the flame guttered down to a silent hiss, Kagan met Artemio’s implacable stare once more. “The Arazi don’t fear gods, because we’ve faced them and found them wanting. Might do you some good to consider that.”

3 - The Spring of Discontent
Gemmazione, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Yelena stretched out her wings to their fullest extension, bone pinions curving back against the strain, leather creaking. The sun rose over her city, flooding her with warmth. Kagan was settled against her back, flooding her with calm. All was as it should be.

Surging forward, she launched herself off the palace.

There were angled tiled roofs all around her instead of the dead-drop of a cliff that would make taking flight all the easier, and she had to beat her wings furiously to navigate over their gentle curvature. From the sides of the vast, white palace, there grew towers and buttresses that had to be ducked and dodged. All the while she was falling, letting gravity carry her down, letting momentum build.

With any other rider, she would have felt the anxiety flowing as she continued to plummet, but Kagan was so deeply embedded in her consciousness after all of these years that their feelings were one. She was not afraid, so he was not afraid. She knew what she was doing, so he knew what she was doing. He might not have approved of such showy behavior, but he understood her well enough to know why she felt the need to perform.

He could not feel fear in her, but everywhere else around them it had gathered in a vast stagnant pool. The fear of what had happened, the fear of what was still to come, and, sharp and piercing through it all, fear at the sight of a dragon in their skies.

My skies. Yelena’s thoughts whispered into his head. An emotion so strong it took the form of solid communication.

It was a dragon’s nature to be territorial, to find a place and claim it as their own. To defend their territory, tooth and nail. To dominate any that would oppose their mastery of their own domain. For Yelena, who had her own territory crushed down so small that, for so many decades, she could touch all sides of it when she stretched, it was completely unsurprising that at the first opportunity she would lay claim to as vast a domain as she could. What Kagan had not anticipated was her willingness to bind herself to some human power in exchange for that territory. To make a treaty with the new king of Espher and lower herself to the level of one of his feudal servants. It was unnatural. A disruption of the natural order of dragons.

“Your skies, over lands owned by some human.”

A dragon did not speak, not when its actions could speak for it. A dragon did not trade, not when it could simply take what it desired. This arrangement that Yelena had made was something new and frightening. Something that felt alien to their way of life. She had always been progressive in a way that other dragons were not, willing to consider new ideas and break from the flight. It had endeared her to Kagan when the time had come for the selection of bondmates. It seemed that her imprisonment had not calmed that part of her. Quite the opposite.

It is not the first time I have bound my fate to a human’s. If it were, we would not be speaking.

She spread her wings completely once more to catch the rising thermals from the city square below. The city was a gift. The flat planes of terra-cotta soaking up the heat of the sun and throwing it back up. The ambient heat of the caldera below pushing heat all through the night. Rising up, making every moment in flight so much less of an effort.

Kagan’s thighs tightened around her. They would have a saddle and harness made soon enough, the craftsmen of the city had already been given their instruction, but for now it was the strength of their flesh that kept them together as they rose.

“I’m Arazi.”

We are not Arazi. Irritation rumbled through her, vibrating up his legs. The Arazi worship their god-slayer. The Arazi twist the bond we have to make aslinda their slaves. We are different. There is no word yet for what we are. And what others can become if they free their minds.

He peered down at the people of the city as they banked. All their heads snapped up to stare at the monster in their sky. Fear radiating up from each and every one of them. It prickled up Kagan’s back, and he knew that Yelena could feel it too. Exactly what he’d always known he would be confronted with if his nature was revealed to the people of Espher.

“You think other aslinda will want this?”

It is how the world should be. How the aslinda should have always been. Dragons spread across the world, ruling the skies, humans ruling the dirt. Both living in harmony.

Back in the old days, they had shared their thoughts on what the Arazi could be, what they should be. Loathing the way that Konus was warping the nature of the aslinda to suit his purposes. Forcing them all into close proximity when it went against their every instinct. The aslinda were meant to fly, to spread and find their own domain. Konus had made shackles of the bond. Made the aslinda into a mockery of man.

In their silent moments when they had nothing but their own thoughts to share, Kagan and Yelena had known that it was wrong, but they had been so immersed in the Arazi way that they lacked the perspective to form a coherent image of what the world could have been without it. It seemed that Yelena had devoted her time to philosophical thought while Kagan was more focused on survival.

With a steady beat of wings, Yelena brought them higher, out of the reach of the early-morning thermals and into the lowest of the drifting tufts of cloud. Her wings were warmed up now, each stroke of them thundering over the people far below.

What few horses the Espherans had managed to gather up for their new cavalry were set outside of the city walls in a vast corral. Each day that Yelena made her flight, they startled and tried to break free. Their keepers ran about, scowling and trying to calm the beasts, cursing the dragon above them. This was the world Yelena wanted to live in. “Not sure how harmonious life would be, getting dragged into every squabble.”

She had not even bothered to glance down, though he could feel a pang of hunger in her stomach from the rising scent of living meat, tinged with the terror that marked the hunt.

We are powerful. It is the place of the powerful to protect the weak. To drive out the shades. To make the world safe.

For a time, as they cruised through the clouds and headed to the east in silence, Kagan struggled to put the turmoil within him into words. She could feel all of it, even from a distance she could have felt it all, but she waited. She waited until he was ready to express what he was feeling.

“You sound like him.”

Once more the rumble of wrath passed along the length of the dragon. Fire did not truly boil up from deep within a dragon. They sprayed a flammable venom and ignited it with the grinding of their flinty teeth as their jaws parted. When that great rumbling sound came from deep in the guts of a dragon, it was the glands that produced that venom kicking into action, readying it for a fight. The Inferno seeks only to consume. To swallow all the world in pursuit of his imaginary foe. He cares nothing for the people he conquers. No more than I care for the cattle I devour.

She dropped into a dive, not to scare Kagan, who could never have less than absolute trust in her no matter their disagreement, but to bring the roaming animals of the farmlands into sight. So she could take her pick of the herd.

Once breath came back to Kagan after the drop, he pressed her. “So aslinda should rule the world instead?”

We are the light in the darkness. The flame that drives out the cold. Let the dirt people fight among themselves if they must. We are above it. We are not their stewards; we are the protectors of the world.

The fields stretched out as far as the eye could see. The green pastures framed by hedgerows, the bare fields only now showing sprouts of spring growth, and the shining patches where rice was grown. This was not a wild place, where the dead took vengeance upon the living. It was not a place of chaos like the steppes, like the Arazi lands or the lesser kingdoms, where at any moment a shade might tear through and destroy everything and everyone.

Here the dead were tamed, as surely as the grass and the trees. Human hands had shaped them into perfect order. Placed them all into the same square grid as the crops. Trimmed back those that grew too unruly and fostered the growth of those that withered with age.

Kagan did not know why he kept speaking out loud. He knew that Yelena could hear his thoughts clearly, but the habit of centuries was on him now. “You’ve picked the only place in the world that doesn’t need us.”

She swept down towards a field of fat sheep. Anticipation tingling along the length of her body, scales pressing flat to smooth their drop, even as her wings tucked in smoothly against her sides.

We have other ties here. Don’t we.

When Yelena’s claws took the sheep, the impact of her body’s momentum traveled through it, snapping its neck before she’d even tightened her grip, then her wings unfurled once more, the air catching in them suddenly, jerking them back in their sockets and making Kagan’s own shoulders ache in sympathy. He wondered if Orsina felt it too.

“The girl…”

The beating of Yelena’s aching wings drowned out his voice as she hauled herself up against the pull of the earth below. They cleared the fence at the field’s edge, wings beating faster and harder, hauling them up and away from the pasture they’d plundered, skimming past the bright young leaves of a tree planted at a corner to mark where three of the boxes met.

There was no rumble from Yelena now. She was not angry but hurt. You raised her. Bonded her. It should have been a choice that we both made. I would not breed without your assent.

Kagan groaned. “I didn’t… She just happened.”

Yelena’s thoughts grew more pointed. Sharp enough that they stung. She has happened to me, also.

“I didn’t… I had no idea that…” He took a breath and let his thoughts settle once more. “I didn’t even think I could bond her, let alone that it would extend to you.”

Yet you did it. And now all three of us are bound. From now until the end.

Kagan closed his eyes and spoke truly. “I’m sorry. It was that or death for us all.”

You have tied my soul to a stranger. A dragon-slayer.

He tightened his grip on her once more, the horned edges of her spinal plates digging into the inside of his thighs. Not because he feared he would be dislodged, but because he did not know the answer to his next question. “Would you have chosen death over our bond?”

Yelena’s heart hammered in turn with his. He could not believe how badly he had missed the beating of her wings, the tiny whips of air that played off their edges and struck him, the ache of exercise in muscles that he himself did not possess. This was the one place in all of creation where he felt whole. The thought that he might have compromised that by bonding with Orsina made him feel sick to his stomach.

I could not be more pleased.

His guts felt like they’d dropped out of him. As though they’d taken another dive instead of the slow ascent they were undertaking. “What?”

I know you, Kagan, better than you know your own heart. You love this girl like a father loves a daughter. If you had not saved her when you had the chance, your soul would have been scarred for all time.

For the first time since they’d taken flight, he was surprised to find a smile had crept upon his face. “We saved each other.”

That power she wields… The weight of Yelena’s excitement struck him like they’d hit the ground. So solid and palpable it stunned him that he’d missed out on it before. It is enough to defeat him. Enough to bring all the walls of every kingdom crashing down. And you made her ours.

“I don’t know about ours.” Kagan chuckled. “Tell that girl to go left, she’ll go right to spite you.”

He leaned to the left to take a better look at the city as they slowly turned back towards it, only for Yelena to bank the other way. If a dragon could snicker, then that would have been the noise that she made. She is more dragon than human. You need only treat her so to get what you desire.

Jabbing her with his heel in some small scales, he managed to get Yelena to bank back the other way, at least for a moment. Covotana did not look much like a city in preparation for war. There were the horses outside, but the actual armies would not gather until the last moment so as much labor might be eked out of each peasant in the fields as possible before it came time for them to risk their lives once more. In truth, the only way that it differed from when he first laid eyes upon it was that it was a little uglier now, thanks to the extensive repairs from all the times that it had come under attack. The pristine, white city shining in the center of open fields had its dark patches now, where soot was ingrained in stone too high for the servants to clean, or where sections had been replaced with whatever dark rock could be had for ready money. With time, Kagan was sure it would return to its old form and function, but for now, Covotana looked like a beast laid out to lick its wounds. “She’s just a little girl. Not whatever monster these people think she is. Not the devil the Arazi say she is either.”

With a lurch, they were headed straight up, then the serpentine neck curved back farther still and Yelena was looking down into his eyes for the briefest of moments before the rest of her followed into the flip. At the moment that they were both entirely upside down, she let loose her woolly quarry, letting the sheep carcass fly up into the air, and righting herself before it reached the peak of its arc and came tumbling down in front of her face.

With a huff of effort, her venom came. Dousing the dead sheep. Thick, sticky, and clinging to wool and skin alike as it fell by.

Then they were dipping into a dive, chasing dinner down to the ground, teeth grinding and sparks gathering around Yelena’s lips. You cannot lie to me, Kagan. No more than she can. We are of one heart. Whatever you might want her to be, she is what she is.

Her fire was unleashed, catching the coated sheep and setting it ablaze. Still it fell burning from the sky like a falling star to hit the packed dirt of the road below. Their own descent was slower, a gradual spiral down through the greasy smoke and delicious aroma of burning fat.

Kagan had the good sense to dismount before Yelena got into her food. He’d been splattered with enough gore in his lifetime to know better than to sit directly behind a dragon’s head while it fed.

Giving her a good bit of distance to protect himself from the abrupt launch of an arterial spray, he circled Yelena. “She’s been through some hard times. She’s been hurt. She can heal. We all heal in time.”

It seemed that his bondmate was in something of a hurry today. A single bite had cracked open the blackened skull of the sheep, and Yelena’s tongue darted out to taste the sweet prize inside, but once that was halfway to done, she turned her attention back to the body as a whole. Head weaving from side to side as she dislodged her jaw to swallow it in a single bite.

There’s no healing from power. Not once you’ve tasted it. You know that as well as I.

Kagan set his feet apart under his shoulders and straightened up to face Yelena. There were few things that he would ever oppose her will about. But Orsina was one. “I’m going to help her get back to herself.”

I’m waiting with bated breath for what she will become next. Yelena’s head flicked back, and the sheep vanished to become a slight swell on her neck, moving slowly down as the muscles of her neck worked.

Kagan’s frown deepened. “What is that supposed to mean?”

With her hunger sated, Yelena now turned her sooty muzzle towards him. Why are you pretending that you do not know already? That you do not know what we will become now that we are together. You can feel it as clearly as I. The hole in our hearts.

“She’s bonded to us, that doesn’t mean…”

The pressure of Yelena’s thoughts knocked him off balance. The weight of her sincerity, the depth of her conviction, it pushed him back a full step before he could regain control of himself. We were a pair, now we are a three. We are incomplete without her.

There were things that he had not been willing to admit even to himself about what he had accomplished when he became Orsina’s impresario. The one to initiate their connection may have been her, and the circumstance in which they had undertaken it had been one of duress, but that did not matter to the bond. The truth of the matter was that if it had been anyone else in the world, he would have rejected the offer outright, and even with the connection he had already felt with the girl, it likely would have failed if he had been any other Arazi. He was a dragon-rider without his dragon. He had a soul crying for the touch of another that it had long been denied. His own desperation for any sort of connection had left him open to her, vulnerable, so that when she offered to bind their spirits together, he had been unable to resist the offer. So long as he had kept his focus on other things, he had not needed to grant this event its significance. He had been able to push it to the back of his mind during the war with his own people, with his long pilgrimage back home. His focus had once more been locked squarely upon survival, but now that they were all safe, there was no more excuse to turn his gaze from the thing he had wrought—other than his own fear of it. Still, he tried.

“She’s just a girl.”

You feel her absence as keenly as I do. Why are you lying to yourself?

He held up a hand to Yelena, and without further prompting, she nuzzled against it. Her scales still blazed hot around her mouth, like the hearthstone of a fire freshly stifled. The blood upon it had already dried to stickiness. She could feel the turmoil within him. The deliberate ignorance that he had cultivated. She was forcing him to confront it so that he might heal, but that didn’t mean it did not hurt to poke at the wound. “Because I don’t want this. I didn’t want to bond with her. Didn’t want to go save her. I didn’t want any of this. I just wanted to live a quiet life.”

On another dragon, the shudder of scales would have been a rebuke, a sign of disgust, but he knew Yelena too well to misinterpret her motions, and she knew him too well to offer up a comforting lie. Even though she was wincing in sympathy with his pain. You are mine. She is yours. I am hers. We are dragon and human and more. There can be no peace for us. It is not in our nature. We fight, we strive, we rule. We do not hide. We do not cower.

“Do you know how many years I was alone? Living off the land, doing no harm and passing unseen?” Kagan knew she did, knew she was reading through his surface emotions as the memories replayed themselves in his mind. He knew that she knew everything that he did, but he still felt the need to say the words. To make his hesitation clear.

I felt your suffering every day I was imprisoned. It rang in harmony with my own. It was how I knew that someday we would be reunited. For no soul could suffer such misery every day without seeking solace.

“I wasn’t miserable. I had everything I needed.” The words tasted like ashes in his mouth.

Except purpose. Lie to yourself if you must, but do not lie to me, Kagan. I know what you felt. I could feel every hollow victory being soured by my absence.

“I missed you, but I did not miss this.” He managed a grim smile. “The fighting, the arguing, the grandiose plans.”

Imagine a world where none had to fear the shades. Where none had to kowtow to the Inferno for protection. Imagine the world that you and I could make, with her.

She lowered a wing to him, to make his climb back up onto her back more easy, at the expense of pressure on the sensitive membranes of her wings. She truly must have been feeling bad for him if she was offering that. “It’s a pretty dream, but that’s all it is.”

Back on her back, with all the life flowing from her body into him and around once more in what should have felt like a complete circuit, he should have felt at peace again. But the niggling absence of Orsina from their presence left this old perfection feeling like they were playacting. With her life, so flowed Yelena’s thoughts. With her power, it could be real. Our visions of the future can be fulfilled. Everything that we have ever wanted is right there for the taking.

“Everything you ever wanted.” He lay down flat upon her back as she began to beat her wings. For stability, but for the closeness with her too. To hear the beating of the twin to his heart.

Do you still regret? Yelena’s sorrow washed through him. But it was not what he had expected. It was not misery at all they had suffered or guilt at the course she had led them on. It was pity for him. For his lack of perspective. Without a second mind for his thoughts to echo back from, it was as though he had not been hearing them at all. After all this time, haven’t you realized that we were in the right? That they would not have had to send you away and bury me beneath a mountain if they had not feared our words?

“I don’t care anymore. Right, wrong, they’re just excuses we make to do what we want to do.” Kagan forced himself back up to sitting as they drifted higher and higher by the strength of her wings alone. “You want to rule. So you say a world where you rule is the right one. Me, I just want to live. I want her to live.”

There was no way around her. No way to speak to her that she had not already foreseen and set aside. She had the key to his heart and his mind and no shame in rummaging through the both of them to find exactly the words she needed him to hear so that he would follow the course she’d laid out for them. Same as it ever was. Then you’ll aid me in making her strong enough to survive.

“You saw what she did.” The memory of Orsina’s power sent a shiver running through Kagan. He may have been a dragon-slayer now, but it had been a choice of monumental consequence to him. A taboo that he had almost died for rather than break. And when Orsina had stood and called on her shades, it had made a mockery of that indecision. She had not been indecisive; she had not batted an eye as she cut dragons down from the sky as casually as a lesser woman might have swatted away flies. “You think she needs anything from us?”

She needs our life to feed her power.

They were high enough now for forward motion to resume. They began to drift all too slowly back towards the city and the tangle of mixed emotions tickling at the periphery of Kagan’s senses. It was only here, in flight, far from the ears of spies and Orsina herself, that Kagan dared to speak the truth of their situation. “She’s got it. There’s no locking her out now. What she wants, she can take.”

Yelena stopped the beating of her wings just long enough for gravity to turn Kagan’s stomach again. Another expression of irritation. Yelena wouldn’t want to produce more venom now, not when it would sit in her neck-sacs like a sloshing weight. How can an empath be so oblivious to the feelings of others? She is taking from us, this creates obligation, guilt. Even though it costs us nothing, she will feel this. It is a potent lever to control her.

“What if I don’t want to control her?” Kagan chose his next words with care because the both of them knew it was the crux of his whole argument about their situation. “What if I want to set her free?”

Then you’re blind or a fool. Perhaps both. Either we find a use for her, or others will. Wouldn’t you rather see her spend her life building a utopia than advancing the position of a petty king in some border kingdom?

His own anger flared at the thought of Orsina trapped in either version of the future Yelena had just outlined. If he had the choice, he’d take her far away from all of this. “She’s not some wyvern to latch your wagon on the back of. She’s a person with her own hopes and dreams, same as you and me.”

And being a person, that set us free from our obligations, didn’t it. Being a person meant that we were never punished for straying from the path others demanded of us. After all that I have suffered, don’t preach to me about the freedom people are due.

Yelena was strangely still beneath him as the memories of her imprisonment washed through them both. The endless darkness. The endless silence. The nothingness. The weight of a mountain between them and the sky. Everything that aslinda feared most, she had endured, and she had come out the other side unbroken. She had not been changed by her pain, she had been forged into something truer to what she was always meant to be.

The only freedom anyone will ever have is strength. Enough strength to throw off the yoke of whoever is trying to control them. We are the ones who are making her strong. We need to reap the benefits of that while we can.

Strength would set them free. That was always the way the Arazi thought. Kagan could not be sure whether that idea had come to them from the dragons or the humans, but either way, it had driven them to some of their worst excesses. If others were meant to determine their own fate, then they should have made themselves strong. As though some itinerant goatherd was born as capable as a dragon of inflicting wanton destruction. For Konus and his cult, it had become a rallying call. Proof that their actions were according to some greater plan, some divine mandate for their endless cycle of expansion and conquest. If they were not meant to rule over all, then why did nobody stop them?

Kagan’s words came soft, but there was no fear of Yelena missing a single word. “I will not let you use her.”

Yelena fell back into her usual rhythm as they passed over the city walls, angling out to take a long spiral around the city before they went back to the palace to roost. He hadn’t realized it before, but Yelena was doing it on purpose. Letting herself be seen by all and sundry. Reminding them of her presence in the city. She did not need to go out and feast every day any more than he would have needed to stomp his way through the city streets to whichever inn was the fullest. She was choosing to be seen. To evoke their fear. To remind them that they lived only because she allowed it.

We are three in one, Kagan. She cannot reject me any more than your arm can reject your leg. My thoughts are her thoughts. Just as yours are mine and mine yours. You know I cannot bring her to harm.

Yelena had always been good at this, thinking in circles around him, placating when he set his feet to hold his ground, undermining him with compassion. Using the trust they shared like a bludgeon to get her way. He’d missed this so much. His heart ached, and even as he recognized what she was doing, he knew he could not resist. But for Orsina, he would still try.

“Ambition can be a poison.”

They swept low over the rooftops where solid terra-cotta tiles that defined so much of the city gave away to a patchwork of thatch-work. It was where the poor lived, crammed atop one another with abandon, dozens sharing a bed, stretching one man’s food to feed a family. There was no fear radiating up from these houses, only the same desperation that marked every moment of their lives. It was almost a relief by comparison. It felt more honest, like the minds of animals at hunt. All of their focus drawn in to a single point instead of the chaos that the rest of the city reverberated with.

Yelena paused in flight above the worst part of the city, wings beating as she looked down at the poor and downtrodden. The ones the Arazi would have said were suffering for their own weakness. Poison is a medicine in the wrong dosage.

The city was a warren, hard to decipher from above and impossible for Kagan to understand on the ground. There seemed to be no reason to the way it was laid out until he had realized that it was not a single city but dozens upon dozens, built and rebuilt centuries apart. Layered and blended. A tapestry of the many lives that had been lived here. A tapestry stitched without any thought about what had come before or what would come next.

“Your plans for great change have hurt us before.” It was a low blow, to put the blame on her for what had befallen them when he had gone right along with her rebellion happily until it was crushed.

Her wings blurred at either side of him. There were thermals here that she could have been riding to regain the height they needed to reach their eyrie atop the palace, but she was choosing not to. She was choosing to vent her frustrations through the violent thumping of her wings. Another growl rumbled up through his legs that had nothing to do with venom and everything to do with aggravation. Your willingness to pass through the world without leaving a mark has hurt us so much more. You have lived as a peasant when you were born to be king. You have banked your flame so low that it cannot be seen.

They hung in the sky above the palace, and everywhere that his senses turned, Kagan could feel the eyes upon him. He felt the flares of emotion rising up as the dragon was seen, as its meaning was recognized. Terror. Awe. Hatred. Anger. All the things that a dragon should inspire. “No danger of going unseen now.”

You are back where you belong. Yelena’s wingbeats slowed, and they sank back down onto the ruins of the Rose Garden atop the palace. She touched down so softly that Kagan did not even feel it. We are where we belong.

“Now all that you need to do is convince the girl that she is meant to be here with us.”

She spread her wings wide open and let the world see her one last time before she settled. Spraying out a swift arc of venom into the air and sparking it alight. The emotions of the city were deafening. But even over the top of it, he could hear her surety and sincerity. Who could resist this?

4 - The Price of Peace
Gemmazione, Regola Dei Volpe 1

The clash of steel on steel stirred Harmony from her slumber. Once more, she had come to bed alone, with Orsina’s attentions turned to her endless studies. Her dreams had been troubled since the battle of Selvaggia, made only more violent since she had fought through the Arazi to rescue Orsina. She attributed those sounds to a dream at first. To the nightmarish blur of the wars she waged night on night with unceasing and unstoppable foes.

So when her eyes opened to the darkness of her chamber and she heard the scraping of metal a second time, it was as though those nightmares were following her back to the waking world. She scrabbled a hand in the sheets, looking for the sword that had lain beside her every night as they crossed the steppes, but it was not there. She was home, in the center of the most fortified palace in the north. A place where swords need not stay close to hand, where there were soldiers and guards and walls and a dragon all standing guard over her each night to ensure that she never had to go from fully asleep to fully awake in an instant and spring from her bed.

Habits were hard to break, and the kind that kept you alive were harder still. For all that a blade did not lie by her hand as she rested, her sword belt still hung on a hook by the bed, and it was swung about her nightgown and fastened before she reached the door.

A glance at the library as she passed assured Harmony that Orsina was safe and well behind the thick oak and the rime of frost coating it. For the first time since stirring, her steps lost their assurance as she tried to decide whether it was better to leave her in place, where she would be safe, or call upon her aid. A brief moment sparked up from her memory unbidden. Orsina on dragon-back, arms upraised, and the Arazi falling from the sky all around them. The blissful smile on her face.

Better not to bring her along. They didn’t need the whole palace torn down around them.

From her own suite of rooms, it was simple enough to follow the noise to its source. She didn’t even need to tread lightly, given the cacophony that was going on. Along a few corridors, down a flight of stairs, and she rounded a corner directly into the mass of the fighting. She drew her sword to support the palace guard only to realize a step later that they were clashing not with some Agrantine assassin or Arazi invader, but with other guardsmen, wearing barely different colors. She could not parse what was happening until she spotted the huddled group at the center of their mass. Clothed still in a night-robe, the same as her, dragged from their beds by unexpected violence, the same as her. A man, woman, and two children, huddled together, trusting in the strength of their men at arms to protect them.

It was quite apparent that they weren’t going to be sufficient. They lacked the numbers to hold off the palace guard, and they lacked any route of egress even if they were successful in defeating this group. Harmony shouted over the clatter.

“What is the meaning of this?”

If she had hoped that the voice of a princess would carry more weight, she was soon disappointed. One of the palace guards outside the press turned to face her, bared weapon already up and swinging before he realized who he was attacking. At which point there was an abrupt halt to his motion, presumably as his life flashed before his eyes.

“You should not be here, Princess. Know that this is by your brother’s order, and do not worry yourself with it.”

She could not keep the obvious contempt from her face. “My brother ordered you to pull children from their beds and attack them?”

The unfortunate guard squared his shoulders. As though puffing himself up would make her back down. “The king ordered that these traitors be arrested.”

A shrill cry cut through the melee. The woman had a baby at her hip, perhaps old enough to stand and walk on its own, but so dazed by the turn of events that it was being carried. “Exactly what treachery did that swaddled babe commit?”

Beneath his helm, the guard’s lips formed a thin line. “I have my orders, straight from the king.”

One of the traitors’ guardsmen fell with a scream of his own. A halberd from the second rank knocked aside the brawlers as they pressed shield to shield and hammered down into his shoulder. The mother and baby were sprayed with his blood as he flopped on the flagstones.

“Enough of this! Everyone hold.” She shouldered past the guard, and he made no attempt to restrain her. Probably judging that he was less liable to be held responsible for her wading into a maelstrom of hacking swords than for laying hands on her personally. “Put up your arms. All of you!”

The palace guards were relatively obedient, to her pleasant surprise. They probably hoped that she was there to relieve them of this dishonorable duty. Close enough to the nobles now, she recognized them. Lord and Lady Rana. Minor nobility held in sway to their neighbors, the Cavallas. The mother found courage now that Harmony was there to call out.

“What is happening? We were stirred from our rest by an assault on our chambers!”

Harmony still had no idea what was happening or from where these bizarre accusations of treachery within their own palace might have sprung forth, but she felt certain that either Art knew or he would know the very person to lambast for overreaching like this.

Pressing through the massed guards, she put herself between the front line of men at arms and palace guards. The Rana men had been on the worse side of the conflict, several were bleeding, others had their shields in splinters, dangling from broken arms. They’d fought valiantly to defend the family that employed them. They did not deserve to be harmed over some politicking nonsense.

She spoke loudly and clearly, so that those behind her were as certain of her words as those in front. “These men mean you no harm, please put down your arms and allow them to take you into their custody without further bloodshed. I will go to my brother immediately and set this right.”

Lord Rana may have been disheveled and dragged from bed in the middle of the night, but he was the very picture of wounded nobility when he pushed his children behind him and cried out, “You expect us to believe that?”

“I can make you no promise, except that I will go directly to my brother on your behalf. I can see no reason for this chaos, and I know his heart.”

“Perhaps not so well as you think, miss.” The guard at her heel was holding a writ, a red wax seal still looking warm on it, a Volpe signet ring having been pressed into it. She snatched the paper from his hands and scanned through. Everything was as it should be. There was no room for misinterpretation or suggestion of forgery.

For a long moment she just stood there, staring at the writ. Trying to parse any reason for it. Some secret that Artemio was holding close to his chest that might explain why he would issue such a command, but she could not. He had been distant since his ascension, surrounded at all times by servants and sycophants. She was not in his confidence as she once had been, and that hurt her heart, though not as much as the lurking worry that he might have changed so much without her even managing to notice.

She forced her expression to remain calm. “Guards, return to your stations. Lord Rana, please escort your family back to their suite and remain there so that the guards stationed outside your doors have no cause to quarrel with you again.”

The guard who took the proffered writ back from her did not shame her by speaking loudly, but when they stood close, he still told her plainly, “You can’t overrule the word of the king.”

“The king is not here, and I am. Do you suppose that he would thank you for killing me?”

The guard took a full step back. “Killing you?”

“That’s what it would take, to make me stand down and let you abduct the nobility of Espher in the night. You must know that I have no issue with killing you, sir. That at this point in the evening’s festivities, it would in fact be a welcome relief.” Her hand was resting on the hilt of her sword now, and every one of the gathered guards had turned their attention to it. All but the one still clinging, aghast, to his writ. She couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for the man, thrust into the middle of a situation like this. “You… you are not disobeying your king’s orders. You are merely delaying acting upon them until they can be properly clarified. There is no other escape from the Rana chambers, I suppose?”

“We’ve guards on the servant’s passages.”

She spoke softer then. “Then there is no harm that can be done here. Is there?”

There was a flush of shame to his expression as he stepped back a little farther to make way for her. “An hour. I can give you that, Princess.”

She nodded in thanks as she passed him by. “More than enough time to get this all straightened out.”

To gain entry to the bedchamber of a king would have been no simple task for anyone else in the palace. The Cerva had been intense about their privacy, and it seemed that Art had made no change to the protections they’d layered in place. Their suite was a fortress within the palace, which was a fortress within the city, which was in turn a fortress of sorts. Palace guards stood watch over the doors to the suite. There were Shadebound lounging in the outermost chamber, and before the doors to his bedroom itself, there were a pair of familiar-looking lords who it took Harmony a moment in the dim light to recognize as sons of Duchess Granchio.

While the others had been simple enough to cow into submission, the Granchio sons proved to have been made of sterner stuff. They outright refused her entry. “They king’s rest is not to be disturbed.”

“If the king did not want his rest disturbed then he should have not issued commands that make no sense to be enacted during his rest. If you won’t let me in, then get him out here. Now.”

With precisely the same clipped tone, the other one replied. “The king’s rest is not to be…”

The smile on Harmony’s face was not forced, but it was in no small way manic. “That’s fine. I understand, you have your orders. I’m just going to stoke up the fire while I sit out here and wait for him to wake naturally.”

The brothers looked to each other, but neither seemed to have any objection. The chamber certainly wasn’t cold, but then they weren’t in their nightgown. She stalked over to the low table by the fire, picked up the oldest leatherbound tome that was in reach, and tossed it into the flames.

At once the uproar she’d been expecting appeared. Both brothers yelling and dashing forward, though only one had the courage to thrust his hand into the flames and grab for the book. He cried out in pain as the flames licked up his arm, but nonetheless he managed to retrieve it before too much damage was done. The edges of the pages would be forever ashen and the title would likely be beyond understanding until it was rebound, but her goal had been accomplished as she set a finger to her lips and shushed them.

“The king’s rest is not to be disturbed.”

It seemed that no matter how plush the furnishings, some sound did make its way through into Artemio’s quarters. He emerged, looking half dead as he always did when roused, to discover the two noblemen he had placed at his door to guard him in the night playing a game of chase-me with his sister, who stopped dead and grinned the moment he came into sight.

“So nice of you to join us, your Majesty.”

Still half asleep, he nodded to her politely. “Harmony.”

She gave a bobbing curtsy that would have made her mother proud in turn. “Artemio.”

The night-guards looked entirely lost, so Artemio did them the courtesy of dismissing them with a wave. Then he made his way to the chaise lounge by the fire and slumped down, ignoring the sooty stains and smoldering tome on the hearth. “I suppose that you have some good reason for visiting me at…” He glanced at the candles on his fireplace. “Three in the morning.”

“Well you know me, Art, I just can’t sleep when there are guards pulling people from their beds in the dead of night. Something about the screaming and fighting. And when I can’t sleep, well, I tend to wander and make it everyone’s problem.”

He pinched his nose for a moment, as if trying to stop the spread of a headache, then finally he asked, “The Rana are quartered near to you?”

“Are there so many innocent people being dragged from their beds that you can’t keep track of them all?” She was surprised to find herself looming over him, having crossed the room in her fury before the words had worked their way out of her.

“Innocent.” He met her glower with a steady stare. It was like looking down into a deep pool with no bottom. Only yourself reflected back. “That’s a very weighted word. Lord Rana’s estates flourish despite him being little more than a vassal to the Cavallas. Not in terms of agriculture, but in terms of wealth. I should like to know who is providing him with a pension, that he might live in the lap of such luxury.”

She almost laid hands on him then, reaching for the collar of his bed-robe before catching herself and forcing her hands down to her sides. “For the love of… Art, you can’t arrest people just for having money.”

“I’m told that I’m the king now, and I might arrest people for whatever reason I fancy, but consider how the Rana have always voted in favor of Agrantine interests before you leap to branding them innocent.”

She forced herself to sit, to settle on the edge of the table heaped with books, knocking some to the ground but paying them no mind. “Art, you’ve said it yourself that half the court have had their pockets lined by the Agrantine at one point or another.”

He sighed at the toppled tomes but made no move to right them. “True enough, and this shall provide an ample message to every one of them.”

“Oh, so we’re making an example of them.” Harmony’s voice hardened. “Treating people like pieces in a game?”

“Some of the greater families who have taken from Agrant I cannot afford to lose. All are traitors to the crown, in one way or another, but I have inherited a box of broken tools that I must use to fashion together a future that will last.” He had begun to come back alive as they spoke, but now he sounded more exhausted than ever. “If the cost of keeping all the other traitors in line is the head of one of their co-conspirators, then I see it as a bargain at the price.”

But for Harmony, this was not some abstract idea. It was tears streaming down the cheeks of children, parents clinging to each other in fear in the dark of night. Guards bleeding and dying to protect their family. “And what about his wife, his children?”

“She’s complicit. They shall be fostered by a more trustworthy family.”

That stopped Harmony in her tracks once more. “Complicit?”

“Either of the two might have been broker of their deal. I cannot take the head of one and not the other, so both.”

Harmony found herself curling up, resting her forehead on her hands, her elbows on her knees. She did not know that she could stand to look at Artemio in that moment. She didn’t know if she’d be able to hold back the comparisons to their father. “Is this the kind of king you’re going to be? Spilling blood whenever it best suits your purposes?”

“I am a student of history, Harmony. That is all that I have ever been. Look to the kings of old and ask yourself if they lost sleep over the massacre done in their name.” There were few things in life that could make Artemio Volpe sound like a lovestruck poet, but the subject of his great kingdom that he loved ever so much came the closest. “Ask Espher if she regrets the blood her soil has drunk to keep her safe.”

She couldn’t appeal to his morals, because he was willing to set them aside when it came to his precious Espher, but he was still a man, and that meant that he still had an ego. “Is this how you want to be remembered?”

“All I want is for there to still be something people can remember.” He slumped back on the seat, resisting the urge to slump down and nap but not by much. “When the wars are done, we can turn our attention to a beautiful legacy, but for now survival must come first. At any cost.”

She reached out and caught his hands in hers. “But… not like this, Art. Surely there’s a better way. Snatching children from their beds in the dead of night…”

He let her hold on to his hands, he did not draw away, but neither did he give any sign in his face or bearing that he was understanding anything she was telling him. “Every night that a traitor lays down their head and tries to settle to sleep, they shall not dream of my defeat, because they will be too troubled by the thought that at any moment a knock may come on their chamber door. Did you think that I chose this course lightly? Espher is in disarray, and I must bring the entirety of court to heel if I mean to save her.”

She released his hands and caught his face, stubble rubbing over her fingertips as she tilted his gaze up to meet her own. “Even if people call you a tyrant?”

A twitch of his lip was all that he showed. The beginnings of a sneer. “When have I ever cared for the opinion of my lessers?”

The next words came softly. So soft she couldn’t even call them a whisper. If he had not been him, she doubted they would have even been heard.

“Even if I call you a tyrant?”

“Harmony… you are my sister. You shall always hold a special place in my esteem, but you have a soft heart, and I cannot afford to show weakness right now. Not even to those in my own camp. I cannot have you arguing with me in public. Here, in private, by all means, voice your concerns, but out there we must present a united front.”

Her hands fell back to her lap. She couldn’t keep herself from biting back at that. “So I should just sit down and shut up, like Father always said?”

“You should trust in my judgement.” It was him reaching out to her now, her resisting the urge to pull away from him. “Have I ever steered us wrong?”

“You steered yourself onto the throne, without ever getting your hands dirty or your reputation sullied by the suggestion you might actually want it. Poor Art, just doing the duty that’s been handed to him.”

He released his grip on her clasped hands, staring down at his own as though he could not bear to meet her eyes. “I can assure you, my hands are… not clean.”

“Oh, I know that.” She leaned away from him now. “So how long is it going to be until I get a knock on my chamber doors in the middle of the night to make sure I never tell it to anyone?”

“Harmony…”

She scoffed at his halfhearted attempt to distract her from the truth before the words even came. “Oh, you’d never do me any harm, right? Unless it was convenient. Unless it was for Espher.”

He continued looking down at his feet. “Everything that is great about this land is embodied in you, so how could preserving her and you ever be at odds with each other?”

“When I disagree about having people executed for no reason other than to make a point.”

He sat up straight as a bolt. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. I shall have every other traitor hauled out of their beds to be executed too. Everyone that has ever taken Agrantine coin. Everyone that has ever been against me. Then I shall sit here in an empty kingdom, listening to the wind whistling through and waiting for the Agrantine armies to come marching in.”

It was difficult to remain angry with him when this played out so like so many of their childhood arguments. “Don’t be facetious. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Dear sister, you’ve just dragged me from bed at three in the morning.” He chuckled drily. “The fact that I’m even speaking in words that can be understood is a small miracle.”

It was the chuckle that did the trick. If he’d gone on being stuffy and royal and distant, then she’d probably have ended up smacking the smug expression of his face, but he was still Art. No matter what crowns were put on his head, or what roles were forced on him. He was still her brother.

“All right. I’m not going to fight you on this. I’m not going to interfere. But I do need for you to keep me informed. You have me running errands for you all day, I barely have a chance to see you. I need to know when things like this are going to happen, or of course I will react out of surprise to them.”

He opened and closed his mouth before conceding the point entirely. “That seems exceptionally reasonable. I shall have my staff schedule suppers for us to share, unless some other event precludes it.”

She gave a gracious nod in return. Just the right side of playful. “Thank you.”

There was a smirk playing over his lips. “Any other demands?”

“I need you to take the Arazi threat seriously.”

That seemed to take the smile right out of him again. “Harm, there is only so much I can do in any given day. Preparing for war against one unbeatable enemy is much like preparing for war against another, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t know, would you say that fighting an army of dragons was the same as fighting an army of men?” she sniped back.

“We have watchtowers raised to give us warning should anything bigger than a crow fly south of the steppes.”

There was a momentary lull, then Harmony got to the point. “Why aren’t you worried about fighting them?”

“Because of your little sweetheart, dear sister.” Harmony blushed, but she didn’t contradict him. “And I do dearly hope that you are keeping her sweet. She demolished the Arazi in our last conflict, and she has only grown in strength since then.”

She couldn’t believe the nonsense she was hearing. “You think Orsina can defeat the entire Arazi army?”

He shrugged a shoulder, trying to right his night-robe as it slunk off. “I think she can even the playing field sufficiently that they present markedly less of a threat than the endless legions of the south, certainly.”

If he wasn’t willing to see reason, she did not know how she could force him to. “They have dragons, Art.”

“And what is a dragon but a particularly clever lizard?”

She snorted. Then covered up her mouth, mortified as usual. “I’d love to see you describe Yelena that way to her face.”

“Just as soon as I can find where the Cerva hid their fireproof robes.”

They both chuckled, but then the silence came back. It was not the comfortable silence of their past long nights with only the other for company. It was different now, with sharp edges. Artemio was the first to break it.

“I am sorry, that I haven’t been giving you the attention you require. I’ve been… The actual running of the kingdom is a massive undertaking in itself, before you account for the wars and the backstabbing nobility and… I have taken your confidence for granted, and it was disrespectful. I apologize.”

Harmony feigned a gasp of amazement. “Now that I’ve heard the king apologize, I will most certainly be murdered in the dead of night.”

“Just keep it to yourself, and the executioner can have the morning off.” He chuckled.

Then the sobering truth crept back into the room. The executioner would not have the morning off. Two heads would be taken, and Harmony, who had rushed off to champion the people who were facing death, had instead become complicit in it herself. As surely as if she’d signed the writ in her own hand. What Art did reflected on her just as surely as what she did reflected on him. He might have allowed her the outlet of actually confronting him about his bad decisions now, but all that did was share the burden of blame across both their shoulders when she couldn’t convince him to reverse course. Given that she couldn’t recall ever having won an argument with him, this was liable to be increasingly uncomfortable for her.

“Good night, Harmony. I’m going to see if I might snatch another hour or two in bed before the servants try to squeeze me into whichever hideous monstrosity the Cerva considered to be fashionable.”

She tried to hide her relief that they were parting ways with a chuckle. “Good night, Art.”

5 - Neither Threat nor Promise
Gemmazione, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Orsina’s head ached. It always seemed to ache now. Her wounds might have closed, and her nightmares might have been quelched, but behind her eyes it was always there, like an ember. She had called it the shade at first. The amalgam. The place when the spirits of the dead, warped and contorted together into one vast bestial thing, ate at her mind. Trying at every moment to break free of their bonds and consume her. But there were no bonds, and there was nothing to consume. She had set the shade loose in her when the time came that she needed the power, and it had not retreated since. The two of them were one. Occupying the same space. Thinking the same thoughts.

Sometimes she would hear a thought in her head that sounded more like Mother Vinegar’s or the dragon’s or her own, and it would seem alien to her for but a moment before she recognized that they were all one and the same now. She couldn’t even be afraid, because so much of her was no longer the creature that had known fear. Orsina told herself that she was the one in control, but it was no longer clear who the “she” in question was.

With the ache and the blending, there came long periods where she was a little hazy on what was going on around her, as though someone else had taken the reins for a time and handed them back only when it was appropriate. It was not like being ridden by a shade, for which she had studied and prepared, and more like the partitioning in her mind that she had employed to keep the shades separate from her still existed, even though the vast majority of what she considered to be herself had spilled over into it.

As such, it came as no great surprise that when the headache drew her back to the moment, she was standing to the left hand of the king, with court fully in session.

There were nobles lining the Teatro, every seat filled now that the armies had returned home and every stray or itinerant had come running to kiss Artemio’s feet. Old men, young men, some women among them, even down here on the lower floors instead of up in the balconies overhanging the benches.

Yet not one of them had held Artemio’s attention the way that this new visitor to the court did. He was an older man, made older still by his shorn head, and he was dressed in unflattering black, almost a defiance of the finery of court. Orsina would have taken him for a peasant like her were it not for the heavy chain around his neck, set with the great golden eye sigil of Agrant above his heart.

All of the usual pomp and ceremony seemed to have been set aside for this man, still smelling like horse and slick with the sweat of the road. A messenger of some sort. Certainly not anything like the ambassador that Agrant had sent before.

“Greetings to you, King Volpe.” There was a flatness to his enunciation, though his Espheran was clean and clipped. Some accent he had deliberately drained from his speech. Yet beneath it, there was a rankling arrogance that the dragon part of Orsina prickled in the presence of. A man who knew no fear because he knew what would befall any who harmed him. “Long has it been since one of your kin sat the throne of Espher.”

There had been no formal introduction from this Agrantine messenger, and so the conversation was ever more stilted. “Greetings to you… messenger.”

He raised his voice a little so that it might echo through the hall. “I speak for the God Emperor of Agrant.”

“Can he not speak for himself?”

There was a rumble of muttering through the hall at that sharp comment. Orsina’s eyes widened as she realized it had been spoken in her voice.

The visitor’s eyes narrowed at her. “He has bestowed upon me this seal, that you might know my words are as his.”

Artemio was quick to press on rather than let Orsina blurt out whatever other nonsense sprang to her lips. “Just as the previous ambassador spoke with his authority, I understand. Please continue.”

“It is on the matter of the previous ambassador that I have come. The God Emperor is displeased at your ill treatment of his bride.”

A deathly silence had fallen upon the usually bustling hall now. A tension that could not be ignored or denied. This was the first true test that their new king had faced, and nobody wanted to miss whether he leapt clear of the hurdle or stumbled. “I think that you shall find she was treated as well as anyone would have been, given the circumstances.”

The ambassador’s lips thinned. “The God Emperor disagrees.”

Orsina’s attention was not on him, however. It seemed that the whole court of Espher, waiting with bated breath for the king’s next words, was satisfied. He had fashioned himself a ladder to the throne out of his appearance of strength, it was why so many had struggled over the thought of their one-handed king. They could not grasp how he could be so damaged and yet still show that strength. Well, he had shown it now. In his words.

The Cerva would not have dared to speak to an emissary of Agrant like that. They certainly wouldn’t have told a man that his wife deserved to die for her actions, whether it was the most powerful man on the continent or the lowliest peasant. The dragon within her practically purred. It did not see this as rudeness, it saw it as honesty, being spoken for the first time in a hive of liars. Of course, the dragon within her was now her, just as all the other shades had become her. She approved of him speaking plainly in the face of threats. After all the lying she was smothered in, day on day, it was like a breath of fresh air.

Art leaned back in his throne with a smile playing over his lips that had to be forced. He’d known this was coming. They’d all known. Even if Artemio hadn’t killed the bald ambassador woman, there would have been some other excuse. “And what form should we expect the emperor’s disagreement to take?”

“You shall hear that from his own lips.” The Agrantine man turned his back on Artemio and declared to the room, “I come now bearing the most wonderous news that any one of you shall ever hear. A god shall walk these lands. The one true god.”

“I cannot say that I am surprised at the visit.” Artemio ignored the insult of the emissary turning his back on him with good grace, though Orsina knew he was filing this slight away in his mind along with everything else. “Though I had heard that your emperor rarely leaves his capital these days.”

With a sneer, he was answered, “Only when the occasion warrants it.”

Artemio straightened up in his chair. It was strange how comfortable he looked in it, even though it was wrought from something hard as stone. Orsina would have found herself numb on the backside if she spent any time on it. “It is a delight to hear that your emperor so values our words that he would come all this way to converse.”

Once more the emissary made a booming statement to the room instead of answering politely. “There will be no talking. He comes to tear your city down, to burn your people to ash, to salt the earth so that this place once called Espher is instead named nowhere and is forgotten to the annals of time.”

The king’s head tilted to one side. “Didn’t you just say we would hear his disagreement from his own lips?”

“The last water to flow in this city shall be spit from his blessed lips upon your grave.” There was already spittle spraying from the emissary’s lips. Orsina felt glad to be out of range of the spray.

Artemio’s smile returned. “Ah good, I was worried that in all the posturing you had lost consistency there.”

And now the sneer was back again. Orsina wondered if the emissaries that Agrant sent out were selected from the most unpleasant people, those they simply couldn’t stand to keep in their own lands anymore. “You are very glib for a man facing his death.”

A deathly silence fell over the room once more. It was treason to speak of the death of the king in Espher. Punishable by death. But Orsina supposed that you couldn’t very well charge foreigners with treason since they owed Art no loyalty anyway. “And you are very glib for a man threatening a king in his own court.”

The silent tension held. Artemio had not given any gesture or sign that he wanted this braggart cut down to size, but neither had he given any indication that he would tolerate being spoken to in such a manner. The guards stood ready to charge. Orsina’s hands drifted down to the sickles still hanging at her hips, almost entirely forgotten of late.

Finally Artemio spoke. And spoke softly. “What compensation will your emperor take, so that bloodshed might be avoided?”

“I have already stated the terms under which he will be satisfied.”

Artemio leaned forward in his throne, as though they were merchants in a tavern, brokering a trade. “If I come with you now, to Agrant, and lay my head upon the headsman’s block, would you leave Espher in peace?”

The uproar that had not come when the king was threatened with death now arrived. Every noble of Espher bellowing, “You cannot!”

Duchess Granchio looked the most personally aggrieved. “Your Majesty!”

Artemio held up his hand and silence fell. “It is only a question, my friends.”

Yet no matter how ridiculous the offer had been, it seemed that the emissary had been prepared with an answer for it. As though they knew the kind of man Artemio was, willing to sacrifice even himself for the good of the kingdom. “The emperor would not see one life as sufficient recompense for the wrong that has been done to him.”

Artemio’s grin would be forever etched in Orsina’s memory. The antagonism he offered up to sweeten the deal. “Would it help if I told him that mine was the hand that slew his precious wife?”

The emissary was unshaken in his resolve. “He is aware.”

“Then I have offered all that I can offer to make peace with your god.” Art settled back with a shrug. “Let him come and see why this is a land with no god set above its king. Let him come and learn the price of his vengeance.”

The implication that his god was anything but omnipotent finally roused the visitor to anger. He snapped, “Even now you are defiant when you should lay down and weep. Such is the arrogance of…”

Orsina’s hand had risen, seemingly of its own accord, and now she tightened her grip. The emissary was lifted from his feet. Frost riming his dull black robes where the power of her shade held him. He dangled there, weak and helpless in the face of her power. With just a squeeze, he would be dead. With just a twist of her wrist, he would be torn limb from limb.

“Such is the arrogance of a living man in the kingdom that rules death itself.”

He was held too tightly to squeak out an answer, but the spatter of urine upon the flagstones told Orsina that he understood his predicament. She started to squeeze.

“Thank you, Lady Aceta,” Art coughed. “I believe that we were finished speaking.”

In an instant she came back to herself. Realized that she was not alone here in this room. That murdering this insolent worm was a breach of some etiquette or other. Not that she could bring herself to care about that anymore. She cast him away from her, and he landed in a crumpled heap, scrambling to his feet and fleeing for his life before another word could be said. The guards on the door at the far end of the corridor hastened to open it and let him out before any more messes were made.

Orsina folded in on herself. Shrinking back from the attention of the court. Half mumbling, she tried for an apology. “Sorry, Art… your Majesty.”

But all that Artemio gave her by way of punishment was a pleased smile. “As I said, your timing was impeccable as always. And sometimes it helps to remind those who mean us harm just how capable we are of resisting them.”

The Teatro adjourned for a while so that the floor might be mopped and the various cliques might take the time to whisper to one another about what they had just witnessed. Once given her leave, Orsina fled the room with all haste, cursing herself under her breath. “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Why am I so stupid. I just had to stand there. I didn’t need to do that. I shouldn’t have… I could have killed him. Then where would we be?”

She fled all the way up the stairs and through the warren of passages and empty rooms to find her chambers. The suite given over to Harmony where she had elected to hide instead of seeking out the chambers that were due to her with her station in court.

A suite of her own. She couldn’t abide even the thought of it. Being alone in some tower, completely alone with nothing but her own thoughts for company. Being waited on, hand and foot, like some spoiled little princess, when she was no different from the people doing the serving. At least with Harmony there, she had a buffer, someone who was used to servants and orders. Who felt no compunction about demanding whatever she pleased whenever it pleased her. Orsina could never be like that, even when she needed to be.

Artemio would probably be annoyed when she didn’t come back. Irritated that he had to send servants searching for her to drag her back to her job for the day like she was some child refusing to do their turn in the rice-paddies. Her face burned with the shame of the whole day. Why couldn’t she just control herself? It wasn’t like she hadn’t been doing it for months. Why did the words she thought have to come blurting out her mouth? It had to be because of her breeding. The nobles had all been born for this sort of thing, and she just wasn’t. She wasn’t made for all the lies, for controlling everything about herself and presenting the most palatable version. She’d never had even friends, other than Kagan. And he hardly counted, since he could feel whatever she was feeling and didn’t need her to express herself in a way that made sense.

The shade coiled around her, crispening her far-too-fine clothes with frost everywhere it made contact, and for a moment, she could not comprehend what it was doing, until she felt the tickle in her mind that had to be Mother Vinegar. It was a hug. The dead that she’d press-ganged into her service were trying to comfort her. It was an almost comedic thought. She might have laughed if she hadn’t felt so like melting into that embrace and weeping.

With a little exertion of will, she slammed the doors of the suite shut behind her and was abruptly alone once more. It was the middle of the day. Of course Harmony wasn’t here. She had her own life, her own role to play, her own job. She fit in here perfectly, like she’d been born for it. Because she had. And no matter how Orsina tried to fake it, she would never fit. Not here, not among the commoners, nowhere.

She was completely alone in all the world.

The maid startled from her work setting the fireplace. Popping upright like a startled squirrel, then nervously bobbing into a curtsy that made Orsina feel faintly seasick. “Don’t bother with that nonsense. And don’t let me interrupt you. I’m sure you’ve more work than you can handle without me getting in the way.”

“No bother, miss. Not too much on today,” the plump-faced maid replied with good cheer. “Oh, bugger. Uh, not miss. Mistress?”

“Orsina’s fine.”

She blushed, actually blushed, at the prospect of calling another human being by their name. Everything about this place was meant to isolate them from one another. To keep everyone plotting and scheming instead of treating one another as equals. “Oh, I couldn’t be so forward as to call you…”

“Everyone wants me to tell them what to do all the time, then when I tell them what to do, they tell me I’m wrong.” She cut the girl off before she could get any distance into her mumbling apology. It seemed odd to her that she’d think of this maid as a girl instead of a woman, though she likely had five years on her. Perhaps it was just that Orsina had seen so much in her short years that others seemed young by comparison of the burden in their minds. “You can call me Orsina because that’s my bloody name. Not Lady, not Shadebound Royal, and not any other made-up nonsense. Orsina.”

“I’d get in dreadful trouble, if anyone heard me, Miss… Orsina.”

“I’d probably be in dreadful trouble if anyone heard me telling you to call me that too. But I’m so tired of all the lying.” She slumped down onto the couch in front of the half-built fire. Beckoning for the maid to sit too, though she already knew that she wouldn’t. “That’s all this stuff is. All the titles and the fancy clothes. They’re just people, same as you and me. They’ve just spent so long lying about being important that they all believe it.”

“But you aren’t like that.” The maid looked genuinely stern. It was out of place on her cheerful round face. “You are important, Miss Orsina.”

Orsina could not help but roll her eyes. “Oh, please, spare me any nonsense about my rightful place in the world.”

“I don’t mean nothing like that, Miss Orsina, I just mean… well, you fought the dragons, didn’t you?”

Orsina slumped forward until her head rested in her hands. This was the worst lie of the lot. The one she could fight off the least, without destroying herself and all that she’d helped to build. She hadn’t done anything. She never had. The shades worked through her. She was just their anchor to this world. An anchor no more steered the ship than the figurehead was the captain. “The united armies of Espher marched out to face the Arazi. Not just me.”

“But you were the one who fought them, really fought them. It’s all anyone can talk about. Forget the southerners and the new king.” She’d come down to kneel in front of Orsina now, and that was so much worse than having her standing around, talking. It was like she was a supplicant. “Us common folk ain’t forgotten it was you that killed the dragons that came to burn the city down.”

Orsina brushed it away. “If it hadn’t been me, someone else would have fended them off.”

“But it was you, miss.” The maid reached out in a stunning display of boldness and took Orsina by the hand. “You were the one that took the fight to them. You were the one that cared enough about the common folk to face a monster for us. To keep them from burning the city down on us.”

She let that touch persist for a moment. That comforting hand, callused from a hard day’s work.

“Anyone would have done the same.”

“I would have pissed my pants and hid in a well, personally,” the maid opined.

That set the both of them off laughing. “I doubt it. Since you’re brave enough to talk about piss to some high lady.”

“Oh, piss.” She slapped her hands over her mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be stupid. Everyone does it. Even if the nobles do it in a gold pot instead of an outhouse like sensible people.”

The maid glanced around nervously. “I don’t envy them chambermaids that need to clear them out every morning.”

Orsina chuckled. “At least the tanner will give them a copper or two, eh?”

“Got the midden wagon down at the kitchen door at all hours, I can tell you.”

“Oh, I’d believe it, place this size.” She settled back in her seat, no longer pinned by the maid’s grip on her hand. It felt safer somehow, to lean back, to keep her distance. It made it less obvious that they were the same. That little bit of distance.

It seemed that wasn’t enough. “So what sort of fine lady knows about tanners collecting piss?”

“We didn’t all grow up in fancy houses…” Orsina began to spin a lie, clumsily.

But in the midst of her pink and cheerful face, the maid’s eyes shone with understanding. “They all did. You didn’t.”

For a moment, Orsina couldn’t move. She couldn’t think. This was everything that they’d been trying to avoid from the moment she arrived in Covotana, and now for the sake of a little joke-around with a maid, she had ruined everything. She had to… she had to deal with this. She had to stop it from spreading. If anyone else found out, it would be the end of her. Powerful or not, there was no way the nobles of Espher would stand for some peasant lording it over them like she had. They’d kill her if she was lucky.

There wasn’t much left in the world that she had to fear. But this sudden spike of dread in the base of her stomach was enough to set her shade squirming. The fireplace caught alight, though no tinder had been set. The candles streamed wax as they blazed impossibly high. When she spoke, there was the chill of the grave in her voice. “If you say anything, to anyone, then I’ll… I’ll…”

“Ain’t no need for that now!” The maid bowled over, trying to scurry away, trying to put up her hands. Terror radiating off her. Some poor scared girl trapped in this place by circumstance, surrounded on all sides by monsters with no power to protect herself. It was small wonder Orsina felt pangs of sympathy for her. “I’m not going to say nothing. I just… how did this happen?”

With a heave of will, Orsina crushed her shade back down. For a long quiet moment, that was all that she could do, sit there and shake as the power of the dead tried to rise in answer to her emotions. On the battlefield it would save her life, but here, it might kill just because she had entertained a dark thought.

“I don’t know. Nobody does. The… others they think I’ve got some noble blood, somewhere up my family tree, and that’s where the magic comes from but… I’ve never heard nothing about that. I was born like this.” She stared down at her hands. Visible by the calming firelight and by whatever sense let her see shades roaming around the world. Her own shade just there beneath her skin, flesh and spirit overlaid. “Out in Sheepshank… a farming village. Farmer parents. None of it makes sense.”

When she dragged her eyes up to the maid, the other woman was staring at her wide-eyed with fervor that made her voice quake as she spoke. “Like a blessing?”

It took all the refinement that Harmony had been forcing on her to stop herself from spitting. “Like a curse.”

“Come now, miss, surely it ain’t bad as all that.” The maid tried to lay a comforting hand on Orsina’s knee now that she’d managed to right herself into a squat again. “You’ve gone from sleeping on hay to sleeping on goose-feathers. Eating all the best, dancing and drinking with a king. Isn’t that better than what you had before?”

“The price has been… high.” The memories of most of it were gone now. Consumed into the maelstrom of her mind, where shade and living girl had competed for dominance once, and now they were merged into one. “Everything I thought I knew about myself, everything I am, it’s all been… I can’t even remember who I used to be anymore. Before it all started. Before I ended up here in the middle of all this.”

“Sounds to me like you were a good person, miss.” The maid reached up and took hold of her hand once more. “Sounds like you still want to be one.”

The chamber was warm now, thanks to the early lighting of the fireplace. So when Orsina felt cool lines running down her cheeks, it confused her, at least until she remembered what tears felt like. “I wish I could remember how.”

“You do remember, miss.” A squeeze of her hand that only seemed to draw out more of her tears. “When there’s trouble, you help. You don’t stop and think about how it would help you. You don’t stop and think about what it might cost you. You’ve been good all along, doing good all along. If anyone’s been saying different, it sounds like they’re the ones who don’t remember how to be good.”

“That’s very kind of you.” She drew her fingers from the soft grip of the maid without incident. Though that one touch of comfort had felt like her tether to reality. “But I really must have your promise that you won’t share what you’ve learned here.”

“You’d trust the word of a maid, would you?”

Orsina managed a smile through her tears. “Never had one lie to me before.”

The maid clambered to her feet, patting Orsina on the knee as she rose. “I’ll do you one better. You aren’t the only one with secrets around here. I’ll show you mine, then we’re even. Neither can say a thing without the other talking out.”

She tried not to smile at that. As though whatever foolish tryst or mischief this girl had inveigled herself in could compare to the kingdom-destroying revelation she now bore the burden of. “And what is your secret, exactly?”

The maid opened and shut her mouth. “Tonight. I’ll show you tonight, after the bells. Come down to the kitchens, and I’ll take you from there.”

“All right.” She said it without even meaning to, feeling too guilty over her previous snobbish thoughts to even examine the good sense of what she was doing now. “Yes. It will do me good to get out of the palace, if only for a little while.”

“There you go talking like them again.” The maid chuckled. “You don’t need to do that with me, miss.”

She started to head for the door of the chambers. Presumably all the other fires were already set. But Orsina halted her in her tracks. “What’s your name?”

There was no hesitation before she answered. “Armida, miss.”

Orsina vaguely recalled some superstition that she’d heard as a child about the dangers of giving your name to the Shadebound. Like it gave them power over you. Either it had been a country superstition, or Armida was showing her considerably more trust than she’d earned.

She nodded back in thanks. “All right, Armida, I shall see you tonight, after the bells.”

Then she was alone again. Drawing the caftan from the back of the seat, she wrapped it around herself like a blanket, like old Mother Vinegar’s shawls. She hunched towards the fire, as though mere flames could touch the chill inside of her, and reached out.

The fire reached back to her. Reacting to a hollow inside, being drawn closer. It was not that the rooms were cold, it was that she was sapping all heat from them.

At some point, she must have roused herself and returned to the halls below. At some point she must have stood by Artemio’s side, looking as imposing as it was possible for a girl to look. There must have been a dinner presented to her at some point, and in all likelihood she must have eaten it, but if she were asked to recall any part of this later, it would have eluded her. She was not missing memories, she simply had not made them. Nothing that was happening held her attention well enough for her to retain it. Not until the night was through and the bells were tolling and she found herself slinking down the servants’ stairs to the kitchens, dressed not in the finery of court, but in the rough men’s clothing that she was allotted for her physical training. She was not a princess, and she was not a commoner, she fit in nowhere, so these clothes that were never appropriate felt like a more honest fit than any of the other clothes she might have worn as a mask.

At this time of night, the servants were not scampering up and down the towers. They were either with those they served, readying them for bed, or down in whatever domain of the palace they had been bound to, sweeping out the ashes of their labors. Orsina had a free run all the way to the kitchens at the palace’s feet.

Orsina made her way outside, to wait in the shadowed overhang of the buttresses outside of the kitchen doors. If whatever secret Armida meant to share was inside the palace, it wouldn’t take a moment to step back inside, but here she was safe from all prying eyes. With her hair tied back she might even be mistaken for a page or stable-boy. Provided nobody looked too closely.

In the dimming evening light, she wondered if her life might have been like this, if she had come to the city under her own power, if there had been no hole in her soul that the shades were so desperate to fill. If she had been born Orsina and lived all her days as nothing more, might she have longed for excitement instead of dreading it? Might she have made the long journey to the city and sought out work as a maid herself? Would she have had the courage to speak with her mistress while setting the fires?

Armida emerged and dragged Orsina back to the present. She caught sight of the shape in the shadows and gave her a smile. “Ready, miss?”

She was ready.

Orsina had not walked the city since her first night there. The opportunity had never presented itself. Obligation after obligation had weighed on her, from the pressing matters of her studies and battle to the more subtle obligation to behave in a manner that was ladylike. She supposed that it was not ladylike at all to go wandering the streets of an evening, that any girl might encounter trouble in such a situation. Of course, she was not any girl, and any trouble that found its way to her would soon regret it.

Down through the wealthiest parts of the city they walked, Orsina keeping a hood up over her distinctive features so that she might just be another servant heading home after a day’s work. Then out farther still they went, through the mercantile provinces of the freemen and the wealthy, until finally they broke free of all the fine architecture and beauty and found something more honest. The walls here were not carved stone, but plaster. The roof tiles were padded in their broad gaps with straw, and the windows were more often just shuttered holes. There was no money here, and though the buildings might once have pretended to be like those in the heart of the city, disrepair had taken its toll. Born not of a lack of care, never a lack of care, as a peasant was as house-proud as any king in Orsina’s recollection, but from a lack of means.

When dragon fire had rained down from the sky, these had been the houses that could burn. The venom and flame had stuck to the stone ones, but it could not destroy them. These had been like kindling. Long swaths of what had been homes were missing. Broad, sooty spaces where the city had not yet begun to encroach. Set up upon the blackened embers, tents and lean-to shelters made of whatever could be salvaged. In time, someone of means would rebuild, charge extortionate rent, and ensure that the peasants never had a penny to their name, but for now, more pressing matters were being attended to. Which left those without homes sleeping under the clouded sky.

So it had always been.

From the poorest parts of the city, Armida led her out into those places where even the peasants could not live, where the mills ran all hours of night and day, where the water that the whole city drank was pushed through the complex gravity stairs required to keep the fountains flowing. It was down into that apparatus that they went, unseen by guards or passersby due simply to the absence of any such in so desolate a corner. Down through one stairwell after another until Orsina felt as deep beneath the earth as she had been when the Arazi buried her under a mountain. Only then did Armida reach back to take her hand and lead her through a door into a press of bodies. Far too many bodies for so small a chamber.

“What on earth?”

Armida pressed a finger to her own lips and led her deeper in. Orsina had never seen so many people crammed into so tight a space, and the fact that a solid half of those people were the misshapen part-animals that made up so much of the city’s lowest class only exacerbated that fact. A man with the horns and bulk of a great bull stood amidst the press of dirty clothes like a rock in a stream. Others, just as huge but given less to height and more to width, spread out among the more human-looking members of this audience. Condensing what was already an uncomfortable crush of crowd into new intimacy.

Yet still Armida’s grasp on Orsina’s hand never faltered, and as she moved forward, the crowd seemed to part around them. Despite her hood, she had no doubt that she was recognizable now in the torchlight. That any one of these people might have known her. There were some faces she half recognized herself. Servants from the palace, carriage drivers, normal people. But why were they here?

Orsina was so intent upon looking around that she almost walked into the back of Armida when the other woman halted. Startled by that, she did not notice the maid passing her hand into the wizened grasp of an old woman with the vast shell of a turtle upon her back. Milky eyes turned blindly towards her, and the conversations around her were dampened by interest.

“Welcome.”

“I… thank you.”

The turtle woman reminded Orsina of Mother Vinegar. Whether she wanted her to or not. Something in the shawls strewn over the hunch of the shell, the slow speech. Once her hand was held in the soft leathery skin, she could not bring herself to pull it back. “She’s not told you where you are? Why you’re here?”

Orsina cast a concerned glance around for Armida and found that she was fading back into the crowd. She’d done her part, it seemed. “I’m afraid not.”

As one, the gathered crowd echoed the old woman’s next words. “There is only one king, and his name is death.”

They stared at Orsina expectantly, as though that odd old idiom meant anything special to her. When it became apparent that they were no longer going to be speaking in synchrony or speaking at all without a response, she managed to mumble, “All right…”

“That phrase gets bandied about, but folk don’t understand it.” The turtle woman pulled on her hand, leading her deeper into the press of bodies. The crowd filtered around them, watching but not touching. “It don’t mean that we’re all going to die. Though we will. It don’t mean that the king don’t matter none. It means that when we’re all dead and in the dirt, the worms will eat them wearing gold as easy as them wearing naught. In the end, we’re all the same.”

The part of Orsina that was human had seen dead bodies enough to know that beneath the thin veneer of civilization, every corpse was the same. The part of her that was shade, that had been dragon and rebel leader and wise woman and all the rest, chimed in harmony with that truth. They were all the same in death, all shades, all equal. No one of them granted any special power by their birth when the other end of their lives had been reached. “That’s truer than you could ever know.”

“It’s the way the world is. Everything else is a lie.” The turtle woman’s head bobbed up and down, and Orsina became uncomfortably aware of just how long her neck was, how much it seemed to extend forward out of her torso. She looked so fragile, despite the great armor plate on her back. So like every old woman she’d ever met. “And you don’t strike me as a liar. Don’t reckon Armida would have brought a liar along with her. Must be something special to win her over.”

She scoffed at that. Despite her attempts to contain it. “I’m nothing special at all. That’s what I keep trying to tell her. What I want to tell everyone…”

“Because you’re peasant-born? Because you’ve no father’s father who won some war by hiding behind a wall of our bodies? Because you’ve some sense of dignity and don’t put yourself ahead of everyone else?” Every word was like a nail being hammered into Orsina’s coffin. Armida had not kept her secret. Armida had sent word ahead to this little gang of hers, and now would come the demands. The price for their silence. “I’d say among that lot in the palace, you’re very special indeed.”

She tried to maintain a casual expression. Tried not to let her voice crack as she asked, “How did you know…”

“Because we aren’t all as blind as the folk you’re tricking, and we’d never turn in one of our own for getting one over on the bastards. Before you start to worry.”

In truth, the dread of her disguise being torn away had completely deadened her to all else. Her head had been spinning with the idea that she might be exposed, and now that solid footing of terror had been torn out from under her just as surely as the stability she’d lost but a moment before.

She felt like she was obliged to explain. Even though she’d already been told that her lie didn’t matter. That they wouldn’t betray her secret. All of this time, she had just been waiting to get caught, and at last it had happened, and all the excuses that she’d made for herself, to herself, came tumbling out. “It isn’t about getting one over on them, I… I was born wrong. I can…”

There was a wry smile on the old woman’s half-beaked lips. “Shadebound. We know. Famous for it, hard to miss.”

“Exactly!” They understood she’d had no choice. “So it isn’t like I’m lying for some advantage… I’m just…”

One of the others in the gathering caught her other hand and stopped her progress. A boy of no more than sixteen summers, eyes so wide they looked fit to drop from his face. “Do you know how good it feels to look up and see one of your own kind up there in the sky? Fighting for you. For the love of you?”

“I hadn’t…” She managed to slip her fingers free of his grasping hands. “I haven’t really thought about any of that.”

“We know who you are. We know what you are.” The turtle woman had stopped her progress when Orsina was snared, and now she stepped in closer, wrapping her arms around Orsina’s far more slender body. “And we love you, Orsina, daughter of nobody of note. We love you because you’re just like us.”

“I don’t know if…” Out of habit, Orsina’s arms went up to wrap around the old woman hugging her, but she didn’t know what was happening or why. She also couldn’t reach around the broad spread of shell.

“If you’d stepped left instead of right, you’d be in the gutter with us. Luck or fate might be what got you in the door, but you’re the one who chose what to do with it. Nobody could have expected you to do all you’ve done for us. Nobody would have thought to ask. Any one of us given the chance to sit idle and enjoy the lives they’ve built on our backs, well… it would be hard to turn that down. But you… you didn’t even think of it.”

Pushing her way back from the old woman’s embrace, Orsina felt panic flutter again. And with it came a chill wind, sweeping through the chamber, setting all present shivering. “How do you know all of this… Have you been watching me? All this time?”

“You’ve been hard to miss.” A boar-faced butcher chuckled from by her elbow.

They all knew. Everyone knew. She had to go. She had to get out of the city. Kagan would come with her without question. Yelena would carry them off without a second thought. Harmony… she’d be more difficult, she loved her brother. Wanted to be here to protect him. So long as Orsina never came between them, she knew everything was going to be all right, but she couldn’t ask Harmony to leave, not now when so much was happening. She didn’t even know where they could go. The Arazi would come after them, wherever it was. They’d come back here because it was home, because Harmony was convinced that her brother would know what to do. “All this time I’ve been trying so hard to stay hidden and…”

The turtle woman laid her hands on Orsina’s shoulders and stopped her downward spiral. “You’re no natural-born liar. That’s something to be proud of, not shamed. Them that don’t know what they’re looking for will be fooled every time, and you’ve done all they’ve taught you to pass, needn’t be worrying about that.”

In her heart, Orsina was still a child. She’d had no time to grow, to learn, everything had been rushed out and forced on her. So when an older woman gave her comfort, she was still fool enough to believe it was real. The chill mist that had been picking up from the floor of the chamber began to settle. The shivering terror spreading out from her to the nearest attendees of this clandestine meeting began to retract back inside her.

“What is all of this about, why have I been brought here?”

“Because you need to know the truth of things. Not what the books and kings will tell you, but what actually happened. What has been happening since the start of all time.” The turtle woman’s ancient, shaking hands had skin as brittle as paper as they ghosted up from Orsina’s shoulders to cradling her face. “We want to put an end to all this. An end to kings. To the few setting themselves above the rest and hoarding everything. We want to set the world free of their yoke.”

Orsina pulled away from her. Staggering back a step as the others reached out to hold her up. “You’re talking about treason… you’re talking about… you know I’m friends with the king, don’t you? I’d never turn on my friends…”

“Even when they turn on you?” The turtle woman’s hands sank down to her sides. “That man, he’s like every king we’ve ever had, but worse. We aren’t people to him, we’re things. Tools to be used and discarded. And if you aren’t careful, that’s just what he’s going to do with you.”

Orsina’s jaw clicked as she ground her teeth together. “You don’t know him.”

“You want to know a man, look at how he treats his servants,” Armida half whispered from the crowd.

Orsina tried to cut that off before another word could be spoken. How dare some maid talk about her master in that way? After all that he did for her, paying her and giving her a roof over her head? “Artemio has always treated his servants with respect, if not kindness.”

“Any man can appear like a good master to his fellow masters. I’m talking about who he is when there’s nobody watching. Good or bad, the man’s still a king. And a king’s throne is built on the bones of people like us.”

A chill ran up the length of Orsina’s back that had nothing to do with the shade dwelling within her and everything to do with the mounting realization that this was not just some griping session, and this was not just a random assortment of Covotana’s citizens. This was a peasant rebellion, right in the capital, under the lords’ noses. These were the people who made the nobles’ beds, the ones who made their meals. If they wanted the palace full of corpses, then come morning it would be. She may not have had Artemio’s mind, but presented with such blatant evidence, it did not take long for her to make connections. The assassinations when she’d first arrived in Covotana. The corruption that Artemio had allegedly rooted out. Lies upon lies.

But if he were a liar, he had still been friend enough to her that she’d hear his side of it before betraying him. “If you got rid of him, someone else would just take his place. Someone worse.”

A few of the gathered conspirators met one another’s eyes as she said that. Like she was repeating something they themselves had argued about. But it was the old turtle woman who spoke. “We’re not talking about killing the man, we’re talking about breaking the throne. We’re talking about ending it, forever. No more kings. No more nobles.”

Orsina wet her lips. It was like talking about a world without a sun or moon. A world without a sky above them. She didn’t know that she could have even comprehended the idea when she first arrived in the city, but now there were insistent voices in her head, fragments of the dead who lingered on within her. The prideful dragon that insisted that nobody had a right to reign over it. The wise old woman who had contemplated long and hard through those winters when the granaries ran empty after the levies had been taken. Back when Espher still remembered Sheepshank existed. The rebel leader who had tried for this very same breaking of the natural order centuries before. All of them could see the sense in what was being spoken. Why couldn’t she?

“Who’d rule?”

“Do you need ruling?” The turtle woman’s voice dipped low and rumbling, into something like Kagan’s, something like anger. “I know I don’t. Back where you come from, did you have a king on his throne, telling you all how to live?”

Her head still spun. “No… but…”

“We don’t need to be ruled,” an entirely human man with thick scars across his cheeks piped up. “Nobody does.”

It was like the whole room had rehearsed this. Like whatever argument she had, they’d prepared a counter. If she’d had more time in the House of Seven Shadows, then perhaps she might have mastered the rhetoric required to turn the conversation around, but her education had been slapdash at best. Condensed, as the Prima liked to describe it. “You can’t get rid of kings and put nothing in their place. Who will pave the roads? Who’ll fight the wars?”

The turtle woman shrugged, and the shell upon her back heaved up and down. It must have weighed as much as a millstone. “Who does those things now?”

“What happens when Agrant invades? Or the Arazi?” She was throwing out anything in her mind at this point, desperate to refute them. “Who is going to rally everyone and fight them off, so we don’t end up under their heel instead?”

She turned at Armida’s touch on her shoulder. Her soft smile belied the bite in her words. “That’s why we invited you here to talk.”

When the temperature dropped in the room this time, it was not a mindless reaction. Orsina had called upon her shade very deliberately, and just as deliberately she was showing them all that she was not to be toyed with. The nearest of them shrank back from the sharp chill biting at them. The torches streamed in towards Orsina as even the air itself was drawn towards the hollow in her soul.

“I am nobody’s weapon.”

The air that had been drawn in towards her thumped down now, staggering all those gathered near. Staggering everyone in the room, in truth, thanks to the way the falling rippled out. The water that had flowed through the chamber on its way to processing was now frozen in place, frost had painted fractals across the floor and ceiling, and the only one untouched by it all was Orsina.

The old turtle woman seemed to have suffered the brunt of the shade’s fury. Perhaps because her blood did not run so warm as the others. She was down on her knees before Orsina, hands held up in supplication. For an awful moment, the dragon part of her ruled, it looked down on this little person who would have used her and considered this inferior being to have been put into her rightful place. But as soon as that thought entered her mind, Orsina cast it aside. Disgusted to have ever entertained it.

Water broke through the ice, knocking it aside and spraying those too close. The frost began to melt. The shade retreated back into Orsina’s hollow heart. “I… I will not be your assassin, or your soldier. I am a person, just like any of you. Not just a tool to be used to your ends.”

“Nobody said you were.” There was a plume of breath as the turtle woman forced the words out.

“You just said that you’d brought me here to fight for you.” Orsina may not have been enraged anymore, but she was still afraid and in a den of potential enemies. “You blackmailed me with the threat of sharing my secret to get me here and then…”

Armida’s gentle words cut her off again. “You’re just a person, like us.”

“I am.” Orsina didn’t know why it brough a quaver to her voice to admit that. Perhaps she’d spent too long in the company of those who thought themselves superior. Perhaps she was just desperate for someone to acknowledge her humanity. “I am.”

“And we will never treat you like anything less. I promise you.” The old woman whom Orsina now realized she had been throwing around like a rag doll reached up to her, and she could not help but offer her help back up to her feet. “All we want to do is talk to you. To know that you understand why we have acted as we have. So that when the time comes, and the throne is broken, you will not think we are your enemies.”

Orsina set her jaw. “I will not fight my friends for you, and I won’t step aside and let you do them harm.”

“And we’d never ask you to. All we’re asking is, if the time comes that they’re no longer standing for the people of Espher, will you?”

6 - Blood Mirror
Gemmazione, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Harmony was not alone. Orsina might have been absent by the time she returned to her chambers the night before, Art might have maintained his distance despite promises to the contrary, but that did not mean she was alone.

To her immense surprise, she had discovered that she had people of her own. Most of them were simply spillover fans of Orsina who could get no time with their distant idol, but a slim sliver of the nobles of Covotana seemed to have an interest in her for herself. She was in a position to exert influence over the king, and she had been public enough in her dissension with some of his decisions over the past weeks that she had become something of a lightning rod for those who wished to steer him from his current course.

She was loyal to her brother, because of course she was, but that did not mean she could not listen to those dissenting voices or make use of the network of contacts those voices connected her with. To Art, she could claim she was gathering intelligence on those who were working against him in court, but in truth, she wasn’t sure she’d dare to name names given how many lesser families had disappeared in the dead of night to affirm that Agrantine pensions were no longer to be accepted.

The tone of court had become more serious, more like Agrant, in truth. Bright colors were not frowned upon, but the king led by example, and his wardrobe remained surprisingly dull but for the few affectations of royalty forced on him, like the golden crown and fur-rimmed cape. The old playful whispers that had once defined life in court seemed to have been quieted too. It was said, among those who were the most fearful, that the new king could parse truth from lie, even in jests. That no small number of those who had mysteriously “returned to the country” had been engaged in all of the usual games and fun right up until the moment the laughter stopped dead.

It wasn’t particularly believable to anyone with sense or who realized that despite his new hat, Art remained nothing more or less than a human being, but it seemed to keep the worst excesses of deviousness to a minimum, so little objection could be voiced.

Being used was not an unfamiliar sensation to Harmony. Art used her almost constantly, but she had always had faith that his demands upon her were for her own good, along with the greater good. Those who came courting her favor now clearly wanted to use her for their own ends, and she was surprised to find that every so often, she actually did put forward one of their ideas as her own, either to win their trust, or simply because it actually sounded like a better option to her. Not often the latter, and far more often because she was being asked her opinion on a matter of which she knew nothing but was expected to have considered deeply.

Regardless, when morning came and there were no official appointments for her and no sign of Orsina with which to spend this blissful peace, she went out for breakfast. Lady Anatra had a standing invite for Harmony, and she was in Artemio’s good books too. The Anatra compound was a short carriage ride from the palace, and it felt amusing to return to the scene of her previous break-in to have fresh fruit parfaits.

Anatra and those other ladies who were dining with her that morning represented the majority of Art’s inner circle. Or at least their wives. All of the people who wouldn’t have met Harmony’s eye a year ago, now desperate for a kind word. She made a point to be generous with her praise. Probably too generous in truth, it was confusing them. For people who were accustomed to coldness and glib comments as the norm, there was an underlying suspicion that everything Harmony commented upon, she did so sarcastically. She’d seen more than one young noblewoman changing her hair after announcing that she liked it.

The buzz of conversation today seemed more charged than usual, and when Harmony was ushered into the glass-house dining room in the gardens, there was an excitement in the air that she had not expected. Everyone was all smiles as she was ushered to a spot at the table, right by Lady Anatra’s side, and even as the food was brought out, there continued to be merriment afoot. Eventually she could take it no longer.

“Could someone please tell me why we’re all so excited this morning?”

“Surely you’ve heard the news? Your brother means to marry!”

Harmony was aware that he was not keeping her in the loop with regards to his plans. They were taking steps to improve upon that situation. But the idea that he could make so monumental a decision without consulting her, that still managed to shock her. “I… I knew that he intended to in an abstract sort of way, but I hadn’t a clue that any formal plans were being made. It was my understanding that no suitors had yet taken his eye.”

The Duchess Ragna tittered. It was not a sound with which any of them were well acquainted. It had a dry quality to it, as though the mechanism by which laughter was produced had long been abandoned. “I think the princess may be a little better at keeping secrets than anyone has given her credit for.”

Harmony forced a smile. Showing that they were divided would weaken her position. It was better for them to assume that she was keeping secrets than that she was unaware of what was happening in court. “Truly, I had no idea that he was moving ahead with plans. So far as I was aware, he was still focused entirely upon the war efforts.”

Lady Anatra let loose a giggle, as though this were all some charming surprise that Harmony had managed to keep hidden under her nose. “And next you will be telling us that you had no hand in arranging the match either, when she is your dearest friend?”

For a long moment, Harmony drew a complete blank. She had no friends. She had never had friends. She had peers, at a stretch, but friendship had always been denied to her for one reason or another. If she had ever called anyone a friend it would have been Art, and while it seemed apt for him to be marrying himself, that wasn’t what was being discussed here. For a moment she wondered if they were speaking of Kagan, picturing him in bridal-wear, before the person they were actually discussing clicked into place in her mind.

“Orsina?” She had almost squeaked, so she mustered all the calm that she’d been trained to show, still flustered and fumbling. “He means to wed Orsina? Well, that’s… that’s just what I’d hoped for her. That’s… that’s wonderful news indeed. When he became king, we had thought that he might have been forced into some political arrangement to cement an alliance or… but… no, that is… this is what I wanted. This is precisely what I wanted to happen.”

What the hell was Artemio playing at? They hadn’t even sat down to discuss him marrying Orsina. He had probably been dimly aware that she’d been planning to broach the subject at some point, as it would have provided them with a way to hold on to Orsina and allow Harmony to continue her relationship with her, but that had been before everything had changed. Orsina had her own established place in court now, bound to the family Volpe. There was no need for this.

“Then we celebrate.” Lady Anatra raised her glass of honey-watered wine. “A toast to the king’s new marriage, may it be long and fruitful.”

He knew how she felt about Orsina, he knew, and he’d still done this. Marrying a king and marrying a minor noble were two entirely different things. When Art had been some lesser lord, on the periphery of society, a marriage to him could have been entirely for show. He had never intended for the Volpe line to continue back then. But as a king, he would need heirs, and to produce them…

Harmony’s hands tightened into fists beneath the tablecloth.

Just the thought of him touching Orsina set her skin crawling and her blood boiling. For their whole lifetime, he had been put first, given the best of everything while she came second, a bodyguard to him, a font of life for him to drain for his powers; everything that she had was his. Nothing was her own.

For the first time in her life she had something—someone—that she cared about. Someone that she wanted for her own. And he meant to defile her.

She couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t believe it.

Automatically, Harmony went through the motions of the toast. “May they reign a thousand years.”

She was going to kill him. Just as soon as she could pry herself free from the polite conversation and veiled insinuations of this god-awful breakfast, she was going to choke him to death with her bare hands. It was the only solution, clearly. Or perhaps merely beating him to within an inch of his life and giving him fair warning that she’d take that inch the moment he so much as looked at Orsina again would be sufficient. She’d just have to judge when the moment came, and he was bruised and bloodied at her feet.

She resented every moment that she was trapped there at the table, listening to the blithering of women who had, at best, nothing of interest to say. She understood the purpose of these interactions, the complex interplay of conversational domination and submission that created a pecking order among the women of court, but bringing herself to care about it, even when there was nothing more pressing on her mind, was beyond her abilities. She had lived outside this complex web of shifting alliances for too long. She had been the fly, trying to buzz through the gaps between the connections, unseen. Well, now she had the power and position that had been denied to her all her life. Now if she was to collide with the web, it would not be the spider’s delight. She would tear clean through it.

It seemed that the other women at the table were equally aware of how volatile her presence made things. They were polite to her, of course they were polite to her, but they did not pry, and they did not go out of their way to initiate any conversation that might lead to her giving more than a few hollow words in answer. It was as lonely as it had ever been when she was isolated, but it did give her the benefit of some time to think.

She couldn’t believe it.

It was not an expression of dismay or confusion anymore; she genuinely did not believe her brother would do her this harm. Not unless he truly did not understand what he was doing. This must have been some ploy or trick, not reality. Art was not devoid of empathy; he would not do this.

The initial rush of anger that might have led her astray was now cooling. The mistakes she would have made while carried on that wave could have caused real trouble. She needed this time to realize that there was no way Art would betray her in this way. In other ways, she was sure he might have, but not like this.

Orsina was beautiful, she was perfect, she was everything that Harmony desired, but Art was blind to it. His head had never been turned by a pretty smile or a flirtatious wink.

There had been no shortage of girls through the years that had taken an interest in the heir unapparent, and not a one of them had so much as caught his eye. He was more likely to get excited about the distant lineage of a young woman, what her great-grandfather had done, than in what she had tucked away in her corsets. She’d pondered, through the years, whether Art had an interest in men instead, but he’d given no hint of that either. Eventually, she had concluded that his focus was entirely on matters of the mind rather than the body. Or that his interest in others was so circumspect that she couldn’t divine it.

Which meant there was no possibility that he would betray her out of desire. Lust would not lead him astray, love… would not have entered into his mental equation when it came to the taking of a wife. This was a calculated move that she just didn’t have the context for yet.

Disentangling herself from the breakfasting ladies almost two hours later, she made straight for the palace. Slipping into the first carriage she could flag down.

She had not seen Orsina since the morning of the previous day. It was not so unusual for them to be apart during their daytime schedules, through the many appointments that courtly life demanded of them, but that she had not returned to their shared chambers last night was quite firmly an anomaly. Might she have retreated to her own chambers to consider Artemio’s proposition in solitude? A treacherous voice also questioned whether she might have spent the night in Art’s chambers, but Harmony swiftly set it aside. Orsina would not have thrown away what they had so readily. She would not have hurt Harmony in that way. No matter how strange or distant she might have become since their return from the north, she still cared.

If nothing else, they still had that much.

The journey back to the palace felt like it took three times as long as it had taken to depart, and beyond the first conversation regarding Art’s wedding, she couldn’t recall a single thing that had been said or done.

Within the palace, a few short words got her brother’s location, and a few stern looks parted what guards were arrayed between her and her goal. He was taking lunch by the time she got to him, bowls of olives and sundries arrayed around him in easy reach as he read. It was presumably one of the few moments of solitude he’d managed to carve out of the day, and for a moment her step faltered.

She shook it off. It wasn’t a cruelty to want answers. Art hadn’t even looked up before she spoke. “Congratulations on your impending nuptials, dear brother.”

The book remained open in his lap even as he glanced up to greet her. A reminder that her presence was unwanted. That she was distracting him from things he’d rather be doing. “Good afternoon, dear sister. It is nice to know that my company is so desirable that you could not wait to take supper with me.”

She smiled at him like a blade being drawn. “I think you know exactly why I’m here.”

“To congratulate me as you already said.” He made it a statement, though it should have been a question. He was not surprised by her reaction to the spreading news, and neither should he have been. If word had spread that she was planning to usurp his throne, she imagined his response would have been relatively predictable too.

Through that same icy-placid smile, she spoke. “Send the servants away, Art.”

There was a hint of mischief in his smile then, a little bit of the boy that he’d been still in the man he’d become. “Is there something else that you want to discuss that isn’t suitable for their ears?”

“Send them away.” The sharp edge to her tongue was blunted by that glimmer of her brother beneath the mask of the king, but what she demanded was still necessary.

“Leave us. If you would.” He gave a nod to the guards and the servants, sending them flocking out of the room in perfect symmetry.

She finally lowered herself into the seat opposite him. Looking over the spread before picking out a rather plump green olive. “Imagine my surprise to arrive for breakfast to find the room buzzing with news. My brother is getting married. He’s marrying my…” Her voice faltered for a moment. “Orsina.”

“I can imagine your surprise.” He reached a hand out carefully to pluck an olive of his own from the platter with exaggerated caution. “Though I expected that it would play out in a more violent fashion.”

“Oh, I was ready to stomp you, rest assured.” She smirked. “But I have had some time to calm myself now.”

He settled back into his chair with a smile she suspected was forced. “I’m glad. I suspect conversation shall be more productive than violence.”

“First time for everything.”

“I have not announced anything yet. The rumor mill is running wild.”

“Well, of course,” Harmony scoffed. “Even I wouldn’t have managed to miss an official announcement.”

“The rumor mill is running wild at my behest, of course,” he conceded.

“I suspected as much.” Her fingertips bit into the upholstered arm of the chair, but she kept her tone jovial. “You’ve been dropping hints?”

“After the violent display in the Teatro yesterday, I insinuated that Orsina’s actions were a product of passion, rather than a lapse in judgement.”

Harmony had not seen her. Not since she’d set out for the day in court. If there had been some sort of fight, if Orsina was injured and she hadn’t even known… “What happened?”

“She has not told you?” Artemio chuckled. “She almost killed the Agrantine ambassador when he came to make threats.”

Given the strange moods that had been racking Orsina since their return to Espher, it was not entirely surprising to hear, but it was still far enough out of character for the girl that it was a surprise. Harmony knew herself, knew the violence that was inside her, just begging to be tapped. It was absent from the heart of Orsina, or at least, it had been until now. It was almost a relief to find out that she was human, instead of some pristine and infallible creature from on high.

Bemused, she asked, “Only almost?”

“It would have been rude, so she restrained herself.”

Harmony pressed him for more details. “And you suggested it was because of your… relationship.”

He let out a laugh dry enough to sap the very moisture from the air. “Rather than suggest that our most dangerous ally is entirely out of our control. It seemed like the safer option.”

“You’d rate her more dangerous than the dragon on the roof?” She said it like it was a joke, but in truth she knew which of their two allies had the greater power at her beck and call. She just hadn’t known that Artemio knew it.

“By a long shot.”

His gaze was on her then. That calculating stare that he had turned on the world, assessing and dividing it down into its component parts. Grinding it apart with the mortar and pestle of his mind until only the fundamental nature of things remained. The truth. She tried to play it off, as if she didn’t see him assessing her, breaking apart her expression and body language and words. She shrugged, almost playful in the expression she forced onto her face.

“Huh.”

He pressed on past what was probably an obvious and fumbling attempt at deception. “This invariably generated a degree of speculation among the court, as to whether or not the feelings were reciprocated. I did not say that they were, but I did mention that you had been hinting that I might marry her before our ascent to power.”

She had, of course, been planning for it. Back when none of them had any prospects or excuse to keep Orsina close. If he’d wed her, even in payment of the debt that Art felt he’d owed her after she’d saved Harmony, then that would have allowed them all to stay together, no matter what the future brought.

None of them could have thought that this was how things would unfold.

“They took that to mean you had an existing relationship. That you had been in love back before you were people of relevance. Young love, overcoming the odds and the change of circumstances. It is like a fairy tale.” She tried not to let bitterness into her voice. It was her fairy tale. The one she had been living. But because she was a she, the tale would never be told. Princesses did not get to ride off into the sunset on the back of a white steed with their bride. Princesses, so far as she was aware, were essentially items of furniture when it came to fairy tales. Things to be acquired and placed in a castle and looked at admiringly. Perhaps being an outcast had suited her better.

Still, Artemio droned on. “And while popular opinion about me is somewhat mixed, the adoration of Orsina is nigh on universal. Weaving myself into that fairy tale seemed to be the intelligent move.”

It took Harmony a moment to parse, and even once she had, it was a struggle not to laugh out loud as she voiced it. “So you’re allowing people to think that you’re going to marry her so you can benefit from her good reputation?”

Orsina, peasant-born nobody, had so much adoration from the people and nobility of Espher that the king was now putting on an act of courting her so that he might benefit. It was farcical. The sort of story you might find in a poorly written opera.

“If it is known that she is spoken for in some way, then I am less likely to field daily questions from those who would court her. Questions that I cannot rightly answer without exposing your relationship,” he said, softer than their prior conversation, as though even now he feared eavesdroppers. “It also eliminates the demand on me to marry if the court believes I have a wife lined up and ready.”

That all made a degree of sense and essentially lined up with what Harmony had originally intended when drafting her own plan to wed them, but so much had changed since then. And the volatility of their situation, with royal lineages and alliances all in the wind, made her more than a little nervous. “But what happens when you don’t marry her?”

He finally folded his book shut with a heavy sigh. He did not use a placeholder. Harmony knew that he simply memorized the page number as he closed them. Another of his unsettling little idiosyncrasies. “Well, presumably by the time the calls come for the marriage to take place, after all the matters of war are settled, I will have accumulated sufficient goodwill that the match is no longer required, and we can settle the matter amicably.”

Something about this wasn’t ringing quite true. Some fault in the plan she didn’t think she could see. So she began to poke around it. “You don’t think being jilted is going to harm her prospects?”

He gave her a look as though she were a fool. “I should hope so, I was intent upon having the two of you be together, which would preclude her from marrying someone else.”

“And what happens if public opinion has not turned by the time the war is done?”

There was definitely something more to this. Something that he was not telling her. Because he was Artemio, and he never laid out all of his cards until he was forced to. There was some twist or turn to his plan that he was not sharing with her, but when it came to Orsina, she could not simply sit back and trust in him. Not with something so very valuable to her.

“The war, or wars, as the case may be, are the only reason that I require the level of unity that I am demanding.” He reached for a slice of cured pork. “With the wars resolved, I am contented to have Espher devolve into as many backstabbing power struggles as always for a few years. The nobles may have their intrigue, as a little treat.”

He snapped the sliver of meat from between his fingers. As though he were a dog receiving its biscuit.

“Really? You’re just going to let everything go back to the way it was?” She wet her lips, then quoted him verbatim. “Inefficient?”

He chuckled. “Well, perhaps I shall not let it devolve fully, but the good grace that winning two impossible wars in a matter of months should earn me will be sufficient.”

“If you win them.”

He arched a wry brow at her. “Dear sister, have you ever known me to lose?”

It was her turn to grin, letting some small portion of the fierceness she felt show upon her face. “I seem to recall slapping you around the sparring ring more than a few times.”

He took her grimacing smile into account. He filed it away, the way he did all information. He understood that her baring of teeth was not an expression of joy, it was wrathful. He understood that he had incurred that wrath. The question was whether he’d correctly deduce it was because he was involving Orsina in his machinations or not. If he did, there was no sign of it in his casual shrug. “Regardless, if I do not win, then who is betrothed to whom becomes something of a moot point, wouldn’t you say?”

It would, absolutely, but the fact that he was dragging the conversation to such a close, and with such swiftness, suggested to Harmony that there was something he was trying to conceal. In others, directness could be read as honesty. In Artemio, it meant he was trying to hurry you along before you could notice the trap he’d left in his words. She ran the conversation back to herself in her mind. Searching for the sticking point he’d smoothed right over.

She wet her lips. “So settling the matter amicably, that means breaking off the engagement?”

He didn’t flinch when she hit the nail on the head, but the complete absence of an expression on his face was almost as telling. If he hadn’t been surprised to be caught out, then he’d have faked an expression of mild annoyance, but the absence of any response meant he wasn’t prepared. “If that is your desire when the time comes.”

It was another bout of odd phrasing. Not obscenely so, but odd enough to catch her attention now that she was looking for trouble. “And what about your desire, Art?”

His voice and expression had gone utterly still. He was at his most artificial when they came closest to the truth. Stilled by his desperation to give nothing away. “Desire is not a feature in my decision making.”

He was giving non-answers. He was denying the process, not the conclusions. “If I didn’t object, would you marry her?”

“I would never do anything to hurt you, dear sister.” He took a careful sip of wine, eyes never leaving her face. “Least of all snatching your first love from your embrace.”

“You do want to marry her.” The truth sank in even as the words spilled out of her mouth. Even as she’d been prying for the truth, she had never wanted to find it. “You haven’t denied it once. Just given the reasons you’ll give her up. When did you fall for her exactly? When have you had the time?”

He scoffed. “I have fallen for no one, nor would I allow such feelings to cloud my judgement even if I were to succumb to them at all. You are my sister, and I would never take her from you.”

It was the wrong thing to say. She was up from her seat before she’d even noticed her own movement. “You think you could take her from me? We’re in love, she isn’t some toy you can pluck from my hand.”

He glanced up at her new position, but he would not meet her gaze. “Harmony, I think we’re getting off topic.”

She stepped closer, looming over him. Nudging the plates on the table between them with her knees until they teetered on the edge of toppling towards him. “Would you prefer that I give my full attention to the fact that you want to mount the woman I’m in love with?”

With his hands splayed, he pushed the platters back into the center of the table. Still taking care not to meet her gaze. It applied little pressure to her legs, but she still wasn’t so wasteful as to have food scattered across the floor, so she settled back into her seat. She was also aware that she might have been exaggerating his position regarding Orsina somewhat, in her anger.

After a long moment of uncomfortable silence, Artemio spoke. “Are you familiar with the precepts of animal husbandry?”

A steadying breath kept Harmony in her seat. “Am I going to smack you by the end of this line of questioning?”

“Desirable traits fade in beasts, unless they are bred with others of their kind with similarly desirable traits.”

She carefully shifted all of the bowls remaining on one of the silver trays to the table and gave the tray a practice swing. “You may want to brace yourself.”

“But to breed within too small a group produces inherited health issues. The positive traits are amplified, but so too are the flaws. For true success you must have diversity of… ow.” She had leaned forward, ever so slightly, and bonged the tray on the top of his head. “Harmony, you cannot hit me anymore, kings cannot be struck.”

“I bet you can.” She grimaced as she took another resounding swing at him.

“Ow. Listen… listen… the Shadebound, they’ve been getting weaker, generation on generation, because we have so limited a pool to draw upon in selecting mates.”

She wound up for an even bigger swing this time. “You’d better run.”

“Orsina, she represents the first new blood in the pool in generations, and you can see how potent her natural gifts are.” He was out of his chair and ducking under the shimmering sweep of the silvery tray. “It would be irresponsible of me not to at least consider the production of some children with her.”

What followed was not a game of cat and mouse, it was a clumsy scramble about the room as she tried to beat him with the tray and he tried to evade her. She was angry, because of course she was angry, but the malice seemed to fade with each gong of the tray and each comedic yelp of pain. It was like they were children again, and she could not hold hate in her heart when she remembered her brother as a child.

And just like when he was a child, Art would not stay put to take a beating, instead jumping over furniture, scrambling around, and trying to reason with her. He had never learned that reasoning with her just gave her more opportunities to hit him. “Imagine it, Harmony, a bloodline on the throne for all future generations that outstrip all other Shadebound in power. What crises in succession would Espher have to face? What enemy from without could ever conquer us, with every heir and scion of the Volpe line imbued with Orsina’s incredible strength.”

She pointed at him with the tray from across the room. “What I need, is for you to stop imagining any scenario in which your moist little hands go anywhere near to Orsina.”

It would have been undignified for a king to yelp, so he did not. But there was the definite hint of yelping in his voice as it pitched up in disdain. “I would not force her, if that is your concern. I would simply present it to her as an option.”

The room was in a mild state of chaos. Chairs overturned, tapestries hanging askew from where Art had pulled them out into her path. Even the rugs had been rucked up. The only thing that seemed to have survived unscathed was the low table of food, which they had both been carefully dancing around.

“Just as you’ve presented marriage to her as an option?” Harmony snapped.

She could see the moment’s pause before he spoke. She knew what he was going to say an instant before he said it. Yet still she waited for him to spit it out. “Unfortunately, we have not yet had the opportunity to discuss our impending engagement.”

She threw the tray, and it beaned him right on the forehead, bouncing off with a comedic wobbling sound to crash to the floor. “What do you mean you haven’t… you didn’t even talk to her before you started spreading rumors that…”

He pressed the flat of his hand to the tray’s impact point on his head, but she could tell that it was mostly for show. If she’d actually meant to do him harm, she would have thrown it edge-first. “As I said, it was a decision carefully considered, but committed to in the heat of the moment. I have yet to consult with her or hear her opinion on the masquerade.”

This was enough to take the wind from Harmony’s sails. She lowered her hands to her sides instead of seeking a new weapon to continue the playful violence. “She isn’t with you?”

Artemio looked genuinely concerned for the first time in the proceedings. “Why should she be? As you are so intent on pointing out, she is your love, not mine.”

“She didn’t…” Harmony felt as though the floor were tilting beneath her feet. This wasn’t right. “I have not seen her since yesterday. I’d taken her absence to be a sign that she was in discussions with you.”

All of the boy was gone now, and only the cold man who wore the crown remained to glare at her. “The most potent weapon in our arsenal has gone wandering, on your watch, and you want to have an argument about some hypothetical future in which she may or may not be wed?!”

“She is not a weapon!” Harmony’s answer was barked out before she had given any thought to it.

“She was the deciding factor in our clash with the Arazi, she has brought a dragon to our cause as an ally, she has won the hearts and minds of our people to the degree that I must entertain thoughts of wedding her to secure my position as king, and you do not think her absence worthy of note?”

All at once it was as though all of the anger that he had been pushing down to keep this conversation entirely civil had reared up again. He strode across the room, and if she had not been his sister, Harmony suspected he might have struck her right then and there. Not the playful taps that she had been doling out with the tray but an actual blow. “Find her. Immediately. Tear up the whole city by its roots if you must. She is vital to all of my plans going forward.”

The rage on his face, the disappointment, she knew they were not an act, she could recognize his real passion when it rose to the surface, and a lifetime of habit had her on the back foot, already heading to the door to do as he commanded. But some small part of her was still trying to think like him, still trying to analyze every word he said. She paused.

“Vital to your plans?”

He rolled his eyes at her. As if she were some idiot noble who wouldn’t step in line. “Don’t act like it is some surprise that the most potent Shadebound in memory, capable of downing a legion of dragons in an afternoon, is not something that I need to take account of.”

But she had hooked onto his words now, and she was not letting go until she’d wrung the truth from him. “What plans, precisely, do you have for her? Beyond breeding her like a prize mare.”

His expression softened, all the empathy he had been faking before came flooding back. Perhaps it was not false, but the speed at which he switched tactics entirely suggested to her that nothing he said could be truly trustworthy. “Harm, please… do not misunderstand my…”

“Don’t Harm me. You little shit.” She stepped back up to him and pushed him back a step. “What are your plans for her, I need to know before I decide whether I want to deliver her back into your grasping hands?”

For his part, he gave no sign of resistance, staggering back the step, raising his hand to show it was empty. As though that meant anything. Showing her the stump of his wrist. Reminding her that he was soft and injured. Something to be protected. “I wouldn’t ask anything of her that I would not of myself.”

“Well, given that you’re willing to do anything to serve your purposes, that doesn’t really help to narrow things down much, does it.” She was not thrown off. She stepped after him again, and again he took a step back.

His tone became cajoling. “You have asked me why I have not been formulating a plan to address the Arazi threat. Complaining, one might say.”

“One might, if one were not in easy smacking range.” The fists tightening at her sides were not a display of anger that she was putting on. They were long-silenced rage finally making itself known.

“Well, that is because my solution to the Arazi problem requires a degree of subterfuge, something I am aware does not come entirely naturally to you.”

She seized the king by his collar to stop him backstepping again. Eyes narrowing. “Will you just spit it out, Art.”

He was speaking faster now, trying to get his manipulation out before she could cut him off. “By your account, and that of Kagan, the Arazi seek Orsina. Not war with Espher, not invasion or conflict, only her.”

“If this plan even meanders into the area of expecting me to hand her over to them, I should warn you that the last few blows to the skull will be the least of your worries.” Her grip on him had tightened, and she was surprised to discover that she truly meant it. Brother or king or anything else, if he meant to hurt Orsina, she would show no quarter.

“Of course not. I would not squander her in such a manner, even if you and I did not have our own attachments to her.”

“No, of course not,” she spat. “You wouldn’t send anyone to their death just because it was convenient.”

Once again he seemed to be struck dumb by surprise, making a show of all the emotions playing over his face. Forcing a crack into his breath. “Not her.”

“All right.” She released him, and he staggered back to clatter into the table and the forgotten food. “You aren’t going to trade her, but you want to play off the fact that she is their target.”

He nodded along with her, coaxing her. “Of course. I’d be a fool not to.”

“So what is your intention?” She spoke now with the soft and careful tone she had used to convince the Rana to retreat to their chambers and await the death he’d decreed for them. “To send her away, lead them on a wild goose chase?”

He did not glance sideways. He did not give any hint that he was trying to avoid giving his answer or that the answer he gave was anything but forthright. That in itself set alarms ringing in Harmony’s head. “Something like that, yes.”

She worked through the idea in her head as they spoke: Sending Orsina away could avert a clash with the Arazi, but it was not a plan that could work so easily. With the Agrantine and their many spies in court, perhaps, but not with the Arazi whose idea of diplomacy involved the throwing of spears. “They would not believe that she was elsewhere just because we told them so. They’d have to see her. She’d have to risk herself. Keep herself in their sight, to lead them off from our lands. You’d make bait of her.”

Artemio attempted to smile. “Bait is not the right word, I think. It comes with an implication of helplessness. As though one were staking out a goat to attract a wyvern, when in this case I suspect it would more be a matter of loosing a wyvern upon a cadre of goats.”

“I won’t let you.” She did not smile back. She did not fall for his deception. It was too late for them to go back to friendly discussion. “I won’t let you offer her up as sacrifice to lead the wolf from your door. You wanted to keep her here, you wanted her power, that means you have to pay for it.”

“Do you have any idea how many lives I can save? How many children will not lose parents? How many—”

She cut him off dead. “Strangers matter nothing to me.” She knew without a doubt that he cared nothing for the people he was professing to protect. He might do it because it was his duty or because they might serve his purposes, but there was no sorrow in him. He would shed no tears for dead peasants. Neither would she, truth be told. “I will not let you take Orsina. I will not let you throw her in the path of an oncoming charge in the hope they might trip over her broken body.”

He let all of his false empathy drain away until he was as cold as the dead. Cold as he’d ever been. No longer was he cringing or cowering. No longer was he showing weakness in the hope it would draw out some care from her. “What luck, then, that it has nothing to do with you whatsoever.”

Her hands, once clenched into fists had now gone loose at her sides. Her stance, tensed with anger, had now become light-footed. As though she were a dancer readying to take her first step. “I do not think there could be a matter that had more to do with me.”

Artemio crossed his arms. “Orsina is the one whom I would assign this task, and Orsina is the one who need give her consent. Not you.”

“Oh, so you’d actually ask her, instead of commanding?” She laughed out loud at the thought. As if Art would ever leave anything up to chance. As if he’d trust anyone to make the right decision for themselves instead of the one he had chosen for them. He was turning out to be worse than a tyrant. At least a tyrant wouldn’t believe that he was doing it for your own good.

“It is a fool’s practice to make demands on allies too often.” He said it all too casually, another quote from some long-dead scholar that nobody else could even remember. “She would see the reason of what I propose, even if you do not. You might care nothing for the plight of the common folk, but Orsina has not yet had that portion of her heart excised.”

“You think that just because she’s from…” Her eyes flicked to the door where the guards or servants might very well have their ears pressed even now. “You think that just because her lineage is not known, she will hand herself over to the Arazi to save some peasants?”

“She will not hand herself over to the Arazi.” He had given up all pretense of caring about the conversation now. He had returned to his seat, to his book, to his lunch. He sat himself down, and Harmony felt half a fool to still be standing there, spoiling for a fight. “I would beseech her to do quite the opposite in fact. To avoid them at all costs. To lead them off, so that our people need not suffer their wrath for her transgression against them.”

“What transgression?” Harmony’s words came with venom. “She’s done nothing to anyone.”

“She is their enemy.” He picked up his wine and took another generous sip. As though they weren’t deciding the fate of their only friend with this conversation. “Whether we understand the reason or not, they are sworn with religious fervor to slay her, and so we must contend with that reality whether we understand its root cause or not.”

“I will not let you do this to her.” At last, they had come to the sticking point. Harmony’s hand drifted from her side to rest on her sword-hilt. The threat obvious. “Do you think she’ll go along with whatever you say blithely?”

He met her gaze as steadily as he dared. “I do not think you hold as much influence over her as you believe.”

“One word from me, and she will be gone.” Harmony loomed over him where he sat. She had always had the advantage of height over him, and with him seated, it was amplified. “Her, and the dragon, and the dragon’s keeper. All of them. Gone in the night.”

She was backing him into a corner. She knew she was. But at this point, only direct confrontation was going to be enough to dissuade him from this foolish course. He set his glass down firmly. “Then the only logical course is that I must prevent you from speaking that word.”

She rushed at him then, only to be rebuffed by some invisible force that chilled her to the bone. She came on again, only to impact against the very same spectral wall. Bisnonno Fiore’s voice tickled at her ears, but she would not listen.

Step by painful step, she moved through the buffeting winds towards Artemio. The sword by her hip was stilled by her hand on its hilt, every motion made slow and deliberate. Closing the distance between them. Hubbub began outside of the chamber doors. The guards who had been diligently listening in were debating whether they should come in or not. It didn’t matter one way or the other to Harmony. Let them come. “There isn’t a man in your guard who can beat me.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. We shall not find out today.” Sighing, he raised his hand. Still, he did not reach for his blade. Still, he did not move to intercept her. The shadow stretching out from his feet doubled, and he traced burning lines in the air between them. At first they were just the faintest traces of flame, flickering so pale that Harmony was not certain she could even see them, but as they layered up, the points where they intersected shone brighter and hotter. A net of living flame. Woven out of the air to hold her. With a second sigh, Artemio pushed it off to drift towards her. Not even looking as it folded to encircle her.

She couldn’t move now, not from the force pushing her back, but from fear of the flames that surrounded her. Even if she could push on forward, it would only be to have the fire bite into her body. Still, she was not satisfied. “Scared to face me?”

With a tightening of his fist, the fine net became a band around her. The thin lines of flame that had danced in the air collided and sizzled in a solid barrier she could not escape. “My dear sister, an injury to the one of us is an injury to the other. There is nothing that crossing blades can accomplish, except for mutually assured destruction.”

“Then draw your sword, coward.” She spat, though the heat of her bonds turned it to mist before it could strike the ground.

He did cross the distance then, and for one glorious moment, she thought that he was actually going to do it. He was actually going to be baited into fighting her. But when she met his eyes, there was no fire there but that which reflected from around her. “Harmony, the world has changed around you. We are not children anymore. We are not outcasts or outliers. You cannot offer violence to a king as you would a brother that you brawl with. You cannot threaten the body of the king without those about him taking up arms. I am afraid that you must be confined until such time as you have adapted to this reality.”

At last, the guards must have overcome their fear of interruption as they all came pouring into the chamber like they had burst loose of a bottle of sparkling wine. A half dozen more of them than Harmony could recall seeing, at least. Art returned to pick up his book and retrieve what of his lunch hadn’t been knocked onto the rugs. “If you would be so kind, take my sister away and secure for her some comfortable chamber from which she will not find easy exit. I want her treated with the utmost of care at all times. And find me the Lady Orsina with all haste. I have a task for her, and she had been absent from court all day.”

As the guards moved in to seize her, the flames died away, and she went for her sword. But unseen by her, he had been channeling heat through it the whole time she was bound. As the pommel seared their crest into her palm, she screamed out. “Art, you bastard. You’re as bad as Father ever was.”

Finally after all of this time, she had said something to break him out of his polite detachment. His cheeks flushed, and he roared back. “Father was a self-obsessed old cretin who would have burned all of Espher to ash if it granted him the throne. I live only to serve. I would do anything for this great nation. Anything!”

For one quivering moment, all in the room was silent, the guards and Harmony frozen in surprise at this outburst. But then Art let out a heavy breath and gestured for them to take her away. “The fact that you cannot distinguish between the two extremes speaks to your own lack of perspective rather than anything I have said or done.”

“Art…”

He sat down and opened his book. Not troubling to glance up as she was dragged away.

7 - The Man Who Would Be King
Gemmazione, Regola Dei Volpe 1

There had been a lot of chatter in the water refinery. More talk, as the various segments within the group gathered to discuss what they had seen and learned, sharing all the dense information that would have made any spymaster jealous as freely as they would the price of milk at market. They were everywhere, from the palace through the city and out to the farms beyond. Every inch of Espher could have been described, given time for someone to ask their buddy, or their cousin, or the friend of a friend of a friend. Their network expanded out from them exponentially, and as confusing as Orsina may have found the intricacies of courtly life, at least it was somewhat limited in size by how few of the elite there actually were compared with these people.

She was passed from group to group, learning what she could about their efforts. How they’d helped break the siege during the Agrantine invasion, how some of them had fought alongside her at the battle of the Selvaggia, as militia spearmen. From the mongrel-men, she learned the depths to which they had to sink to make ends meet. Things that even in her darkest times she would never have considered. So many of them were grieving. Children and parents, friends, and loves all lost beneath the crushing wheels of war and progress.

Too much had been lost. Far too much. With every fresh-shed tear, she could feel her anger mounting, until it was there inside of her skin, prickling like her dragon-fire scars. With all that she had done, the things she’d seen and the places she’d been, she had forgotten that this was where she came from. These were her people. She might have liked Art, maybe even loved Harmony, but they were from a different world. She had more in common with the rabbit man who gathered pine nuts beyond the city walls than she did either one of them. She had more in common with everyone here than with anyone in the palace.

As the night stretched on and she learned more about what had happened, about the assassinations undertaken at the command of their leader, her affection began to fade. They’d had a leader, it seemed. One they’d all agreed would help to destabilize the already chaotic courts. He’d died, and that was why the killings had stopped. Yet the instability they’d wrought persisted. Without it, Artemio could never have ascended to the throne. When people were afraid, they reached for what was familiar. They reached for their old kings and their old gods.

In the early hours of the morning, their gathering drew towards its end, and Orsina sought for her servant to lead her back to the palace, but it seemed Armida had already absconded while the conversation ran thick. In truth, she needed no escort nor any direction back to her temporary home, but it was taken on as an excuse by her hosts. “Dark is the night, dear girl. And long. Come with us, we shall settle you until morning.”

Were she not already so taken with these old beast-women, Orsina might have felt some twinge of danger, as though they were trying to confine her, but in truth their overbearing invitations-cum-demands were an odd comfort to her. Like the bickering hens of her village back home, all preening. Were it not a seditious movement, Orsina was fairly certain they’d all be trying to feed her and set her up with their sons too. It was the universal language of old women everywhere, and now that she was alone in the world, she could not help but cherish it. She blamed Mother Vinegar, of course, for making her this way. The memory of her, not the part of her that resided still trapped between existence and oblivion within the hollow of Orsina’s soul. The old woman had been the only parent she could remember, and even her memories of that were tainted now, seen from two angles, with two chains of memory attached. It made her want to linger in their company.

And why shouldn’t she. She spent all her days at the palace alone, whittling through her hours reading books that seemed to say nothing new. Who would even know if she spent some time in better company?

The bed they ushered her to, in some forgotten bunkhouse in some soured corner of the capital, scarred by dragon’s fire, was not so comfortable as the one in her palace chambers. It was hard and lumpy, the mattress stuffed with straw. She slept away the usually fitful hours until dawn when her shade usually troubled her the most as though she were a swaddled babe and woke up with an ache in her bones that felt like home.

It seemed that for all the few hours she’d slept, the old women of the rebellion had slept fewer still. There were three of them bustling around the kitchen when Orsina came down. The old turtle woman who had been her introduction to so much of the common’s history was among them. A human-looking woman who looked of an age with the old turtle woman, eyes blind and milky. Another woman but a little younger, fur poking up from her collar though she kept her face shaved clean. She was the first to speak, as though Orsina were her own daughter. “Look who’s finally rolled out of bed.”

The old turtle woman chuckled. “Must be nice to be young and sleeping until noon.”

“Can’t remember ever sleeping to noon in my day,” said the blind one.

The shaven woman mumbled, “All that soft living, I’d say.”

“Soft living?” Orsina couldn’t help but fall into the rhythm of it. “I spent the better part of last year in a cage.”

The blind old woman was pottering at the stove, muscle memory carrying her along though her sight had failed her. “Plenty of time for sleeping in a cage, I’d wager.”

The turtle woman laughed. “Oh, don’t poke at the girl.”

“I’ll poke where I please,” she spluttered.

“Better poke at that porridge, it’s starting to stick.” The shaven woman had lines upon her face when she turned and stretched. Those places in her wrinkles where the razor had not touched. It reminded Orsina of the face of a cat, the patterning.

The turtle woman bustled in then, shell nudging the other two aside. “Serve her some out will you, poor thing’s as skinny as a stick. Surprised there was a cage could hold her.”

“You don’t need to…” Orsina began, only to have a wooden bowl shoved into her hands. “Thank you.”

She settled herself in the single chair in the corner of the room. Perched upon it, out of the way of the old women as they worked. The fur-striped face turned towards her for just a moment before the grumbling went on. “Don’t know what they’re feeding folk up at the palace. You’d think that with all that money they’d eat well, but half them women look starved.”

“Oh that’s just the fashion, isn’t it,” the turtle woman said with a chuckle.

“Can’t remember having fashion in my day.”

The furry woman cackled. “Missed us down here in the gutters, I expect.”

“Hope it keeps on missing if it leaves you looking half starved,” added the turtle woman, who would not have lacked for girth regardless.

“She’s right, though, that fancy food doesn’t put no weight on you. All them little bites.” Orsina paused in scarfing down the porridge as fast as possible with a little wince at her forgotten manners, then both the sighted old women started laughing while the blind one shook her head.

Eventually the sputtering laughter broke down into coughing, and only when they’d all recovered from that did the turtle woman give her a reassuring smile with her blunted gums on show. “You eat up, girl, you’ll need the strength.”

“Why is that?” Orsina tried to quip back. “Do you mean to have me fighting in a pit today?”

She waddled on over to Orsina’s side then. Taking the empty bowl from her, still smiling wide. All the wrinkles on her face a testament to a life that had stretched longer than many kingdoms. “You’ve done a lot of listening, and you’ll do more soon enough. And listening, that’s harder work than talking. Making words, that’s easy as letting out air, but listening. That’s work.”

“After everything that you’ve already taught me, there is still more to tell?” Orsina couldn’t help but feel a little taken aback. Her head was already spinning with all she’d learned.

“Them with the money for it put their history down in books. Them that don’t, all we’ve got is our words, our memories. We’ve got to pass the stories down. Mother to daughter. Father to son. All the way down from the day it happened to the moment we rise this day.” The turtle woman looked half crushed by the burden of all the stories she had to carry. “Easier for some of us, having been around for some of the things we tell of. But I’d wager you’d get the same story, word for word, from any of the young ones.”

Taking Orsina by the arm, she led her through to the common room of the house, where the noise and clatter of the kitchen faded. Just as she’d had straw for her mattress last night, so too was the floor here scattered with it. Straw and reeds and the herbs she couldn’t remember smelling since Sheepshank. The furniture was old in a way that nothing in the palace had been. Everything there might have experienced the same turn of time, but here every year showed. The chips knocked out. The stains sunken in. The fabric worn through to bare strands. At any moment it might fall apart, the craftsmanship not shoddy but nowhere near to the masterworks she had become accustomed to parking her behind upon.

The turtle woman had her own special seat, with no back to it, but with such wide arms that she could wedge her shell into their curve quite comfortably. Like a button in its hole. “What do you know about Espher?”

Orsina tried to give this question the kind of weight that it deserved. It was a collection of people. It was a nation. It was a place. It was a patch of land, much like any other. It was music and stories and food. It was all built up to be this big amorphous thing, like her amalgamated shade, so much more important and powerful than its component parts could have ever been. Eventually she ventured, “It’s under attack from all sides?”

“Not the place,” the old woman chuckled, cast in shadow by the fire just starting to burn at her back. “The man.”

“There was a man named Espher?” There was a tickle in the back of Orsina’s mind. The Owl in the library in the House of Seven Shadows was the keeper of old knowledge, old secrets, things it had picked up in pieces from the students that came through, a repository of knowledge so dense that even it didn’t know how much it contained. She had gone to it in her desperation and traded away memories from her early life, things that it could never have learned from the wealthy and powerful who paraded through Septombra. She had heard something about this from him. Some reference to a reference in a long-forgotten text. Fragments of words that her own life had eaten away at as the shades had eaten away at her. Progenitor myth. Originator. Intrinsic ties to the kingdom. These little nothings made sense to her now.

The old woman had paused long enough for Orsina to parse through her thoughts, but it was not for her benefit. She was trying to shape a word. “Azfer, I think it was Azfer, to start with, when he first came down off the steppes.”

Azfer. Orsina felt the shape of the name. It hadn’t been in the texts. She could see why, now. “Az… he was Arazi?”

“This would have been before the Arazi were Arazi.” The old woman shifted, and the wood beneath her creaked, trapped between her bulk and the flagstones below. “Before the dragons and unification. When they still had their gods and their freedom to run.”

The paranoia that should have been running frantically alongside her throughout this entire venture finally caught up. She had been put at ease by these common people like her. By the old women who reminded her of grandmothers and doting aunts. They had made her feel safe, and now that the suspicion caught up to her that she was not, it was all she could do to remain still and calm. To keep the shade from leaping to her rescue before she knew anything for sure. She would not be caged again, that she knew.

“How do you know so much about the Arazi?”

“Girl, look at me.”

Orsina’s head snapped around involuntarily to the fur-collared woman, come through at last from the kitchen.

“Part human, part beast, does it not remind you of anything?”

The fear was mounting now. All of the people she’d thought of as being just like her. Kin but for a few scales or feathers, and all of this time they were the enemy. “You’re Arazi? All of the…”

She didn’t know what word to say, what word they used among themselves. The words that others used for them now stung of prejudice, but what else was there to call them. If not Arazi then what?

“Mongrels, aye. We’re of the same fold. Though you’d never know from how high and mighty they are.” The fur-striped woman came to sit, not on one of the chairs, but lithely coiling up on the floor by the turtle woman’s feet. “As if a big flapping lizard is any better than old Buttercup, here.”

What Orsina had first taken for some other piece of furniture in the dim light leaned ever so slightly to the side to nudge against the fur-striped woman’s hand. It was a tortoise, so vast in size that it had become unrecognizable as a creature. It was as broad across as Orsina was tall. Too big to get out of the room through the doors. Grown from smaller in here or sealed in on purpose. She couldn’t even imagine how old it had to be.

Still she tried to drag her attention back to more pressing concerns. “But if the first settlers of Espher were Arazi, then why aren’t you…”

“Get it straight, girl, there was no Arazi. There were just… people.” The turtle woman snorted, and Buttercup made the same noise in harmony. “Folk with the beast bond, and folk without. Back then, you wouldn’t get killed or exiled if you were born without the bond. You just… lived, knowing what you were missing. Cruel enough punishment for being born wrong, I’d say.”

Orsina’s brows drew down once more as she tried to parse all of this new information. “Then why would the people without it establish dominion over…”

Buttercup’s bondmate coughed loudly to interrupt her. “Am I telling this tale, or are you?”

“Sorry.” Orsina leaned back and fell into an awkward silence. “Sorry.”

“Aye, Azfer, he was the first to come down off the steppes to this land. And here he found an abundance of folk already staying because the farming was good, and the hunting was good, and there was clean water and peace. Folk without the bond, mind. They made him their king, though he was an exile from far-off lands. Because of what he could do.”

Orsina couldn’t help but ask, “Because he could bond to animals, they made him king?”

“Because he couldn’t. If he were able to bond to beasts, why do you think his own people would have cast him out. No. Our boy Azfer, there was something wrong with him. He could feel the bonds, but he couldn’t make the bonds on his own. Nothing that lived would come to his call…”

It clicked then. Finally. What would make this one beast-bonded nobody into the king of Espher.

“The dead…”

“Aye. The dead. There was something wrong in young Azfer’s soul. A hole in him where there should have been a hook. And when the dead came a-wandering out on the steppes, he could hear them. He could see them. He could lord over them, way the Arazi do their mounts.”

It made an awful kind of sense, but still Orsina had to confirm what she thought they were telling her. “He was Shadebound.”

“Right enough he was. First of them. A mutant.” The fur-lined woman’s voice came in a growl by the end, deep and throaty. It made Orsina wonder what she’d bonded to.

“And they banished him for that?”

“They feared him. Feared what he could make the dead do. Feared that he was in league with the dead against them.” It was as though the turtle woman was withdrawing back into her shell. Face receding into the deeper shadows. “They weren’t all wrong in that. Once he’d found his power, Azfer didn’t hold back none in punishing them that had mocked him for being without the bond.”

“Sounds like ideal kingly behavior,” Orsina couldn’t help but scoff.

“Don’t it just. So like a king.” Slowly, the retreat into darkness was reversed. “Anyways, he came down here, bound the dead, set them to work for him. Made slaves of the free folk that didn’t already worship him for saving them from the shades. Then he set to work making as many more mutants as he could. Every poor woman he could find he lay down with. And some half of the babes came with extra shadows trailing off them. See, Azfer wasn’t satisfied with just being king. He wanted the Arazi to hurt forever. He wanted the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the men who’d crossed him to lie awake at night, fearing his return. And that, that’s your first king of Espher. A right hero, wouldn’t you say?”

“So all the nobles of Espher, all the Shadebound, they’re… his blood?”

She stumbled over the last words. Trying not to say what she knew they were thinking. Tainted blood. Mutation. Monster. Just like Orsina.

“So far as we can be telling.”

“Then why are you here? Why are there… bonded people here?” Orsina tried not to stumble over her new attempt at naming them. She’d really need to speak to Kagan to learn the right words in their own language. It was probably something simple. She probably needed to speak to Kagan anyway. All of this new information would matter to him as much as it did to her. “If you knew what a monster he was? If you knew what he’d do to hurt you? Why come to Espher?”

“Because many a hundred year after that, we had a monster of our very own. A man bonded to a dragon, who went around killing our gods and making us bend the knee to him.” Orsina tried not to shudder at the memory of him. The man who’d pretended to be her friend instead of a god-killer. She had faced him in the chaos above the Arazi homelands, but it had not been conclusive enough for her. Maybe she’d hit him, maybe she’d missed. Maybe he’d never come out of the mountain at all. Her memories were all a tangle when she let the shade take her over. All sight and sound and scent with no logic to it. Like a nightmare that she chose to live. If the turtle woman saw any of that in Orsina’s face, she didn’t say a word. “We couldn’t be safe without our gods to protect us from the dead. That was his point. We needed him and his dragons to keep them away. So it was him or the dead.”

Somewhere across the vast gulf of the city, she felt Kagan stir in his dreams. Just thinking of him was enough to bring the connection between them to life. A thread connecting them, a tickle of sensation. It was daytime, yet he was sleeping?

“We’re the ones who chose the dead.” The striped woman spoke softly, sadly. “Who chose to come south rather than submit to him. To the kingdom of the dead. To Espher.”

It was the last piece of the puzzle, obviously, but Orsina was still completely lost. “But… why?”

“Because our gods were among them dead now.” Buttercup had nestled into her bondmate’s leg as they spoke, nuzzling like a dog begging for attention, but now she finally stilled. Turned her little dark eyes towards Orsina. Stared just as the old mongrel-women did. “We need somebody to bring them back.”

It left her stunned, to hear such a mad idea spoken so freely. Orsina knew nothing of gods, nothing of the Arazi ones in particular, but the idea that one could be conjured up with the same ease as some dead human seemed vaguely insulting to everyone involved. Except… that little itch in the back of her head where Gufo di Archivo had imparted so much ancient and useless knowledge began to burn once more. It was known that the famed dead were all the more likely to become shades because of the belief that people put into them. Just as the folktales surrounding Mother Vinegar and Ginny Greenteeth had ensured their survival beyond death.

What about gods, then? Things that were already subject to belief and worship before their death, surely they’d be almost guaranteed their place as shades. Yet in all the annals of history that had been bestowed upon her subconscious mind, she could find no example of such a thing. She supposed that was because, by their nature, a god was immortal. It was hard to create a shade when their living source never died.

Or at least, none had ever died before. Not before the coming of Konus and the rise of the Arazi. Not until a man took the natural connection between human and beast and contorted it in his hunt for power. What kind of shade would Konus make if he were to die now? Would his be so different from the remains of the gods he’d burned?

The dragon within her longed to know. Longed to swallow that shade down whole and add all the belief that the Arazi people had invested in Konus over the centuries to its own power. Konus might not have made a god of himself yet, but his legend was as ripe for the plucking.

It took all Orsina had to push her shade back down, to empty her mind of such thoughts. It was becoming all too easy now to let the shade rule her. To let it slip into the hollow parts of her mind that she’d burned away. Parts it had grown to fit so perfectly. She was no longer herself, and the shade was no longer just a shade. They were one and the same, more and more with each time she touched its power.

She must have made her excuses, must have apologized and left, because when she came back to herself, she was nowhere near to the old women or the tumbling-down houses on the edge of town. She was in eye-shot of the palace, her feet having guided her there of their own volition.

Except that wasn’t true. It was not her feet that had guided her there, it was the shade. When she lost control, the other end of the scales rose up, and the shade seized it. It had brought her here, it had some purpose in returning her to the palace, though she could not say what it was. Whether it was the remains of Mother Vinegar trying to usher her home, the dragon trying to bring her back to defend the territory it had claimed as its own, or maybe just the old rebel leader who wanted her to cleave Artemio’s head from his body with the sickles on her belt. Any one of them could have brought her back here, or all of them could have, working in perfect harmony to guide her body—their anchor to the world—back to where she’d be the most useful to them. Her life was not her own.

Kagan still slept in the warm sunlight. Yelena was out basking in the heat, and he was relishing the sensations of it after so long. They had been what guided her home. They were home. Not this vast edifice of white stone and self-satisfied construction. A beacon in the dark storm that had consumed her. Guiding her back.

Palace guards swarmed her as she approached the doors, chattering away at her as she parsed not a single word. She was ushered in, guided up stairwells and through corridors, the bodies of the guardsmen pressed in all around her. She thought she needed to speak with Kagan and felt his concern whispering down to her from where he lay huddled by Yelena’s side, but that was as much as she was able to achieve before she lost her focus in the bedlam. Tapestry and white stone passed in a blur, but the bodies, the swarming bodies were what she saw the most. Pressing in all around. Courtiers and strangers in constant flowing flux.

At last a door was shut behind her, and she was alone again, but for the presence of Artemio at the far end of a long table. She did not recognize the room, but then, she did not know most of the palace. She could not have given an accounting of her own chambers in truth. All that she knew, it was as though she had learned it fresh and through the fog of a mind that filtered part of what her senses told her to her passenger. The tapestries on the walls seemed to depict fighting, and the braziers were tall, to illuminate the maps spread out before Artemio. Heavy, cast-iron things that would have been difficult to haul around. Probably fixtures of the room. Which meant it was Covotana’s war room. It made a twisted degree of sense for them to have a room dedicated exclusively to the planning of war; war was the sport of kings and nobles, and they had individual rooms lower in the palace depths devoted exclusively to the storage of cheeses. For something so important to the nobility to only be dedicated a single room was a greater surprise. She’d probably find other supplemental war rooms off the sides of this one. Outgrowths to house those deemed too low in class to be admitted to this chamber.

Yet here she, a peasant, stood, with the full knowledge of the king as to her identity.

Artemio looked so small, all alone in this huge chamber. Just one man in a place built on a scale of giants. It should have been crammed to the rafters with advisors and allies, all clamoring to be heard, but instead it was still and silent as the grave, the only sound the gentle scratch of quill on paper.

There was no question he knew she was there, this was some sort of game, not speaking to her. She found she didn’t have the patience for it. Not when her hands itched to snatch up her sickles and set the common man free. She blinked that thought away, alien to her.

“You asked for me?”

He glanced up from his papers. “So nice of you to come home after absconding without a word.”

“I didn’t realize I was a prisoner.” The words were out before she could bite her tongue. That one had sounded less like Rossi the rebel and more like Mother Vinegar. It had that edge to it.

Artemio chuckled as though she had been making a joke instead of giving him cheek. She had no idea how to talk to him now he had a crown. It had been awkward and strange before all of this, and it was only growing stranger. He let her see the soft and deliberate smile he’d plastered onto his face very deliberately, tilting up his chin so it was visible even in the dim light. “No more a prisoner than we all are, bound to our duties. You were missed while you were gone.”

“Sorry.” She wrested control of her voice back. “I didn’t mean to cause anyone any trouble.”

“No trouble at all, merely plans that had to move ahead without your consultation.” He beckoned to her, and she walked the long dark length of the hall. Each footstep echoing out. She realized she still wore the tattered brown cloak she’d used to disguise herself over her day-old dress, and now she was standing before the king. She supposed that it wasn’t as though he could think any less of her than he already did.

The map of Espher was spread out and weighted down at its corners with empty glasses and a candlestick. To the north, where the Selvaggia and Sheepshank had once stood, there was now a patch of paper, glued down, showing the new lay of the land. The scar that Orsina herself had put there. Not the mud and the ruins and the hacked-down woods that had stood the test of centuries, just the burn. It was labeled “Artemio’s Triumph.” His name, on her awful handiwork. It seemed apt somehow.

His hand, the only one he had left, looked pale even by the warm glow of candlelight. Fingers pointed and moved along. Marking out the watchtowers to the north. Much of the steppes’ foothills and plains had already been ceded to the Arazi without a fight. Even the land behind the watchtowers. Evacuated, despite Artemio’s insistence that the dragon-lords were not a threat.

“When the Arazi forces arrive, the only warning that we will have will come from these towers. There is a chain of beacons that will be lit down the north road, all the way back to the capital. Within two hours of their encroachment over our borders, we shall know.” He trailed his finger down the beacons on his map, pausing at each one for a moment as they were lit and the warning was carried on. “From that moment on, the slaughter will begin. The dragons will strafe back and forth across the farmlands and crofts, burning and slaughtering indiscriminately. Killing not only men, women, and children, but cattle and crops. Ensuring that anyone who doesn’t die then will starve through the winter. Choking our supply lines and ensuring that Covotana cannot withstand a siege of any appreciable length.”

The words, they came out clean and crisp as though he were reciting them from a book, like he always did. Like this was not some story he was inventing but a history he’d glimpsed before its time.

Worse yet, it was relentless. Every time he paused for breath, she hoped that it was done, but it wasn’t. It never would be. All of the future was laid out before him, and he was set to describe every awful detail of what was going to unfold to her. “As this is happening, the main body of their army will proceed south behind the screen of fire that the dragons lay down. Any civilians they encounter who survived the initial onslaught will be enslaved or slaughtered, depending upon the pace set by the scouts. While it is possible they will slow to assault other townships on the way south, most likely they will progress directly towards Covotana through the most densely populated stretch of land in all of Espher. Once more, fire and slaughter shall mark their passage. On arrival here, the main body of our forces will face them, and our army will be massacred, the walls melted, rape and pillage will be conducted throughout the city until finally they depart to begin preying on the undefended towns throughout the rest of Espher. Those they will almost certainly enslave, having no real need to destroy them now. By the end of a three- to six-month campaign, they will have annihilated Espher’s sovereignty entirely, and we will be a new part of the Arazi Empire.” He paused, then added. “By we, I, of course, exclude myself. My sister and I would be figureheads for any survivors of the current regime, so we would have to be publicly humiliated, brutalized, and executed.”

He opened his mouth to begin the next stretch of recitation. The horrors of it built up into too much for her to bear. The little detail of Harmony’s fate a twist in her stomach. “If you know all of this, why aren’t you doing anything to stop it?!”

He cocked his head to the side in confusion. “What do you think I am doing right now?”

“Talking.”

He tutted like he was one of their tutors in the House of Seven Shadows. “I am informing you of the consequences should you fail in the task I am assigning you.”

“Task?” She blinked. Finally, something to do with herself other than linger and wallow in her own thoughts. Somewhere to go, a problem to solve… She was startled at how desperate she was for someone else to tell her what to do. She supposed that it alleviated the pressure on her to siphon through all the thoughts in her head to work out which ones were actually her own and not the prompting of some primordial specter trying to trick her into obeying its will. “What do you want me to do?”

His shoulders seemed to slump a little, as though he had been expecting resistance from her. How bizarre. “I want you to lead them away. It is you they seek, not me, not Espher, you.”

“You want me to give myself up to them?” She gawked at him in surprise. She’d heard that he could be cold and calculating, but she’d never seen it. Not like this. “I won’t be put in a cage again, I won’t be their plaything. I’d rather die than go through that again.”

“I do not understand why everyone is so inclined to think the worst of me.” He pinched at the bridge of his nose. “My intention is that you shall fly north on your… Yelena, make yourself visible to the Arazi, and then lead them astray.”

Baring his face once more, he set his finger back on the Selvaggia and trailed it from the patch on the map down to the east. “This route will avoid most of the population, ensuring the minimum number of deaths. I believe that their focus on you will also prevent the true dragons from spreading out from the main force, though I cannot guarantee that. You will continue southwards, over the mountain range abutting the great lakes. It is rough terrain that their ground forces will likely have to split up to cover. I have already sent as many of our scouts as possible into those mountains to begin laying traps and to wage a war of attrition against them as they attempt to pass. It will thin their numbers slightly and slow their advance sufficiently that you should only have to face off against their flighted wyverns and true dragons if they do catch up to you.”

She could see this new alternate history playing out behind her eyes. A different book that Artemio had picked from the shelves of his mind and started reciting. She tapped at the map herself. At the point where land and mountains met. “And if they go around instead?”

“My feeling is that they will not while they are in pursuit. Not when you might make use of the mountainous terrain to seclude yourselves and rest. Even if they do, it will still buy you time, and the foothills are mostly dominated by vineyards.” There was something like a smile playing over his lips. “We will spill wine, not blood.”

She was all too willing to accept his words at face value, to believe everything he was saying, but there were more suspicious minds contained within her slight frame. Mother Vinegar was the type of woman who would not only look a gift horse in the mouth but also ask for a medical history. Meanwhile, Rossi did not believe a single word Artemio spoke on principle, assuming that everything was a deception just as every move of his distant ancestor had been. The dragon was happy to take everything said at face value but objected to anything resembling obedience. Still, the clamor of them all sparked at least a little doubt in Orsina.

“How long ago did you send out your scouting parties into those mountains? It is a long ride from here to the eastern border.”

He met her gaze steadily. Though he was caught out, it did not seem to concern him. “They were dispatched the day after your return to us.”

“So this was your plan from the very beginning, to throw me at them?” Bitterness crept into her words. Unfamiliar to her, all too familiar to the older and the wiser minds that had become a part of her. She’d wondered why he’d accepted her back from behind enemy lines so easily and demanded so little of her for her new station in life. She hadn’t realized she was a sow being fatted for the slaughter.

“You will serve as bait, not fodder.”

Still she could not bring herself to let it go. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you had already suffered. I did not want to haunt your dreams with the challenges to come. I wanted you to rest.”

Orsina’s eyes narrowed, but Mother Vinegar looked out from behind them. “And?”

“And…” Artemio hesitated, then he made a show of sighing. “I wanted to maintain secrecy, and while I know you are quite excellent at keeping things to yourself, my sister is not, and I have no doubt that you would have informed her of my plans and sent her in here wailing about the unfairness of it all.”

“It is unfair.” Orsina conceded to Harmony in her absence. “It’s unfair to ask this of me.”

Artemio watched her, trying to gauge how much of that feeling was merely a repetition of his sister’s stance, and how much was actually Orsina. She could feel his eyes boring into her, reading her expression, reaching to read her mind. Good luck to him trying to make sense of that mess.

Yet even as he tried to understand her, he spoke. “I know that. But I will not do you the discourtesy of a false apology. It is my purpose to make the difficult decisions that must be made. To gamble that my wit is more than a match for that of our enemies. This is our best option.”

The sad truth was that the opportunity to have some purpose again weighed heavier on the scales of her decision making than what Harmony would think. Possibly even more than what she herself thought. “Then what?”

He was back to his map the moment he thought she had conceded. “From the mountains, you shall head southwards still until you reach the Tagliare River. From there, you will cut across to my family’s lands on the border. Once there, make all haste back to Covotana.”

She tilted her head to the side as though a different angle might ease her confusion. “You want them attacking from the south instead of the north? How does that help? Isn’t the south meant to be the ‘bread basket of Espher.’ All that rich farmland? You want that burned instead?”

“I would of course prefer for nothing to burn, but if some part of Espher must die so that the rest might live, I would make it the province of Tagliare and the Osservatore.” He managed a grim smile. “If someone must sacrifice their lands to be a battlefield, it should be me.”

Orsina’s eyebrow seemed to have slipped loose of her control, lifting up on the accord of some shade as she said, “How noble of you.”

He maintained his smile in the face of her incredulity. “They’ve been badly mismanaged for a generation; little will be lost.”

From the moment she was born, shades had come whispering secrets in her ear. It had cost her more friends than she could count in those early days, before she had developed her hard-won control. Control that was all but gone now. The whispers were back. Pointing out not secrets, but things she had not observed. “But people will know what you’ve sacrificed for them. That will buy you some popularity.”

He did not scowl, but he did fix her with his gaze in a somewhat surprised way. “For all your claims that you have no interest in politics, you are surprisingly astute when it comes to analysis.”

She laid her hand on the map, fingerprint tapping by his. “Why am I heading home instead of fighting them at Tagliare?”

“I beg your pardon?”

She tapped again, pointedly. “Why am I running instead of joining your army in Tagliare?”

“Because you will be exhausted from days of flight.” He settled down into the seat beside the map. The one she doubted he had touched down on in hours. “And because it is not a battle I wish to see decisively settled, not immediately anyway.”

“Why wouldn’t you…” Once more it was not her own mind that supplied the answer but the specter of a better one, still whispering away. “Agrant.”

“Agrant indeed.” He seemed obscenely pleased that she’d worked it through. She didn’t have the heart to tell him it was actually the amalgam shade. “You were there when the ambassador made his threats. He would not have risked his words if it meant that his emperor might lose any advantage. They could not afford to give us time to prepare. If they were here making threats, then his armies must have been close to breaching our borders. I expect to receive word of their arrival shortly.”

Now that she actually understood why she was doing what he was asking her to, all of the tight coils in her stomach seemed to loosen. This was not a fool’s errand after all. “You want me to lead the Arazi to the Agrantine army?”

She met his gaze then and saw for just a moment a hint of the wrath that he restrained so politely in company. “Preferably to the very emperor himself.”

“You think they’ll fight each other instead of allying against us?”

Artemio seemed to weigh the thought, as though he had not already given it more than its due consideration. “Both are ruled by megalomaniac dictators. Those are not men who will tolerate an opponent of equal power anywhere on the field, nor will their egos tolerate the sharing of power in an alliance. One will seek to dominate the other.”

“And if they don’t?”

She was looking for any hint of doubt in his face. Any suggestion that he was not completely certain. None showed.

“Then I still only have to plan a war on one front instead of two. A distinct improvement, I should say.”

She nodded her head, almost out of habit, then turned to leave. “I’ll need to speak to Kagan, pack what I need.”

“I have already attended to those matters on your behalf. In your absence.”

She stopped, foot hovering halfway through a step. “He’s ready to go?”

“Go?” Artemio looked confused. Or he gave the appearance of confusion at least. “Why should he go anywhere?”

“You think he’s going to let me just take his dragon and leave?”

“If that is my command, I am certain of it.”

She felt a rebellious twinge that she assigned to Rossi. “He isn’t yours to command.”

“Kagan will remain here with me, to brief me on matters relating to the Arazi.”

She rolled her eyes at his transparency. He didn’t want Kagan to go because he was scared the three of them would make a run for it. Kagan was his hostage to ensure Orsina’s compliance. “And why do you need to be briefed on that?”

He didn’t smile, because it would have been entirely inappropriate, and there was nothing that Artemio did better than present a mask of appropriate behavior, but there was a degree of smugness in his voice, as though he were winning a game, as he said, “Because the watchtower flames reached us an hour ago. The Arazi are now on Espheran soil, and you must depart with all haste.”

Whatever argument she had left in her was knocked out with that blow. “Now?!”

“Immediately.”

The rush of adrenaline drove away all her second guesses. “I need to find Harmony; I need to tell her where I’m going.”

Artemio was on his feet now, ushering her towards the door. “She knows.”

“I need to say goodbye, in case… anything happens.”

He didn’t roll his eyes, but the fact that they were not in mid-swivel was clearly an act of will. “I’m sure your sentiments have already been thoroughly expressed. We do not have the time.”

“But… wait…” She dug in her heels, some thought still chewing at the back of her awareness, desperate to be heard. He was rushing her for a reason.

He’d waited until he had her consent to his quest before revealing that it had to be undertaken with such celerity; it was all deliberate. “I regret that there is no time for waiting. You must depart.”

She laid a hand on the door before he could pull it open. “Two riders.”

He looked genuinely harried now. He’d obviously assumed she’d be easier to lead. “I beg your pardon?”

“Yelena won’t tire, but I will. If we’re fleeing night and day from the Arazi, I’ll need someone else with me, to keep me in the saddle.”

“I shall assign one of my personal guard to see to your safety.” He reached for the door handle once more, but she did not let it go.

“I need someone who can ride a dragon, it isn’t as simple as sitting on it, you have to move with them, or you risk being tossed off their back with every stroke of their wings. I need Kagan or I need Harmony, or this will not work.”

She could not see the wheels spinning behind his eyes. She could not hear the strain as he tried to guess at her intention, guess at how much of his intentions he’d given away to her, how much rope he could afford to give her. She didn’t know any part of the process that led him to snap back, “Harmony. You shall take my sister. She would never have let me part the two of you, regardless.”

At last Orsina snatched her hand from the door, and it leapt open. The guards outside startled to attention. “Where is she?”

“Currently… occupied. I shall fetch her to you. If you wish to, head to the gardens and make your preparations. Perhaps a change of clothes may be in order, also.” There was just a glimmer of who he used to be before the crown in his face then, a little smirk, as though they were both in on a joke the world was missing. She was surprised at how much she’d missed that.

She smiled back. “Hard to ride a dragon side-saddle, like a lady.”

“Indeed.” He fell into step beside her as they headed for her chambers, or rather, for Harmony’s chambers, where all of her things were kept. “There is… one other matter that we must discuss before you depart.”

“Something more important than an Arazi invasion?” she quipped, feeling like this was the old days, before the weight of their respective ventures had crushed all the joy from them.

“No. Yes. Potentially.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, setting his fanciful fur collar askew. “More awkward to discuss, certainly.”

She paused on the stairs to face him. Looking down that slope into his upturned face. “What is it?”

“We are engaged.” He was too refined to squirm, but there was a distinctly squirmish manner to the way in which he said it without meeting her eyes directly. “To be married.”

She chuckled at his little joke. “I feel like I’d remember if that happened.”

“It is different between royalty and their subjects, there is no requirement for… That doesn’t matter at this moment in time. I had to assuage your enemies in court that your recent instability was an emotional response rather than…”

The exact moment that she became aware that he was serious was somewhere about the same moment that she thought what a mockery this was, of engagement and marriage in general, him looking up at her, as though down on one knee, announcing that it was a done deal.

“How did this end with marriage?!”

“There are others in court seeking to wed you, or at least bed you. This way I could offer you protection from their pursuit.” She took a step back down towards him, and he held up his empty hand in placation. “I am faced with the same… pursuers of a different cloth. This seemed the optimal way to handle the situation, freeing us to focus upon more important matters. It will also provide you with sufficient political cachet to…”

“Artemio, I don’t care how… convenient I am…” Her voice trailed off as she met his sorrowful eyes. Perhaps in some version of their story, they might have fallen for each other. In a world where she had been strong enough to resist the power that had been offered to her. In a world where Harmony had faded into the background of the story instead of rushing to become its hero.

“Apologies. I should have been clearer.” He looked away from her entirely now, this level of discomfort too much for even him to bull his way through. “When things are more settled, we shall break off the engagement. This is a temporary measure. I have no interest in you. Well, I mean… academic interest…”

She was practically screaming by this point. “If it doesn’t even matter, why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you would hear it eventually, and it was better from me than a stranger.”

She covered her face with her hands and groaned. “Can I please go fight a thousand dragons now?”

“By all means.”

8 - Shared Passions
Gemmazione, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Few things in the world could compare to the sights and sounds of a dragon in flight. The gentle creaking of bones and skin stretched taut against the drag of the wind. The whisper of wind across the scales, each one like a tiny tuning fork, humming in the breeze, and beneath that sheet of sound, the almost fluid sensations as every muscle of this vast and powerful creature works in perfect harmony to fulfill its sole purpose. The air became clear and smokeless, cool as a forest pool in springtime as the dragon rose.

Orsina was nestled back against Harmony, completely flush against her chest, enclosed in her arms, a blanket of a cloak wrapped around the two of them. Orsina clung to the pommel of the saddle, but Harmony had only Orsina to fill her hands. They were practically fused together, rocking against each other with every sweep of the dragon’s wings. Body warmth shared between them.

Harmony was appreciating none of it.

For a long time, she had clung on mechanically, in stolid sulking silence, but at last she felt like she could contain herself no more, leaning ever closer to Orsina to whisper in her ear. “That bastard.”

The tickle of breath over the back of her neck made Orsina shiver. “Harmony, he’s your brother.”

The whipping wind gave her an ample excuse to raise her voice. “And that’s how I know what a bastard he is.”

“What was he to do, let the Arazi come on unhindered?” Orsina attempted to shrug her shoulders, but it just seemed to nestle the two of them closer together. Still, she stared straight ahead.

How could she be so naive? Was she blind to Artemio’s manipulations? “He’s a king, he has armies, all the Shadebound of Espher are at his beck and call, why does it always have to be you thrown into the lion’s jaws?”

For a moment it seemed Orsina was entirely still in her arms despite the flux of motion that flight forced upon them. “You know why.”

“So the Arazi want you? What does that matter? Why should we give them what they want? Why should we give a fig what they want.” She clung to Orsina all the tighter then. “I want you too, shouldn’t that weigh more heavily in the balance than what some lizard-rutting barbarians want?”

There was a rumble from the dragon beneath them, but Harmony couldn’t bring herself to care. She had carefully divided them from the rest in her estimations. Yelena and Kagan weren’t Arazi anymore. They’d fled that life. Harmony wasn’t entirely sure what they were anymore, in the grand scheme of things, but neither had she any spare attention to grant the question when there were far more pressing things to consider.

“All of the people, Harmony. Not the ones riding horses or shouting orders, the real ones. They’ll die if the Arazi come.”

Harmony wasn’t sure how to tackle that description of the unwashed masses, but she knew exactly how to deal with the threat of their imminent demise. “You think Art would let that happen? You think he’d let them die, just to prove you’re the only one who can stop this? Of course he wouldn’t. He was playing on your kind heart to make you do what he wanted.”

That stillness came again. Even this close to Orsina, Harmony could not help but feel that there were times she could not touch her at all. Just brush against the surface. “And what if it is what I wanted?”

She scoffed. “Then I’d say you were mad, most likely. Who wants to fling themselves into danger’s teeth at every opportunity?”

Orsina did move then, shaking inside the circle of Harmony’s arms. Erratic, her movements were entirely out of rhythm with the dragon’s flight. Harmony clung to her all the tighter for fear that she was losing her grip or, worse yet, that she was crying. It was only then that Orsina finally cast a glance back, and Harmony could see how hard she was laughing. “Didn’t you travel across the most desolate land in the known world to come fetch me back from the Arazi against all odds? Didn’t Kagan say something about you jumping onto a thunder lizard’s face?” She cracked up at the affronted look on Harmony’s face. “Who wants to fling themselves into danger?”

Harmony hoped her face was already flushed with the cold wind scraping across it, but in truth, she knew the embarrassment would produce an entirely different tone. Not matching the red of her hair, but more closely resembling a strawberry. She cleared her throat and tried to play the whole thing off. “That was different.”

“Because you were doing it for love?” In anyone else, there would have been a hint of teasing in the tone, but not from Orsina. She understood that Harmony’s feelings were not some poet’s dream. She knew the depth of them. There would never be mockery of that.

She tightened her grip around Orsina again, not entirely voluntarily. A lifetime of toys plucked from her hand. Of being cast aside. Second best. “The fact remains, he was a bastard for tricking you into this. And when we get back, I mean to give him a piece of my mind.”

“I know that the two of you have had some sort of falling-out, but you can’t go taking a swing at the king every time you have a little problem.” Orsina must have felt Harmony’s hands tightening into fists where they clung to her. “Some things we just have to endure. Some things we can work to change. Attacking the king, that’s never going to solve things. It’s just going to make trouble.”

It was hard to get a read on Orsina at the best of times. Sometimes she was so wonderfully open, other times she was as cold and distant as the moon above. And here, though she suspected that she could read her body language more easily with such ease of access, tone of voice seemed to be snatched away by the wind. Everything sounded distant, even when it was an intimate whisper. If they had been on the ground, she might have suspected that the ramble was directed not at her but at Orsina herself, but here, everything was too muted to be sure.

“It isn’t a falling-out,” Harmony managed to mumble without a snarl. “Has he told you what he means to do with you?”

Orsina had been gradually relaxing back against her, trusting more and more in the dragon beneath them to keep her steady and safe. Now she laid her head back on Harmony’s shoulder and sighed. “Do you meaning offering me up to the Arazi or marrying me?”

The sound Harmony made was a sort of strangled cough. “You knew?!”

“He told me, just before you were fetched from your cell.”

“And you’re just… fine with that?” Harmony felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes despite herself. She couldn’t pull away from Orsina now, not without one or both of them tumbling off into the open sky, but she could at least feel confused at the cruelty of telling her like this. “I thought that we…”

With a bravery that astounded Harmony, Orsina brought up a hand from the pommel and touched her on the cheek, cupping it gently, stilling the outpouring of sorrow. “We are.”

The cheek where it had been touched burned now. Shame gnawed at Harmony’s gut. She was such a child, even now. Thinking that just because Artemio demanded something it would be his. Forgetting that Orsina was a person in her own right, who could make her own choices. Not a toy to be snatched away. “I’m… sorry.”

Orsina seemed determined to ignore it. “I don’t need the kind of scrutiny that marrying a king would bring. I won’t let myself become part of… I don’t want to be a queen. And I don’t want him.”

Harmony pressed her grin into the back of Orsina’s hair so it couldn’t be seen. She wasn’t going to lose her. Her arms wrapped tighter around her. There was no sound but the wind and the wings.

Perhaps this was what their future could be. Away from the capital, away from Artemio and all the troubles heaped up at his feet. She was his sister, but that didn’t mean she owed her whole life to him. Orsina had been the one to tell her that, right from the start. That her life meant more than her father had told her. That she didn’t have to make her world so small just so Artemio could feel big.

Maybe these comfortable silences, with no obligation to speak, to fill up every moment with endless prattle, maybe these could be what she and Orsina offered each other. A reprieve from all the noise and chaos. She held her close and let the whipping wind and the warmth of the body before her wash everything else away. If it wasn’t for Kagan, and Artemio, they could just go. Forget the Arazi, the Agrantine, Espher too. She had no loyalty to those people. Only to her blood and kin, and even that was increasingly thinning the more Art pushed her away.

She realized after a time that Orsina was still talking, just not to her. She and Yelena, they had some sort of connection that Harmony was a little worried to pick at, and it was clear by the different expressions playing over Orsina’s face and the soft tectonic grumbles from the dragon below that there was communication going on.

“You know it’s rude to exclude someone from the conversation like that.”

“Sorry. She can’t really… speak to you.” Orsina seemed to be trying to talk in between the gaps in the dragon’s words that Harmony couldn’t hear. “We’re talking about what comes after the war.”

Harmony scoffed. “I’d imagine her future involves as many sheep as she can eat, supposing we win.”

“She isn’t an animal.” Orsina stiffened. “She’s different from us, but she isn’t less than us.”

Harmony leaned back to pat the great beast on the flank. “Of course not. I didn’t mean to imply that she was, only that I’m sure she shall have a life of comfort and excess in thanks for her contributions.”

“She doesn’t… A dragon is… like a king?” It was as though she were translating a foreign language and doing a poor job. “They don’t want to be rewarded. They do things because the land belongs to them.”

“Well, I’m dubious if Art will share his crown…” Harmony was aware of her own faults, but she did not consider her ability to hold on to a grudge as though her heart were a vise one of them.

“She doesn’t want… Slow, please… I’m trying to… Sorry, the thoughts come faster than words can.” Orsina sighed. “She doesn’t want Espher. She says there will be plenty of territory to parcel out when… when we rule Agrant and the lands beyond the steppes.”

“I wasn’t aware that we were laying the foundations of an empire for her. I’m sure Art will be delighted to hear it.” They banked hard, and Harmony had to grip tighter to Orsina to avoid sliding sideways.

“Not for her, for…” Orsina trailed off.

Harmony didn’t care for this game of whispers. She wasn’t sure how much Orsina was sanitizing for her ears. “What?”

“Some things do not translate, just… give me a moment. Both of you. A moment. Please.” There was a surprising sharpness to Orsina’s tone, even here in the open sky. It bought her the silence she needed. “There is a word, it means all-thinking-things. Dragons, humans, some of the wyverns and other creatures I don’t know. She doesn’t want to make a new world for herself. She wants it for everyone. A world where everyone can fly? I think she means a world where everyone is free.”

Harmony smirked. “I was not aware that they made pipe-dreams so large, though I suppose that she blows enough smoke naturally.”

“Is it so hard to imagine? A world where aydinla… where all people can live as equals?”

It was a lie, the kind of simplification that people with no knowledge of political realities loved to trot out. “A dragon and a peasant are not equal, where is the equality if one can take whatever they want from the other without recompense?”

“I wish you could hear each other. I wish she could say it in her own words. She says inequality breeds something? Each gets what they need?”

“I’d imagine as the dragon in that situation, I’d find that arrangement quite satisfactory.”

“I don’t think I’m saying it right.” Orsina’s voice had been reduced to a mumble as her failure to explain was compounded.

Harmony did not like to see her unhappy, so she was quick to change the topic. “Perhaps we should speak about something else?”

“I walked this land once. Coming down to Covotana. Me and Kagan.” It was a funny thing, the way that Orsina’s voice seemed to change when she remembered her life before meeting Harmony. All the eloquence and fine shaping of words dying back to reveal her peasant roots. The clipped words, enunciated with no care. To her horror, Harmony realized she found it charming. She was in love with a peasant, and she thought Orsina’s peasant pidgin version of the Espheran tongue was cute. Who could have foreseen any of this.

“Was it a pleasant journey?” she asked quickly before her blush could return to haunt her.

“We slept in a ditch down there. Made a tent out of our cloaks to keep the worst of the rain off. Or maybe it was over there…” Yelena banked gently as they went, weaving a serpentine pattern through the sky but tilting them enough for the dirt roads beneath them to be visible.

There was a lot of mud. Even now when it had been dry for days. “Not so pleasant then.”

There was a soft smile on Orsina’s face when she looked down at it. “At the time, I couldn’t think of much worse.”

“But now you can?” Harmony knew she should leave it alone, but like a bruise she couldn’t help but pressing on to feel the depth of the damage, she had to ask.

“We could have gone anywhere. I could have just said the word, and Kagan would have led me anywhere in the world I wanted to go. I haven’t been free like that again since.” Harmony had no idea how that soft smile still hadn’t left Orsina’s lips.

“You have it now.” Even as she spoke of freedom, she found herself clinging even tighter to Orsina. “Yelena would take you anywhere you want without question. I’d follow you…”

“Artemio wouldn’t let us go. Konus wouldn’t let us go. There’s no way out.” The smile faded at last as their flight smoothed out once more. She cast a glance back at Harmony. “No way out, except on the other side.”

“I hardly think suicide is our only option.” Harmony’s grip had become vise-like now. Her grasp on the dragon with her thighs equally tight. There was no way she was going to lose Orsina like that.

But Orsina just laughed. “The other side of the war. We fight, we win, then we’ll be free again. We can… we can go anywhere. Do anything. Artemio has his kingdom. I have you. The only things that matter to either one of us.”

That little bit of sentimentality was enough to push Harmony back into her bliss. Cuddled up to Orsina like they hadn’t been in far too long. And if the dragon went on talking to her love through all of that silent joy, then what care had she. She was all that mattered to Orsina. It didn’t matter what the dragon said. It didn’t matter what dreams it wove. Harmony’s only dream was real.

The sun began to sink as they came upon the northern reaches of Espher. In the distance, the black smear that had been the Selvaggia spread out before them. The battlefield and the burn that Orsina had left upon the face of the earth. She pointed off to an empty patch of land, the faint lines where fields might have once met. “Sheepshank, that’s the village I was… That’s where I was born. Gone now. Fire took it. Dragons took it. War burned it up.”

Harmony had been half expecting this maudlin moment. “That’s where you came from?”

“It wasn’t known for much. Didn’t have much to be known for, but we had that name because we kept sheep. Grazed them up on the low steppes.”

“Are there…” She didn’t even know how to ask the question. “Did anyone escape before the Arazi…”

“I don’t know.” Orsina sighed. “I don’t even know if I’d remember any of them, even if they had. It shouldn’t matter to me anymore. My life… it’s so far away from all this.”

“We can talk about them if you want. I know that you never really got to when we were in the city, but there is nobody to eavesdrop on us now. If you want to tell me about them… your family…”

“No.” Harmony involuntarily stiffened at the rebuke but softened again as Orsina leaned back. “They weren’t really my family. Not for a long time. Even before… all this.”

She stared down at it now, her face a rictus of pain. Something so deep and untouchable that Harmony couldn’t even guess how to ease it. “I used to think the shepherds were heroes. Going out there when a sheep went stray. Facing all the monsters of the steppes. Guiding the stupid animals and keeping them where they could survive.”

“It must have taken some courage to face.”

Harmony struggled to understand courage. Or at least the absence of it. She seemed to have been born with a surfeit of confidence, and the world, and more specifically her family, had devoted a great deal of energy in grinding it down. She had crossed those steppes with nobody but an Arazi who might turn on her at any moment. She had faced down its dangers without flinching. She could not help but feel that anyone who could not was… lesser, somehow. Maybe that was the true distinction between nobility and the smallfolk. She’d been born with blood in her while they had only water.

Still Orsina spoke, halfway to a whisper now. If Harmony had not been hanging on so tightly as they banked down towards the edge of the battlefield, then she wouldn’t have heard a word. “Shepherds, they don’t care about sheep. They care about wool. They care about mutton. Shepherds care about shepherds.”

Unsure if she was meant to hear any of this at all, Harmony chose to remain silent until they made their landing.

As dusk washed over them, they set up camp in much the same place that Artemio had laid out in his original battlefield plans. The blackened earth had been baked solid now, smoothed by gravity as it came apart. Everywhere was a fine place to lay their heads, so they trusted in Yelena’s judgement as she settled herself in one particular patch, then set up their little tent in the lee of her. Neither woman had ever put up a tent before, and even if Orsina wasn’t already being strange and withdrawn, it likely would have been a struggle. As it was, Harmony felt she was doing thrice the work, doing both of their parts of setting up the tent and carrying both sides of the conversation.

“It was very kind of Yelena to offer to take watch all evening. I understand that she needn’t sleep as we do, but it is still much appreciated, after a day in the saddle the possibility of stretching out and relaxing is intensely appealing, I must say.”

Orsina would be behaving almost normally for a moment, then her eyes would be dragged sideways, to the mark she had wrought on the face of the world. Harmony felt a stirring of pride every time she saw it—this testament to Orsina’s power—but it just seemed to bring back bad memories for the woman herself.

“Perhaps I should build a fire, so that we might be comfortable. It isn’t so hard to do, and it isn’t as though we’re attempting to pass through here unseen, is it. Quite the contrary. The more of a fuss we make the better. Although I suppose that it will be something of a bother to gather much in the way of firewood, given the state of the place.”

Still nothing.

They ended up with a charcoal fire, roots clawed from the earth by Yelena and lit by a huff of her breath. The dragon was proving more of a friend than Harmony could have ever hoped. It was strange to see the way the creature moved around her. With just Orsina, there was never any hesitation, the two of them flowed in motion with each other like birds in flock, just as the Arazi and their mounts managed, but with Harmony there was such hesitance. Every time Yelena moved, she seemed to have her eyes fixed upon the tiny human body beside her. She was so incredibly aware of Harmony’s vulnerability that it began to grate on the tiny, squishy human’s nerves.

“You know I shan’t break if you bump me. I’m not actually made of fine crystal. No matter how fine I sparkle in the starlight.”

The dragon let out a snort that might have been interpreted as a laugh, but her awkwardness did seem to ease a little, and she seemed more willing to nudge at Harmony if she needed her to move instead of hovering politely. Harmony took this as free license to clamber over the creature’s scaly hide whenever it was in her way, and soon the two of them had as close to a rapport as anyone could have hoped for.

Yet through this all, Orsina sat silent by the fire. As though they were at a funeral wake for all those she’d killed. It was exasperating, to say the least. “You know they would have killed you right back if they’d been given the opportunity?”

That finally seemed to shock Orsina out of her stupor. “What?”

Harmony reached out a hand to her, but it was ignored, her care rebuffed. “The Arazi you killed. Every one of them was out for your blood, their dragons too. Not one of them would have hesitated if you had given them an opening.”

“I know.” Orsina still hadn’t turned her eyes from the flames.

“Then why do you let guilt plague you so?” Harmony couldn’t keep the annoyance out of her voice.

“You think this is guilt?” She spat into the fire, and it sizzled away. “This was the last place I felt human. The last place, before the shades… I’m not mourning for the Arazi. I’m mourning for me. This is where I died.”

It was the kind of dramatic pronouncement that should have ended all conversation, but Harmony was not so easily dissuaded by drama. She had grown up in a home with walls echoing with grand proclamations. They did not cow her, and she found strange strength in defying them, if truth be told. “You seem quite alive to me. When I was holding you earlier, you seemed positively warm. Not to mention the way that you still scarf down your food like you’re a pig at a trough no matter how many times I teach you how to take delicate bites. And the fact that we’re having a conversation right now seems to indicate…”

“All right.” Orsina’s face creased into a smile. “All right. You do have a way of bringing life back to me.”

“Oh, I’ve got many ways, you just haven’t seen them all yet.” Harmony waggled her eyebrows in what she hoped was a humorous manner as she shifted from one charcoaled log to the other, until the warm line of Orsina’s body was nestled against her side. Judging from the little blush on Orsina’s cheeks in the firelight, it had been a successful waggle, more or less.

“I’m not sure how I am the peasant, yet you’re the one who’s so crude,” she tried to snipe back, but the besotted grin on her face belied any sting in her words. Harmony could actually feel the tightness in her chest loosen a little at the sight of that smile. It had come so often when they first met and so rarely since Orsina had come back to her from the war and the Arazi. It was her true face, the one she’d been schooled to hide from the nobles of Espher. A secret, to be shared just with Harmony. Overcome, she leaned in to press a little kiss to Orsina’s cheek.

It was simply luck that Orsina happened to turn her head at that moment, and their lips met instead.

The stars crept slowly across the sky. The clouds spooled and uncurled above them. The night, which had seemed so long and cold before, was now passing so fast it was hard to believe. They retreated at last from beneath the sky into the cover of the tent, neither one undressing before slipping under the blankets, as the night grew colder, and they could not spare the time redressing if the Arazi caught them unawares.

It seemed to Harmony that their lips never parted in those moments, or those hours. That even as they lay down together, they were locked in place against each other’s bodies. It must not have been so. They must have parted, to navigate, to breathe, but she could not remember any of it in the days to come. Yet in the face of such intensity of emotion and sensation, nothing else could shine bright enough to be recalled. All the fear and distance and change fell away in those precious moments snatched from the jaws of life. Right up until the very final moment, when abruptly Orsina pulled away.

“Stop.”

Harmony, by this point more than a little flustered, took a moment to obey. And a moment longer to even understand the word. “What?”

Hearts thumping in time, neither one of them had heard much from beyond the cover of the canvas slung above them, but now Harmony came to alertness abruptly, cocking her head to listen for the telltale beat of wings bearing down on them. “What is it?”

Orsina had been lost to thought, as surely as Harmony. Her face and her body radiated heat in the closeness of this tent, but now she hunched in over herself, drawing back from Harmony’s touch. It was hard to tell from a look, but a brush of fingertips revealed what her eyes could not in the dark of the tent. Mortification played over Orsina’s face. “Oh no.”

Harmony nipped her ear between her teeth. “I have to tell you, if you think that this is too embarrassing, what I’m planning to do next is even worse.”

“Shut up. Just shut up. I can’t… I can’t right now. Just. Everyone be quiet.” Normally Harmony would have been concerned over such an outburst, but right now, the flustered girl in her arms was just too precious to bear.

She pressed another kiss to the side of Orsina’s neck. “I don’t have to say another word.”

“Harmony, stop. Please.” She dragged herself away, despite all signs up to a moment ago that the two of them would never stop kissing and touching. She kept her palm flat on Harmony’s shoulder as she forced words out through her shame. “I… she can feel it.”

Harmony kissed her on the inside of her wrist, setting Orsina shivering all over again. “You’re meant to feel it.”

“Yelena can feel it.” That put an abrupt halt to all movement in the tent. “Everything that we’re… she’s…”

“Oh. Oh no.” If Harmony had not already been on her knees, then she likely would have tripped over herself in the scramble to get away. “I didn’t think that you… I thought that you could…”

“I didn’t know. When… normally…” She trailed off. “Yelena, please stop talking. Stop. I can’t…”

Harmony was caught between her natural impulse to wrap Orsina in her arms and offer her comfort as she struggled through this latest strange development and the disgust she felt to have had her love exhibited in such a way. She sat, half tangled in the blanket and unmoving as Orsina seemed to carry out a whole argument in her own head. “When emotions… when things get heated… emotions can spill over. I’m not used to being so close to…”

Rather than watch the poor girl struggle through the limited vocabulary she knew to discuss the acts they had been so close to committing, Harmony supplied an alternative. “Me.”

“Yelena. You, I’m very used to being close to.” Orsina said softly, a tug of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “She was miles and miles away before, and now she’s here and we’re linked and…”

Harmony was out of the tent, stamping back into her boots as she went roaring out at the dragon. “You couldn’t have kept it to yourself for five more minutes?”

There was a strangeness to the dragon’s silhouette that Harmony was not yet familiar enough with the beast to place. Something about its shape that looked wrong against the barren expanse of stars. “How long has this been going on? How long have you been clinging to her feelings and suckling like a parasite?”

Orsina burst out of the tent, her clothes still askew. Threw herself into her love’s path. “Harmony!”

But Harmony’s wrath had not been abated by the sight of her. She snarled and stepped around Orsina as though she weren’t there. Spitting out her words. “Is there nothing in this world considered sacred anymore, that our most intimate moments become a font of entertainment for prurient reptiles!?”

“It isn’t her fault!” Orsina caught her by the sleeve, slowing her charge, turning it into a spin. “It’s mine. I don’t have enough control yet. I don’t…”

Once more Harmony shrugged her off. “You’ve been learning all this in weeks, while she’s had centuries, you do not think that she might bear some burden of responsibility? Perhaps you spoke too loud, but that did not mean she had to listen!”

“Harmony, she wasn’t trying to…”

There were tears biting sharp at the corners of her eyes, tears that Harmony had not even known might come. Anger and sorrow were old companions to her, but the intensity with which they bled together now startled even her. “I will not have the one right thing in my life made into a sideshow attraction for this… creature. I will not throw up my hands and give you up to her. I won’t. I can’t. Orsina, don’t you see that.”

Orsina drew close to her again, took a hold on her Harmony’s face to stop her from pulling away. “I know. I wouldn’t give you up for her either. She knows that. She’d never ask that.”

How could she be so blind?

“She’s just like my brother. And eventually, you know that both of them will test us. Ask us to choose. They’ll have to. They need to know if their pull is greater. It’s the nature of the beast. To prove its dominance.” She spat each word as though it were bitter poison. “It’s self-importance.”

“Yelena isn’t like that.”

The dragon loomed behind her. Vast and formless in the dark of the night. A creature so large that logic should not have allowed for it. A creature built not to the scale of the living but to the scale of the mountains they sheltered beside. It was a dragon, whatever its connection to the man Kagan, or to Orsina herself, it was what it was. And just as all dragons had flames spilling from their jaws, so too did they have the same desire at the heart of them. Domination.

“She’s laying out plans to conquer the world that you seem quite ready to throw in with just because you happen to have a shared friend. I think it is fair to say that there is no small part of her that is exactly like that.”

At last the creature made itself visible. A spark of flinty teeth ignited a plume of venom, bathing them all in a cloud of yellow phosphorous light. Orsina spun on her heel and held up her hands in supplication. As though she couldn’t tear this lizard limb from limb at a whim.

“Yelena, no.”

“Yelena, yes.” Harmony’s sword had found its way to her hand at some point between the kissing and the flame. “Please. Give me the excuse. I’d far rather walk home than go on through this fool’s errand regardless.”

She was surprised to realize that she was telling the complete truth. She would rather fight a dragon by herself than traipse along on this stupid adventure, trying to tease an army into chasing them around without ever letting them catch up.

Once more Orsina’s soft hands took hold of Harmony’s face and turned her to meet a steady gaze. “If you hurt her, you hurt me.”

“How do we even know that’s so? Just because it is what they told us?” Harmony couldn’t quite sneer with Orsina’s face so close to hers, but she could at least frown. “I’d bet I can strike her down without leaving a scratch on you.”

“Harmony! She’s a dragon.”

“I have eyes!” Harmony snapped back and then leaned aside to make eye contact with the serpent where it lay. “And this would hardly be the first of her kind I’ve felled.”

The tears in Orsina’s eyes had nothing to do with rage and everything to do with misery. She had not chosen this for herself. She had not forced it on Harmony. She was suffering, as surely as the rest of them, as a result. “Even if you could, even if I survived it, you’d kill Kagan. You know that you would.”

That took the wind out of Harmony’s sails again. Here in front of her, she’d had an enemy. Something she could face. Something she could fight. Something that would make all the confusion and backstabbing and stolen kisses in the night fade away. With a blade in her hand, everything was simple.

Her stomach dropped. She was just like Art. The understanding washed over her colder than the chill air of the night on this exposed plain. She was trying to do exactly what she’d claimed Art and Yelena were up to. Trying to force Orsina to decide between them. Not out of some desire to dominate, but out of pique. She’d had the happiest moment of her life interrupted, and now she was spoiling for a fight. She took a steadying breath.

“Get her out of your head. Get her out of our bed.” She pressed a gentle kiss to Orsina’s salt-traced lips, ignoring the dragon’s shudders. “Give me… just a moment alone with you. Just you and me and nobody else demanding our time. That’s all I want from life. To be just the two of us again.”

She slid her sword back into its sheath and strode back to the tent, then flung herself angrily down onto the blankets to lie in stillness. She knew she was being a fool. She knew this fit of pique ran the risk of driving a wedge between her and Orsina, but she also knew that she had been pushed past her breaking point these past few days, and the chance to finally be alone with some version of Orsina that seemed almost like her old self again, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. She needed it. The way that her lungs burned if she drew no breath and her stomach gurgled when she had no food. She needed Orsina back.

Moments became minutes, and she finally could take no more. “Come back inside before you freeze.”

From what seemed far too great a distance, she heard the quiet reply. “It is warm enough by the fire.”

“Don’t be a fool.” She bit back on her anger. “Who knows when we’ll sleep again. Come back to bed. Be with me. Even if we can’t be alone. Even if… she’s still lingering. Come inside. Just be with me.”

There must have been something truly pitiful in her voice by the end of that plea because Orsina burst into the tent just a moment later, wrapping her up in her arms once more. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“You’ve done nothing wrong.” Harmony’s own eyes felt wet, though she did not know when the weeping started. “You’ve never done anything wrong.”

9 - The Distant Drums
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Kagan was a prisoner again. Trapped on the ground. Trapped in the palace. Pinned in place by the pull of the earth below and the stone above. Over time, he had become numb to it. Suffering, but never thinking on it. Now it was as though the wound were opened fresh.

The pompous ass of a king was lounging on one of the half-chair, half-bed things the Espherans seemed obsessed with. He had bundled papers on his knee and a pen that kept scratching as Kagan waited patiently. There seemed to be no rhythm to the motion, a spasmodic twitch of the hand, another mark of ink on paper. It had been minutes since the servants had departed and taken with them the last vestiges of conversation.

Kagan jumped when the man finally spoke. Never looking up from his etchings. “At what speed should we expect the main body of the Arazi force to proceed?”

Annoyed with himself for being startled, Kagan’s voice was an even deeper rumble than usual. “If he brought everything he had, slow. An army only moves as fast as its slowest unit, and some of the thunder lizards are too big for haste.”

The king’s brow raised, quizzical. “And should we expect that he brought all that he had?”

“Last time he didn’t, and you ran him off.” Kagan shrugged his shoulders. Uncomfortable in the courtly clothes that had been foisted on him. Handmade by some poor bastard in the lower depths of the castle to fit his gargantuan measurements. “The man’s full of big ideas, but he’s got the biggest ideas about himself. You’ll have stung him with that win. Might have made him want to come at you with everything.”

At last Artemio looked away from his scribbles. “Might?”

“If it were me, I’d only bring the aslinda and the fliers. Come on fast, strike hard before you could mount a defense. But that’s me, and I don’t… I don’t think like an Arazi.” Kagan trailed off.

In the old days, when force was respected above all else, he’d have been able to guarantee that the Arazi would have marched with full numbers against any enemy that repulsed them once, to prove beyond a doubt that there was no weakness in their tribe. But now, things had changed so much, the nature of both dragons and men were intertwined beyond the point of unpicking and twisted further by his father’s designs to reshape both into a singular weapon.

The king rolled his eyes and returned to his papers. “I must say, for all that you are our preeminent expert on them, you’d think that you might have more solid ideas of their tactics.”

“Could tell you how they fought a hundred years ago, but things change.” Kagan shifted uncomfortably. He could wear a harness of leather like he was born to it, wear the furs of dead beasts without need for tanning them, but this crispy shirt they’d stuffed him into itched like the fabric were made of fleabites and straw. “Can’t make any promises.”

Artemio allowed his papers to drop once more, condescended to look at Kagan directly once more. “Imagine for a moment that you are Konus—”

Kagan cut him off. “No.”

He’d spent too much of his life with people thinking that he was just another Konus. That he was his father’s son or sworn to such obedience that they spoke in the same voice. It was not so, and he would not pretend it was so for the amusement of this little nobody with a shiny hat.

Artemio clearly thought Kagan did not understand what was being asked of him from the barely concealed contempt he showed. “I am not asking you to assume his mantle in truth, only to think as he thinks for a time.”

“No,” Kagan growled again. “He’s a monster, and I’m not going to make myself one.”

“Then allow me.” Artemio turned his attention back towards his papers once more. “I am Konus, my ego is bruised, but despite my wrath, I have a very specific target still in mind. One that I captured and that slipped my grasp and escaped from my place of power. I have been embarrassed in front of my vassals and must make a show of power to maintain their loyalty. How is that best achieved?”

“Total war.” It was the Arazi way. Something these soft nations of the south could not really comprehend. They lived off the land, off trade, off having a whole swarm of peasants running around and fetching and carrying to keep their few warriors in the field. The Arazi were all warriors. They ate what they could steal from the men they’d killed. “All-out attack.”

The king held up a proclamatory finger. “Yet I am not a foolish man, and I understand that my target has great mobility on her side.”

“Split the army.” Kagan pushed his shoulders back against the stone behind him as he spoke, trying to itch the spot between his shoulders that his hands couldn’t reach. He should have told them he’d rather be naked than wear this awful shirt. “Rush ahead to try and catch her with the aslinda but keep the rest marching on.”

Another mark on the page. A scratch of ink beside something already written there. “That is what he would do?”

Kagan’s hairless brows drew down over his eyes. He didn’t know what the game was, but he knew when he was being played with. “You’ve already decided it is. So why are we talking about it?”

Artemio cast a glance over to the chamber door, as though ensuring that they were entirely alone, before giving his answer. “I find it difficult to trust. Some might say that this is a failing on my part, but I have always considered it to be one of my virtues, if I have any.”

“So what, this is a test?” Kagan rocked forward off where his shoulders had been rubbing the wall, onto the balls of his feet. “See if I give the same answers you’ve already got?”

Once again, the little king looked up to meet his glower. Perhaps his own stare was intimidating to the little people he commanded, but Kagan had stared down dragons. Artemio would need to do better. Glancing away first to return to his work, the king sighed. “To see how you think.”

“I think we’re both wasting our time.” Kagan settled back. The fabric of the shirt catching on the rough-edged scales across his back. “I might have plenty to spare, but you don’t.”

“Your company is reward enough, my friend.” Artemio forced a smile. It would have looked genuine, but Kagan could feel the absence of all feeling behind it. The burden of empathy.

“Don’t recall us being friends,” Kagan growled. “Last we spoke alone, I’m pretty sure you set me alight.”

Artemio let out a little huff of laughter. “You may recall that you were trying to murder me at the time.”

“Doesn’t sound too friendly.” Kagan gave him a smile, showing off his shark-like teeth. They were not blackened like the ones you’d find in a dragon’s mouth, but they certainly bore the same triangular point.

Artemio released his papers to flutter down onto his lap and clapped his hand on his leg. “Consider this a fresh start for both of us. There is no reason we cannot ally ourselves. You and I, we want the same things—”

Kagan cut him off dead yet again. “I doubt it.” He’d heard all this sort of rhetoric before a thousand times through the years.

Once more, Artemio seemed on the brink of a sigh before he pulled himself back. “We both care for the women in our lives, and we wish for them to be well. The fact that those women, yours and mine, seem to be… entangled, means that for their sakes we must at least attempt to emulate their bond.”

Kagan just stared at him for a moment. If Artemio thought that reminding him of the way he’d set his sister to latch onto Orsina and manipulate her was going to make him want to be closer, then he was incorrect. He could see some part of Harmony’s appeal, but only in small doses. He bared his teeth once more. “If you think I’m planning on entangling with you the same way, you’re in for a fright.”

“Coarse.” The king was unable to hide the beginnings of a sneer after hearing that. “I mean only that we must be friends to each other, for their sakes. And it is well known that friendship grows from understanding.”

Kagan had listened to enough of this crap. “Understand this then. You’re Konus.”

Still acting as though his guest was a little slow on the pickup, Artemio settled back on his lounging seat. “We can probably dispense with that little thought experiment now.”

“No.” Kagan’s false smile became a grimace, then a growl. “You’re Konus, writ small. You’ve got a bit of power, and you’re hoarding all you can and trying to bring everyone in the world to heel. The same evil that’s in him is in you. The evil that makes a man look at the world and think it should belong to him.”

It had probably been a good long time since anyone had told this king the truth. It was a hazard of being powerful, that everyone else lied about everything to get in your favor. Truth telling had always been Kagan’s value, until he crossed a line with his father that could not be uncrossed, and his unwelcome truths became a division between the two of them.

Artemio attempted to play it off as though it were nothing, but Kagan thought he saw a glimmer of remorse somewhere behind those narrowed eyes. “I am not certain that my ambitions should be considered evil, any more than my natural lack of trust. They are simply aspects that must be acknowledged.”

“It’s evil.” Kagan had no interest in dancing around the subject until they were both blue in the face. “And it always leads to the same end.”

Another sardonic glance. “So we cannot be friends because you consider me your moral inferior?”

There was no tone to the voice to give Artemio away, but Kagan had senses that humans did not. He felt the amusement and contempt that flowed behind the words. The Espherans looked at him and saw a beast, a savage, the idea that he could look at them and feel the same way was too perplexing to engage with.

He kept his own voice steady, because he was still in this man’s house, whether he liked it or not. “No. We can’t be friends, because a man like Konus can’t have friends. He only calls a man friend to use the word like a cudgel later to get what he wants.”

There was something almost like a pout on Artemio’s face. It made Kagan want to cave it in. “You believe that I am incapable of the softer emotions? That I do not care for others?”

Kagan’s laughter came unbidden. Hoarse and heavy. “Put all your so-called friends on one side of a scale and power on the other, I can tell which side will hit the table.”

It brought Artemio, who never seemed to be lacking for words, to a state of silence. A long stretching silence that would have made any of his little underlings trip over themselves to fill it. Kagan felt no such compulsion. He preferred the quiet, if truth be told.

Artemio folded first. “For all that you look like a barbarian, you are surprisingly astute. I do not agree with your analysis, but it is a better one than I would have thought you capable of making.”

That was the nicest thing any of these Espherans had managed to say to him yet, and still it was an insult. Well, Kagan knew how to meet force with force and fight fire with fire. “Hard to be friends when you think you’re better than everyone around you too.”

“Well, I am a king, that does come with a degree of superiority implied.”

There was just a hint of a smirk there. That same sneering superiority Kagan had encountered everywhere he looked in this blighted land. Kagan did not smile. Couldn’t really smile here, without everyone thinking he meant to chew on them thanks to his jagged teeth. But he could speak soft and true. “Crown never made you think you were the smartest man in the room.”

“No.” Artemio turned his attention back to his papers. “That was experience.”

“Let me tell you something I had to learn hard, boy.” Kagan was across the room and looming over Artemio before the one-armed king could even cast his pen aside. “You’re never the best. There’s always going to be someone smarter, or stronger, or faster. You live long enough to get some more experience, you’ll realize that, and you’ll make peace with it.”

Artemio’s face lost all emotion. As though the soul had left his body. Even to Kagan’s empathy, it was as if he’d just vanished. “Well, if you insist that we cannot be convivial, then I shall dispense with the pleasantries. Where are my sister and your dragon?”

Kagan took a step back, then closed his eyes. Feeling for them. “In the air.”

Artemio let out a little tut. “Should they not have made contact with the Arazi by now?”

“Depends.” Kagan attempted to shrug, but the cloth of the damnable shirt caught on his back once more, and continuing the motion would likely have ripped it.

When he met Artemio’s gaze, one of the boy’s brows was raised once more. Someone must have told him it looked imperious rather than like he was puzzled all the time. “Upon what?”

“Your towers shouted the minute they heard wings flapping, but an Arazi army, it sends scouts out ahead. Keeps its eyes open. Odds are, they sent up the alarm on the scouts, not the army. Scouts wheel back to the army body at the end of the day.”

Artemio’s pen scratched all the swifter, though he did not glance down. “That is the kind of helpful information that I could have made use of days ago.”

Another abortive shrug. “You didn’t ask days ago.”

There was no mistaking the sharp edge to Artemio’s words this time. “Feel free to volunteer information before it become too late for it to matter.”

He wasn’t going to be offered up another opening like that. Kagan sank down into the too-small chair opposite the king’s lounging. “This isn’t going to end how you want it to.”

Once more his statement brought the room to silence, but this time he did not feel as though it were pressurized. Artemio was not trying to make him speak, he was pondering his answer.

Eventually he said, “It is rare indeed for anything to end how I want it to. If it did, then I would not be king and Espher would be at peace.”

Kagan let out a snort. “You’re saying you don’t want to be king? You?”

“It would not have been my first choice.”

Kagan wasn’t going to call a king a liar to his face. Not again. “Right.”

“If I had wanted to be king, then there were a great many easier ways to go about it, I can assure you.” Artemio did emanate a little sadness as he spoke, to Kagan’s immense surprise. “I am king because there was nobody else.”

Kagan pointed in the vague direction of the vacuous courtiers lingering outside the room. “Throw your crown out that door, and you’d have fifteen people prove you wrong.”

“There was nobody else who would be capable of guiding Espher through…” Another weary sigh that Kagan could feel the weight of. “All this.”

Whether it was true or not, Kagan could feel that Artemio believed it to be true. He was either delusional or the available crop of potential leaders were a truly miserable selection.

“Altruism?”

Artemio went back to his writing as though he had not been interrupted. “Duty.”

Kagan felt fire on his flank. Sudden and lancing. He curled in the air, mindful of the precious cargo clinging to his back. There in the cloud bank, shadows. Battle cries.

He grunted out, “Shut up.”

Wings tucked in flush against his side he dropped, spinning down to gain distance and speed on his attackers.

Artemio’s brow rose again. “I beg your pardon.”

A lurch as his wings spread, the press of the bodies on his back as their direction changed. The brush of grass over his wingtips before the rise.

Kagan grunted with the effort of trying to be in two places at one time. To be still and seated and to be twisting in motion. “Yelena, she’s… they’re…”

Cold. The font that connected him to Yelena felt frozen solid. Yet the life drained from her as fast as she could replenish it. Some parasite draining her of life. Great blades of air and flame sweeping up past her outstretched wings to burst apart both cloud and aslinda alike.

“They have made contact with the enemy.” Artemio smiled and made a little tick on his papers. “Good.”

Another lance of flame, this one from Yelena’s mouth, searing a line across a leathery wing, splitting it, sending wyvern and rider into a frantic spiral down to the ground. Satisfaction. Bloodlust. Victory. More flames, licking at Yelena’s tail. Stoppered with a sudden rush of cool water. A fresh-made cloud washing out to envelop them. Hide them from sight.

Kagan shook as he experienced it. He should have been there. He should have been on Yelena, fighting as one, as they were meant to be. “They’re… fighting.”

“I expected as much. Tell your dragon to break away.” He paused, then added, “Head southeast.”

Even if Yelena could hear his thoughts, she was lost in the chaos of the war in the skies, the shifting flows of air as one stream then another rushed upwards as the heat of her breath took hold. Through gritted teeth, Kagan snarled.

“I do not command her.”

“I do.” Artemio’s condescension dripped from every word. “Tell her what I said.”

“She couldn’t hear me, even if I did.” Flames washed over him. His wing cocked up to shield his riders. Enough heat that it should have torn the fine membrane apart, if not for the sudden cold that passed right through it in a wave. Heat and cold. Fire and ice. Impossibilities that made everything work. That made Yelena and her riders invincible even in the midst of the squall. It was overwhelming, but through it all he could feel her pride burning hotter than any flame “At this distance, there is only… sensation.”

Artemio’s voice seemed distant compared with all that was bombarding Kagan in that moment, but the sharp tone was unmistakable “I am hinging a considerable part of my designs upon Yelena’s success. If I had been informed that your ability to communicate was so limited, then I’d have been less inclined to keep you close.”

Kagan lurched to his feet, desperate to find somewhere he could wrap himself up in all of these feelings without being seen. “I can go?”

Claws puncturing scale. Blood hot as flame. Tearing. Rending. A buffeting wind called out of nowhere to fill her wings despite the burden of deadweight until she unhooked. That same wind suddenly cast down, slapping dragons from the skies as if they were gnats. Understanding bleeding through, just as he had learned the flight of a spear from Yelena’s mind. Just as he had learned the shape of the wind. Minds bleeding together. Becoming more than the sum of their parts. The majesty of it. The miracle taking place.

Artemio went on scratching at his papers. “Of course you can’t go. I still need you to keep me apprised of the situation, even if the information only flows in one direction.”

Each moment they fought, they fought better. Powers combining. The rough-hewn shapes that Orsina had once conjured giving away to more subtle shifts. The cold of her power seeping into the blood of the serpents that filled the skies around her, sapping their speed and strength as though she’d swallowed the sun. Kagan fought to have his own thoughts. His own feelings. He caught onto his own anger and let it serve as an anchor.

“So I’m a carrier pigeon.”

Artemio scoffed. “Would that you were so quiet when you had nothing useful to convey.”

They were diving again, but there was no tension in Yelena’s shoulders now, she knew that the ground could not touch her when they were together. The pull of the earth meant nothing now. It could not even grant her speed beyond what Orsina could push into her from any direction, at any time. It was a tactic now, not a necessity. Playacting to bring the other dragons low.

The anger, he had to hold on to the anger. “You want me to tell you everything and not to speak.”

Wind switching the ways it couldn’t. Nature given over entirely to new possibilities. Stopping dead in mid-air not because of an updraft or a strain, but because Orsina had reached out and grasped Yelena in her icy grasp. Cradled her in invisible hands. The wind beneath their wings gone dead. The dragons that had chased them down spreading wings out wide and finding nothing to catch. They fell like stars, crashing to the earth, bursting apart in showers of venom and flame and flesh.

Artemio rolled his eyes, somewhere so far away from anything important. “The knowledge that my dear sister is fighting dragons is much appreciated. Your commentary upon my decisions is not.”

Wind came back, flowing naturally, the rising thermals of the dead dragons giving enough lift that when Yelena was released, it took only a few strokes of her wings to rise again, to gain height, make sure she was seen. This was better than victory. Better than the joy of the hunt. She might have lived forever in the dark beneath the mountain. Might have lived forever soaring through the skies as an obedient little servant of the Arazi. If she had, she never would have felt this. This must have been how the gods had felt before they were burned. The whole world a tool to be manipulated for their ease. The elation as they rose. The spark of delight as they were sighted, but the aslinda who should have been easily her match quailed at the sight of her. She was more than any of them. They were more than any of them could have ever been.

Anger. Kagan felt it slipping away from him. He clung desperately, like a child being snatched from its mother. “Don’t like being called a bastard, stop being a bastard.”

Artemio chuckled at the insult. “I’m beginning to see why you were exiled.”

It would have been so very easy to go after the aslinda. The little wyverns in the sky wouldn’t have proven a challenge despite all their numbers. There weren’t enough of them to drown Yelena in their blood, so there weren’t enough of them. She made a gentle turn, showing them her contempt, showing them her tail, and then with steady strokes of her wings she set off.

With that, there came some peace from the torrent of sensation. Kagan was able to slump back down into his creaking chair and sighed. “They’ve broken away. They’re being chased.”

Nodding absently, Artemio continued with his scribing. “According to plan.”

Kagan had to close his eyes now to feel them, now that the rush of combat was done. He had to reach for them instead of the thunder of their hearts overpowering him. “Yelena isn’t hurt, but I can’t feel Orsina.”

“I would imagine she is channeling her shades at the moment.” Artemio’s eyebrow rose, and he began scribbling another little note to himself. “I do not wish to delve into the metaphysics of our respective connections, but I suspect that would be antithetical to your emotional connection.”

It was enough to bring Kagan back to the moment. “You don’t feel when you’re using your shades?”

“You feel, but whether those feelings are your own or those of the shade is a subject of much debate. I could not say how that might appear to an outside observer, because your… situation with Orsina is literally unprecedented. I have no references to draw upon, only my own supposition. I would suppose that you cannot sense that which shades feel, as it is beyond your ability.”

Reaching out with more focused intent, Kagan found that he could sense her, if only by the empty hole where she should have been. “She’s there, just… far away.”

A glance to the map on the table beside him brought forth Artemio’s reply. “There is the entirety of Espher between you.”

“Farther.”

The king shrugged and settled back to his writing. “So long as you are able to continue relaying updates to me, the perceived distance is not of import.”

“Carrier pigeon.” Kagan nodded. “Got it.”

“You are more than a carrier pigeon. You are also a reference text.” There was a smile playing over the little man’s lips that Kagan did not like. “Explain the limitations of the Arazi empathic abilities in combat. I wish to prepare countermeasures.”

10 - The Last Wife
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Three days and three nights had passed. Mountains bathed in mist had flowed beneath them like a river’s waters. On the distant horizon seen beyond Yelena’s tail when she twisted around, there were still dark specks visible. Tiny birds were they closer, but dragons at this distance. Harmony could not contain her sigh each time.

This was what they had wanted, but the reality of it was miserable. They touched down once or twice in all their time traveling so that the women on Yelena’s back could see to those necessary human activities that could not be performed on dragon-back, but every other moment they needed to be in flight. Every second they were on the ground, their pursuers were closing on them.

The truly twisted thing she had realized after their first few stops was that Yelena could have outpaced them. She managed to regain the distance they lost from their stops time and again, but only when it was Harmony’s turn to sleep. She would wrap her aching arms around Orsina, feel her love tighten her grip to make sure that she was safe, and then when exhaustion carried her down into sleep with the gentle rocking motions of the dragon in flight, something must have changed, because by the time she stirred again, the Arazi were once more specks on the horizon.

It had to be Orsina. The dragon’s motion never seemed to change as she slept; if it did, she would have stirred from her sleep, she had no doubt. She had seen the way Orsina had whipped the wind around them when they fought, though she could have sworn the girl had no shade with control over the air. She didn’t ask, because in truth she did not want to know. Orsina had made the pacts that she needed to, and it was not Harmony’s place to question them. Besides, every time their wind-muffled conversation had come near to the subject, sadness seemed to well up in her love, and she would not deliberately bring it back if she were given the option.

Every part of her ached. There was no moment when they were not in motion, when she did not have some fixture of the harness digging into her or rubbing her raw. Even having her arms wrapped around Orsina all day and night was beginning to lose its appeal. For an hour or so a day, it was exciting to be able to hold her like that, but then the inevitability became crushing. It was not an hour that she would be enjoying having the girl in her arms, it was every hour. And what had been a sweet embrace soon became an exercise in shifting around in such a way as to support her through her sleep while trying to minimize the growing ache across her own back and shoulders. She might have considered herself prepared for this kind of grueling activity after her march to the north, but in truth that experience had not made her tougher and stronger, it had only provided existent aches for the new ones to latch onto.

Orsina and Yelena might have been there all the time, but her true constant companion was pain. Pain and fear that if she were to loosen her grip even the slightest bit, then either she or Orsina would go tumbling from the saddle, down through the clouds, and shatter upon the earth below.

By dawn of the fourth morning, she’d rather have stood her ground and fought all the dragons by herself than endure much more.

What luck then that the mountains and vineyards were giving way at last to lowland hills and home.

She had never seen the Volpe lands from above. Never seen the way the river sliced its way across the land, the way the mercenaries were scattered about their guard towers in half-permanent camps, and the way the durum grain fields that should have been up against the river for irrigation were thrust back on the far side of the blockades that had been assembled along it. The mountains had been a wild place, the vineyards clinging to the foothills with a desperation like Harmony’s hold on Orsina, but here there was nothing of nature and everything of order enforced on a world that did not want it. The grain grew short, and the prime land was given over to the business of war because Father had seen the value in one and not the other. He had hated Agrant with such passion that he had put a stranglehold on his own people for the small advantage of facing an enemy that would never come on the banks of the Cut.

If Art were here, he would have fixed it. She felt certain of that. It didn’t matter if the two of them were at odds right now, she still knew him and how he thought. He would fix it not because he cared about the farmers that proper management would feed, but because the inefficiency of it all would aggravate him. And because to undo something that their father had done would have brought him joy.

All those years, her father had scraped together his pennies and traded in favors so that this place would be a bulwark against the Agrantine invasion he’d felt so certain would come. He had hired in mercenaries and granted them land and title in exchange for their service. He had blockaded all trade with the south, single-handedly driving Espher’s merchants to look to their other neighbors. All that he could do to sour Agrant’s victory in supplanting the Volpe line on the throne, he had done, and now it was all for nothing.

Art had undone something their father had done. He had undone in days what had taken years to build. The gates at the bridges hung open. Those long-suffering peasants who had labored diligently under the elder Volpe’s less-than-tender care had been set free and marched northwards to safety. The mercenaries that had been bought at such inflated prices had been sent alongside them, to keep the people that they had once treated as dirt beneath their feet safe and to join the mustered armies of Espher where they were gathering outside of the capital. All of this land was being ceded to the Agrantine invasion without a fight.

The Agrantine themselves were gathered to cross the river.

Harmony had marched north with Espher when the war with the Arazi was upon them. She had seen the trail of soldiers stretching from the horizon ahead to the horizon behind. The trail behind them of camp followers and smiths, and all those other smallfolk that were necessary for an army to march at all. She had seen all of them, and she had felt invincible to be surrounded by such numbers of warriors, ready to wage battle upon an enemy whom she would soon discover numbered just as many. When those two armies had clashed, man and wyvern, Espher and Arazi, she had thought to herself for one brief moment that this was the only time in her life that she would see so many living people all gathered together in one place, greater than a city, more densely packed than the palace at the height of a ball.

She was wrong.

In every direction, the Agrantine stood. Robed in black, clad in armor still coke-stained from the furnace. A solid wall of them, all in lockstep, a breath of air between them, and then the next perfectly ordered rank. There was nothing intimidating about a single Agrantine soldier, if anything she would normally have considered them to be something of a joke, trying to scare their opponents with dark clothes and faces hidden under their steel masks. But seeing them now massed together in their endless ranks, she could see why they struck fear into Art’s withered little heart. At the end of each block rose something like a tower, cast from iron and billowing smoke into the sky. Forges perhaps, or some sort of war machine. They were wheeled, but slats protruded from their sides so that the soldiers gathered around could hoist them up for rough terrain.

The few pale flashes of bare skin and shaven heads, they were more alarming to Harmony than the armored masses, because she knew those individuals spaced evenly throughout the legions of the empire were saints. Masters of the sword and warfare. Enemies she’d been hard-pressed to beat despite her talent with the blade and the full lifetime of training she’d devoted to it. One on one, she was a match, but here and now, she doubted she’d get off a quip before being gutted.

To the rear of this massed collection of humanity a great palanquin as large as a peasant’s hut was hoisted onto the shoulders of a legion in itself and carried amidst the heart of the pack. It was made of the same blackened metal that marked the strange chimneys among them, and from the same fluted workings atop it, smoke did pour forth, but it was shifting in color and intensity as it vanished into the great, dark cloud above. Incense smoke, a dozen different herbs at least, all burning in this bizarre contraption.

The army were already in Espher, had been for many miles, but now they were about to make the crossing at the Cut. The first good spot to hold them off, using the terrain to render their numbers useless. They must have been imagining any number of traps as they came up to the bridge.

A dragon was likely still a surprise.

Crossbow bolts began to fly as Yelena swept down towards the Agrantine. All falling short, but nonetheless being loosed at them with all due malice. Chill already spreading across her skin, Orsina whispered, “Hold on tight.”

Yelena’s descent became a plummet, she was diving down into the range of the enemy crossbows even as they were being hastily restrung. Venom trailed from Yelena’s lips, falling in great thick globules to spatter across the gathered soldiery, but she did not set them alight, not yet. The goal was not to engage with the Agrantine, but to make this army ready to leap into battle with the next dragon that crossed their path. Corrosive drool was the tool they meant to employ.

Drool and haste.

Beyond the pagoda to the rear ranks, Harmony could make out proper war machines, scorpions and ballistae, the kind of mechanical solutions that would tear the walls of Covotana down. The temptation to go after them, to cripple the Agrantine with one great breath of flame, it was almost overwhelming. But they had a task they’d been set to, and giving away that a dragon served Espher would have undercut that plan entirely.

On and over they swept, circling out past the pagoda so they did not pass through the smoke rising there. Harmony did not know the constitution of a dragon, but some of those plumes looked distinctly like those you found coming out of barely cracked windows in the rougher parts of Covotana or drifting up from the courtyards of the more depraved noble parties. A drugged dragon might be a frightful sight indeed. Harmony had no desire to hear Yelena giggle. Less desire still to be on her back as she wobbled her way home.

The upturned faces of the Agrantine passed in a blur. There was no time to see if they were awestruck or consumed by terror. Yelena spat great gobbets of venom among them, thick and steaming, ready to burn with but a single spark. When their pursuers came, there would be fire aplenty to set such traps alight, even if matters would otherwise have been settled amicably.

They made their turn somewhere to the rear of the Agrantine lines, where the carefully ordered soldiery gave away to covered wagons and supply lines snaking off towards the enemy’s own homeland. To Harmony’s right, she could see the distant specks of the Arazi growing ever larger, but still too far for their purposes.

“Another pass.”

Yelena let out a growl of disapproval, thrumming up through Harmony’s legs to set all her bones quaking, but the reality of the battlefield cared not for her comfort, nor for the crossbow bolts that would soon be launched at them. They had to hold here until the Arazi were almost upon them, or they might veer off ahead of the Agrantine army and this whole fool’s errand would have been for nothing.

“Don’t grumble so, I’m sure Orsina can screen their arrows.”

Where she had before been a comforting warmth in the cold open skies, holding on to Orsina now felt like clinging to a stalactite of ice protruding up from the dragon’s back. There was an expression on her face that was entirely unfamiliar to Harmony until she recognized it as something she herself might bear. Disinterest. As though all of this meant nothing to her at all.

The wind beneath Yelena’s wings seemed to be lifting now, hauling them up higher and out of range without any extra beating of skin on air. Orsina’s touch no doubt. Down on the earth below, Harmony could see the soldiers of Agrant being hammered by that same hardened wind, knocked from their order to fall to their knees.

Across the armies the wind carried them until they were passing by the pagoda once more, and only then did the air about them seem to still. Yelena beat her wings against that sudden stillness, but like those dragons and wyverns they had downed to the north, it was as though there were nothing for her to gain traction against.

She dropped like a stone.

As they fell, the last of their momentum carried them forward, Yelena’s still outstretched wings catching upon anything they could to keep them in flight, yet it seemed all too obvious that they would have no luck. They were falling now, and no force that either dragon or woman astride it could bring to bear would undo that. Clinging close to her frozen love, Harmony wailed, “Orsina! What are you doing?”

“It.” Orsina tried to turn, but it seemed as though she were held fast in the same vise that now kept Yelena’s wings fixed in place. “It isn’t. Me.”

“What do you mean it isn’t you!?” The slow spiral as they plummeted to their death lurched her from side to side. “The Agrantine don’t have any Shadebound!”

Yet there below them stood a man on the platform of the pagoda. A giant of a man, forged not in the womb of some titanic woman but in the banquet halls of an emperor. He was robed in black, but not the simple sackcloth that adorned his saints. Velvet lay over a form more suitable for a mountain than a man. Thick fur collars surrounded the hulking semisphere of his head, making him look all the more like an egg in its nest. He had fingers thick as sausages outstretched towards them, and with a tightening of his fist, the God Emperor of Agrant stopped them dead in the air.

For a moment that stretched out forever they just hung there. Pinned like a butterfly by the weight of his will, then with a gesture, he drew them closer. Dragging them across the sky. Yelena was in full panic, frantically trying to beat her wings, to be free. Harmony could feel the muscles shifting beneath her scaled skin, but as powerful as the dragon was, she was nothing in the face of this power.

They were shifted sideways through the sky, then brought down until they were level with the God Emperor himself. Only then did he speak. “What do we have here?”

His voice was soft, almost delicate, and his accent was lighter than Harmony would have anticipated. It seemed strange to her that some foreign king would bother to learn the language of a people he’d never meet, yet here he was, chatting away.

“Dragons, my eyes have observed many times before. Two humans atop it? Arazi, of course, but you have neither scale nor claw.” There was no way he was speaking loudly enough for them to hear him over the marching of his army all around, yet his words poured into Harmony’s ear like a honeyed whisper. She tried to answer, but the same force that pinned Yelena to the surface of the air was holding her too.

“The real Arazi are coming.” Orsina’s voice came breathy, sounding distant though she was right beside Harmony on the dragon’s back. “For you and your army.”

The whole mass of the man seemed to buck as he laughed, beckoning Orsina closer with a curve of his finger. She was ripped from Harmony’s arms. Drawn through the air, dangling like a helpless doll until she was swaying right in front of him. “Do I have need to fear the Arazi, oh child of Espher?”

“They’ll kill you.” She spat the words out through gritted teeth. Whatever hold the man had over Harmony and Yelena, he had it on her too, but she had some strength to fight through it. To feel that crushing weight and still draw breath.

“They are a rabble.” He lowered Orsina gently until her feet touched down upon the platform of his pagoda. Down beneath them, a little extra strain was added to the backs of the hundred unfortunates that had to cart their emperor around. “Why need a god fear their ilk?”

“Ask the gods they burned.”

For a moment, as the God Emperor’s eyes widened, the armies of Agrant stilled in their marching. Harmony could not guess how many crossbows were leveled at them just then. How badly this would all come apart if they did not escape before the Arazi did arrive. Then just when it seemed that the affront had been too much, his mouth sagged open, and he let out a belly laugh that seemed to shake the whole pagoda. Beyond the edifice of carried iron, the laughter seemed to spread like the pox, rank after rank throwing back their heads and chortling with glee. When their god laughed, they all laughed with him.

“This is good, I like this.” He paused in his laughter to ponder the right word. “Wit. My children, they are not much for wit.”

Orsina was now standing fully under her own power but had only an instant to appreciate it before he crooked a finger, and she slid across the smooth surface of the metal towards him. Up close, he loomed over her by only a foot or so, but his girth was such that she looked like a child beside him.

“It has been long since my court flourished with laughter and wit.” He held out his meaty hand and hers was yanked up from her side to be placed inside of it. “You should come back with me when my dirty business is done in Espher. You would fill my life with joy.”

His grasp on Orsina must have been tighter than what he exerted on the others, because even from here, Harmony could see the sweat beading upon her love’s forehead as she fought back. She could not snatch her hand away from him, not with his physical strength holding her in place too, but she could resist the pressure that was flattening her hair and trying to make her nod her head.

“No.” The Emperor looked aghast before she could force her next words out. “Thanks. But no. I’m no jester.”

His hands were encrusted in rings now that Harmony saw them up close. Gems as big as her eyes rested on the backs of the fingers he now brought up to stroke at Orsina’s cheek. “Fair as you are, I’d make a wife of you.”

There was enough pressure being exerted on Orsina now that Harmony could feel it even from a distance. A crushing weight, trying to drive her to her knees in supplication. But the longer Orsina faced it down, the harder it seemed to find holding her. Before Harmony’s eyes, the girl straightened up and met the God Emperor’s gaze.

“Thank you, but I am already engaged to be married.”

It was almost seamless, but Harmony could see the breath of hesitation between Orsina’s words and the emperor’s reply. The moment when he was surprised.

“My compliments to your betrothed on their good fortune.”

It could not have been often in his life that he was denied what he wanted, and rarer still that he had to engage in actual conversation when he could move all the people around him like puppets.

“And my compliments to your many other wives,” Orsina managed to say through the thickening air. As if it were a jab at him. Harmony would have winced if she could move. There was a rebellious spark in Orsina that she’d always been quite drawn to but which, in their current circumstances, might very well have been a suicidal impulse.

The God Emperor of Agrant bowed his head. “Deeply, they mourn for their lost sister.”

All around them, the hardened soldiers of Agrant began to weep beneath their masks. Harmony could feel tears pricking at her own eyes. It seemed to hit Orsina the hardest of all. Tears flooded down her cheeks as she struggled to spit out, “As do we.”

Fire burst to life upon the northern flank as the first of the Arazi arrived. Harmony strained with all her strength against the invisible force holding her in place, but it was useless. They were sitting ducks here in the midst of it all. Target practice for the descending horde.

“Here comes now your people’s true mourning.” There did not seem to be any anger in the emperor’s musical voice. It was as though none of this were happening at all. As though the venom bursting into plumes of fire among his loyal followers was words on a page that he was reading or playacting on a stage. “A gift of slaughter to repay their slight.”

Orsina was being lifted from the deck of the palanquin once more, hoisted by the emperor’s will. She had never faced anything like this, but the power that she held inside of her seemed to recognize it well enough. With a sudden burst of cold air that washed over Harmony and Yelena, the grip was broken. Yelena dropped the final few feet to land atop the soldiers below, men who had been standing to stalwart attention but a moment ago, now crushed beneath the dragon’s weight.

Harmony ran up the length of Yelena’s curving neck even as she fell. Strength finally returned to her, she burned with the need to move. To get closer. To stop all of this before Orsina got herself killed. She leapt from atop the ridges of Yelena’s brow for the deck of the palanquin and found herself caught once more in a thickening of the air before she could land beside her love and the god that walked among them.

Yet still the cool waves of Orsina’s power washed over her, cleansing her of the foreign influence. She may have been stopped, but she was not stilled. She still had the full motion of her body, though no friction with anything around her that she could use as leverage.

“This is a gift, Emperor of Agrant,” Harmony barked out. “My brother’s gift to you.”

This close, the details of the man’s face became all the more clear. His skin was smooth as a baby’s, his lips, thick and moist, only adding to that impression. Only his eyes seemed fitting for a man of such power, beady and dark beneath his hairless brow. They were affixed on her now. A stare that might have pinned her in place were she not already trapped by some other force at his beck and call.

“You did not want the Arazi on your borders. It was half the reason you’ve never come after Espher before. We were a buffer for you. Well, here is our gift to you. Among those dragon-riders that we’ve delivered to you, there is one who rules them. Konus. If you strike him down, the threat of the Arazi is over. He is the one who unified them. He is the one who holds them together with purpose.”

“You lack this one’s wit if you think I might believe such a deception. I do not want you for a wife.”

The scorpions to the rear of the army loosed their javelins, and fearsome as the dragons might have been, there was something to be said for the terror of human engineering too. For a moment the sun was blotted from the sky by the vast bolts’ passage. Light returned as they struck home, then the rain of blood began. Drizzling down to quench the flames on the ground. It did not matter that they lacked the precision to pick a single dragon from the sky with such weapons when they could instead fill the sky with sharpness.

Blood rained down over the emperor too, pattering on his bald pate and slicking down his face. He did not flinch nor respond in any way to the sudden dousing. He only had eyes for Harmony in that moment.

“War comes for your people not because it is convenient to me, but due to a matter of honor. One among your people slew my wife.” He paused dramatically, as though he were in fact overcome by emotion. “My beloved wife. That is an insult that cannot go unanswered.”

Orsina reached out and caught him by the hand, surprising all present into sudden silence. “If I were to marry you, as you asked, would you forget all of this?”

“Orsina, no!” Harmony gasped.

He drew his hand carefully from her grasp, glancing to ensure all of the rings were still in place. It did not seem to occur to him that lying was an option. Presumably, when one was so powerful, deception became unnecessary. “Beautiful though you may be, my blood runs slow in these elder years, such distraction as you might offer would be but temporary. Honor demands answer.”

That seemed to deflate Orsina a little. As though she’d thought the idea of slotting herself under this bloated and entitled lump was some great victory that she could have won. As if his touch would not have sickened her.

“Please take no offense, dear lady. It is rare that I find one I wish to take as my own. Rarer still to find one who can resist my command. You could have been one of the greatest curiosities of my life and I the master you so dearly deserve.”

He raised a hand, and a plume of dragon’s fire was turned away before it could bathe them, sweeping instead over the grand edifice of his palanquin and leaving it barely more soot-stained than it had been before. “Still, I am still gentleman enough to accept your answer without pressing further. You may be on your way. Go in my grace.”

Harmony spoke over Orsina before she could say another word. “Thank you, your… emperor-ness.”

Orsina caught Harmony’s eye and finally seemed to understand the danger they were in. The venom they had secreted across the camp was blazing now, the smog-filled sky creeping lower with every moment. She ran to Harmony as the invisible strings holding both of them gave away, and seizing her by the hand, they leapt out into the open air.

Yelena rose from beneath them. Wings thundering as she fought to gain height until Orsina remembered herself and thrust wind up from beneath them. Rising into the maelstrom of dragons and screams hanging between cloud and the earth.

Once more they fell into the rhythm of war. As each dragon sighted them and turned to give chase, Yelena beat her wings all the faster, not fleeing, but pursuing that clash of scale and claw. The nearest pivoted around into the path of another flight of scorpion bolts, the next spat forth a great lance of flame that Orsina deflected with her shade and a wave of her hand.

It was only in that moment that the God Emperor’s gestures became familiar to Harmony. Orsina moved like him now. Commanding the world around her with a motion. It sent chills up Harmony’s spine that had nothing to do with the suddenly chill body pressed up behind her and everything to do with the glimpse of the future she’d just encountered.

As the dragon burst through the diverted plume of flame where it was diffusing into the sky, Yelena lunged forward, her teeth snapping into the small scales at its throat. The rider let out a gargling scream as she experienced the same death as her mount, then both fell limp to crush some soldiers below.

Harmony never even saw the one that was sweeping in at them from behind, but Orsina knew it was there, and scales and flesh parted in a line, like a cake being sliced, as it ran into the sharpened edge of air that her shades had conjured. The first she and Yelena knew of it was when the blood doused them.

In motion now, Orsina looked more like a conductor than a warrior, directing the course of the battle with gestures and rhythm. Here she pointed, and there a dragon fell from the sky, gored. There she waved, and a fresh wall of scorpion bolts swerved off course to bury themselves in the hides of the dragons around them, but never touching Yelena.

Harmony found herself touching far more of Yelena than she’d ever intended, flattening herself against the dragon’s back to avoid the chaos above. Clinging to her scales when she overreached the harness. “Take us back to Covotana. Please, Yelena.”

Whether the dragon heard her or not, she could not say, but mere moments later they swept up into the thick black clouds over the Agrantine army, and a moment later they were free in the open sky above. Orsina sank back down into the seat behind Harmony with a sigh of what was probably relief.

“So that’s what passes for a god these days? I’m not impressed.” The voice was Orsina’s but the words… they didn’t sound like her at all. Reaching back to take her hand, Harmony found it still deathly cold, but she told herself it was just the chill of the air, nothing more.

Yelena drove on towards home, hearth and roost, and if any dragons or wyverns managed to break free of the clouds to give chase, they soon thought better of it.

11 - No Man’s King
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Artemio had become so accustomed to his shadow that he did not think twice as Kagan came lumbering after him when the day in court was done. In his chambers, he set aside his kingly garb and instead dressed in the manner of an entirely different leader. Clothes handed down unwillingly by his father, and a mask that obscured his face. In the palace, he spoke for Espher as its king, but beneath the surface of the city, down in the dank caverns where cults and rebels gathered, he bore this entirely different mantle.

Changed, he stepped back out into the parlor of his suite and was headed for the servants’ passages that would by now be abandoned if his orders had been followed. He made it almost half the distance before spotting Kagan still lounging on the chaise, one scaled ridge of an eyebrow raised. “Going out, are you?”

Though the man had grated on his nerves for the duration of his tenure as an oversized carrier pigeon, they had some form of rapport built by this point. Artemio would ignore the things that the exiled Arazi said to him that could be considered insulting or treasonous, and in turn Kagan restrained himself from making a running commentary on all of the things he considered Artemio to be doing wrong until they were out of earshot of any underlings. He did not anticipate any issues now. “See if you can’t find an oversized cloak somewhere in the dressing rooms. Something that will disguise your features, if not your bulk.”

“I’m coming with you?”

Better to have the man with him. He’d blend in fine with the Last King revolutionaries as a mutant, and it would be better that they remained in each other’s company until he had fed the man sufficient lies to curb any desire he might have to discuss Artemio’s current garb. “My need to be kept updated on the battlefront has not yet abated.”

“Nothing’s changed. They hit the Agrant army, the Arazi hit it after, they left.” Despite his words, Kagan was up and moving with that strange sinuous serpentine grace that did not seem to fit with the size of his body. “Smooth flying since then.”

“Once they are safely behind our walls, I shall cease to worry, until then, I will require your presence. Now go make yourself presentable, we have an appointment to keep.”

It had been more than a season since he had last attended one of the meetings of his most secret servants. With all the work of running a country single-handedly heaped upon his shoulders, he simply could not make the time for it, despite many unexpected palace servants quietly approaching him to inform him of when the next meeting would take place.

To his shame, he had actually forgotten which of the servants in his employ at the palace were party to the conspiracy at this point. Even for someone capable of retaining such vast amounts of information, there were limits, and it seemed that his were caring about which of the three various servants who cleaned out his chamber pot was on duty on a given day.

With his scaly shadow stalking behind him, they descended first into the guts of the palace, the warren of interconnected passages and chambers that only a servant with a lifetime of service or a genius with an accurate and up-to-date map might hope to navigate.

From there they passed not directly into the sewers as would have been convenient, but out into the courtyard instead, where horses had churned the mud into a froth, and they soon took on the same patina of filth as was normal for the common elements of the city. He had planned his route according to the rainfall of the past days. If it had been dry, they would have diverted elsewhere.

He did not care to smell of low beasts and their leavings, but it was something of a necessity to blend in among the common people. On Kagan, it was something of a relief. Every so often, Artemio could swear he caught a whiff of something strange and alchemical about the man, like some watered-down version of a dragon’s venom, or perhaps the scent released when a snake’s nest was overturned in the fields. Mud and excrement may have been unpleasant, but they were still preferable to that alien aroma. “You take me to the nicest places.”

The joke, while feeble, drew a surprised laugh from Artemio. It may have been the first attempt at humor he’d heard from the hulking Arazi in all the time they’d known one another. “I regret that there was no ball for you to attend this eve. Perhaps next time.”

Kagan grumbled something in his own tongue, but for all of his presumable complaints, he kept pace with Artemio all the same as they set out into the streets and down well-hidden stairways into the canals that ran through the city. “Here.” Artemio paused just long enough for Kagan to see him before he seemed to vanish from sight. The access grating to the overflow drains was concealed around the curve by a clever feat of architecture. Artemio was oddly proud of whichever of his forebearers had come up with that one. All the benefits of a full system of sewerage with none of the unsightliness.

With the mildew-stained tiles overhead almost scraping against his head despite his hunching, Kagan followed after Artemio like the loyal dog that he was. It did not matter that he was someone else’s loyal dog, only that he was well trained. “Why are we in the cesspits?”

“There are elements within the court that are still… fractious after my ascent to the throne. Those who do not believe that my family has the power to hold it in the long term. Those elements must be excised so that their doubt cannot infect others.”

“I remember how it’s done.” Kagan’s voice was still a bass rumble, but there was a sharp edge to it that Artemio was not accustomed to, even when he was needling the man. “Smash the heirs’ heads on the nursery floors.”

“Luckily enough, the Cerva were not particularly successful with regard to heirs, so there was precious little of that to navigate, but now that they are gone, every wayward branch of their family tree that had assumed power would be passed to them at the end of the twins’ reign has been agitating. I need them to stop until such time as the current crisis is past.”

Artemio had lit the storm-lantern he’d carried with him for the purpose of navigating these passages, so when he grinned, Kagan’s teeth shone in the lamplight. “Crises are the best time to murder a king and replace him.”

“Well, speaking as the king in question, I think I’d rather have those who’d see me dead sliced to ribbons instead.” He strode ahead, forcing Kagan to keep pace or be left behind in the dark. It was a minor cruelty, making the man duck under the vaulted ceiling and shuffle along with all haste, but it did amuse him.

Still the man insisted on mockery. “Trained sewer rats down here to eat them?”

“Not far off the mark.” Artemio attempted to maintain the same jovial air. “You may recall when we first met I was in pursuit of a cadre of assassins, preying upon the nobility of Espher?”

“When you set me on fire.”

The man was like a terrier with a rat between his teeth. He just would not let that go.

Artemio pressed on. “Well, we are set to meet with that cadre this evening and issue them with some new targets, now that their previous master has expired.”

There were twists and turns through the passages that he had to recall, back to the underground lake where he had first encountered the cult of the Last King. Despite their title, he did not think they truly worshiped death, nor did he even believe that the violence that had brought them to his attention was typical of any individual within it if he was entirely honest. They were peasants, ground under the heel of nobility for so long that they felt they had no choice but to strike back, and this little organization they’d attached themselves to gave them the means. Individually, in their real lives, they were nobody, a maid, a gardener, a cabdriver, a mill worker, but beneath a mask and cowl, they became something more. They had tasted power, and now not a one of them would willingly set down that chalice unless they were forced.

He had no intention of forcing them. Not when they provided him with so useful a tool. For some reason, they had fallen under his father’s thrall, but the anonymity of the mask meant that the majority of them did not even know who their leader was, nor when he’d been replaced. It was entirely possible that his father had taken on the mantle of leadership of the group in the very same way that Artemio himself had usurped it, by killing the prior one and replacing him silently.

The sound of falling water grew louder as they approached until its echoes through the tunnels became all that Artemio could hear. Stepping out into the cavern proper was almost a relief for the abatement in noise.

Or at least, it was a relief until it became apparent that the chamber was full of people, maintaining the silence that he now enjoyed. All eyes turned towards him.

“See why you wanted me along now,” Kagan rumbled softly. “I’m not your bodyguard.”

Artemio raised his hand in greeting, declaring as was customary, “There is only one king.”

From all quarters the answer echoed back, overwhelming even the sound of water with its sudden volume. “And his name is death.”

Usually, he would not have to deal with the rabble directly except when making a speech, but whatever sub-leaders the cult had designated seemed to be absent this night. It was enough to make Artemio wish he had learned their names.

Once there had been a wooden stage assembled by the lakeside, on which his predecessor would stand and make his declarations, but now it was all burned away, and only the heaped blackened timbers remained for him to cross through the crowd and mount.

The bodies of the peasantry seemed oddly resistant this evening as he walked through them, where before he was shown the due respect and they’d parted for him, now he found his shoulders brushing against their tattered cloaks, and he had to step around some of the more hulking half beasts to make his way. Kagan stayed at his heels, but it seemed he did so only to voice the thoughts that Artemio himself could not give credence in his own mind.

“Something isn’t right here.”

“Quiet yourself.”

A hulking mongrel stepped from his spot and into Artemio’s path. Horns protruding from the sides of his head and thick dark hair creeping up his neck. “Should listen to your pet, boy.”

There was clearly some ill feeling over his extended absence, but he had been conveying such orders and messages as he could through the channels he had available to him. Presumably this could be diffused with some well-chosen words. “Nobody is anyone’s pet. We’re all equal here.”

That should have settled them down. The few who knew his identity would take it as a statement agreeing with their principles. Kagan would have had his waning tolerance for Artemio bolstered. Yet the bull man seemed to bristle even more than before.

“Run back to your palace, Princess.”

It was becoming increasingly apparent that there had been some change in leadership in Artemio’s absence, and that his true identity had been disseminated through the populace. This presented a problem, but it also provided a degree of protection. If the cult knew who he was, then he could leverage his position as their actual king as a means of control, and of course, there was no peasant in all the world so bold that they’d try to lay hands upon a king.

He cast off his disguise, and despite their knowing precisely who he was, he could see all of the nearby conspirators draw away from him as though a rock had been overturned and the viper beneath unveiled. Presumably none of them had ever laid eyes on a king before. “It is true, I am the king of Espher. Should I know shame because of that? I was born to my position in society, just as all of you were. It was chance of birth, not choice, that made me your ruler, but that does not mean that I cannot share in your opinion on matters of politics. Monarchy is an inherently unstable mode of governance, each generation born with the potential for greatness or incompetence entirely by random chance. If a superior method could be devised, then I would be more than content to see it implemented peacefully.”

The first part, claiming that he shared in their bizarre ideas of equality among all, had been the first countermeasure against his discovery that he had contrived, but the latter part was inspired, if he said so himself. Drawing on his knowledge of history to acknowledge the flaws of aristocracy as a method of rule while placing the burden of offering up a replacement to the peasants themselves, who would have as much education in political theory and rhetoric as he had of cow birthing. It also planted a seed in the mind of the more moderate that there was a non-violent solution to things. He did not need to win them all over, only enough to create division. Only united were they a threat.

“Aye, you should know shame,” came the crackling voice of some old woman among the pressing crowd. “Your forefathers were thieves and murderers, taking all they pleased, giving nothing back, then passing down all the comforts their cruelty bought to you. You’ve lived in the lap of luxury from the sweat on our brows.”

To Artemio’s immense surprise, Kagan offered that sniping old hag her answer. “Are you responsible for your father’s sins?”

The Arazi’s rhetorical skills may have been honed among barbarians, but his delivery was swift and memorable. He made it sound as if he himself were truly considering the philosophical question instead of trying to hammer home a point.

With that particular line of thinking currently snipped short, Artemio had the chance to present his case. “I am king, that is true. I was born into a power that you will never know. I cannot deny it. But that presents us all with a historic opportunity. An opportunity for true change in our lifetimes.”

The hubbub that had been slowly building around him rose to a furor as he said that, with one of the closest feather-headed conspirators scoffing, “As if you’d just drop it because we asked you to.”

“Of course I would! Who would want to be king? I do not care about being king. It is the job that I must do because there is none better suited, but should the time come that a better means of ruling comes along, I have no attachment to a crown. It would bring me great pleasure to abandon statecraft and pursue different interests.” Artemio let a little honest feeling bleed into his statements, taking a cue from Kagan’s surprisingly emotive display.

Yet it was Kagan that stabbed him in the back. “Do it then. Do it now.”

The demand was picked up by the crowd. If Artemio had been physically wearing his crown, then in all of the excitement it might very well have been snatched from his head. What luck that he had more sense than to wear expensive jewelry on this outing.

“We have no alternative.” He held up his hand for silence as the protests grew more enraged once more. “At present, Espher faces a war on two fronts. The Arazi of the northlands come to lay our people to waste, and the emperor of Agrant marches from the south with all his legions in tow. Rudderless, this ship will sink. You will fall under the rule of far more fearsome despots than I, men who would not willingly offer you the kind of magnanimity that I do.”

The great bull who’d stopped his advance to start with was now looking at him with confusion writ on his features. It was working. They didn’t know what to do. What to say. If Artemio had been oppositional or defiant, they could have rallied against him, but how could they rally against the very thing they were asking for? “What mag… what are you offering?”

This gruffness was enough to draw an interested silence from the crowd where Artemio’s own statements were not. They wanted to see what they could get out of him. If it had been as simple as money, he’d have dipped into the royal treasury and put gold in every pocket here. The value of these peasants as spies and assassins made them a more worthwhile investment than half of the kingdom’s soldiery. They could move invisibly through every circle of society, they could strike from the heart of an enemy’s own home. Without their aid, Artemio doubted that he could have made it halfway to the throne, let alone sit firmly upon it as he did now.

This would have to be quite the sales pitch.

“I want Espher united. Together we are strong, divided we will fall. I will offer everyone here amnesty for whatever crimes they have committed in the past, by my command or otherwise, and I will welcome a delegation of citizens to discuss matters of state to ensure that your views are heard.”

The crowd had fallen dead silent at this offer. Representation was likely better than any one of them could have hoped for. Most of Espher’s nobility wouldn’t have even thought to offer it. But Artemio had also lived in a family where his needs and wants were entirely disregarded, and he knew just how valuable being heard was to someone who had spent their whole life denied. Besides, just because he had said that he would listen to the peasants didn’t mean he was going to obey their every whim.

If they came to him with a suggestion that had value, he would be able to act upon it, and all the praise for each decision would be attributed to his wisdom. When they came to him with ideas that were not feasible or ran in opposition to his own goals, he could simply refuse, with the excuse that his new advisors were simply uneducated in that particular matter.

Moreover, if they ever did overreach themselves and try to force his hand, that delegation of the commons would serve as a list of ringleaders. “When the current crisis is resolved, we can work together to create a more equitable situation, whereby violent uprising is not the only way for your voices to be acknowledged.”

That was it. He’d made his offer, angled it towards the moderates who just wanted to live their lives. All that remained to be seen was how badly they had been radicalized against the nobility. If their war was ideological rather than practical, then there was little he could do or offer that might sway them, but if they were truly interested in improving the plight of the peasantry, this was their opportunity to compromise and have all the sins of revolt washed away while still achieving some portion of their goals. No risk, all reward.

“No.” The old woman pushed through the crowd. The same haggard old thing that had demanded he felt shame. She was a rotund thing with a shell pressing out against her cloak, giving her a bizarre silhouette down here in the torchlight. “You offer us nothing. You offer us forgiveness? We’ve done no wrong. You offer us a chance to come beg you for what is ours by right? We don’t need to ask for what we’re owed. You… you’re a crafty one, but we’re not fools, no matter how little you might think of us. There is only one king that we bend our knees to, and it is not you.”

“So you shall continue to spiral into irrelevance without direction?” He was grasping at straws now. The bodies that had parted so begrudgingly before now formed a wall behind Artemio and Kagan.

“We have all the ‘leadership’ we need,” the old turtle hag sneered. “Our king is come.”

They had betrayed him. Betrayed Espher. There was no telling what commands their new leader had issued them regarding Artemio, but he could not imagine that there was any hope that it would be to bring him comfort. Their “king is come” meant that they were throwing in with either Agrant or the Arazi. Most likely Agrant, the absent flair of their nobility would appeal to the peasants, and they would not have to fear encountering dragons in their day-to-day lives.

It made sense. Peasants were cowards at heart, that was why they never made anything of themselves. So when it seemed that Espher was faltering, like drowning rats they were fleeing to another ship. Cowards and scum, every one of them, and he’d thought that they might serve some higher purpose like the fool he was. Always looking to see the best in people, and always being disappointed. He would not be fooled again in the same manner.

The crowd had stilled once more, watching Artemio with bated breath, like the hounds before the hunt began. They were not soldiers or warriors, they were common people, armed with little more than knives and what rocks they could scoop from the cavern floor. If he died here, to them, it would not be some glorious annal of history, it would be a joke. He would be a joke. All he had sought and struggled to achieve would become a footnote in history, the shortest restoration of a dynastic line in all of time.

“There is only one king, Artemio Volpe.” The turtle woman emerged from the ranks of gathered nobodies and faced him down. “And he is not you.”

Like a signal had been sounded, they charged. Artemio had no sword on his hip, for he’d had no way to disguise such a thing, but he did have that which he had been born with. The flickering shadows cast by the torches around his feet doubled in number as a shade came as bidden.

A lance of flame leapt from his one good hand, searing clean through the hardened shell of the turtle woman and boiling her inside of it. Steam and blood burst forth from around her neck, shoulders, and hips, but Art had no time to savor his minor victory because the rest of the cult were upon him. Fists rose and fell with a smith’s steady rhythm. Powerful or not, if he did not have a moment to think, he could not direct that power. The forge spirit’s flame fluttered hopelessly in the palm of his hand.

Then all at once the press of bodies was gone. Kagan stood over him, blood already dripping from his clawed hands. A glance told Artemio the story. Of the ox man who had tried to accost the unarmed Arazi, thinking he was more than a match for the strength of any hybrid. Not realizing that Kagan was not bonded to some beast of burden but a creature of legend. Kagan had seized him, hoisted him, and thrown him.

The crowd that had been beating upon Artemio had been bowled over by the sudden impact of one of their titanic kin, and now Kagan stood over him, clubbing back anyone fool enough to close the distance with his massive fists.

“This doesn’t mean I like you.”

“The thought had not crossed my mind,” Artemio mumbled through the taste of his own blood. The room swam as he clambered back to his feet.

“You shall not leave here alive, king of nothing.” It was not the freshly made turtle soup speaking this time but some other elder who’d likely dissolve to Artemio’s fire just as easily. The trouble was, he had no more fingers that he could afford to sever in exchange for the burst of power it would take to get them free of this trap. Even the brief burst of fire he’d called a moment before had put a fresh streak of white in his hair. He dared not draw on Harmony for fear of toppling her from dragon-back, so all he had were the reserve of years left to him, and they were not so many that he wanted to spend them so freely.

Yet when he saw a flash of silver heading for Kagan’s ribs, he did. He spent an hour of his own life to preserve the Arazi exile’s. The sudden burst of flame setting the hulking man’s cloak afire even as it took the would-be assassin in the face.

“You set me on fire, again?!”

There was no chance to speak, only time for a burst of laughter that he was surprised to find escaping him. He had to rely upon the other man’s instincts to carry them through this.

With a twist of his wrist, he flung out a line of flame, barely thick enough to have done more than hurt, but enough to scare back the press of peasants before they could make a charge at the Arazi’s back. With his concentration mostly on holding that line, Artemio took a grip on the back of Kagan’s shirt and started hauling him towards the entrance to the cavern.

Compared with the bulk of the man, he must have been barely noticeable. But as Kagan fended off blows with his scaled forearms and punched out at anyone fool enough to remain in his reach, he moved, step by painstaking step, letting the ball of his foot touch down, then rolling the heel down slowly, like he couldn’t trust the footing.

Roaring to intimidate his foes, Kagan’s first punch seemed to go wide, but as he moved, he tore the burning cloak from his own back and cast it over them, tangling them up and buying himself time to deliver bone-grinding kicks to the smoldering heap of squirming bodies.

Artemio could not keep ineffectually dragging him. Not when enemies were closing in, ducking under the line of flame, jinking around its outer edges to charge in at them. With his bare hand, Artemio had to catch a knife being swung for him, reaching past what had probably once been the prized blade of a hovel somewhere to seize a wrist so skinny he wondered if these peasants were so starved, they might all be bowled over with a single swing.

Using his untrained foe’s momentum against him, Artemio carried through on his downward swing, throwing his own weight behind it as it passed him by and burying it in the unfortunate man’s gut. The expression of surprise on the man’s piggy little face would haunt Artemio in the moments to come. The disbelief that any harm could actually come to him. These people were a cult in truth. So devoted to their cause that they overlooked the reality of the situations they were throwing themselves into.

Kicking that one away, Artemio faced the next, and the next, managing to buy enough time by driving the last attacker at them to summon a blade of flame from his knuckles that he then punched past the assassin’s swinging broom-handle to broil his innards. The smell of cooking meat flooded out through the chamber, drawing a rumble from Kagan’s stomach where it hung behind Artemio’s back.

The bigger man may have had no weapons or any burning desire to preserve Artemio’s life, but that did not mean that he didn’t fight like a bear backed into a corner. Once or twice the smaller cultists managed to get around his bulk and stab at his flanks, but their little blunt knives were no trouble to Kagan’s scales. They deflected off him with a rattle, and for a moment Artemio felt like he could breathe again.

From amidst the gathered foes arose a champion, a great mongrel man with a bull terrier’s distinctive sloped head. He pushed his way through the throngs at a charge, hoisting a gardening fork in both hands. Those muddied and rusted prongs would have made it through even Kagan’s thick scales if he got in reach, so Artemio had to ensure that he never got in reach.

Fearful as the metalwork might have been, the shaft of the makeshift weapon was nothing but wood. Cheap, easily come by, and flammable.

Letting the red line die, Artemio instead focused his summoned flames on the dog giant’s hands. Smoke licked out from where they grasped his tool, but still the bulldog came for them at full pace, trident already descending. The smoldering heat that Artemio had conjured seemed insufficient to dissuade progress, so he fed the flame.

From the scorched woodwork out, fat liquefied in the dog man’s arms, bursting out through his crackling skin. He let loose a dread howl that the other canid mongrels took up, mournfully, as the strongest of them toppled to his knees and then the dusty cavern floor.

The goal was not to kill them all. Artemio did not have enough life left in him for such an undertaking. The purpose of his conquest was instead to frighten them off. To present a version of a Shadebound’s power that was too dangerous to approach.

Once more, total war was not the requirement. He didn’t have to beat all of them, just enough of them that the rest recognized the error of their ways and fled. They didn’t even need to flee, if truth be told. Just keep their distance enough that Artemio himself could escape.

Kagan may have been a force to behold on the battlefield, more a primal explosion of nature than any sort of disciplined combatant, but even he was not possessed of limitless resources. In places he bled now, where the knives that had glanced from his scales had found purchase in between them. His shirt and trousers slowly darkened as the moisture of his blood spread forth from each of these nicks and scratches.

His furious assault was slowing. It was barely noticeable, and had Artemio’s life not depended upon it, he himself likely wouldn’t have spotted the more sluggish way that Kagan continued to fight.

Splitting his attention to keep track of his fighting partner had weakened Artemio’s tenuous hold on his magic. The blue-hot flames he’d called from his hand now shone red, and instead of slipping through hide and flesh they were buffeting against it more and more often. Sending out smoke and startling the foe but doing nothing beyond that. Half of the mongrels had hides so thick that they wouldn’t even notice the burns he was leaving for hours.

“Kagan, we need to go.” Artemio had to yell for a hope of being heard over the clash with the rabble, and even with his voice raised, he had his doubts as to whether a single word was being heard.

Kagan took hold of the next mongrel to approach him, ducking under a swipe to catch on the woman’s thick-furred ankles, then he started swinging.

It became Artemio’s turn to duck when the Arazi spun, sweeping the unfooted woman in a great spiral up to chest height before letting her go. Like the first bull that Kagan had thrown, everyone could see what was coming, yet nobody seemed to have been expecting it. A whole rank of encroaching revolutionaries were knocked from their feet, toppling the press behind them like dominoes, with only the third set being caught by those pressing in behind them and righted.

“We needed to go before we even got here,” Kagan roared over the pained cries of the people he’d just scattered. “Any idiot could see it was an ambush.”

Artemio let loose a great wall of flame, paper-thin and barely hot enough to singe hair, but enough to scare men who were barely more than beasts. “It was a calculated gamble.”

“You lost.”

Leading with his shoulder, Kagan bowled the last few protectors of the entryway aside. He had bulk and strength on his side and a long lifetime of learning how to best throw it around. If truth be told, he made quite an excellent bodyguard in all aspects but one. He had no loyalty. He would save Artemio for the love of Orsina, but when Orsina’s care for Artemio waned, when she was issued commands that she could not stomach or asked for something she did not want to give, then he would let the king of Espher die without a second glance. And while Orsina herself was mired in sentiment, it seemed abundantly clear that Kagan was not. If he thought that her needs were best served by Artemio’s death, he’d commit himself to it.

As they slipped and sprinted back along the sewerage tunnels, rebels snapping at their heels all the way, Artemio’s mind was entirely clear for the first time since he had become king. All of the distractions of rulership set aside. A horse could not wear two bridles, and Espher could not tolerate two kings. He had been lucky, thus far, that Orsina had been pliant, but eventually a schism between them would arise.

He may have been a war hero and a king, but much of his reputation had been built upon the back of her labor. If she did break away from him, he could not help but wonder which of them would be left with the greater fraction of the court.

But just as he could not call down the city guard upon the rebels of the Last King’s cult, neither could he reveal the secret of Orsina’s heredity. He would have been incriminated by both for his foreknowledge of their actions.

Whatever lies he may have spun to Orsina about their engagement, in truth he was simply trying to solidify their base of support into one. Whatever justifications he’d made, he truly needed to make her his wife, for there was no other way to ensure that she would not someday decide that she would prefer to have the crown for herself. She had power enough that there would be nothing he could do to stop her if she did make that decision, so he needed to bind the two of them together so that neither one could strike at the other without suffering the same harm. When the war was won, they would be wed, or he’d have to see her dead, no matter his sister’s opinions on the matter.

Besides, how much of the gamble of aristocracy that he’d shown his disdain for to the peasants could be alleviated by a king powerful enough to defend his kingdom alone, without an army or allies. His heirs could be powerhouses to rival the living god of the south.

With a wave of his hand, Artemio sent sparks trailing behind them, igniting the foul-smelling gases that the sewers extruded. Flames washed over him, over Kagan, over everyone in pursuit, but while it merely singed the backs of those who were being pursued, it seared the faces of those behind them. A blinding, stinging flash that brought their hunt to an abrupt halt.

By the time that their eyes adjusted back to the darkness of the tunnels, the king and his Arazi were gone.

12 - The Devil’s Bargain
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

When Orsina and her dragon came back to Covotana, the peasants breathed a sigh of relief. It was not that they didn’t trust in their city walls and their noble protectors, but there was comfort to be found in the thought of a champion of limitless power who rode around on a dragon’s back that the city guard simply couldn’t match.

Beyond the city walls, there were more people than could be counted and abandoned wagons with all the worldly possessions of people who had few. Farm animals that had been shepherded across miles of roads milling about aimlessly, but in three times their number, the press of mankind trying to get inside the walls, through the gates to the only safety they could hope for.

The streets were swollen with the presence of so many people. All the peasants of the southlands who had been driven here by the coming of the Agrantine were milling about, waiting on their ration of bread, what little money they had brought with them long lost. The city may have been large enough to contain them, but there was nowhere for them to go. They looked up at Orsina’s return not with the awe and delight of the city’s normal residents but with a dead-eyed fear. This was not their world, the high walls and ordered streets as alien to them as the great flying beast casting a shadow over them. Orsina could not feel what they felt, but she remembered how it had been, coming to this strange place, where there seemed to be rules for everything, but she knew none of them.

Atop the palace gardens, where Yelena had made her roost, there was an honor guard awaiting her. Two bold knights stepped forward to offer her a hand down from the saddle. Livery boys scampered around unfastening Yelena’s harness and scrubbing at her scales with sudsy brushes. And there at the center of a delegation of the most powerful men and women in Espher stood Artemio and Kagan. The former the very picture of patrician calm, and Kagan grinning like a shark at the sight of her. She rushed forward from among the courtiers trying to attend to her, ignoring the ache in her legs, and flung her arms around the Arazi’s waist, as high a hug as she could manage. He chuckled and embraced her back.

In their years together before coming to Covotana, he could not think of any time they’d been so free in showing their affection for each other, but now that their feelings flowed freely between them, to act as though they did not care for each other would have been foolish, if not impossible.

“Welcome home, little one.”

To those gathered nobles, it may have seemed a declaration of loyalty, that the Espheran capital was now home to the three, dragon, Arazi, and Shadebound, but through their bond they both knew the truth of his words. She was home because they were together again. They were each other’s home now, wherever life might take them.

Harmony was flanked by the knights that had helped her down from dragon-back, casting jealous looks over to Orsina and Kagan. Though whether it was a jealousy born of her love for the girl or a jealousy of anyone having such comfort and affection readily on offer was impossible to say. Orsina could not feel what Harmony felt; she only knew what she was told of the world inside her lover.

Artemio should have been that for her. Her brother and her partner through the impresario bond, but he stood stiff and stern, and the longer that Orsina looked, the more obvious it seemed that the knights stood ready to seize her if she made the wrong move.

As Harmony strode towards Artemio on shaky legs, the knights tensed, but it seemed she had no ill intentions this time. “Brother, I owe you an apology for my outburst. It was foolish of me, and I hope that you will think of it no more.”

There was a measuring quality to Artemio’s gaze, as though he were trying to decipher the meaning of these words, spoken in some foreign tongue. Then at last he bowed his head. “The fault is mine, dear sister. In all the bedlam I have not made the time to share my plans with you as I should, so it is no small wonder that you are taken by surprise on occasion.”

There was a delicate balance to be struck here between what they would say to each other in private and what others would overhear. “I should trust in your good judgement.”

He reached out his hand to Harmony, and Orsina was startled to see bruising across his knuckles. “And I should listen to your good counsel.”

Harmony took his hand gingerly and forced a smile. “So we are friends again?”

“Always and forever the best of friends, dear sister.” He smiled back.

“Then as your friend, I must tell you that now I have returned, I need to sleep for a week.” It drew a chuckle from the gathered nobles. The tension that had hung over the reunion was released.

“Perhaps I might have some report of your success?” He still held her hand, though Orsina felt sure it was hurting him. For Harmony’s part, she looked haggard enough that she might well have been close to death.

Orsina piped up at last. “If it would please my fiancé, I would make that report to him in private.”

Kagan stiffened at the word fiancé. Clearly he had not been informed of Artemio’s plans for her. That was probably for the best. She could only imagine that in his attempts to defend her from whatever wicked plans the king had laid, he would have been brought into conflict with Artemio, and strong though he might have been, he wouldn’t have been enough to kill a king in the seat of his power. She let calm and comfort flow through her into Kagan’s mind. Let him know that there was nothing for him to fear in this new development.

It had brought a dark look to Harmony’s face too, but she was schooled enough to wipe it away before anyone else noticed.

Of all the gathered people on the rooftop, Artemio was the only one who seemed pleased at what she’d said. “That would be delightful. A late breakfast in the solar, perhaps? I cannot imagine you have eaten well on your travels.”

She forced out the kind of tittering laugh that noblewomen of Espher were meant to have. “That is putting it mildly.”

She let herself be led then, flowing along with the servants and the nobles as though they were just another dragon to be ridden, trusting that it would take her to where she was meant to be. Separated from the pack by some maids, she was swiftly hauled out of her clothes, scrubbed down with moistened towels still hot from the fire, and strapped into some fashionable dress that pinched and squeezed her into a shape most unlike her own. Glancing down, as they braided her hair into a more acceptable fashion, she was surprised to discover her bosom on display, pressed tight by the corsetry, but seeming all the larger for how it was being crushed. True, she had not kept much track of how aging rapidly had shaped her body, but she felt certain that if she had acquired these new proportions then she would have noticed at some point.

From there it was back into the flux of the hallways and up spiral stairs to the solar where Artemio sat waiting with a spread of food that made her long-ignored stomach begin to grumble. It was entirely possible she would need to bring one of the maids back in to loosen her dress if she meant to eat all of it. And she did. She had a dreadful hunger in her now that food was present.

Artemio gestured to the food as grandiosely as he could and banished the servants with a glance, allowing her free rein to begin stuffing her face without having to maintain a façade of manners. “I am to assume from your return that the quest went well.”

She swallowed down a mouthful of olives and nodded. “Led the dragons straight to him.”

“And they collided as intended?” She could tell that Artemio was on tenterhooks, yet he was politely waiting for her to chew her bread.

She washed it down with a gulp from a glass of watered wine. Grimacing at the taste. “They were still fighting when we left. Only dragons and fliers, none of the wyverns and stuff.”

“I did not truly expect that the bulk of the Arazi forces would be able to pursue you with much haste.” Artemio nodded along. “That division is good news. The riders of the true dragons are the upper caste of Arazi society, the commanders and leaders, without them, the ground troops will have been robbed of much of their efficiency.”

He waited then, letting silence fill the room. Prompting her to speak again.

“We met the emperor.”

Artemio wet his lips. “You met him?”

There seemed few things in the world that could knock Artemio off his balance, yet through his façade of calm, Orsina could see how deeply that little tidbit of information had startled him.

Orsina hid her smile behind the glass once more. It was such a rare treat to surprise Artemio that she was relishing it ever so slightly. “He plucked us out of the sky. Offered to marry me. Sent us on our way with a smile.”

“That is… unexpected.” He pushed a plate of pastries across towards her. She had not seen them among the variety of platters, but now realized that they were the glazed-and-filled-with-pine-nut paste ones that she had always liked the best. She wondered for a moment if he had memorized what she ate each time they dined together. Filing it all away in the boundless brain of his so that it could be wheeled out again the next time it could be useful. Had he ordered the kitchen staff to make them, just for her? Were they standard fare that he had not touched himself simply because he knew her preference? “I had assumed that if he identified you as Espheran, then he would not have engaged in combat with the Arazi. That he would have slain you as an enemy.”

She reached for one of the pastries regardless. They were her favorites no matter how they’d come to rest on the table. “Well, the Arazi attacked first. Didn’t have much of a chance for negotiations.” Now that the initial desperation of hunger had abated, she practiced at her polite single bites. Placing the pastry back on the little plate in front of her between each one.

“We can only hope that their conflict was prolonged and depleted the numbers of both sides.”

“Pretty sure the emperor could have killed the dragons all by himself if he’d wanted.” That man had frightened her in a way that she had not been scared since laying hands upon Yelena. As though the shade within her sensed something that could match it in power and shied away from the conflict. “I’ve never met anyone that could do the things he did.”

“So the rumors prove true. He is capable of some arcanum with which we are not familiar.” Artemio sank back into his seat with a fine line forming between his brows.

“They call him a god.” Orsina could feel the hairs on her arms rise as she remembered the touch of the emperor’s power. Through Yelena, she had learned how to seize control of the air itself, to shape it and move it to hold and push, yet the emperor had done none of that. His will had been exerted directly upon her body. There was nothing she could fight back against. He wanted something, and it became so. “Is he one?”

Artemio’s gaze had slipped out of focus, his mind clearly elsewhere as his mouth moved of its own volition to answer her. “That is a subject of much academic debate.”

Chuckling despite the chill creeping up her back, she said, “I’m guessing the Agrantine think he is and everyone else who hasn’t seen him in action doesn’t?”

“The existence of gods is in itself something of a philosophical debate,” he replied, sidestepping the question neatly.

With her pastry finally consumed, Orsina’s eyes drifted over the table once more, finally settling upon a silver filigreed bowl containing a rice porridge. It did not fit on the table. It was a peasant’s dish, elevated by some fancy spices, no doubt, but still a meal unfit for a king. She could remember the taste of it from when she was just a little girl. One of the few memories from before the forest that still stayed with her. She reached out for it automatically, taking up the whole serving dish and a spoon.

“Whatever he was, he could move things around without touching them, his feelings bled out into everyone around him, and he was completely unfazed by a dragon attack.”

Artemio nodded along to each point, filing them away. Slotting them into his worldview, trying to decipher how this combination of abilities might have come together. If this god were some hybridization of the other magical gifts bestowed upon the people of the world or something entirely new. Of all the people in the world, she had hoped he might have an easy answer for her. That he would whip out some historical tome that broke down all the terrifying power of the emperor into something bite-sized and manageable. Instead he merely sighed.

“Then we must assume the worst and plan accordingly.”

Unbidden, she asked what had been on her mind since the moment the vast mountain of a man garbed in black had plucked her from the sky. “How do you plan to kill a god?”

“It can be done.” Artemio managed to force a smile for her. As though such a vague statement might ease her nerves. “Your time among the Arazi has proven as much.”

There was another lapse into silence as she ate her fill of the porridge, then set it aside. She had barely made a dent in it, and the rest would go to waste, she knew. Someone down in the kitchens might have pilfered some of the other finery when it was returned to them untouched, just for the thrill of eating something that their common neighbors would never taste, but something like this that could be found hanging over every hearth in Espher each morning would find its way to the midden. There was enough left to feed a whole family, and it would be thrown away. Artemio was waiting for more. More that he could use. Every snippet she spoke another tool that he might use to pry at their problem.

“He’s angry at you.”

That drew a more genuine bemused smile to Artemio’s lips. “I’d assumed as much.”

“He wasn’t angry at Espher, just you.” She felt like that point needed to be made clear. “He’s going to make all of us pay for you killing his wife. Said it was an ‘insult that couldn’t go unanswered.’”

“Not entirely unexpected.” Artemio genuinely seemed unmoved by the thought that a literal god wanted vengeance upon him. She supposed that he must have been used to it by now. “It offered him the perfect pretext for the war of conquest that he has long craved.”

“I don’t think so.” Artemio raised an eyebrow as she spoke. “He said it was a matter of honor.”

“You don’t think so?”

“He seemed… well, not upset, but like he didn’t have a choice?” She struggled to put what she’d seen into words. The feelings that had been bleeding out of the emperor through their conversation had felt like her own, and there was some deep well of sorrow in the man when he thought of marching on Espher that had nothing to do with the killing that would be done and everything to do with him feeling as though his hand were being forced.

“He is the sole autarch of his empire, in no danger of losing control over any part of it, worshiped as a god. There can be no internal pressures in the empire driving him.” Artemio picked apart this fresh puzzle one step at a time, as he did all things. It was strangely enlightening to watch the silent process happening in real time instead of merely observing the aftereffects. “The Agrantine do not have a cultural precept of honor that would force him into conflict with us. Honor, as a concept, is aligned with individualism. They are quite the opposite; all individuality is subsumed into the state.”

She thought back to the masked legions she had seen, every person moving in synchronicity with the one beside them. Like ants all perfectly spaced as they marched along in a line. Even their heroes, their saints, were denied anything that might make them their own person. Every one shaved of their hair and dressed in the same clothing. One person, but part of some vast machine. Everyone the same, made in his image. Feeling what he felt.

“One of them is still allowed to be a person.”

Artemio snapped his fingers and grinned at her little contribution. “The emperor himself. And given his presumptive age, he likely predates the loss of honor as a concept from Agrantine society. One rule for everyone else, and another for him.”

“Same as all kings.” Orsina had blurted it out before she could stop herself. She’d like to think it was Rossi’s bad influence shining through, but in all honesty, it was not him that she felt like a swelling within her soul but those old women who guided the revolutionaries. Who had taken her in, despite her being a stranger, and kept her secrets and cared for her the way she’d always longed to be cared for.

There was a smirk on Artemio’s face to let her know she had not overstepped too badly. “Were I a king, I might take offense at that.”

She found herself fumbling her words, trying to unsay what had already been said. “Sorry, Artemio, I wasn’t… I know you aren’t like that.”

“Historically, more than enough of the rulers of Espher have been, I know.” His smile did not seem forced, but she was not so talented a reader of expressions that she could be sure of that. Within her, the dragon stirred. What did it matter if she offended some man? What was he going to do about it? “I take no offense. And it is my hope that you and all others can see that I hold myself not only to the same standards as those I command, but higher ones.”

Desperately trying to keep the conversation moving along and away from subjects that would rile the dragon that had been folded into her soul, she latched onto the puzzle. “So if it is about honor for him, can’t you just go out and say you’re sorry?”

At last the smile seemed to reach Artemio’s eyes. She had amused him, it seemed. That set all sorts of shades within her prickling with anger, but they were not important now. She tried to keep her focus. To keep them quiet.

“If what you have said of his personal puissance is to be believed, I doubt I would have the opportunity to speak a word were I to present him with so tempting a target, and then Espher would have none to guide her through the conflicts to come.”

She smiled back now, seeing humanity shining through the mask of perfection that Artemio always tried to present. “I’d be scared too.”

Whatever normal human feelings Artemio might have been feeling became hidden behind a wall of inexpression once more. “It is not a matter of fear, but of practicality. I serve my people better alive than dead. I assure you that if the reverse were true, I would gladly make the sacrifice you describe.”

“You’re the one he wants.” Orsina spoke her thoughts aloud once more, even though they would have been better contained within her skull. “Just like I’m the one Konus wants.”

With a little snort, Artemio asked her, “Would you propose to give yourself over to Konus?”

She could not say which part of her rose up in defiance of his laughter. Whether it was old Mother Vinegar who had stalwartly refused to let anyone look down on her ever, whether it was Rossi, the rebel who would have killed Artemio’s ancestor if he’d been given half a chance, whether it was the dragon she had slain who now bayed within her that she was a dragon, mightiest of all living things and master of all she surveyed. In truth, it might very well have been the part of her that was still her, feeling the sting of wrath at the way she and everyone else had been treated through their lives by this man and those like him. The way Konus had treated her. Regardless, she was startled by her own vehemence. “I would. I would propose that. You go face your enemy; I’ll go face mine.”

Artemio seemed to consider it, as though it were a serious proposal rather than an angry outburst. “Sadly, I will require your presence here in Covotana if we mean to overpower the Agrantine and their living god. As such I would not so easily spend your life.”

“It’s mine to spend, and this is how I’d choose to spend it.” The spark of rebellion in her heart had spread now and taken root, and all was ablaze. “I’ll take the Arazi. You go to the emperor.”

Artemio settled back with a sigh. “It is not that simple; I already proposed such a thing to the Agrantine ambassador before you brutalized him. The offer was declined.”

“You haven’t seen him. He isn’t some raving monster. He isn’t like a person at all. He talks like he’s out of a story. So give him the ending he wants, and spare everyone else from getting dragged into the middle of it. Tell him you killed his wife; tell him you didn’t have a choice. Offer yourself up in exchange for Espher. He’ll say yes.”

Artemio had been holding her gaze steadily throughout all of this, but now he glanced down, as though ashamed. “I assure you, he will not.”

He wasn’t listening to what she was telling him. He didn’t understand what the emperor was like. She pressed him. “It’s the perfect ending to the story he thinks he’s the main character of. It’s tidy.”

When Artemio raised his voice, she startled. She could not think of a time when he had not spoken calmly, even in the face of death and destruction. “I will not throw away my life so frivolously on the possibility that in minutes you have correctly assessed a man who has centuries of experience outwitting others. For all that you know, all of this was an affectation to convince you that offering me up like some sacrificial lamb was to our advantage! He was in the midst of making a grand display of power at the time, was he not?”

Still shocked by his abrupt vehemence, she did what came naturally to her and backed down. “He was holding off the dragons.”

“Grandstanding, as I said.” Artemio waved his hand as if he could push the whole debate aside. “It was all manipulation, but you are too unseasoned in statecraft to have identified it so.”

Yet Orsina found that she could not let it go. Her own anger might not have blazed so bright as Artemio’s, but it would not be cowed and nor would she. It didn’t matter if he was the king and she was a peasant, she was more than just the manner of her birth. She was more than he could even conceive. She would not submit. “I’m not an idiot. I might not have been brought up doing this like you, but I know what I saw with my own eyes.”

He dismissed it again. “You saw exactly what he wanted you to see.”

It was becoming increasingly apparent that there was no point in pursuing this line of conversation further, but she still could not let go of her irritation. “Did I mention that he wanted to marry me? Thought I was fascinating. Proposed on the spot.”

“What a shame that we are already betrothed, or you could have joined with our worst enemy and lived a life of comfort atop Espher’s grave.” Artemio’s sneer would remain seared into Orsina’s memory. The contempt that he felt for her in that moment like a knife to her heart.

“I would never do that. I’m not… wicked.” She couldn’t believe that she was even having to say this. “I’m just saying that at least he actually proposed.”

There was a bitterness to Artemio’s laugh. “Would you have me down on one knee before you, pledging my undying love? We both know the wedding between us would be a matter of political expediency and nothing more.”

Always, Orsina had sought the truth from Artemio, even when he had not been willing to give it, but now she wished she could give it back to him, lock it away and never look at it again. He knew nothing of love. Nothing of even companionship. It was small wonder that his views on marriage were so bleak. To her surprise, Orsina began to feel pity for him, until some oddness in the phrasing of his last dismissive snipe caught her attention.

“I thought you were going to call it off.”

She did not catch a guilty expression on his face because he was carefully schooling his features. Yet new to all of this as she was, she recognized now that when Artemio showed no expression it was because he knew that revealing his thoughts on his face would serve only to defeat his purposes. If he wasn’t showing anything, it was because he was hiding something. She had caught him out. He actually did mean to marry her. Despite all his promises to her and Harmony, he truly meant for her to be his bride. His queen.

“I merely meant that there is no love between us.” He tried to backpedal his previous words and overshot into something entirely offensive before trying to reel that back too. “Beyond that of friends.”

“Then as your friend, please believe me. You should go out and face him.” Orsina held his gaze steadily. Let him see that there was no malice or confusion in her thoughts and words. If she could just get him to listen. “Think how good it would look for the common people and nobles, if you were willing to do that. To risk yourself instead of asking them to die for you.”

“My appearance would matter little, unless you were attempting to capture a likeness for a statue to set upon the tomb where I would henceforth dwell.”

“I’ll come with you,” she offered. “I’ll talk to him. This doesn’t have to end in fighting.”

He deflated just a little, sinking down into his chair with a great sigh. He stayed there for but a moment as he composed himself, then he leaned forward to hang over their breakfast once more.

“I am going to explain something to you once and once only. For kings, there is only war and diplomacy, which is the prelude to war. For in the heart of every man there beats a war drum, and in the mind of every man there lives a tyrant, and if a man is made king then he must heed them both or risk ruin. Every time he thinks the best of someone, he bleeds for it. Every time he trusts in the word of another, he bleeds for it. Every time he thinks this time mankind will prove his compassion worthy, he bleeds.” There was a raggedness to Artemio’s words as he made this speech. As though they pained him to speak as much as they pained her to hear. “So please, understand that every time that someone oh so valiantly declares that war is not the answer, I must question who puppeteers them to discover who wants me to be unprepared for the war to come. War is the natural state of all things. We are born, we fight every moment for our lives, and when we fail, we die.”

For a moment, Orsina could not even speak, then finally she found the question she needed to ask. “That is the bleakest thing I have ever heard. You trust nobody?”

“Who is there to trust? Who around me has Espher’s best interests at heart?” There was a crack in his voice that made Orsina wonder if his war wound was giving him pain. “Harmony has eyes only for you and thinks only of your comfort. You care only for your own sense of righteousness. Granchio claims to be loyal, but I can already see her amassing power to herself between the lines of the reports she delivers to me. All of the world is a traitor, and I… I am the king. Whether I want to be or not, this is my burden to bear. When the decisions between life and death must be made, I am the one to make them.”

She shook her head slowly, involuntarily. All of the food laid out before her seemed tasteless now. What she had already eaten lay in her gut like a stone in a sack. “I don’t understand how you can get out of bed every morning if you think like that.”

With another great sigh, Artemio covered his face and rubbed at his temples. “Because despite my torments, I am filled with purpose. Espher will survive, and I will make her survive whether she is willing or no. Regardless of the blood I have to spill and the trusts I have to break, I will save Espher from all of her enemies, within and without.”

Orsina wanted to comfort him. To wrap her arms around this poor lost boy who had somehow found himself planted on a throne, but she could not. There were dishes between them and a fence of etiquette all around them. She could not hug a king, and even if she were allowed to, she knew Artemio would not appreciate it at all. To accept comfort would be to admit weakness, to his way of thinking, and he could never do that. Not even behind closed doors with his most trusted allies. “It sounds more like you’ve been overcome by paranoia.”

“To rule is to expect the worst, to look for the connections where others cannot see them. Do you know how I rooted out half the traitors in court? Their grain purchases. Those who received money from the Agrantine invested it in grain, knowing that war was coming, and it would be at a premium with the fields lying fallow. I have seized half the granary stock we now hold in Covotana against the coming siege from their estates, and do you know what I found growing in their fields where grain should have been were it not purchased from abroad? Grapes. They meant to make wine while our kingdom was laid to waste.” If he were anyone else in the world, Orsina would have said that Artemio was on the verge of tears as he spoke, but it could not be so.

“I am not your enemy, Artemio.”

He met her gaze with dry eyes. “Nor would I ever wish for you to be.”

“Your sister isn’t your enemy either.”

With a heavy sigh, he tore his stare from her once more. It was clear he had been expecting this conversation, but that did not mean he wanted to have it. “My sister… is her own worst enemy. As I am aligned with her, I often find myself conflicting with her worse impulses as they are brought to bear.”

“You locked her up.”

He cut off any attempt at indignation with something like a hiss. “She attacked the king. Anyone else would have been quartered.”

“She’s your sister.” Orsina felt her stomach turn. Was Artemio so lost to his own self-aggrandizement that he no longer cared where he was from, or who had been with him from the beginning.

He let his head slump down into his hand once more, massaging gently at his temples as hair spilled forward. The practical ponytail that he had worn as a nobleman had given way to his hair being worn loose and allegedly regal. Combined with the newfound stiffness of his movements as his missing hand pained him, Orsina sometimes felt like he’d become a different person entirely from the one she’d known. When he spoke, it was soft enough that she had to strain to hear it. Quiet enough that the listeners outside of his door could not parse his words. “Being my sister does not preclude her from making mistakes. I felt that confinement would limit the scope of those mistakes until her temper had settled.”

It was bizarre. He had known Harmony for his whole life, yet he didn’t understand how her mind worked in the slightest. It was as though she were a blind spot in his otherwise excellent knowledge of people.

Unable to let that pass, she had to ask the obvious. “You didn’t think that it might make her angrier?”

Pushing back his hair, he sat back up straight and dismissed the thought with a flick of the wrist. “Harmony has always been swift to anger and swift to forgive, I knew that she only needed time.”

Orsina did not know how to ask for things. It had not been one of the etiquette lessons conveyed to her by her tutor, who was so accustomed to the world of nobility where demands were the norm that it did not occur to her that it might be needed. In the forest, Orsina had not asked, she had been told, and she had accepted whatever was given to her as her lot in life. In the House of Seven Shadows, all was provided, and such abundance had never left Orsina to consider her wants. She was entirely outside of her comfort zone, and not one of the parasitic shades woven through her soul was any better at asking for what they wanted. “I would appreciate it if you did not jail my… Harmony again without consulting me.”

He seemed to weigh the clumsy request with all seriousness, and it seemed to Orsina that he might actually be amenable to reason or restraint. Then he spoke. “And you will make the painful decision for me? I think not. No matter how far the burden of making choices may roam before it arrives, here is where it ends. Now and always. That is the price of being king.”

If for just a single moment he could stop being a pompous ass, then Orsina felt sure she could tamp down her shade’s mounting anger, but it seemed that was asking too much of him. “Would trusting me kill you?”

Mirth had no place in the laugh he let out. It was as bitter as the most brackish of water and twice as chill. “It very well might.”

Without meaning to, she adopted his mannerisms, covering her face with a hand while she tried to get her emotions back under control. Through near gritted teeth she eventually managed to say, “I’m not trying to trick you or hurt you.”

“You are not, but that doesn’t mean that others cannot work through you to do great harm.”

That chilled her temper despite the way he spoke to her as if she were a child. He knew. He knew that there was something wrong with her. With her magic. He could tell somehow that the shades were no longer bound as they should have been.

In truth it was almost a relief to finally have somebody she could talk to about it. Harmony would have descended into a spiral of panic. Kagan would not have understood at all. Yelena would have told her something about freedom being the natural state of all things. Only another Shadebound might have the answers she needed, and only Artemio knew the fullness of her story. “My shades?”

“My sister.” He knew nothing. All of her hopes were dashed. She knew she could not expose herself if she did not have to. He didn’t know, so she would not tell him. “The emperor. The Arazi. Any number of lesser rivalries in the court that would seek to swallow you into their conspiracies. You are an important member of my court. The most important beyond myself, if truth be told. Yet lacking in the cultural education that would render you immune to manipulation. And that means you are a vulnerability that others will attempt to exploit to gain control over me and you both.”

From the pit of disappointment, her fury flared back to life. Echoed back and forth within her by the fractured mirror of her psyche and the shades woven to hold it all together. Every one of them was angry, at having their life snatched away, at the world they found themselves dwelling in, at her, their jailer and the only reason they could persist and grow strong most of all. She snapped at him. “I’m not blind, and I’m not stupid, and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop treating me like I am.”

He clearly could not tell how deeply her resentment had begun to cut. “Act with wisdom and your treatment will be amended accordingly.”

“And wisdom looks like blind obedience to you?” she said with an imperious sneer that she hadn’t thought herself capable of.

He tutted at her. Actually tutted, as though he were some tutor and she was failing his testing. “Wisdom looks like heeding the words of those who know better.”

The dragon flared to life within her, filling her veins and mind with flame. It could not stand to be condescended to. It could not abide to be treated this way. It spoke with her voice. “You think you’re better than me?”

Artemio seemed bemused by the question. As if she were asking something so foolish that he couldn’t believe she’d embarrass herself by voicing the question. “I would never suggest such a thing. Though it is implied by my station.”

“They were right about you.” The words came unbidden once more as her memories, contorted and racked by the things that she had endured, came flooding back. The warnings Kagan had given about kings. The spark of rebellion Gatto had stoked within her. The words of those old peasant women who had fled across the world in search of a god to protect them from men like this. “I can’t believe that I couldn’t see it before.”

His scoffing vanished in an instant, and his answer was sharp. “Might I have the name of my detractors?”

“So you can have them executed?” she snarled, rising from her seat. Manners and meal be damned. “I don’t think so.”

He looked up at her looming over him, shadows flickering into being all around her, and his shoulders slumped. “What do you want from me, Orsina?”

It was enough to shock her out of her mounting rage. “What?”

“You come to me with demands that I offer up my life as recompense for the grave sin of defending my home against an invader, and now you pick fights over nothing. What is it that you are agitating for? What do you want?”

She did not spit because she had been too well trained in the manners of court to even bring herself to do so, but she certainly spat out her words. “Is honesty too much to expect?”

“Yes.” He answered simply, with a calm entirely unbefitting his situation, locked alone in the solar with a Shadebound powerful enough to tear his kingdom down. “Every word that I say to you, you might repeat to a dozen others. My battle plans may fall into enemy hands, rendering them useless. Not to mention that with each new piece of information I acquire, the very nature of my schemes must be remade. All is in flux, yet when a change comes I am accused of deception for failure to have seen the future. I tell you what I can, when I can, when you need to know it.”

She had never wanted anything. Not for herself. She’d relished in the love Harmony showed her after a lifetime devoid of affection. She’d strived to do the best she could in all things because through excellence she might survive, but she had never wanted the power that came with it, nor the violence that power demanded she unleash to protect herself as she became more and more the focus of attention. In all that she had endured, it had not once occurred to her to wonder what it was that she actually wanted when all the fighting and struggle was done. She had no idea of what world she would want to live in, even though she had been granted the power to make it a reality.

She wanted nothing for herself, but for others, she wanted everything. “I need to know how you mean to protect the people. Not Espher, not the nobles, the real people who are out in the streets, outside the walls, bereft of their homes by your schemes and wars.”

Artemio blinked in surprise, taken off guard. “Their situation is unfortunate, but temporary. When the war is over, they can return to their farms and villages. For now, those inside may partake of the same ration all citizens receive.”

“That isn’t enough.” Gatto’s drawling accent bled into her voice. “They are dying. They are suffering.”

“Unless you, in all of your power, can conjure new homes for them, then they will remain so. This is a war, there will be casualties. You must accept that.” He shrugged.

“I don’t.” She cut off his contemptuous surety with but a word. All of this time, he had been using her to his own ends. Now the horse that he had ridden to victory was set to buck him. “You want to know what I want, Artemio? I want you to treat them like people instead of pawns in your game. I want you to care about them.”

She could see the tiniest of movements across his face as his emotions washed over it, and he slammed the door shut on all honesty and humanity. “Then you ask for the impossible. If I were to shed a tear for every person that my choices hurt, then all of Espher would be flooded. I do what I must, not what pleases them.”

It was time to put her money where her mouth was. “Then I won’t fight for you.”

His mouth fell open for an instant before his placid, expressionless mask was slammed back into place. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’m your weapon, right? Well, I refuse to be drawn.” She forced herself to stand still though her body longed to move. She picked up her wine and sipped from it. As if this were all normal. She made a show of being the same as him, implacable in the face of whatever adversity was being discussed. “Until you show me that you give a damn about the people, until you make sure that they are cared for, I will not go to war for you.”

Once more, he laughed at her. “You expect me to believe that you, with your bleeding heart weeping over every peasant’s stubbed toe, will sit back and watch as war comes to Espher? That you will let dragons burn the city down?”

Alone, she could not have done it. She would have heard the first crying child and taken flight. But she was not alone anymore. She was never alone. And those that dwelled within her heart now were more than capable of coldness. “If that is what I must do to remind you that you have a heart, yes.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She took a shuddering breath. “As you said before, Artemio. We are friends. And for my part at least, that means I speak honestly with you. Until you prove to me that you’re not the tyrant you are behaving like… I won’t fight.”

His eyes narrowed as she walked away from him. She was sure turning her back on him was some awful insult, but maybe he needed a little insulting after being surrounded all the time by sycophants who’d obey his every whim to bring him back to the person she’d felt so sure he was.

“Perhaps you need to share a cell with Harmony until your truth is better aligned with mine.”

It was her turn to laugh. And with that exhalation, every candle in the room blew out and the glass panels of the solar’s roof frosted over white.

“As if any prison built by human hands could hold me.”

When she left then, he made no move to stop her. Because as they both knew, nothing could.

13 - The Piper Paid
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

From atop the palace, Kagan might have had the best view out over the surrounding plains, but it would have served him poorly. As night fell over Covotana and the time drew near, he found the softness of his bed overwhelming, like he were sinking down into it and being swallowed whole. In the past, on nights like this, he would simply have gone to Yelena and lain by her side, but this night she hunted far to the east where the farmers still labored and livestock still grazed.

He was alone in the city. Isolated from Orsina by the guards the king had placed around her, as though anyone in the world was fool enough to take a swing at that girl of his now. So he did what he had always done on the night before battle, and he walked among the soldiers.

The city herself was packed to bursting with the refugees of the coming invasions, spilling out beyond the walls into the carefully organized camps of soldiers and mercenaries that Espher had brought to bear. They were not packed atop each other like an army would be if left to its own devices, latrines dug next to camps, next to fires, next to armories. They had been deliberately spread wide in a vast loop about the city, far enough from the walls that the peasants cramming in could be contained but not so far that a trumpet sounding could be missed. If he had his way, Kagan would be down there among them, far from the weight of stone all around him, but if anyone saw him trying to sneak through the city gates this night, he’d have been hung as a traitor trying to carry intelligence to the Arazi. He was trusted only as far as he could be seen and no farther.

So instead of touring among the soldiery on the ground, he found himself mounting the walls of Covotana, the once white stone now patched up with whatever could have been found in the panic of reconstruction, in some places sloshed over with whitewash to conceal its new arrival, in others left bare as a testament to the frantic pace at which the masons of the city had done their work. Everywhere it was reinforced, and everywhere lay great barrels of water, ready to be sloshed out the moment that anything caught alight.

“Bad idea.”

Some barely pubescent boy in a helmet and wispy mustache turned to answer and startled. “Bloody hell.”

“Don’t fret, boy, I’m the exile. If I was with the Arazi, you’d already be dead.”

For some reason that did nothing to drain the paleness from the boy’s features. If anything, he looked a little more queasy than before. “The one on our side. Right.”

He did not seem entirely convinced of that fact, but neither was he fool enough to press the issue.

Kagan gave the barrel a kick as he passed it by. “The water, it’s a bad plan.”

“For the fires, isn’t it.” The boy scratched his cheek against the shaft of his spear, trying not to stare at Kagan and making himself all the more obvious for his fleeting sideways glances.

“Dragon’s fire will ride on water and spread farther; you need to douse it with sand.” How the Arazi had been defeated by Espher’s armies when they didn’t even know the most basic of things eluded Kagan.

The boy looked bereft as Kagan started his walk along the wall, calling after him. “They didn’t give us any.”

“Better not catch fire then.” Kagan chuckled.

Along the walls of this great city, nothing was much different. Green recruits with barely a mustache hair between them, playing at being soldiers, giving the appearance of a defended city when the casualties of the past wars had depleted Espher to the point that it was a wonder some bandit hadn’t declared himself king and strolled right in. Kagan knew that Espher’s strength had never been in its force of arms, but he was still shocked at just how little military power it truly could bring to bear. For all of the debates and arguing among the nobility that he’d been forced to sit through, he had assumed the armies of Espher were vast and fearsome.

The individual forces the different lords had brought to bear in the fields beyond the city, they were slightly more impressive, but they were fractured. What one man had trained his men to do, the next man would laugh at. What passed for discipline in one of these tiny armies would have made the midden diggers of the next weep at the chaos. The armor they wore was even more piecemeal than that which the Arazi cobbled together for themselves. This was not a kingdom well prepared for war, no matter how clever their king might think himself to be. Tactics and tricks might win battles, but they did not win wars. Numbers did, and Espher didn’t have them.

All of this time, they had kept Kagan away from Orsina as much as was humanly possible, and now he understood why. If he’d known how dire the situation was, he’d have scooped her under one arm, jumped on Yelena’s back, and left this whole mess behind them. Now it was too late.

Yet even looking at the pitiful display of military might all day long had done nothing to put a damper upon the morale of the Espherans. Letting his senses sweep out over the city, he sensed anxiety, of course, but the bone-deep dread that they should have been feeling just wasn’t there. It made him want to shake them, pick them up and shake them, until they realized that they were all going to die here.

They had faith. In their leadership, despite all of history telling them that they shouldn’t. But more than that, in Orsina. They thought she was some fairy come to grant all their wishes. Scare all the monsters away.

Idiots.

They had no idea they were putting this massive burden on a slip of a girl with enough already loaded on her shoulders to break an aslinda in two. All it would take was for her to make one mistake, and their whole world would come tumbling down.

At the periphery of his empathy, Kagan felt something familiar. A mind that was not a tangled mess of emotions but an arrowhead of focus. A predator’s mind. Dragons.

“They’re coming!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs, scaring the nearest guards from their stupor.

He took off running, already feeling Yelena’s excitement flooding through him. This was what she’d been waiting for. Ever since they came to Espher, she had been spoiling for this fight, for a chance to show what she could do now that she was fully herself again after her long imprisonment. He felt her launch long before the sound of her wingbeats could reach him. Felt her elation as she swept down over the roofs, tiles scattering off in her wake.

All he could do, for his part, was to move in synchronicity with her will. He ran the length of the wall, into one of the towers, up the spiral of stairs past guardsmen and fresh-faced recruits, all the way to the open platform on top where the king in his wisdom had placed a great crossbow ballista, as though anything so clumsy as a bolt had a hope of hitting a dragon in flight.

From there, all he had to do was jump, once onto the ballista’s frame, again onto the battlement’s top, and once more into the open air beyond the wall where Yelena’s swooping ascent brought her by at just the right moment to catch him.

Whatever he thought of the Espheran armies, he couldn’t deny their craftsmen did good work. He slipped into the harness on Yelena’s back and locked his heels in as easily as slumping into a seat, and a whole rack of javelins lined both sides of her like the spines of a thunder lizard, stretching as far as his reach along either side, lowered the closer they were to him to maximize his field of vision. Dragon and man as one, hearts thundering in time, her battle-lust flooding through him, his hands aching to take up one of those spears and launch it into his enemy’s heart.

Down in their camps, the thunderclap of Yelena’s wings had stirred all the men from their rest and they scrambled for bows, slings, crossbows, whatever they had been offered as a dragon-slaying weapon, as if they’d do more than scratch an aslinda’s ventral scales.

It mattered little. Men in motion were a harder target than men asleep, so at least this was some progress.

Without the day’s thermals to lift her, Yelena had to beat her wings hard to gain some height. They had expected an attack by daylight, when the enemy dragons would have had the advantage of the same rising air to support them. To attack by night like this spoke to Konus’s desperation or to a deliberate attempt to circumvent Espher’s expectations. He had underestimated their king’s paranoia.

He could feel Orsina in her chambers where she sat awake. She must have known the Arazi attack was here at last, but she did not move, she did not rush to her station. For an instant, the clash of Yelena’s hunger for battle and Orsina’s stillness left him completely disoriented, then he closed his heart to her. If she would not fight, then she would not fight. He was not going to be the one to ask it of her.

Above the thin layer of cloud cover, he could feel the coming of the dragons as acutely as if it had been broad daylight and he was staring right at them. They meant to strike by surprise instead of overwhelming with their numbers and power.

He would take that surprise from them.

Yelena unleashed a stream of flame up into the skies above them. The heat of it rising, parting the clouds, showing the Arazi sneaking like cowards. Her wings straining to bring her up in reach of them. Catching on the tail of the rising heat to launch herself up all the quicker.

Him and Yelena against all the armies of the Arazi, as it had always been. He could feel her pleasure flooding through him. The rightness of this moment. His fingers closed around a javelin haft and he took his aim.

The dragons above took a dive. Wings snapping in tight against their sides so they could drop like stones. Sparks and smoke already trailing from them. Making their own cloud cover as they came.

He held back the javelin until the strain of his throwing arm was singing, and then finally when it would have been harder to hold it than to throw, he loosed.

The falling bullets of the dragons were smaller targets than when their wings had been outstretched, but there could be no glancing blow now, no hole punch through a wing that would do no more than sting.

When his javelin hit a dragon with all the strength of his arm behind it and all of the speed of the falling dragon coming down, it struck true. Splitting scales and piercing deep.

With a roar of pain, its wings flexed out, one tip striking off the next dragon beside it, setting both of them corkscrewing out of formation, colliding with more of their kin and sending them spinning out too.

The rest of them flew by, gravity giving them no hope of slowing to face the enemy among them, and then suddenly, Kagan and Yelena were behind their lines instead of meeting the charge head-on.

He could feel her elation sweep through him once more. They had the advantage now, of height and surprise. He threw, again and again, picking off the stragglers they’d knocked out of their dive, one by one. Piercing through men he’d once called brother and pinning them to their dragon’s backs.

Any other day, his heart would have been breaking, but this was the war that had always been coming, and they had chosen to side with Konus against him, against his girl, his family. There could be no quarter for them.

Down below, the Shadebound of Espher finally showed their hand.

Their armies were worthless, their keeps easily conquered, yet throughout a thousand years of history Espher had persevered in the face of enemies on all sides. Because of them.

The first wave of descending dragons were hammered, as though they’d run into a solid cliff-face instead of the elemental storm rising to meet them from all along the walls and amidst the camps. Every Shadebound capable of burning as bright as Orsina, every one of them finally willing to spend their lives for the glory they could win.

Despite the hell unleashed upon them, the dragons were not stopped. Espher could call the dead to their aid, but a dragon was so much more than a specter. So much more than a memory being clung to from ages past. They were alive, vital, more alive than anything else in the world, and they would not succumb to the chill of the grave so easily. They answered the magic with flame, pushing back against it, even as their kin rained down around them.

The dragons that had been knocked from the sky in their first clash with Kagan were down on the dirt now, screeching and flailing as the mortal men around them came with axe and sawing blades. They crawled over the downed dragons like ants, every man avenging a lifetime of fear. They were nothing compared with the dragons, but in that moment, they were the ones with the power, and they would never let the balance tip back.

Wings were ripped, scales pried off. The dragons spewed their venom, prepared to incinerate all who set upon them, but the soldiers, the humans, they did not even seem to care. As the dragon tried to close its jaws, to spark the flints lodged by its venom glands, it could not. Spears were thrust into their open mouths, piercing deep into the leathery flesh. Splaying the jaws open, unable to shut. Venom pooled. If they lit now, they would set their own heads ablaze, but if they did not flame, they would suffer death by a thousand tiny cuts. Some chose the sudden blaze of glory and flame, some died ignominious deaths with none brought down with them. But all died.

With a roar of triumph, Yelena spread her wings wide. Hanging between the moon above and the dead below.

She was so lost in the bliss of their victory that she did not hear the whistling approach of another dragon until the fire was upon her.

It was not the beautiful wash of flame that spewed forth from her jaws, or even the concussive blasts of great venom gobbets expelled. It was a blinding bar of light. Punching clean through her wing where the muscles rooted. The pain, it wasn’t instant. It should have been. When a hole suddenly burned right through her, it should have hurt right away, but instead there was just the sudden absence of sensation instead. She didn’t even bleed. That was how hot the Prophet’s fire burned.

In that moment of no pain, Kagan thought that Yelena had slammed the doors between them shut so he would not need to share in her pain, but there had been no time for it. Neither one of them felt the pain. Only the fall.

Around and around they spun, Kagan’s hands still in motion, still seizing javelin after javelin, launching them up at Konus as he came into sight. He was the one who had taught Kagan to throw; he wasn’t going to be taken as easily as the easy prey they’d faced that night. Only once did a throw fly true, and with a brief flash of blinding light, it was burned away to nothing.

Konus closed his mouth like a coffin being snapped shut.

When they hit the ground, and Kagan knew without a doubt that they would now, it would hurt. The absent pain would come, and it would wash over them, and in truth it might be enough to carry them off. But if it didn’t, they had the ants to look forward to. He was just another Arazi to the brave men of Espher, in the dark of the night, they would know no different. They would be butchered like the animals he had spent half his life hunting.

Kagan did not know which of the courses on offer he would urge Yelena to take. The carving block or self-immolation.

There was still a knife at his belt, and the scales beneath his chin were thin enough that he might make a single cut and end their suffering before either option became necessary. They could leave the world on their own terms. At least that would be theirs.

Whatever they took from us, we have lived.

The Prophet fell from on high. Plunging down with all of the speed that Yelena’s frantically splayed wings tried to deny. When his claws bit into Yelena’s scales, the pain came at last, sharp and burning. Driving out all thoughts. Yelena snaked up to snap at the bigger dragon’s throat but found no purchase. With wingbeats as steady as if they were merely taking a turn over their territory, the Prophet slowed their fall, evened them out, brought them level.

Kagan went for his knife then, not to take his own life, but to take another. To give all of this meaning. He leapt from the saddle to cling to the Prophet’s leg, wedging his own clawed fingers between the thick scales, and using them as handholds as he climbed up and up, around the curve of the beast’s chest towards Konus. Towards his father.

This was the end he had longed for. Not his own destruction, but the death of the man who had poisoned the Arazi. The man who had taken free people and made them slaves. The skies were open above them, but the choice of where to fly narrowed down until there was nothing left but his course.

A javelin took him through the shoulder, just as the Prophet’s flame had burned through Yelena’s wing. He had scarcely caught sight of his father before he was falling once more, landing atop Yelena’s blood-streaked back and drawing from her a groan of such pain that he cursed himself.

The javelin was all that saved him from the fall, hooking in Yelena’s harness before he could slide too far. Yet before he’d even hooked a foot through the straps and gotten his own hold, he was trying to pull it loose. Every tug on the blood-slicked length of bone sent fresh agony washing through him, setting Yelena convulsing below him, but he would not stop. Not until it was out, and he could fight again.

When Konus landed atop Yelena’s back, it was as gracefully as a cat. Even as she heaved and twisted to be rid of his dragon’s grip, he barely slid about at all. Riding with each buck and twist as though he’d been born to a world where the earth was forever in flux.

Get him off. Get him away from me. Don’t let him touch me. He is poison!

“Kagan, you would fight your own people?” He spoke their native tongue with none of the accent of the clans, so neutral it was unsettling, as though he were not one man but the amalgam of them all.

“They aren’t my people,” Kagan spat back in Espheran still struggling with the javelin. “You saw to that.”

Crouching down beside him on the dragon’s back, Konus reached out to help. “Exile was the mildest punishment I could grant.”

Yelena roared beneath them. Kill him. Kill the liar. Cut out his tongue. He tore us apart. He sent you away. He stole us from each other.

“You should have killed me then, when you had me in your power.” With a wet sucking sound, the javelin tore free. Konus tossed it aside, and for a moment all that Kagan knew was the awful pain, then he came back to himself, snarling, “They aren’t my people because you twisted them to serve you.”

Konus let his sorrow show on his face. Pity for his wayward son. It was one of his best expressions, so many hearts and minds had been won over with it. “They serve only the quest.”

He is not your father; he is the father of lies. Kill him now. Set our people free.

“Your quest.” Kagan lashed out with the knife but came nowhere close. Strain though he might, he did not have the strength to pull himself upright and give chase. Even pulling himself halfway up to sitting had brought darkness sweeping in from the periphery of his vision. “Your story that you spun to trick them.”

Konus showed his empty hands. As though they made him any less deadly. “It is all true.”

We tried to talk to him. We tried to tell him. We warned him he was going too far. That his quest was making our people twisted. He would not listen then, he will not listen now. Only killing him will set us free. The skies are chained until Konus lies dead. Buried beneath the earth he loves so much.

Kagan fell back, straining for breath. The javelin had torn through scale, skin, and muscle, but his breath came clean without the taste of blood. Everything vital had been avoided. “True or false, you had no right to destroy our people. To make them your slaves.”

Actual tears pooled in Konus’s eyes. “Should I have let the world die instead?”

Let it die. Let everything burn, so long as Konus is first on the pyre.

“The world doesn’t need you to save it,” Kagan roared as the world spun around them. Up became down, left became right. Even for one practically born to the saddle, it made his stomach turn over.

He held a hand out to Kagan, as if there were any chance that his son would ever trust him. “If not me, then who?”

The world existed since the beginning of time with no Konus to save it. It does not need him. None of us need him.

Another concussion rocked them as they flew. Shadebound magic or dragon’s venom exploding, Kagan could not have said. It was enough of a blow to make Konus hook a toe under Yelena’s harness.

“The world doesn’t need you. The world doesn’t want you,” Kagan snarled. “You’re a monster.”

“You are a slayer.” Konus’s dragon roared in time to his plaintive wail. Tears flowed freely down his face now. “One law I laid down for our people. Only one. Man shall not kill dragon. And the moment my back was turned, what did you do?”

He sent that dragon for us. He made us the enemy of all. If we had not fought, we would have died. Would he have had us lie down and die? Is he so desperate for obedience? If his quest is so righteous, why does he need to kill and torture people into following him?

Kagan’s voice cracked, but he put it down to the pain. “You left us no choice.”

“And you leave me with none now.” Konus walked to the closest of his dragon’s claws as he wept. “I wanted you to know, Kagan, that if you ever set this rebellion aside, I will still be waiting for you. I will still love you. All you need do is submit to your father.”

Never.

“Never.”

Konus did not seem surprised or even sad. Just resigned. “Then… goodbye.”

He took hold of his dragon’s leg as it loosed its grip on Yelena. Then both he and the Prophet whipped away out of sight, carried up on the wind, while the earth took hold of Yelena once more, and she fell, tumbling.

Kagan had seen nothing of their journey, with eyes only for his father, but now he saw that they had not been carried far. They had been hauled across the skies above Covotana until they were almost to the wall, but now they had been unleashed. A living battering ram, meant to bring the battlements tumbling down.

Yelena beat her one functioning wing frantically. Trying to slow their roll through the air, trying to make their velocity just a little less terminal. It was of no use. A dragon’s wings were meant to work in harmony, not alone. There was nothing she could do. Nothing Kagan could do. Nothing but cling together and brace themselves for the end.

A foot from the wall, they stopped dead.

Orsina stood atop the wall in her nightgown. Her shade held Yelena in a cradling grasp. Kagan struggled to draw a breath. To shout out a warning. This was a trap. Konus had used them to draw her out, to put her in harm’s way.

The Prophet wheeled above them, turning to make another pass.

Beyond the walls, the city burned. Dragon fire had swept along the thoroughfares, preventing the movement of troops, and the cheaper parts of the city, closest to the walls, were entirely ablaze. It left Orsina standing there in silhouette, as visible as if she were out there in broad daylight.

Kagan managed to croak out. “Orsina! Run!”

For a moment it seemed that their eyes met, and he saw on her face a contemptuous sneer that had no place on that sweet young woman’s features. Her lips moved, and if they were not connected heart-to-heart, he would have had no idea what she said over the roar of flames and the screams of battle.

“A dragon does not run.”

The Prophet plunged down towards her, its jaws opening, the blinding white light in its throat burning brighter than the sun before it was unleashed.

All Kagan had time to do was scream before the pillar of blinding light came down on Orsina. Blazing so bright that it would be hours before he could see again without the shadow of it traced down the center of his vision. He felt the heat of it this time, first on his own skin, then on Yelena’s, and finally, terribly, on Orsina’s.

The heat surrounded her, the chill of her wraith the only thing keeping it from consuming her. He could see her inside of the light, like a shadow being cast from far away. He could see her raising her hands up, even as he could feel the white-fire blackening them and crispening her skin away.

Still she did not let Yelena fall.

With a sudden thunderclap, the whine of the dragon’s pillar was cut off, and Orsina was still there. Still standing, though her clothes and hair were gone, and her skin was one great burn. Whatever force animated her body, it was greater than the damage that had been done to her. However hot that fire had burned, she burned brighter.

14 - Visitation Rites
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Orsina had not seen the end of the battle for Covotana. She had not seen the Prima of the House of Seven Shadows rallying the Shadebound of the city. She had not seen the dragons retreat in the face of that new stolid defense. She had not seen Konus pull back, thinking the fatal blow was dealt, nor Kagan and Yelena being carried back into the city atop the shoulders of the soldiers.

In her chambers, in her tower, the apothecaries flitted back and forth through the dim candlelight. Applying tinctures and poultices. Pouring stinging boiled wine over her. Changing out her sheets as she bled through their bandages. Kagan and Yelena were there in the periphery of her mind. She could feel their wounds being tended. Feel their pain. Kagan’s shoulder burned, but not nearly so fiercely as his shame. His wrath.

It did nothing to help her.

She was not in pain, though she clearly should have been from the damage that was dealt her. The apothecaries did not speak to her as though she were a person anymore, only like she was a task they had to endure until its inevitable end. They couldn’t understand how she was alive.

Kagan’s emotions boiled over time and again as he was tended and stitched. Shame that he had let Orsina be hurt. Shame that he’d needed her to save him so badly that she’d ended up in harm’s way. But fury had no clear anchor. Konus was its focus, but there was no single place from which it had sprung up. It seared him, set his muscles twitching, tore him from his rest and onto his feet to pace. It infested Orsina just as surely, but she did not have the luxury of movement to help abate it.

Through all her convalescence all she could do was wait. Wait for the next stinging balm to be applied. Wait for them to open the curtains and unveil the true horror of what was left of her. She would wait a long time for that one with no satisfaction.

She would wait for Harmony the longest of all. Torn between wanting her there and wanting nobody to see the state she was in.

Somewhere deep inside of her, she could remember being a frightened child, devoid of all power, feeling a fever rise and knowing the sickness would come but having no means of staving it off. It was just a spark of fear, but it seemed to enrage the shades within her. Mother Vinegar would never stand for her girl to die. Rossi did not know the meaning of surrender. The dragon was the worst of all. Its wrath was worse even than Kagan’s. The Prophet’s white flame had burned her, and she had no opportunity to strike back. It could not abide this. Lying down to die like charred cattle. It was not prey; it was the hunter. It would not let this be.

And still nobody came. Time dragged so slowly, pinned there in the space between life and death, the windows shrouded, the candles extinguished every time her carers left the room so that the touch of light on her skin would not pain her.

She almost craved the pain. The doctors ascribed the numbness to the terrible heat of the Prophet’s breath killing those parts of her that could sense. At least the pain would have made her feel alive. Instead she lingered on, with only fleeting sounds and half-caught glimpses of motion on the periphery of her vision.

A shade. She was a shade. All the living world passing her by while she was only a memory.

Even Artemio would have been a reprieve from the silence.

Yet it was none of her so-called friends who came to see her as she lay there burned; it was a maid. Armida. The one who had led her to meet with the peasant uprising. The one who’d treated her like a human being.

“How’re you feeling?”

The room was pitch black, and Orsina could not see her at all, only hear her breathing in the silence. When she opened her mouth to speak, she did not feel pain, but the scabbing that covered her face cracked and leaked.

“How long have I been here?”

“Just a day or so.” She sounded hesitant. Was she lying? Had it been weeks? Months? Surely, they would have just let her die by then. “It’s been bad out there.”

It took time for her thoughts to swirl into recognizable shapes. Not because her mind was a tangled mess of intermingled souls, but because she had been lying here for so long with no thoughts whatsoever.

“The refugees?”

“Even them that had a place to sleep have got nothing now.” Armida crept closer through the shadows. Not close enough to touch or close enough to even breathe on Orsina where she lay, but close enough that some part of her could recognize the other woman’s presence. “Half the city went up in flames.”

“My fault.” Orsina would have wept, but she did not know that her body could anymore. There was a wetness about her eyes, but most likely it was the product of her blinking splitting her open all over again. “Should have stopped them.”

“Ain’t nobody blaming you, miss. Dragons are going to burn things.” There was a crack in the girl’s voice, and Orsina couldn’t help but wonder what had made it. Whether it was the memory of the dragon’s fire pouring down on her home because Orsina hadn’t troubled herself to help, or if it was the sight of what that same fire had done to her. “That’s what they do.”

The burden of her guilt bore down on her with more weight than the wet sheet laid over her to preserve her dignity. “I didn’t fight.”

The maid made another choked-up sound. “Surely looks like you did.”

She had to confess her sins. If she was going to die here lying in this bed, they needed to know why she had done what she’d done. She had to make sure they understood it wasn’t spite or malice. “I… I stayed back. Let the soldiers and the Shadebound face the dragons alone. I… I was trying to make Artemio fold. Trying to make him…”

“Trying to do right by all of us.” Armida reached out to take her hand, then flinched back before her work-callused fingers could touch the bare flesh robbed of its skin. “We know.”

It made no sense. “You know?”

The maid chuckled. “Ain’t never alone in the palace. Always someone listening behind a door in case the king calls.”

She didn’t understand. If she was laughing, then she didn’t understand. Orsina had done this. She’d caused all of this. If she had just gone out, she could have faced Konus, led him away, saved everyone.

“I should have fought from the start. Could have…”

“You didn’t do nothing wrong.” Armida had tears in her eyes now, but there was a fierceness to her words that surprised Orsina. She had no idea there was such passion in her. “King might try to blame you, but the people never will. We know why you didn’t come. We know it was all for us.”

It did not hurt to turn her head and look the woman in the eye. Things tore, liquid flowed, but if damage was the price of passage, then she’d pay it. She’d been paying with her own destruction for everything she’d done since leaving the forest—why should this be any different.

“The… the people… the ones you took me to meet. Do they still… do they still believe that I’m…” She struggled to put what she was trying to say into words now that she could see the horror on the maid’s face. There were no mirrors in this chamber. Little enough light, even if there had been. But in Armida’s expression, Orsina could see how badly she had been burned.

“They’d follow you anywhere.”

Orsina took a ragged breath, gathering her scattered thoughts. “Tell them to take care of one another. Tell them… take care of the refugees. Whatever they need. Try to help them.”

The tears were flowing freely down the girl’s face now as she looked down at the ruin of Orsina. “We’ll do all we can.”

“I think I need to sleep now.” The darkness was already dragging her down as she said it. The tumult of shades within her clawing her back down.

If Armida said goodbye, she never heard it.

The world came and went. Darkness and light flickering by each other, almost imperceptibly different to Orsina as she lay there bleeding. Always bleeding, but never dying. All alone with her thoughts. With her shade that ever more spoke in her own voice. That was becoming her as surely as she was becoming it.

The apothecaries came infrequently now. The care of her turned over to servants, who touched her with reverent hands. Turned her and cleaned her and tried to force broth past her lipless lips. She did not need to eat, not anymore. All of her strength was drawn from a different wellspring now, but for the sake of the people trying so desperately to help her, she tried to choke it down.

When her eyes opened to candlelight but she had not been disturbed by the sponges and sizzling tinctures, it startled her almost entirely awake. She forced her head to turn and was amazed to find that her skin no longer cracked open with the motion. Her skin was pulled too tight across her, trying to keep her in place, but the more she pulled, the looser it became. Elastic despite its toughness. She wondered if this was how Kagan had felt when he first grew scales.

Artemio was there, seated by her bedside, scribbling away in some leatherbound book. He glanced up at her motion, but he did not stop his writing. Waiting, as was his way, for her to speak first.

“I didn’t fight.”

He still did not look up from his book. “You did not.”

The silence hung heavy in the air for a time as she gathered her thoughts, finally grateful for his patience. “Are you ready to make a deal?”

He sniffed, eyes skimming over her. “What use are you to me now?”

She tried to laugh but managed only a splutter. “Some use. Or you wouldn’t be here.”

He caught her eye then, and she saw him calculating. Weighing her worth. “You are healing, slowly. Perhaps by the time the main force of the Arazi armies arrive, you may be able to sit up and watch as they massacre us.”

“Have you purged all your traitors?” There was a wryness to her voice that she did not recognize as her own. But there was no longer a dragon or a ghost within her that she could blame. They had become her, and all the parts of her that had been her alone had faded into them so smoothly that she could not even remember what it had been like before.

He managed a smile. “With the exception of my dear sister, all opposition seems to have been curbed for now.”

“I want…” Her voice cracked as she tried to draw breath and found the skin around her ribs resisting. “Their land.”

Artemio’s eyes narrowed. “I beg your pardon?”

“You took their land. Their homes. Their money. When you got rid of them, it went to the… crown. I want it.” She hoped that it was clear enough, that there was no ambiguity or wiggle room. He’d told her that the only way to help the poor and homeless of Espher was to do so under her own power. To conjure up houses and lands for them to occupy. He’d implied it would have to be a work of magic. This wasn’t. It was an act of power.

After a moment to absorb her words, Artemio snapped his book shut and leaned back in his chair. “That is a not insubstantial demand.”

“You want me…” She drew in another ragged breath. “To be your queen. Nobles, they have land.”

He stroked his chin, where a beard might have been had he been fully grown instead of scarcely a man. “If I were to turn it all over to you, yours would be the richest house in all of Espher. It might very well cost me the loyalty of those who were the traitors’ allies, hoping that it might pass to them when their loyalty was more thoroughly proven.”

“I’m… worth it.” She forced her face into a smile that felt more like a rictus. “Worth more than all of them.”

His brows had drawn down. “You have no family, no servants, no knights, what would you do with all that land? All those houses?”

“My business. Not yours.” Let him stew on the mystery for a change. She was tired of always being the one on the back foot. It wouldn’t be long before her plans for all the houses and lands became apparent.

Despite the heft of her demand, she couldn’t help but notice that Artemio had not departed. He was considering it. That was all she could really ask. “And in exchange for the most expensive gift in history?”

“I’ll fight. I’ll marry you.” She had not ever tried to be flirtatious, and while she was technically nude beneath the sheet suspended over her, she was not feeling particularly capable of it now. So she offered him honesty instead of anything more tantalizing. “Everything you want.”

“I already explained to you that the engagement was only—”

She cut him off dead. “You want me.”

Despite the dire state of her body, his eyes did dance over her. “I can assure you, madam, that I have no designs upon your person.”

“I don’t mean lust.” She was under no illusion that her current appearance could interest anyone beyond those attending town fayre freak shows. “I mean, you want me… as queen. Mother of powerful children. Enough power to make all your enemies… think twice.”

She could almost hear the wheels spinning in his head. He’d obviously considered this before, because he considered everything, but to have it offered up to him like this without any need for manipulation was like interrupting a complex waltz with a morning-star to the knee.

“I shall have to weigh my options. It isn’t clear if you will make it through the day, let alone bear my heirs.”

She pushed herself up onto her elbows. Glancing down only briefly to see the dire state of her flesh. Ridged and molten scars coated her. Red raw in between the raised parts. She dragged her eyes away before hysteria could take root. “I… will live. If I haven’t died yet, then I won’t.”

“You shall have to give me some time to consider this proposition—”

She cut that off too. “No, I won’t.”

He gawked at her for a moment. “You cannot seriously expect me to…”

“You know what I’m worth to you.” Orsina managed a soft smile, though her lips were as crusted and twisted as every other part of her. “You wouldn’t be here otherwise. Make the deal.”

He fell back on his forced politeness when it seemed that honesty was not sufficient. “This is not how royal marriages are typically arranged.”

She actually laughed at that. “Nothing… typical about either of us.”

“What of Harmony?” He spoke softer now. “She loves you.”

In her chest, it felt as though her heart had grown heavy as a stone. She knew that Harmony loved her. But she did not truly know if she returned that love or if she had been so caught up in the elation of being loved that it had not crossed her mind to question whether it was requited. Hurting Harmony would be the hardest part of all of this, harder, even, than the burns. But she was not living for herself. She was not doing what pleased her. She had a higher purpose than that.

“Nobles don’t get to marry for love. She’s the one who taught me that.”

His gaze dipped down to the ground. If he wanted absolution from Orsina, she could not give it. They would both have to deal with the repercussions of this arrangement. Both the practical and the emotional. “I do not feel that was a lesson that she truly wanted you to take to heart.”

Orsina pushed all thoughts of Harmony aside, so too all thoughts of the shape her future would now take. “Yes or no.”

His eyes darted from side to side, as though there were some physical contract in front of him that he was reading. Beneath his white-streaked hair, his precious mind was trying to find the flaw, the trick that she was pulling, but he could not. Because there was no trick. She was offering everything freely, holding nothing back.

Yet still he hesitated, stuck trying to predict every outcome. “How can I be certain you will uphold your end of the bargain once you are the most powerful landowner in Espher?”

She scoffed. “Have I ever lied to you?”

“My meaning was more that you may not be physically capable of…”

She held up a hand to stop him. “Kagan has been trying to get to me. Trying to bring me to Yelena. Right?”

Artemio shifted uncomfortably. “We have had to dissuade him from moving you.”

“Let him in. Let him take me to her.” She was not looking forward to that particular reunion. To feel all of Kagan’s guilt thundering against her like a drumbeat. “I’ll heal. I’ll be ready to fight again.”

“And how can I trust that you will not simply fly away once in their care?” For a moment, Artemio was no longer a king. No longer a man, even. He was a little boy sitting before her, afraid of being left all alone. She understood now. All that had been taken from him, time and time again.

She reached out towards him before she could stop herself, and he took her hand in his, though it must have disgusted him. “You stopped me from running once before, do you remember? You said that the only way I’d be able to understand who I am, what I am, was to stay. That hasn’t changed. Everything else might have, but that… that’s the same.”

He gave her hand as firm a squeeze as he dared. “I saw the value in you, even then.”

“You were my friend, Artemio.” She snorted in a very unladylike manner. “And we can be friends again.”

When she squeezed his hand back, a smile crept across his face that had nothing to do with manipulation and everything to do with the soft joy that came from having someone care about you. “I think that I would like that.”

She took her hand back carefully, trying not to leave a glove of her fresh-grown skin in his hand. “And don’t worry about Harmony. I’ll talk to her. When things are settled.”

He settled back and rested his hand atop his book once more. “I must admit, I am surprised to find you so willing to enter into this arrangement.”

She met his level stare once more, and she let him see her without pretenses. Let him see who she was beneath it all. “We all do what we need to, to reach our goals.”

“Indeed we do.” He nodded his head in agreement.

“So?”

“I accept your offer, my dear Orsina.” He smiled once more, somewhere between the official one that he used for others and the genuine one she had caught a glimpse of. “I know that you marry me for purposes other than the romantic, but know that I will do all that I can to make a good husband for you.”

“I can’t promise I’ll be the best wife.” She was still trying her best not to think of such wifely duties as she might have to endure. “But I’ll do what I can to make this work.”

“I would expect no less from you.”

His smile faded into darkness as sleep took her, unexpectedly, once more.

The next time she came to, Kagan was there. Tears streaking down the scales of his face as he looked at her. She reached out to him like she were a baby, and he scooped her up in his arms as easily as if she were. Through the touch of his skin, she could already feel the life returning to her body. Where his hands rested across her shoulders, the gnarled mass of scars smoothed.

With the life, came his feelings. She could not accept one without the other. The grief he felt that he had let her come to harm. The shame he felt that she had to come running to his rescue and ended up hurt as a result.

He had seen her burned before. Carried her listless body through the Selvaggia back to Mother Vinegar when dragon’s fire had swept over her. They were repeating their history, but while the first time, Kagan had been torn over whether he should put her out of her misery and rid the world of a dragon-slayer, now Yelena had given him a clarity of purpose. Her voice echoed through both of their heads. Bring her to me.

Through corridors and up endless stairs, Kagan carried her. The ache in his shoulder the only thing that either one could feel. It had been stitched shut before he could reach Yelena, and it had healed wrong as a result of the interference. It would ache each time he used it for the rest of his life, but he still had strength enough to carry Orsina, so he considered it a necessity.

“I’ve fixed everything, Kagan. I’ve made it all right,” she mumbled into his ridged collarbone.

He held her closer. Voice rumbling through her. “Of course you have. You always do.”

Hurry.

Orsina could see no reason to rush, this was the best she had felt in days. Yet she could feel Kagan’s arms begin to shake and the huge muscles of his chest begin to wither. She understood that the new strength she was feeling flooding through her was his strength. Yelena did not fear for her, she feared for Kagan.

At the top of the spiral staircase leading up to the roost, he fell. Not once had he faltered but there at the very edge of safety the strength had finally left him. When Orsina crawled free from beneath him, he was so shrunken and withered that he could have passed for a human. She could see his bones protruding beneath his scales and his skin. The gap between each rib indented. Finding her feet, she took one staggering step towards Yelena and the bottomless font of life the dragon represented, then she stopped.

She would not leave him behind.

Crouching down, she hooked her hands beneath his armpits and dragged him forward. Withered as he was, he had so little weight to him that it scared her. And from that fear sprang new strength. The shade that she had set loose on the world when she wanted her bidding done was inside of her now. It was her. And her arms could lift with all the strength of all the dead inside her too. She need not drag Kagan, she bent lower and hefted him up onto her shoulders, stumbling and staggering on. Out into the open night air. To where Yelena shone like a beacon.

Come to me!

The three of them all fell together, entangled in limbs and wings and the sharing of life. It flowed among the three of them in a cycle. Passing through one, then the other, then the next. Purified at each step before it was returned to its source and started anew. Kagan blossomed back into his fullness. The scar tissue fell from Orsina, sloughing off as fresh-healed skin rose up from within. She was alive. They were all alive. And they would remain so. Forever.

15 - Gods of War
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

When the Agrantine came, the earth shook with their passing. A thousand feet stamping down as one. A thousand more in the rank behind. The sky above Covotana turned from the brightest blue of summer to midwinter’s clouds, thick and choking. An unnatural smog that blotted out the sunlight and left the peasantry staring studiously down at their feet so they could avoid thinking of what was coming.

One side of the horizon to the other was filled with their black-shrouded forms. An army without compare, too large to even consider using the roads, instead trampling and flattening everything in their path. The traps that had been left in their path had made no impact upon their numbers. An assault by the Arazi had no impact upon their numbers. The shades that had been raised to run riot through the land, slaughtering the living, had no impact on their numbers. There was nary a scratch upon them.

Beyond the walls of Covotana, the armies had swung about, fallen into their formations, readied themselves in whatever ways they could to face so impossible an enemy. The walls of the city were lined with Shadebound, ready to unleash hell at their king’s command. In any other war, the fact that they had but a fraction of their foe’s forces would have been less dispiriting, but against the Agrantine and their saints, the Shadebound would exert little pull. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of Espher was blunted.

All of Art’s preparations had been put into place, every part of his great plans exactly as he’d laid them, and it would all count for nothing in the face of their raw numbers. They were not the Arazi, they would not come and dash themselves on the walls, they had a legacy of siege craft stretching back as long as they’d had a standing army.

And every part of that ignored the most imposing part of their force. That menhir of metal carried on the backs of men that contained their god.

Harmony did not know what he was. She didn’t know if he was a god or if there was just some magic to him that she’d never heard of, but she feared it. The others had heard whispers, they’d read legends, they knew of the God Emperor of Agrant through hearsay, but she had seen it with her own eyes, and she could not make any sense of it.

When Artemio stepped up beside her, she still could not tear her eyes away from the distant ziggurat. He might have been king here today, he might even be king tomorrow, but a king was a man, and whatever lurked out of sight amidst the legions of Agrant was something else entirely.

“I don’t think you have enough men.”

Art chuckled. “The thought had crossed my mind.”

“So what do you mean to do?” She glanced to him then and saw that he looked much as he had before all of this began. His face was more lined, the hand that he rested upon the top of the battlements was the only one that he had, and the hair atop his head was streaked through with white all over, but no longer was he forcing some regal bearing onto himself. The stiffness was gone and with it some measure of the sickliness that she had thought a product of his injuries rather than of his mind. He even wore one of his old suits instead of the glamorous robes of a king.

He shrugged his shoulders. “What anyone does when they are going to lose a war. I mean to make peace.”

“You think the Agrantine will listen to reason?” She didn’t laugh in his face, but it was a near thing.

“No. Most likely not.” He turned from the army arrayed against him to look at her. “Which is why I am not going to offer them reason but sentiment.”

“Appeal to their kind hearts? I think that might get you killed even faster than telling them how much smarter you are and that they should listen.”

His brows drew down a fraction. The crow’s-feet by his eyes growing deeper. “You sound like Father. I do not think so little of the Agrantine.”

“The Agrantine are marionettes controlled by their emperor. They walk to his drumbeat; they breathe when he gives them leave to do so.”

“They are just men like any other, and I do not think they’re beyond reason.” The look she was giving him should have quite clearly conveyed how wrong she thought he was, so he changed tack. “Even their emperor is just a man, whatever else he may be. And that means that he can feel, and through his feelings, be controlled.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And how exactly are you planning on doing that?”

Artemio looked back out, as the Agrantine army rippled into new shapes, the straight front line of their formation cascading out into pointed wedges, shield bearers filling them, driving any charge along the length of them towards the crossbowmen deeper in their formation. There would be a saint in each of those spikes to defend against whatever the Shadebound brought to bear. The tactics were simple enough for Harmony to follow without a steady lecture from Artemio, but the execution was flawless. They moved like birds in flight. Every step synchronized so that not a moment passed when the changing formations weakened their line.

“I am going to hand that which is most precious to me in the world to him and trust that he will not crush it in his hand out of spite.”

He said it with such misery that it drew Harmony’s gaze away from the display of discipline and back to him. “You’re giving him your crown? You’re giving up without a fight?”

All he managed was a sad smile. “I’m sending him you.”

She paused for a moment for him to laugh, for him to assure her it was but a joke, yet even in the pit of her misery, she could not simply succumb to destruction without a word in her own defense. “I’m not going out there.”

“He has met with you, and you’ve returned unscathed before.” There was a wheedling quality to Art’s voice that she did not care for, like when they were children and he wanted her pudding.

“He didn’t know who I was! He didn’t care.” She was taking care not to shout and alarm the soldiers stationed nearby, if only because she had no desire to see out the remainder of the siege in a cell somewhere.

“Then this time you shall have the opportunity to make a better impression.” Even he couldn’t manage better than a tepid smile.

Harmony stared at him, wide-eyed. “You must be mad.”

“Dear sister, there are many here in Espher who would have said as much. Who would have called me tyrant and done all they could to see me torn from my throne. Yet you did not. You saw the faults in me and loved me the best you could through them, all the same.”

“I wasn’t aware deposing you was an option.” She couldn’t let bait like that slip by without a little snap at it. “I should have done that to start with.”

At least Art could still take a joke. “Whatever else may have happened between us, whatever else will happen in the days to come, you are my sister, and I love you like I have loved no other since the day I was born.”

She feigned vomiting. “Disgusting. Don’t say you love me. That is so weird.”

He pressed on. “In your way, I suspect that you love me too.”

She slapped him in the shoulder, unable to contain a laugh. “Shut up before I throw up over the battlements and splatter some poor knight.”

Yet though he was smiling, he still persisted. “You were able to reason with me, even when my mind was so set on a course that I could see no other. You were able to pull me back from the brink of true wickedness.”

She met his gaze once more, remembering all that he had done, and she sighed. “I’m not entirely certain that I did.”

“I assure you, the worst of what I have done is by far better than the worst I imagined. And that is thanks to your influence.” He reached out his hand to her, and she took it. “Not winning me over with logic and reason, but with your good heart and kind words.”

“And this qualifies me to be the foremost pawn in your parley with Agrant?” It did not suit her to be bitter, she had concluded that long ago, but there were times when the hurt could not be kept from her words, no matter how their mother had schooled her.

“If you can win me over, you can win anyone.”

He was sending her out there to die, and he would die with her. That was some small recompense. Knowing that even when she was a shade, she would not be alone in the world. They would still have each other, even in death. “You know, I would resist more, but in truth I’ll likely be far safer in his camp than in yours. At least no gods are trying to tear his down.”

He squeezed her hand. “Not unless your prayers have been particularly fervent.”

“I wouldn’t know how to do it.”

“I believe it is a simple matter of dropping to your knees and begging.”

“Never been one for begging.” She squeezed his hand back.

“Nor I.”

If she was to die, then she could at least set the matter looming over them to rest first. There was no point in carrying that heartbreak within her, unaired. “You’re set on marrying Orsina? Even though she loves me?”

To her immense surprise, he did not draw away, even daring to smile. “I have no intention of placing the needs of Espher above yours, dear sister. That lesson, I have learned. She will be a part of our house just the same as you, and you might spend all your waking hours in her company once the wedding pact is sealed.”

“And what of the nights?” Her stomach turned at the thought of it.

He let out a nervous laugh, but still he did not pull away. “I have little doubt there will be a great deal of awkwardness for all involved.”

“I won’t share her with you, Art. She isn’t some toy that can be taken from my hand.”

“I have no intention of seeking her affections, of that I can assure you. I will do all that I must in public, I will do such duty as I must also, but I know the depth of your feeling.”

The weight lifted. The weight that had been bearing down on Harmony throughout the past day, since Orsina had returned to her, hairless as a babe and remade without any of the scars she had known. Ever since she had come, and with all kindness and soft words shattered her lover’s heart to pieces.

Tears pricked at Harmony’s eyes. It wasn’t over. “You had better not fall for her. I know how easy it is.”

He cocked his head to the side. “I must say, you seem to be taking this all with much more calm than I had anticipated.”

“Orsina explained things to me.” It had been cold and formal, an official breaking off of things that had been executed so neatly that Harmony still couldn’t believe Orsina capable of it. She had expected to look to the rafters and see Artemio there pulling strings to make his new puppet dance.

He seemed satisfied with that. Letting out a huff of relief. “She told you it would be a marriage of duty alone?”

“Hah.” Harmony’s laugh was no longer bitter but elated. “She told me that we would no longer see each other, except when we had no other choice. That she was betrothed to another now, and she would not break his trust.”

“She did what?” He gawked at her as though she’d grown a second head.

“So imagine her surprise when you explain to her that actually she can go on romancing your sister.” Harmony brought Art’s hand up to her face and kissed his knuckles. The closest she had come to swearing him fealty. She struggled even to speak. “You have brought me great relief today, Art. Now that I know what your true intentions are.”

There was a slyness to his smile then. “So you’ll go visit with the emperor for me?”

“Of course.” She laughed. “But now that I know I’ll still have a life when I return, I’ll do it with fear in my heart instead of relief.”

The somber mood of the day crept back over them as they stood there hand in hand. The elation that Harmony had felt fading in the face of what she must do next. She was surprised to hear Art’s voice crack with emotion. She was not entirely certain he’d ever let her see him feeling at all before that moment.

“Come back to me. To us.”

“Oh, rest assured, I will.” She squeezed his hand once more before letting him go. “Try not to do anything too villainous while I’m gone.”

He chuckled. “I can make no such promises.”

Riding out under a white flag of parley and wearing a dress fit for a queen had not featured high on the list of things Harmony had ever thought she might do in her life. Facing off against a living god with only her words and wit to protect her weren’t high on the list either, if truth be told. But then, she had never thought she would be at the center of court or courting the most wonderful woman on earth either.

The world gave and it took, and knowing now that Orsina was not lost to her, she could not help but feel that nothing she’d lost had been worth keeping and all that she’d found was worth so much more.

It took longer than she had expected to trot along the length of the road. She had become so accustomed to the speed at which Yelena ate up the landscape that a horse at full pelt seemed slow now. Time stretched out too, because she knew at any moment a crossbow bolt might come soaring out from amidst the mass of Agrantine, and she would never know another moment.

She crossed into their range and covered the last stretch of distance to their front ranks in a tense silence. At her approach, the ranks opened up to swallow her, like some vast ocean beast, and like the fool she was, she rode right on down its throat, channeled through their massive army by the opening they left for her, following that path to its bitter end. Riding all the way into the great ziggurat’s shadow before slipping her heels from her stirrups and dropping down.

A saint stepped forward to meet her. Hairless, black-robed, interchangeable with any of the hundreds more. “We shall listen now to your supplication and surrender.”

She glanced from him to the pagoda that loomed over them before awkwardly clearing her throat. “I’m not here to speak to you, actually. But to the man himself.”

“None may approach the emperor,” he declared loudly and proudly.

“Well, I already did, so I guess that isn’t true.”

For an instant he was flustered, then he tried to press on. “You may make your supplication and unconditional surrender to me, and I shall…”

“Listen, friend, I want to speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey.”

The man looked stricken. Affronted. Disgusted that anyone might speak to him in such a manner. Then he burst into laughter. Not only him, but all of the soldiers bearing the awful burden of the palanquin too. Everyone uproarious in their laughter. Harmony herself began to giggle like she was a little girl again, overtaken by mirth.

Tears flooded down her face, and even the pale palomino that had borne her across the field of battle seemed to be nickering in amusement, and that just made her laugh all the harder.

Sometime in the midst of all that laughter, the God Emperor emerged from his repose.

“Oh witless child of Espher, returned to me again. Where went your fair companion, who I would have as my bride?”

Atop his palanquin’s platform, looking down at her, he might have been twenty feet tall. If this was the only way his own people saw him, it was small wonder they thought of him as a god. What luck that Harmony had seen him from the level and knew him to be only humanly tall, if extraordinary in his girth.

“She’s getting married to the king of Espher.”

The God Emperor clapped his sausage-fingered hands together. “Then two birds shall be struck with a single sling’s shot. My new wife set free, and my enemy laid low.”

“I’m not sure that he is your enemy, actually.” Harmony tried turning the conversation in a less murderous direction.

It didn’t work.

“My people slaughtered. My flags cast to the filth. My offers of friendship, kinship, and kindness rejected with a spit in my eye. All of this, I could forgive. But to kill my wife. My wife! There could be no greater injury. No greater act of cruelty.” The platform shuddered beneath him, and for a moment Harmony thought that his power was shaking the world. But it was not him. It was the people below, shaking where they stood with the burden of his wrath. “All your brother’s work, and you tell me he is not my enemy?”

It was all Harmony could do to resist the rage bubbling up inside of her. Even trained as she was to control her emotions, by both a lifetime in her father’s court and her crash course in Arazi empathy, it came close to overwhelming her. Her voice was gruff when she gave answer. “She didn’t leave him much choice. She cut off his hand. Tried to kill him. Would you just stand there and let somebody murder you?”

He waved a hand, and she was lifted from the ground, drifting up over the heads of his gawking lackeys and set upon the platform beside him. Perhaps his neck was starting to hurt from looking down on her. “Regardless of circumstance, he was the one who slew her, knowing who she belonged to. He slew her, and he shall pay the price.”

“Name your price then.” She latched onto that final word with desperation. “We don’t need to fight. We can work something out.”

For a moment it seemed to her that he was actually considering it. That his mind was not already made up, but it was only a moment, and afterwards she would realize that he was merely composing his next soliloquy. “My price is blood. Your fields salted with it. Your streets flooded with it. Every man in Espher cleft from sternum to crotch, guts unwound. Every woman a slave, every child a slave, every heretic necromancer, incinerated. I am no merchant to be bartered with, no dignitary to be appeased. I am Agrant, and none may defy me and live.”

Harmony had hated her father. She felt no shame in saying so. He was a horrid nightmare of a man obsessed with his own delusions of grandeur to the exception of all else. Of all the other people in the world, she did not think there was a single one towards which she felt such passionate loathing, and now that he was dead, she had truly hoped that she might never taste the bitterness of true hatred again.

It washed through her now. She hated this wannabe god, just as surely as he looked on her as nothing more than a minor annoyance. She was nothing to him. Nobody to him. Yet he hated her and all of Espher with such intensity that it bled out from his skin to infect all around him. This whole army would fight with his hatred in their hearts. They would fight as though everyone they faced was their mortal enemy. There was no question of morals, of conflicting orders and priorities, there was only the emperor’s command, in body and spirit.

Hate so powerful it made Harmony want to shuck all pretense of humanity, to abandon everything she was and become an instrument of destruction. The emperor was right there in easy reach. She had her blade at her belt; they had not even troubled to remove it from her. One lunge would be all it took, the needle point would slip through his blubber as though it were not there. Hilt to his chest, blade through his heart, war over.

The simplicity of it struck her. The ease. Killing him, killing all of them, she had the skill, the strength, there were only so many bodies they could throw at her. She’d die, and Art would die, all of Espher with him, but the hatred boiling her blood would be quenched. She had to think of something else. Anything else. Anything but this awful, overwhelming hatred. “My… friend Orsina. She says you care about honor. There’s nothing honorable about killing defenseless peasants.”

From so close, it was apparent that the God Emperor had no eyebrows, yet there was a twist to the skin above his eyes that suggested a raised brow, even if there were no brow to raise. If he were impressed with her ability to overcome the weight of his passions he would never voice it, but anything that raised her in his estimations had to be a good thing. Still he pointed north to Covotana and sneered. “An army stands before walls as thick as any I’ve ever raised. They are defended. The incapability of their defenders does nothing to change that. You have raised arms against me once more, and that cannot stand.”

With all the strength in her body, she drew her hands up, away from her sword. “If we disband the army, send them home, open the gates to you… What then?”

Once more there was a moment where he seemed to be considering the question, then he began, “Every man in Espher cleft from…”

“Sternum to crotch, yeah. Got it.” It would have been impolitic to roll her eyes. Yet still she would not surrender to the inevitability of death. “My brother, he doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t think that you are bad people, he doesn’t want to go to war with you over a mistake.”

All around them, the rolling legions of Agrant stilled. As though they could hear the conversation, as though they were waiting for the resolution. Harmony was learning the pattern of it now, the dramatic pause before he made another grandiose statement. “When first I walked this world as a man, I believed in mistakes. In fortune. The rolling eons have taught me better. There is no fortune, no happenstance, only fate and those with the will to forge it for all.”

“So change our fate.” Harmony was ready for his grand speeches and emotional manipulation. She might not have had the mind of Art or the warming empathy of Orsina, but when it came to talking, she could do it with the best of them. “Make peace. Show the whole world that Agrant can be merciful. That you are not a monster.”

The God Emperor was stilled, then from deep within him came a gurgling rumbling sound. The great stomach began to heave up and down, the shoulders, the bountiful bosom. His laugh rolled out over the field, but it was not echoed back to him. “Child of Espher, I am so much worse than a monster. I am a god.”

All hope of a peaceful resolution was gone. Had been gone since before they even began. The tightness that she’d felt about her, the pressure to be polite, it finally released her. “If nothing I could say mattered, then why did you let me come? Why did you let me speak to you at all? You could have had your men shoot me from my horse. You could have crushed me yourself.”

In response to her lapse in manners, he did squeeze her just a little. A pressure in the air. A grinding of the bones. It still felt less like a hardship than pretending to be nice to this bulbous monster of a man. He could kill her, but he couldn’t force her to speak kindly to him.

A smile spread across his face. The first genuine emotion she thought she’d seen there. His eyes seemed to simmer with barely contained excitement. He was happier to cast off the chains of politeness and morality too. “As you said, honor. It demands that I listen to your bleating pleas for mercy even when there is none to be had. You shall run back to your people, and you shall spread word of what will befall them, and all will to resist me shall be shattered.”

She scoffed. “You think people are going to roll over and give up when they hear what you’re going to do to them even if they surrender? I thought you were meant to be clever.”

The dark clouds overhead seemed to grow darker, and the nigh comical form of the emperor suddenly seemed like an imposing mass. The shadows all about them lengthened, not because a shade had been called, but because this was how he wanted the world to appear. All was warped by his will, by his presence. Tremors ran through Harmony, vibrating up through the palanquin. “Do not underestimate how terror can unman even the mightiest warrior.”

Fear was in her now, but if he thought that would make her back down, he was sorely mistaken. She’d faced her fear every morning when she rose from her bed and lay down cradled in its arms each night. If fear could freeze her, she never would have moved at all. No fear was powerful enough to stop her.

“You know your people are going to die too. We might not be able to beat you, but this isn’t going to be a slaughter. We will resist you. We will leave your army in pieces.”

He cast a glance out over his gathered legions, the saints who worshiped him, the soldiers who had no choice but to mindlessly obey, every one of them had been a person once, a person in their own right, with their own history and family and future, and they had given it all up for him. He owed them everything, and he gave them nothing. Not even his consideration. With a shrug, he said, “There are always more soldiers. More machines. Infinity is bountiful. Anything that my mind can conjure is out there somewhere, awaiting my arrival.”

And there he had provided her with the perfect balm for the fear he had forced into her skull. The delightful familiar warmth of pure, unbridled rage. “Imagine what happens when the Arazi come across your army, bloodied and beaten when you are done with us. Imagine what they’re going to do with what is left of your people. Imagine what they’re going to do to you.”

He laughed once more. Mirthless and rippling. “If you hope to provoke fear in me, a larger cudgel than your dragon-lords will be needed. We saw them off with nary a scratch when you led them to us before.”

She turned her gaze to the north then, to the shadows rising on the horizon. To the dark shapes flitting beyond the limit of the dark clouds that Agrant had carried with it. Each one of those shapes looked tiny at this distance, but the fact that they were visible at all spoke to the prodigious size of the creatures that were coming. Just as they’d feared, both the Arazi and the Agrantine were arriving at Covotana at once. Despite all their efforts to stagger them, to buy themselves time to prepare, both wars were coming to a head this day. She pointed out there to the north, past the city that seemed to cower from the emperor’s gaze and beyond. To the doom that was coming. “Those were a few dragons. I’m talking about their army. Every single Arazi warrior, trained from birth, and every wyvern, terror-bird, thunder lizard, and dragon they’ve got. With a god-slayer at their head.”

He seized her then, like a child amidst a tantrum, his power wrapping around her like his pudgy fist, hoisting her into the air and flinging her out to the side where she could do nothing but dangle. “Return, oh child of Espher, to your city. Return to your sniveling dregs of a people. Tell them that we come at sunrise. Any who wish to make peace with their own gods or fling themselves from your walls to escape the coming pain are welcome to do so. I grant you that mercy. No more.”

“You’re too scared to even talk about it?” She sneered, even as his power compressed her ribs and stole her breath. “That isn’t very… imperial of you.”

He yanked her back to face him, his spittle pattering over her like sea-spray as he lost control of his temper. “What cause have I for fear, who have outlived a million petty kings? You think this is the first barbarian to come down from the north? You do not know of them because I left nothing of them to know. All of this is a cycle, endlessly repeating. Kingdoms rise, and kingdoms fall, and only gods remain. Only Agrant persists.”

She could not move. She was trapped inside her own body, in the tomb of his power, forced to look only at him. To think about nothing else. Yet she knew she could break his gaze despite it all. “Look at them and tell me you have nothing to fear.”

He did. His eyes darted to the side of her, to the distant horizon where the enemy of his enemy would never be his friend. To the dragons that swept down from on high, dancing and playing through the smog he’d tried to use to block out the sun. Making mockery of all his artifice.

“Fear,” he grumbled. “I do not know fear. Only contempt. Now go. Before I turn that contempt upon you and rend your flesh from your bones.”

With a push of his hand, he sent her soaring off the palanquin once more. Not to hang and hover as a testament to his power, but to land, staggering, by the side of her palomino. Catching at its reins to keep from falling. She hoisted herself back up into the saddle and spat at the churned mud between her and the god of Agrant. “I shall look forward to dawn when we meet on the field of battle, and we learn if a self-proclaimed god bleeds.”

Her only hope was that off to the north, whichever emissary Art had sent out to meet with the Arazi was having better luck.

16 - The Weight of a Heart
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

There was no one left in Covotana Artemio could trust, so he went himself to meet with the Arazi. He had Orsina’s absolute loyalty at last, but her unique relationship to the Arazi precluded him from sending her, and she was by far too unschooled in diplomacy to be of the slightest help. Kagan might have seemed the natural choice, but he had no faith in the man, nor did his own people seem to care for him. As for the nobility of Espher, they were loyal exclusively to themselves. It made him wonder if the place was worth saving. He had given so much for Espher, and it seemed he was doomed to be repaid in disappointment.

There had been a great furor at the idea of him riding out to meet with the Arazi, crippled as he was, but as he was quick to point out with all the sharpness of his tongue, he had all the power of the Shadebound at his disposal, regardless of the number of hands he could wave around.

There was some irony in the fact that those who opposed him the most were those most intent upon seeing him survive the day, while those who were complacent were perfectly happy to be complicit in his death. A poet would have had a field day with such material. But Artemio was no poet. The only art he practiced was this one.

Yelena was kind enough to offer to carry him out, her injury swiftly healed once the sealed circle of scar had been meticulously reopened by such surgeons in the capital as could hold their bladders through all the snarling.

He had politely declined. Though it would have made quite the image, the king of Espher atop a dragon, going to meet the dragon-lords on their own terms, some things mattered more than appearances.

Instead he rode out atop some borrowed horse from Granchio’s stable. Out through the army of Espher where the people rose to their feet and cheered at his passing. Some soldiers were boys, younger than even their king. Some were old men, press-ganged back into service by the dire turn of circumstances. Everywhere Artemio looked, there was terror and desperation hidden behind masks of excitement. Death was closing in on Covotana like a pincer, drawing closer in on each side with each passing moment. Of these men, few would still be in fighting form by the next sunset. There would be widespread death, regardless of how well Artemio managed his armies and tactics. These meager men would serve as little more than terrain, pushing and contorting the enemy forces into shapes that were acceptable to Artemio. They would know no glory, they would earn no ribbons, only the cold of the grave awaited them. He smiled at them benevolently as he passed.

Their deaths were a part of his calculations. The grain stores in Covotana and beyond would be sufficient to carry the women, children, and a greater portion of the nobility through the winter. The men would have to die to keep things in balance. He would not spend their lives thoughtlessly, as waste was not his nature. But neither did he mean to be frugal with them at the cost of victory. To his mind, everyone on the field of battle needed to be expendable to a greater or lesser degree, and the manner in which their lives were spent would reflect the value that they could provide in death, just as he judged them in life.

The leaders of his noble houses were out there among the massed soldiery, dressed in armor beaten out of their inheritance into a shape that might fit them instead of their grandfather. Not a one of them had seen war before Artemio had led them into one, and now they could think of no other way to do it. It was something of an amazement to him that half of these people could lace their own boots, so the fact that they’d willingly give over all command of their preciously hoarded power without a second thought felt like a lesser achievement to him, but still, it spoke to the confidence that the people had in him, on the field of battle at least. It was a good sort of problem to have. Better than being known to all as an excellent peacetime king. At least for now.

The crowd went on parting ahead of him, like they were being tide-pulled into the ditches and tents lining what had once been a road and was now churned mud. He rode on.

On through the ruins of roads it would take them all the summer months to rebuild. On past the crushed wagons and abandoned livelihoods. On over the empty fields where great markets and carnivals had been held on the turn of the seasons. Places that had been full of joy and life, now barren as the Arazi approached.

The Arazi swelled in his vision as he proceeded.

He had been at the battle of Selvaggia. He had seen the forces that were deployed against him, and he had met them with strategic applications of strength until the Arazi had been driven into retreat. It had been textbook-perfect, but for a few minor hitches.

This army made that one look like a tea-party gathering. The true dragons were massed at the rear, surrounded on three sides by the lesser flying wyverns, the false-dragons, and the terror-birds capable of flight. Their numbers matched the army he had faced before, and they were outnumbered five to one by the flightless. Wyverns, thunder lizards, crocorax, feathered serpents, so many of them it boggled the mind, even before accounting for the impossible bulk of most of them. And each one of them paired with a warrior who had been hardened not by a single winning battle, but by a lifetime of conflict against enemies on all sides. Sharing the intelligence of their counterparts just as their counterparts borrowed a measure of their strength.

Without star-metal blades or deities among them, they would be prey to the Shadebound, and Artemio and Prima Cicogna had spent many hours in conversation regarding exactly how best to apply the limited force they had at their disposal. Given their inability to guarantee that there would be any effect upon the Agrantine, their attentions had mostly been turned to the optimal methods of destroying dragons in flight. Now it seemed there would be other more pressing issues to address. The Arazi did not have siege craft, and they did not need it. Not when but one of those vast beasts of theirs could shoulder down a city’s walls.

From amidst the lines of titanic reptiles, one dragon launched, coming forth to meet him. It rose with slow, heavy beats of its wings, dwarfing many of its own kind in bulk and span. It did not take a genius to understand that this was the mount of the Arazi leader, nor that he himself represented the people of Espher, he supposed. He had not worn the crown for his cross-country trot, fearing it might end up in a drainage ditch somewhere, but the color of his hair was likely distinctive enough for all and sundry to know him as one of the Volpe family, even if the specifics wouldn’t have been clear from a distance.

At about half the distance to the enemy lines, it had been his intention to slow and wait, but the longer it took for the dragon in the sky to rise up, the more distance he covered. Stopping now and demanding his opponent meet him in the perfect center could have been read as belligerence, so he carried on, with his heart hammering harder the closer the enemy loomed.

It should have been fear. Perhaps if he’d dug down through his feelings, it would have been at its core, but in the sight of these vast and powerful monsters, bred for war and nothing else, he could not help but feel some degree of elation. They were here to face him. He was the king of Espher. All the world would see him now, as he was, not as the nothing he had pretended to be for his own safety. They would know him.

At almost three-quarters of the distance to the enemy lines, he pulled his horse up short to a skidding halt and prayed that it had courage enough not to buck him when the dragon arrived. That was enough of a concession on his part, enough of a show of bravery for his own troops too. If things did go awry, then he meant to be back in Covotana sometime today, before the fighting started, for preference. Artemio did not dismount, both because he feared he could be making a swift exit and as he was unsure how he’d manage to clamber back into the saddle should he do so. There were many things about his missing hand that he had become accustomed to, mounting a horse was not one of them. Not yet at least.

Kagan of all people had helped him mount up down in the stables, hidden from the sight of his men, more or less lifting him like a child into the saddle. It should have been embarrassing, he supposed, but a king became all too used to people doing things for him. He supposed that the two of them had come to something of an impasse, neither friend nor enemy, and with the wedding to Orsina declared, whatever wedge the exile had meant to drive between them had been abandoned. That, or he had earned the man’s grudging respect by choosing to go and parley with the Arazi himself. Holding tight to the horse’s back with his legs and holding one of Kagan’s javelins high with a white bedsheet streaming behind it, he had ridden out to face his destiny.

The palace had only a single white flag, and it had gone with Harmony. Presumably nobody among the quartermasters had foreseen a situation in which two armies would need to be headed off simultaneously.

Konus and the Prophet touched down with far more delicacy than Yelena had ever managed. The dragon seeming to stop on an inch of grass before pacing in a slow circle, gaze never leaving Artemio. Konus was smiling, which Artemio took to be a bad sign, but he did not say as much for fear that it might poison the negotiations to come.

Clearing his throat he called out, “Welcome to Espher, friend Konus.”

“And what a welcome we received.” The dragon-lord laughed aloud. “Arrows and curses everywhere we went. Poisoned wells. Rotten food. You lowlanders do know how to spoil a place.”

Artemio straightened up in the saddle, as much as he dared. “It was my understanding that you come from a barren wasteland, plagued with living nightmares, firestorms, and chaos. I wanted to make my honored guests feel at home.”

For an instant Konus said nothing, but then he burst out into a genuine laugh instead of the forced and boastful one he had faked but a moment before. “Very good.”

Arazi culture was more forthright than that of Espher. It was considered good form to show your emotions there, presumably because the empathic abilities that so many of them possessed would render any attempts at subterfuge entirely pointless. Even when it was in the presence of an enemy, when a joke amused them, they laughed. There was no guile in them off the battlefield, and for Artemio, who considered every conversation to be a battlefield, it was a refreshing change of pace. To his surprise, he found that when he put a smile into place upon his face, it was entirely genuine. “Though you may not believe it at first, I do think that it is good that you are here. Good that we can talk, as men and kings, instead of dealing through intermediaries.”

“Always found it to be so, but I am Arazi.” Beyond the scales and the bald pate, Art was surprised to find that Konus looked almost entirely human in stature. The other dragon-lords were massive bulky creatures, but there was a sinuous grace to Konus that matched the beast he rode. “Talking to you in person I can read you like a scroll unfurled before me.”

“Then you can be assured there is no deception afoot.”

Konus cocked his head to one side, eyes closed, as though he were listening to the whistle of the wind, but after but a moment, he stopped with a moderately perplexed expression. “How odd.”

Artemio kicked his heels into the horse’s sides to urge her forward, but she did not move. Her gaze was locked with the Arazi’s dragon, and the two of them seemed intent on ignoring everything in the world with the exception of the other. Oh well, it could not be helped. Shrugging, Artemio asked, “So, with that settled. Tell me, what do you want?”

Once again, the nigh immortal leader of the Arazi seemed to be flummoxed by the speed at which the conversation was twisting out of his control. “Want?”

Artemio was careful to keep his smile polite, not spilling over into mocking, but he need not have bothered. If Konus could read his heart half as well as Kagan had done, then he’d know that there was no ill will there. “Yes, you are here for a reason, I presume.”

Beneath Konus, his dragon growled in harmony with him. “The Witch.”

The sound should have made Artemio soil himself, it should have made anyone sane so afraid that they could not even think. Yet he had come out from behind the safety of his walls willingly, so clearly madness had already taken hold. There were still tremors in his legs from his brief time in the saddle. “I assume that you refer to Orsina.”

“We come to bring an end to her before her evil.” Konus had been talking just between the two of them, but now raised his voice, bellowing loud enough for his front ranks to hear and carry the jeering roar back and beyond. “So the world can live, she must die.”

Artemio shrugged his shoulders. “That is perfectly acceptable to me. Is there anything else?”

There was something to be said for the spike of power it made him feel each time it required just a few words to twist the conversation around so rapidly that Konus, allegedly one of the most powerful men on the continent, could not keep up. The king of the dragon-lords’ jaw dropped. “You… you would just give her up?”

Artemio nodded. In all honesty, it was markedly less than he’d anticipated paying. He had expected to have Espher made into a vassal state of the Arazi too and would have had to spend decades maneuvering to have such oversight removed. “If that is the price of peace between our people, then I’d be happy to.”

Konus did not put the spurs to his dragon, but it bounded over closer all the same. It seemed he needed to be closer to be certain of what he was hearing and saying.

“Why aren’t you lying?”

He had suspected from the outset that he would have to give up Orsina. He had planned towards that end, even going so far as to use his wedding proposal to drive a wedge between her and Harmony and to calm any doubts that Orsina might have had about his loyalty to her.

The bottom line was that he was king, and as a king, he could tolerate none more powerful than him within his domain if he meant to maintain his authority. Even the proposed wedding would have been insufficient. She would have become the ruler and he her puppet. It was simple enough for anyone to understand. Hence the layers of deception that had been necessary to keep her off course.

As for Harmony. Once the Arazi departed, there would be nobody around to countermand his tale of surprise and betrayal. Dear Orsina, his betrothed, snatched from him so young by an Arazi assassin hiding in wait. He could ride on the coattails of that sympathy in court for quite some time. Harmony would have her suspicions, of course, but in convincing her that her relationship with Orsina could still be pursued after they were wed, he had made it seem that this was never his intention.

“I will be sorry to see her go, of course. We are quite close. But the needs of Espher come before my own.”

Konus had managed to snap his jaw shut again, though it was clearly a struggle for him to grasp how readily Artemio had offered up one of his closest allies as a sacrifice. Perhaps the Arazi really were barbarians unsuited to statecraft, letting their emotions guide them rather than their principles. Perhaps it did not matter. It was Artemio’s dearest hope that after this day, he would never have to see any Arazi or Agrantine again for as long as the sun still rose.

Konus nodded his head in agreement. “Deliver her to us, then this war of ours is through.”

“Well, there is one slight impediment to that plan.” Artemio acted as though he were reluctant to share this news. In truth he was. If he had only one enemy to face, then this whole thing would have been markedly more manageable. “The Agrantine. If I hand Orsina over to you, I have nobody to fend them off.”

“Their god walks with them.” His grip on the dragon’s reins tightened.

By Artemio’s estimations, it would have been over five hundred years since Konus fought the gods of the Arazi. The Burned Ones, as they were referenced in more contemporary texts. He had fought them, and he had granted them their new titles, and he had framed himself as the liberator of all, because he’d rid his people of that yoke. It had been achieved with such panache that the Arazi people did not even notice the new yoke being slipped over their shoulders during the celebrations. Regardless, those hundreds of years ago when Konus had faced off against the gods of his people were in all likelihood the last time he had encountered what someone from such an honor-bound culture would consider to be a worthy foe. One that had even odds of destroying him. For a warrior culture, having no means to express one’s martial excellence would have been a millstone around his neck. Constantly proving his superiority on the battlefield was the only way for a leader among such people to maintain his relevance, and here he was deprived of any enemies that might be considered a fair fight. He must have been spoiling to go after the emperor of Agrant from the moment he heard of him.

Artemio’s smile had not faltered throughout all of this. “While I am quite comfortable facing off against an army of men, or indeed dragons, a god requires something in the way of special treatment.”

Konus crossed his arms over his chest. The very picture of smugness. “Killing a god is not so difficult.”

“For you, perhaps not. But I cannot boast your experience.”

It was a difficult thing to use words and make a friend do exactly what was desired of them. How much more difficult, then, to convince an enemy of a course of action. Artemio could not tell Konus what he wanted him to do, or it would be refused. For he was the enemy. He could not tell Konus what not to do, or it might be refused as manipulation. The key was not to win the man over with reason, though it would be all the easier if such a thing were allowed, but instead to manipulate his emotions in such a way that it was unclear that they had even been touched upon. The choice of every word was made to invoke a specific feeling. To inflate his ego, let him feel that he was mighty, but also to slip a needle through his guard and pierce that same ego. The word boast, used in this context, was in no way out of place, but it came with its own meaning. Was he really the man that he claimed to be, or was he inflating his own legend? Would he still be capable of such feats? Could he kill a god this day, if he were given the opportunity?

Konus looked past him to the massed army on the southern horizon. To the black-shrouded swarm of killers, ready to descend upon Covotana like flies on a corpse. “This is a trouble of Espher, not the Arazi.”

Artemio shrugged his shoulders, accepting this as his due. It was too soon for a commitment. He needed to give Konus an excuse first. A justification, beyond his own desires. “If you would be willing to delay the trade-off for just a short time, then it can still be done within the day.”

Konus’s good humor seemed to have faded now. As had his delight at the twists and turns of their conversation. All that remained was a quiet, serious man, intent upon murder. “She is a dragon-slayer. She is a monster. The seed of evil. We will not accept any delay. Each moment she walks the world, we grow closer to its end.”

Artemio smiled and let his calm radiate out. “Then if matters are so pressing, I would have to say it is time for your people to prepare for a fight.”

17 - The Last Siege of Covotana
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

The empire of Agrant attacked before sunset.

If Artemio had been back from chatting up the Arazi a little bit sooner, he would have sifted through everything that Harmony had heard from the God Emperor and probably would have interpreted this turn of events from the conversation, but he did not have a chance to speak with Harmony at all. He barely made it back to the gates before the approaching Agrantine made contact with the arrayed forces between them and the walls.

It was a bloodbath. The Espheran troops had prepared as best they could, but in terms of sheer numbers, the Agrantine had them soundly beaten before they had even begun. Orsina and the other Shadebound lined the walls of Covotana, unleashing wave after wave of elemental attacks, all of the nobles who would usually have been so sparing with their use of shades were inspired by the way she spent her own life unceasingly in the defense of the city and redoubled their own efforts. Decades were spent in moments. Lifetimes squandered, as the fire and ice and lightning struck down amidst the charging Agrantine soldiers were almost immediately intercepted by the saints among them. It was not a perfect defense. Many soldiers died with each of the Shadebound volleys, but it was not the utter devastation that would have been required to turn the tide.

Harmony found herself on the walls amidst the Shadebound. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with men and women she’d never even met before, who were now killing themselves by inches to serve her cause.

She could do nothing but watch.

Harmony had neither magical powers to call upon or troops to command. Not even a crossbow to fire out into the mass of enemies. Not that she’d have had the range to do anything more than pepper her own back lines.

The Agrantine did not suffer from the same limitations. The great palanquin had remained in place during their advance, as had those strange, smoking towers, but the war-machines to the rear had been rolled forward almost as swiftly as the foot soldiers. Their advance had only halted because to proceed farther would involve rolling over their own troops, and while Harmony had no doubt that the emperor would order such a thing without a second thought, there was no need to.

Not when they could hit the walls from there.

The scorpions began unloading their lethal rain across the battlefield, some shots poorly calibrated, and falling short into the mass of Espheran soldiers at the foot of the walls, but most hammering home into the city walls themselves. They were not trying to bring them down—for that they would have deployed an entirely different apparatus—instead they were striking at the wall’s defenders. Trying to knock the Shadebound from their posts. The Shadebound might have been ineffective in this battle, but they still represented Espher’s most fearsome resource when it came to warfare.

The bolts flew true, evening out in their curvature so they would pass straight through the space where the Shadebound and their keepers stood guard. From there, the parts of those nobles would be strewn across the roofs of the city before the bolts finally came down. A massacre.

But no plan survived contact with the enemy, and the Agrantine had chosen poorly indeed to make an enemy of Orsina.

They did not shatter off some invisible barrier or turn away as though brushed aside by some unseen hand. They merely stopped dead in the air and then dropped uselessly to the ground. The whole first volley, enough to block the sun from the sky when they had seen it before, discarded like a love note from an unworthy suitor. Stealing a glance at Orsina, Harmony couldn’t hold back a grin. She hadn’t even broken a sweat.

Down on the ground the soldiers saw nothing of this, but up on the walls of the city the defenders began whooping with delight at their newfound invulnerability. Orsina was the only one who showed no signs of joy. If anything, she looked sterner than the moment before. Harmony hated to see her so but had no opportunity to alleviate some of her concerns before the battle started. If she had just a moment to pass along what Artemio had said, then she knew that the scowl would be lifted from Orsina’s face. That the coldness that had permeated her in the last day would thaw, and she would become the woman Harmony loved again.

The next bolts launched from the scorpions were tipped with star-metal.

They must have cost a king’s ransom, each one of them as valuable as one legion of the troops down below, and they were far fewer in number because of that cost, but the investment paid dividends. The bolts tore through clusters of Shadebound along the wall. All of them suffering some injury except for Orsina and those cringing beside her. The bolt that had been aimed for her had stopped, just as surely as the last ones had.

Harmony gawked at it, not understanding how it could have been done, until the head of the bolt tumbled off to enrich whichever scavenger would later wander the fields outside, and she could see that the wooden shaft had been crushed to sawdust in Orsina’s desperate grasp.

She could not touch the star-metal with her shades, but the rest of the bolt was fair game, and she knew now how the trick could be done.

There was no second volley of star-metal, only regular repetitions of the first attempt with the usual steel. Not intended to do harm anymore, but to divide Orsina’s attention. Probably wise, given the sheer destruction that she was raining down now that she had worked out how to circumnavigate the saints’ blades.

It was a turning point in the battle. Though once again, those down on the ground actually involved in the fighting would probably never know it.

Harmony did not pretend to know the distinctions among the various troops out there fighting for her life. She did not know which banners were flown by families loyal to her house and which were political enemies. In all likelihood, nobody on the front lines was liable to be a friend to her and her brother, or they would not have been placed on the front lines. Few battles of attrition were won by such men, and little glory would go to any that did survive the press of two shield-walls meeting. Heroes swept in later, to clean up.

Over the raucous hubbub of armies and the deafening clash of steel, trumpets sounded along the length of the walls, the same sound originating from somewhere deep in the city’s heart and being carried out and all around by messengers. She paused for but a moment, trying to grasp what was being commanded by her brother, then she saw her answer.

On the farthest flank of the battle, where the Espheran army used an outcropping of the city walls to defend the end of their line, the cavalry had arrived.

In all that had followed, she had forgotten all about her desperate hunt for horses. Of the steppes-men bought off and brought down to train rangers in the use of their own twice-bent bows. She had entirely put out of her mind that small piece of all this that she bore some responsibility for, but now she saw its application.

From the one unwatched side of the city, where neither Arazi nor Agrantine had eyes, the light cavalry of Espher sallied forth. Pouring from the gates and where they had lain in wait pressed hard against the walls. Their first stretch was eaten up swiftly, as they rode down the side of the caldera in which Espher was built, and used that momentum well to gain distance. From the back of the horses, the arrows began to fly.

As they came along, the Agrantine would raise shields against them, swiveling within their formation, but it was insufficient and drew attention from the front lines where they began to be pressed back. The insufficiency was not in the perfectly disciplined application of their new defensive posture, but in the speed with which they managed it. By the time they had their shields up, the rear tail of the cavalry charge was already passing by.

All along the length of the Agrantine army, arrows rained down, peppering the troops. Not with enough force to actually disrupt any of the vast formations the emperor had placed them in, but snuffing out lives all the same and, more important, disrupting their focus.

To be distracted when in a pushing match with the enemy army was to lose ground, and even though the soldiers now being hit were near to the rear ranks, the loss of their momentum would ripple forward.

Yet all of this distraction was itself a distraction from the cavalry’s true purpose. They had mustered every warhorse in Espher and as many as could be bought for ready money from the kingdoms that abutted them. They had trained their troops in the use of bows from on horseback, though it went against centuries of military tradition. And now, they were witnessing the payoff. As the slow lumbering beast of the Agrantine army began turning to face them, catching a glimpse only of the dirt that they threw up in their wake, the cavalry cut in at last, sweeping around the rear rank of foot soldiers to head straight into the nests of war-machines.

What the hell was Art doing?

It would have made sense if he had spent all of his horse in that way if they had no defense against the scorpions, but Orsina had already proven herself more than a match for them. He was squandering one of their scarcest resources trying to remove emplacements of war-machines that he could have left well alone to serve as nothing more than a distraction.

Perhaps this was still a distraction, meant to make the Agrantine pull back and defend their soft rear end, but Harmony did not believe it. Art might have used it as a distraction in addition to something else, but she could not comprehend what that something else might have been.

The opposite flank to the one where the cavalry had emerged was suddenly reinforced. She had been so distracted that she had not seen those troops dedicated to facing off against the Arazi being drawn in.

Artemio must have managed to bamboozle the Arazi somehow, convinced them not to attack right now. She had no idea how he had done it, but combining the forces that had previously been split gave the armies of Espher an entirely unexpected advantage. They were still grossly outnumbered, of course, but the differential was now far smaller than it had been.

There was the sound of an explosion, soft and distant, and Harmony’s eyes were drawn back to the rear ranks of the Agrantine lines where one of the transported towers had been toppled to crush a nearby scorpion. The front of the cavalry formation had done their job well, picking off all the crew and operators of the machines, and now the rear, who had thus far done little but trail along behind their more successful predecessors, were dismounting and laying waste to the machines themselves. They would not be destroyed, not by mortal hands in limited time, but they would no longer fire upon Espher this day, and what more could they really ask for?

Something more than the disabling of machines that had already been rendered useless, probably.

The sky above them was awash in a thousand colors. The curses of the Shadebound streaking across the thick cover of smog, changing it, filling it with illusory life and light. Pink and blue, red and gold, a veritable fireworks display spattered across the sky.

Words could not describe the cacophony of war. The screaming, the clatter of steel, the concussive force of the Shadebound’s power impacting against the Agrantine ranks. It was as though all the world had gone mad, and if it would not have cost her face, Harmony would have liked nothing more than to flee her place on the wall and find some quiet hole in which to bury her head.

Yet through it all, neither her brother nor the emperor was anywhere to be seen. Art, she could understand, he was probably mounting the defenses on the other side of the city in preparation for that fresh onslaught, but the God Emperor had no such excuse. Yet still he remained in his palanquin, ordering men to their death without even bothering to watch them fall.

She might not have had her brother’s troops or Orsina’s power, but the one thing she did not lack was righteous anger. That bastard was just lounging around while men died for him, all because he was having a tantrum over one of his little toys being taken away.

Moving in the din felt like an effort, as though she had been rooted in place and now had to drag herself free of the flagstones, but she walked along the wall to Orsina’s side, leaned in close to whisper in her ear, and pointed to the palanquin.

The words she said were snatched away by the chaos. Her vitriol washed over Orsina without finding ingress. But the meaning of what she wanted was clear, and even now after everything that had occurred, Orsina did not seem to have it in her to resist Harmony’s request.

With a jerk of her wrist, a wall of dragon’s fire burst forth in the air, hiding them from sight and wiping away the next flurry of scorpion bolts as though they were moths touching upon a candle’s flame. For an instant, all the battlefield seemed ablaze, but when the thick black smoke parted, all was as it had been, all except Orsina.

She had stepped up onto the wall and held a pointed finger out now, the same accusing gesture with which Harmony had damned the emperor, repeated.

From the finger’s tip a light shone. A flame burning hotter than fire, passing through reds and blues to transparency and then a blinding white. The kind of flame Harmony had only ever seen spilling forth from the Prophet and Konus. A god-killing sunbeam of purifying light.

Where the palanquin was struck, the metal melted away. Peeling off to patter down onto the gathered hordes of soldiers below. They died as it rained down on them. They faltered, and they fell. The whole palanquin lurched forward as balance was lost, as the awful burden those people had to carry in life fell to crush them in death.

That awful burning line cutting through reality burned on, creeping ever slower, parting the vast monolith of steel like a heated knife passing down through butter. The impenetrable steel becoming as water and flowing away from its touch.

Still, Orsina drew it further down, splitting the great monolith in two, all the way down to the very bottom where it would surely find its intended target.

It deflected. Harmony had never seen a prism of glass, did not know the light would be split flowing through it. She had no context with which to describe how that impossible burning light exploded apart into shattered fragments, streaming out in every direction to slice through Agrantine and Espheran lines alike, even carving through the city wall itself before Orsina cut it off.

The emperor was not without his own defenses.

Screaming had followed both Orsina’s initial strike and the deflection that had caught everyone off guard. Agony and terror to see her true potential unleashed. One tower atop the walls of Covotana slid slowly to the side as Harmony could do nothing but watch, the full complement of guards atop it scrambling and leaping for the safety of the wall and failing to make their escape in time before it toppled down to crush the men below. All of this time, this was what Orsina had been holding back. The power to level mountains if she so chose.

Involuntarily, Harmony found herself taking a step away from her love as fear seized her heart.

It was all that saved her.

The emperor struck back, not with fireballs and lightning or any of the fripperies the Shadebound could muster, but with pure unadulterated power. The section of the wall where Orsina stood was ripped away. Lifted from its place as though the smooth curved line carving through the stonework had always been there.

Orsina was plucked from her place and dragged out over the open air. The Shadebound around her scattered in terror if they still lived, but just as the stone had been cleanly parted, so too were many of them. Toppling on the spot as parts of them were simply disconnected and dragged off along with Orsina. All their power, all the spirits of the dead that they could command, it meant nothing in the face of a god.

Harmony barely managed to muster a scream before the little slice of wall that Orsina was perched upon was whipped away. Orsina hadn’t even the time to cast her a backwards glance before the length of the battlefield had them separated.

The last of the Agrantine war-machines had been laid low. The cavalry of Espher were making a frantic withdrawal. The walls no longer needed Orsina to guard them. But even so, the morale of the defenders was shattered as they saw their champion stolen. Men broke and ran. Good, stolid men who had trained for war all their lives suddenly realized how much more of life there had been that they had missed out on. The stairs down from the walls became a tangled mass of bodies as reinforcements tried to charge up and the defenders tried to flee.

Harmony herself was stuck for a moment, ambivalent. Unsure.

Then the shadows fell over them, blotting out what little was left of the light making its way through the smog. Vast shapes moved overhead. Impossibly vast. Larger than anything that should have been able to accomplish flight.

The dragons descended from the clouds as they cleared the city walls and from all across the field of battle Harmony could hear the courage of Espher shatter.

Wyverns swept down in the dragons’ wake, plunging by so close that if Harmony had the wherewithal in that moment, she might have reached up and struck them, but she was too dumbstruck by the sudden turn of events to even form a sentence yet.

The swarm of them blinded her to the battlefield, set her on her heels. Blade drawn and waiting for the first of the Arazi to drop from the saddle and attack, but none came. Even the wyverns seemed to pay her no mind as she swiped at them.

With an all-too-familiar boom, the dragon venom ignited on the field beyond the swarm. There were so many dragons, more than she could ever have even conceived of. Konus must have brought his whole barbarous empire down with him to chase Orsina.

Well, he would never catch her now. The god of Agrant had taken her. She would already be dead, or worse.

Orsina was gone.

She was gone.

Harmony felt the weight of that thought nestle in her mind. A world without Orsina. Forget that the war was lost and that their home would burn. Forget that her brother would be executed and that she’d die with him. A world without Orsina was not a world she wanted to live in.

She drew her sword, and she leapt.

The wyvern she caught was no different from all of the rest. The same leathery skin stretched from forelimb to hind, the same long beak and curved back crest. The same feathered barbarian on its back. She caught it by the rearmost claw, and her weight dragged it out of the sky.

It beat its wings with a frantic energy, twisting and turning to try to dislodge her, but she latched on, tooth and nail. It was borne down by her weight, and she in turn was borne out onto the battlefield, crossing all the distance she’d traveled by horse in moments until a stray crossbow bolt from amidst the Agrantine lines punched through the beast she had borrowed flight from, and she fell to the ground.

Her legs screamed as they hit the churned mud of the battlefield, ankles and knees grinding as she flung herself into a roll to absorb some of the impact. The pain was good. It was better than the awful cold emptiness she had inside her now. She could still hurt. So she could still hurt them right back.

In a flash, her blade darted ous past shield and armor to pierce through Agrantine flesh. The woman who had come running to investigate her fallen body was run through the throat, but Harmony was in motion again before blood had even spilled.

She was not far behind Agrantine lines. Not nearly as close to the fallen palanquin as she would have liked. But it would suffice. Between her and the target of her vengeance there may have been a thousand men, but that troubled her not at all. She needed to warm up before the main event.

Realizing an enemy was among them, the Agrantine lines rippled and shifted around her. Disgorging first one then a second saint to face her. They thought her appearance here was a feat of magic, that she was Shadebound, and that their special swords could do anything to protect them. She was the first sword of Espher. Nothing could protect them from her wrath.

The first came at her swinging, expecting no resistance once the strings of magic about her were cut, but whatever weakness they might have imagined was not within her. She parried the swinging blade, throwing sparks from her rapier as the flat blade scraped down the length of it before twisting at the last moment before the blade struck her guard to turn it aside entirely and leave the sword-saint open to a brief thrust through the gizzard.

She did not even need to think. Every motion of this had been drilled into her muscles. Every movement perfected by a lifetime of needing perfection just to be viewed as acceptable. All her mind might have been consumed by rage, but the harsh beast of her body had never needed its commands, it had needed to be leashed.

The next saint was more cautious, but that just meant that Harmony’s opening came all the sooner. She leapt, giving up her steady footing to close the fullness of the distance between them, scoring a strike across the saint’s thighs before rebounding to hammer the length of her blade into the bald woman’s chest.

They hadn’t brought enough soldiers.

Dragon’s fire burst in two broad swaths alongside her, venom catching in mid-air to rain down. It was the first time she’d seen it up close, the way that it pattered down like tears alight, clinging to whatever it touched. It drove the soldiers closest to her closer and drove the rest away.

She couldn’t have asked for better happenstance.

As the Agrantine fled the dragon’s fire, they found themselves bleeding. Cuts made so swiftly they had not felt the touch of the blade. Dozens died in those moments, bathed in the light of their kinfolk’s pyres, and they never even knew Harmony was the cause.

She followed along the fire-lines where they led towards the fallen palanquin and the god she needed to slay. She killed indiscriminately as she went, delaying her progress but leaving no foe at her back. On her best day, she would never have claimed that she could carve a path through an enemy army alone, but this was not her best day. This was the worst day that had ever come to pass, and all would feel her sorrow before she was through.

Tears flowed down her cheeks but did not cloud her eyes. Blood streaked her, but she did not pause to wipe it away. There would be worse to come.

Again and again the dragons swept over the Agrantine armies, searing lines across them. Art had left the whole battlefield open to them by destroying the enemy warsmachines. He’d thrown open the gates and invited every flying monster in the world to come soaring over.

She couldn’t understand why. He wasn’t this stupid. He’d never been this stupid.

Soldier after soldier died, and her body began to forget. Vengeance still had to be had, but going through the motions, she was becoming more and more sluggish. It was enough, in the heat of battle, against soldiers who had never faced real talent, but should a saint find her path, there would have been trouble. She would have had to think, and to do that would be an unforgivable mistake.

If she thought, she would remember. The sweet smile of a shared joke. The gentle brush of a fingertip over her knuckles. The heat of a body pressed against her as they lay in bed, moving not at all for the fear of shattering their perfect peace.

It did not matter if it tired, her body still had to lead.

The mass of Agrantine between her and the ruins of the vast, molten sepulcher where their god had lived seemed overwhelming at first, but with each pass of the dragons, their numbers thinned and they became more thinly spread.

She was making it, step by staggering step. Slice by bloody slice.

Then she wasn’t. A dragon came down on her, claws outstretched to snatch her up. It was only the instant before it hit her that she realized it was Yelena.

“What are you doing?!” she bellowed up at the dragon, as though it could answer. Yelena said nothing, hammering her wings down as crossbow bolts fired off at them from every direction. Harmony yelled, kicked her legs, even hit at the clawed feet wrapped around her. “Let me go! Let go!”

The dragon would not comply, and despite everything, Harmony found that she could not bring herself to strike at this creature with her sword and cut her way free. It was Orsina’s.

It was bound to Orsina. The same way she was to Artemio.

So if the dragon lived, then that meant…

Dragging her eyes up from the battlefield, she saw them at last. Orsina and the emperor of Agrant, hanging in the air above the battlefield in the midst of a great transparent sphere, which arrow, shade-casting, and dragon fire could not penetrate.

Orsina lived. She fought. And Harmony had been throwing her own life away without a second thought. Stupid. Always so damned stupid. Her face felt as though it were burning as rational thought returned to her. Patting at Yelena’s claws, she felt them loosen, and began the laborious climb across to where the lowest rigging of the harness the dragon wore hung. For the Arazi it was a normal day’s exercise, for the people of Espher it would have looked like a death-defying stunt suitable only for the circus, but at some point this had become Harmony’s life, and she accepted it as such, clambering her way up until Kagan’s bulk came into sight, and he offered her his hand to haul her the rest of the way.

From up in the sky, she could see that the tide of battle had been turned. Orsina and the emperor may have been trapped in whatever strange battle of wills surrounded them, but now that the Arazi had joined the battle, the actual Agrantine forces were in shambles. Their perfectly constructed formations crumbled in on themselves. Their war-machines were little more than charcoal and the portable pillars they’d used to blot out the sun had become bludgeons for the grasping claws of the dragons to sweep about and drop like artillery.

Back at the front lines, the army of Espher stood stalwart, pressing back against them, but it was at the flanks that the battle was truly being fought and won. Titanic thunder lizards, wyvern outriders, even the rare flightless dragons were down there on the ground alongside Espheran soldiers.

Art had done it. Somehow, he had won them over, he’d turned them against the Agrantine. Espher was going to survive. They were all going to survive.

Yet she could muster no elation because Orsina was still locked in whatever mortal combat looked like for gods and those with the power to challenge them.

18 - War of Gods
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Orsina was alone.

There was a boundless silence all about her. Distantly she remembered that there were others out there. People she had cared for. Lives she had sought to spare by doing violence. But in this moment, there was only her.

The shades that had whispered in her mind since the moment she had been old enough to remember were gone. Silenced as surely as if their throats had been cut. They had been the background music to her entire existence, and now she knew only quiet.

It should have been a relief. She was alone, for the first time in her entire life. Alone with her thoughts. Alone, and certain that those thoughts that she was thinking were her own. Yet she could find no joy in it. No reprieve.

The only voice she could hear inside of her head was her own, but that only meant that they had become her so thoroughly that there was no longer a distinction in tone.

Her bones ground together. Her skin dimpled under the pressure. If she still had hair, she would have dreaded to think how many directions it would be splaying about her. Instead, she was as bald as a babe. As bald as the emperor himself. Not even stubble had begun to show.

She could feel fingers scratching over her head. Over her face. Tugging at her clothes. She could feel the emperor’s will pressing itself against her. Smothering her. As though he were right there, lying on top of her as she writhed and struggled to get out. She called fire, she called water, she called every power her shades had granted her, and they all died at her fingertips.

If the emperor had his way, she’d already be dead. She knew that with the same dull certainty that she knew the sky was up and the ground was down. She was holding him off, keeping that awful weight from closing over her from all sides and crushing her away to nothing. His will hooked at her ears, her fingers, it tugged and tried to tear her apart, but her own tremulous hold on her body kept him out.

All of the world might have bent to his whim, and he might have been able to trap her shade inside of her flesh for now, but inside, it was still hers to command, and he could come no farther.

His voice surrounded her. His feelings pressing in on her own, trying to worm inside her head. “I would have taught you to master that which you can barely touch. The faith they have in you, it is a weapon.”

She pushed back. Her power, such as it was compared with his, flexed and strained against the press of his will. Through teeth she did not want to grit, she hissed out, “I don’t want it.”

His amusement tickled over her. A girlish giggle, too high by far from the vast body that birthed it. “Want matters nothing to a god. We are what they expect us to be. What they believe in.”

“I’m not a god!” Orsina screamed inside the confines of her own mind, her own body. Her shade exploded outwards with her wrath, only to be contained once more. Reverberating back and forth within her. Fury expanding and collapsing in on itself endlessly. Her body shook with it. Her thoughts burned.

The emperor felt it, but his response was contempt. “All necromancers play at it. Only you have come close to the reality. It is not about the using; it is about the becoming.”

She pushed, will and wrath and all that she had, trying to drive the explosion out from within her. Trying so desperately to fight. To resist. “I don’t want to become a shade.”

Again that awful tittering laughter seemed to encompass them. Surrounding Orsina until she could not bear it anymore. The mockery, the contempt, the derision. All that she’d feared she’d face if the truth of her humble beginnings came out, now played out over and over again. All that she had, she was going to lose. All that she had made herself, it had been for nothing. The emperor’s certainty of his superiority was so complete that it became a physical force, crushing the rebellion from her as it drove the air from her lungs.

“They are the shadows of the gods they could have been. Imbued in death with the faith of the living. Memories of what they are bound with belief to root them in the world. Echoes of greatness. I am that which they pretend to be. A living god, growing more potent with each new supplicant. With each new believer.”

He crushed her down, smaller and smaller until he filled the whole world, and she was an insect looking up at him. He was vast and he was powerful and she was nothing. She had been born nothing. She would die nothing. What more could she have expected?

“I’m not an echo. I’m not a story. I’m a person. I am a living human being. I don’t want…”

His eyes closed as she spoke, and when they reopened she was there, right before him, reflected in the vast shining expanse of his sight. So small. So worthless. “Your people, they are faithless, but in you they see the spark of the divine. It is the only reason that you still live.”

Down and down she went into the pit of despair and darkness. Into the void that he was pressing her into. So far down, so deep, that the light could never reach her again. This was the best place for her. Something so pathetic and shameful should never see the light of day. She was subhuman. Barely even an animal. She was a pallid squirming thing at the bottom of a hole. That she should dare try to speak to him was laughable. She who was nothing, and he who was everything.

“You’re a god because people believe you’re a god?”

The hole she was buried in must have been a part of him, as all things were. His voice echoed in from all around her. Across the stretch of her useless worm of a body, she could feel it. The greatness of him. “Because I am a god their faith flows to me like rivers to the sea.”

Sometime between her being a peasant and a maggot, she had curled up around herself. Hiding her face. Trying to hide her shame. But there could be no hiding. She was the lowest of the low. Charnel house scavenger. Bloodless and witless. No will of her own. Just that which she’d borrowed from the dead. “But which came first?”

His words stripped her skin from her flesh. Her flesh from her bones. Her tenuous grasp on all of the things that made her Orsina flayed away. “Eternity has no beginning or end.”

Everything she had learned in all of her life had been taken away from her. All of the power she’d hoarded to herself as though it could make the blindest bit of difference. She had no control over her life. She had no control over the world. She had no control over even her own soul. She was nothing. A hollow.

Her will gave way. The walls that she had built around herself gave way. The God Emperor of Agrant reared back to strike her defenseless heart.

But he moved too slowly.

Since the moment she was born, Orsina had walls built around her soul. The ones she’d made for herself. The ones the House of Seven Shadows had trained her to raise. The ones the shades within her had erected to lay claim to their property. They were built to keep Orsina whole, to keep the world outside. They were what had protected her from the God Emperor’s influence. Now that they were gone, the hollow in her heart lay bare.

All that had been holding back the tide of the dead was torn down.

From the first moment she had drawn breath, every shade in the world had tried to squeeze its way inside of her, and all that had held them off was her now missing will and the shades that were already occupying that territory.

Now they poured into her. Little sprites born of a dying blade of grass, vast ghosts long forgotten by the living, still casting their long shadow across history. Covotana was an ancient city, Espher, an ancient kingdom, and all who had lived there had died and in dying come to be shades. The battlefield itself was a nursery, hundreds upon thousands of lost souls severed fresh from their bodies, desperate for some warm, dark place in which to shelter themselves. The dead came to her and pushed their way inside, and down in the deep, dark hole at the center of her spirit, they found something so much worse than the afterlife awaiting them. They found hunger.

A void at the center of it all. The empty heart of Orsina, forged from her soul and those shades she had already consumed, already made a part of herself. The dead and the forgotten and the proud memories of Espher, they all came and dove deep into that pool and never resurfaced. Dragged down to drown, to rot, to become part of her.

Where her strength had faltered, theirs did not. Where her will was broken, theirs was resolute. If this man was a god, then he was mistaken in one thing. Eternity had no beginning or end, but that did not mean that change would not come. Each shade that Orsina dissolved away into her being, adding its power and distinctiveness to her own, had once lived. When they became shades, they did not believe it was any end. Just a change.

A change they could grant him.

Before, the pressure of the god of Agrant’s will on Orsina’s power had been crushing, grinding down her body, spirit, and mind, but now it was not enough. Nowhere near enough. It could not contain this sudden influx of power. When there had been one mind to contend with, he could find the points of weakness and press in, but now she was legion. There were a million voices screaming out from inside of her, and no matter how loud he tried to talk over them, he could not be heard.

Orsina had closed her eyes in the face of the emperor’s awful power, but something else opened them.

Perhaps some part of it was still her. Perhaps even the greater part. The foundation on which all else was built. But what she had become was as different from the Shadebound as a god was from a man. She was not possessed by the shades of the dead. They had become her possessions.

They flooded in, until even her endless appetite was glutted, and now when the emperor of Agrant tried to crush her, he found his hands being pried apart by the forces unleashed from within.

Where he had towered over her but a moment before, large as a mountain in her eyes, now he was no longer being seen in only a single vision. Each shade picked at him from a different angle. A dead courtesan cackling at his size. A dead cavalier contemptuous of his plain robes. Everything that made him vast and grand in the eyes of his own people was a joke to the people of Espher. He might have had the faith of the Agrantine, but he had Espher’s unwavering condescension.

It flowed through Orsina now. Not a faith in her own power, but an overwhelming doubt at his. He was just a man. He had learned some tricks, played games with shadecraft to empower his bloated carcass, but he was just a man. His power was that of the living, temporal, fleeting. Hers was the power of the dead.

When he jerked his hand away from where it had been outstretched, the frost had already begun to spread up from his wrist. He let out an awful wail. And just as every sound he made carried like a lead weight straight into the base of his followers’ skulls, when he hurt, they felt it.

Across the battlefield, the armies of Agrant, united by his unflappable will, faltered. Their march halted. Their saints fumbled their swords.

What had been an ill-matched battle against both Espher and the Arazi now became a wholesale slaughter. The front ranks abandoned their stations. The soldiers providing them with support dropped their pikes and turned too. Everywhere, the Agrantine lines collapsed in on themselves, all of them rushing to their god’s aid.

Orsina had eyes only for her prey.

She had sensed shades before, even seen them, but now she saw the world as the shades themselves saw it. The chaos of it all. The endless interwoven layers upon layers of history stretching back throughout eternity. The young eating the old to become them. The ancient and powerful absorbing any fool to come close to their sphere of influence. Some shone with their resolute existence, others faded away until they were scarcely an outline. But burning brightest of them all was the emperor of Agrant.

His will blazed, his power, his life, shining brighter than anyone else. Everything that had made a dragon unique, the boundless font of life, he had created by collapsing the life of others into himself. She could feel it now, the cracks along the edges of the lie. The crusted layers of power that had been seen as divinity. She saw it, she reached out, and she took hold.

It was as solid a thing as anyone had ever been able to make, built to withstand any blow. His divinity would have been unassailable if anyone tried to attack him as he would have attacked them, overwhelming their defenses with pure will. But as Orsina had told him, she was not a god.

From her hand extended a thousand hands, each finger tipped with a ragged claw. She saw the emperor brace himself for the blow, pouring his strength into the shell of divinity around him, but no blow came. The hands streaming from her were not fists being flung to break him. They hit upon the shell, and they spread across its surface, scrambling like ants, searching with scratching fingertips for their way in.

She knew that he could feel them, that his stomach churned at the touch of their decaying spirits.

She knew that the cold radiating in from outside of his shell was filling him with tremors and terrors.

She knew all of this, but she simply did not care.

She hungered.

The splayed hands of the dead went from gently probing at the shell’s edges to digging in, scraping away at the places where different ideologies and beliefs had been fused together. Where the emperor had taken things that everyone already believed and made them a part of his legacy, there were fine lines of perforation, and the fingers of the dead, they pried and they pulled. It was not pretty, and it was not quick, but if the dead were anything, they were patient.

Terror washed over the Agrantine in waves. Their god, their leader, they could feel him go from confusion to confoundment to mounting anxiety as the impenetrable shield that he had wrapped around himself was stripped away. All of the power their faith gave him began to falter, flapping around like loose ribbons in the air, hunting for something, anything to believe in. And there was Orsina, bald as their god, garbed in the same understated finery, hanging in the sky above them with the same victorious look on her face that their god used to wear.

They were a people who believed in living gods, who had been conditioned carefully to believe in them and their infallibility, and now they believed they looked upon another one.

Those flapping ribbons of faith tried to bind around Orsina, to trap her in the same strictures as had bound the emperor. She would not be their god. She did not want their faith. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t use it.

Deep within her soul, the hollow where shades had once been drawn was now a maw, gaping and slathering. The shades of Espher flowed slowly to it from across the lands, brief bright sparks consumed as another victim was claimed by the battlefield, but when the faith was drawn in, it was not stripped away so swiftly as life had been. More and more lines of faith fed into that maw, the ones coming from the disillusioned soldiers of Agrant, the hosts of them stretching out from Covotana, one dazzlingly bright line flowing to her from on dragon-back. Harmony in the sky.

They were not the full meal of a shade, but they were sustenance all the same. Swelling her with more power, with more life. An endless flow of life, drawn from the living and the dead now, from Yelena, from the faithful, from the shades that she consumed, all of it pouring through her empty heart and into the world of the dead. Filling the amalgam shade that they had all become with strength enough to do anything she desired.

All at once, the shell around the God Emperor came away. The prying fingertips slipped through. Inside his little bubble where he thought he could never be touched, he was wheezing and crying now. Emotions pouring from him to wash over the battlefield, ruining what little hope his people had of surviving. The frost held him. Ice crystals grew all across each crease in his robes, his ears and nose were blackening at their tips, and his broad cheeks too were beginning to die.

The emperor of Agrant may have lived as a god, but he was going to die as a man, sobbing and begging and pissing himself in terror. And Orsina saw that this was good.

Her million shadows stretched out towards him, and he flailed helplessly with all of his power to no avail. He cried, he screamed, he begged. All of his grandeur cast aside as he became a little boy once more, praying and pleading that the monsters beyond the candlelight would not get him. But she would.

To say it was Orsina’s will, or that of her gestalt shade, would be false. Both were one, combined and woven through both of the worlds they occupied. But regardless of where the intent was born, the result was the same. She did not try to crush him with her strength, to burn him with blinding fire or freeze him with the chill touch of the grave. She simply extended her many hands down into the gaps that she had found within him and pulled apart.

Gibbets of flesh rained down over the battlefield. Fragments of bone no bigger than snowflakes, chunks of meat that would have made no more than a mouthful. This was the body of a god. This was what was left of it.

The Agrantine broke. Whatever hold their emperor had over their minds shattering with his death, they turned tail and ran for their lives, hunted by cavalry and wyvern alike. The battle was finished. The war was done. The Agrantine Empire, over.

Every one of them could have been allowed to flee. They were no danger now. Yet the soldiers who had faced them wanted what petty revenge they could muster. They wanted to see them run, to see them fearful and broken as well as beaten. It was not enough to win, they wanted to dominate.

It was an impulse Orsina did not believe she had ever possessed until now. That desire to control not only her own fate, but that of everyone else. But it seemed insane to her that she had never truly considered the possibilities of it. She had all of this power dropped into her lap, she could make the whole world into what she wanted it to be. What did she have to fear?

Her thoughts no longer faded when she was not thinking them. They lingered in her mind, scribed into the raw flesh. Bleeding into every other thought. She could return to any one of them but did not need to flit between them for recollection. Everything was already there. Everything she had ever known. Everything her shades had ever learned in their lives.

It should have been a deafening cacophony, were it not for the far louder demand within her drowning everything else out.

She hungered.

19 - The Spoils of Victory
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

From the outside, the winning blow of the war with Agrant was struck in almost an instant. One moment Orsina and the emperor were hanging in the air, the next he was gone, and blood was raining down on his people.

Harmony had no clue how Orsina had done it. No clue what she could have done against that awful crushing will they’d encountered before, but there could be no doubt that she had done it. All the Agrantine forces crumbled as the Arazi dashed on to hunt them down. Yelena, alone of all the dragons in the sky, turned back towards Espher.

It was a slow and gentle sweep, bringing her in from the broad circle over the battlefield that she had taken as Harmony clambered her way up to the saddle towards Orsina, where she still hung in the air.

The emperor was gone. She must have been burning her own life to keep herself afloat, but she gave no sign of movement. Just cocked her bald head to one side, as though considering her next step. Harmony’s arms caught her around the waist, and Orsina folded into her lover’s lap.

“You did it! I cannot say how or why, but you won!”

Still dazed, Orsina’s answer came back almost too soft to hear. “I know.”

Harmony wrapped her arms around Orsina and held her with all her strength. This had been their final test. The final awful battle before they could finally be at peace together. She did not need to tell Orsina now about her brother’s plans for them to remain together. She didn’t need to say anything at all, they had their whole lives to talk to each other, to share every passing thought and fancy. The Agrantine were defeated, the Arazi were their allies, all was finally going to be well.

It was fair enough that Orsina was too dazed to make much comment on this moment after the display of power she had just unleashed, but turning away from her, Harmony was shocked to see Kagan looking as grim as if they’d lost. “We just won! It’s over!”

“Nothing’s over until you’re dead,” he growled.

Harmony was too elated to let the old man’s moaning bring her down. “Is it so terrible to celebrate? Orsina just killed a god! She saved us all!”

Yelena bucked as they passed over the city walls, the fires burning at its base lifting her ever so slightly. Kagan remained unmoved. “And who’ll save her?”

“What are you blathering about?” Harmony had been through so much already, she didn’t think her heart could take any more. “After that display, nobody would dare challenge her again! We’re finally safe.”

As they rose, the full view of the city spread out before them. No houses were burning. No orphans had been made. The war had been contained to the battlefield. “The Arazi…”

“They’re on our side, just like you. I thought you of all people might have been happy to see that.” Harmony couldn’t believe him. He was so set in his ways that even when the whole world was turned on its head, he wouldn’t believe a thing had changed. “If we’re all friends, that means you might find some accord with them. You might be able to go home!”

“I’m already home.” His gaze lingered over Orsina for a long moment. “Besides, Konus doesn’t have friends. He has pawns.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Well, Art seems to have won him over.”

This time, Kagan’s growl was more of a snarl, his snapped words biting at her. “And what do you think he traded to Konus to win him? What do you think he sacrificed, so that he and his precious kingdom could go plodding on a few more centuries?”

“Artemio…” She wanted to have faith in him. In the peace that they’d made with each other and with the love they shared. But the truth was the truth. “Would do anything for Espher.”

“Exactly.”

“He wouldn’t have…” She turned her gaze to Orsina, once more, and found that she was listening intently to the conversation instead of drifting off into whatever hazy place her exhaustion usually took her.

Orsina looked almost resigned when she asked, “Wouldn’t he?”

“He would have to know that I’d never forgive him.”

“What would it matter?” Orsina sighed.

“It would matter because he is my brother.” Harmony was surprised to find tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t believe what they were saying. “I know that he’s a little cold, but he loves me. He would never…”

Kagan growled, “He’d sell you just as easy if you were what they wanted, and you know it.”

She hit him, but it was like swinging a punch into a brick wall. All it accomplished was hurting her wrist. “You don’t even know him!”

Kagan rose to his feet then, upon the dragon’s back, looming over her, but still showing no sign of anger in his countenance, though it would have been well deserved. There was more sadness in his voice than wrath. “I’ve seen enough of men like him. More than my fill of them.”

Harmony looked from Orsina’s blanked expression to Kagan’s pity, and it burned her. “If you think he means us harm, why are you taking us back? Why aren’t we fleeing for the nearest border?”

Kagan slumped back down into the odd hunched posture he bore when riding on dragon-back. “I’m not the one steering.”

Harmony seized on it. “Yelena doesn’t believe Art betrayed us?”

“No.” Kagan snorted. “She does.”

“She wants Konus dead.” Orsina should have been upset by this, she should have been scared, she should have been something. “She thinks I’ll kill him.”

“And?”

Orsina managed a smile then, the same soft smile that had melted Harmony’s heart when she first saw it. Now used to pleasantly declare her intent to murder.

“And I will.”

One last beat of her wings brought Yelena to the palace gardens, and before she was even fully halted, Orsina was on the move. Kagan swung his leg over to follow him, but Harmony halted him with a tug on the back of his harness. “If this is what you think it is, we need a swift means to depart.”

He growled. “If Konus is there, she won’t face him alone.”

Harmony’s hand trailed down to squeeze his for the briefest moment. “No, she won’t.”

There were servants waiting to greet them as always, a huge hullabaloo of delighted courtiers who’d cowered in the palace while war was waged. Harmony had no time for them. Orsina didn’t even seem to notice them. The two of them breezed by at a swift trot. Heading down to the throne room, the great hall where Artemio would surely wait, and an answer to how he had made his peace with the Arazi.

More servants, more pedants, more fools and bootlickers, they pushed them aside as they made their way down. There were none higher than them in the kingdom, none but the king himself. The king who meant to be Orsina’s husband if the rumors were true. It would serve none of the little people well to get in their way.

“Orsina.” Harmony tried to catch her hand, but she always seemed to be just a step ahead. “Orsina! What are you going to do?”

She received no answer or comfort; it was as though Orsina was not there at all.

The doors to the audience chamber lay open for them, which was for the best given the pace at which Orsina was moving, trailed by the comet tail of courtiers and Harmony herself, just another bit of dust being carried along in her wake. If the doors had been shut, Harmony was half convinced Orsina wouldn’t have slowed, ploughing right through the wood.

Artemio sat upon his throne, still scribbling away in that little book of his. It was so incongruous that it almost made Harmony burst into laughter. There was a war going on at his doorstep, and here was Art with his nose in a book as always.

“What are you always writing in there anyway?” Harmony tried for laughter. Tried desperately to make this a normal day, a normal conversation, not the turning point on which their futures rested.

He met her nigh frantic gaze, and he smiled. “This is my immortality. The day I die there’ll be feasting and cheering. They’ll spend a year glad I’m gone. Then the wolves will be at the door, and the first keep will fall, and someone will say, ‘That wouldn’t have happened in his day.’ A province falls and then another, and they’ll cry out in my memory.” He snapped the book shut and set it upon the arm of the throne. “Some vicious bastard will be faced with the hordes and think to himself, ‘What would Artemio Volpe have done?’ Then he’ll do it. Then the next man will do it. They’ll teach me in schools. They’ll make my evil thoughts a religion. I’ll live as long as empires do. Then some dusty day the next monster with a fight on his hands finds my books, reads my thinking. I’ll spread like a plague. Until I’m living in the head of every living thing in the world, forever.”

With a groan of effort, Artemio rose to his feet. The empty sleeve dangling over his missing hand. The Volpe family sword hanging loose at his hip over his less-than-regal clothes. He might have looked like himself again for a moment, were it not for the sadness in his eyes. “People… they do not last. The only thing that matters is our legacy.”

Harmony could feel every word like a stab to the heart. She couldn’t believe that he truly thought that way. That he truly didn’t understand that life as they lived it actually mattered. She tried, so desperately, to come up with the magic words to change his mind. To convince him that there was another way than the course that he’d laid out.

Konus stepped out from behind the shelter of the throne.

Harmony reached for her sword. Artemio reached for his. Orsina didn’t move. Her dull gaze swept over Konus as though he were just another part of the furniture.

“Orsina.” He had been her friend once, when she had been in a foreign land without anyone. He had tricked her into thinking that he was just like her. Young and lost. Harmony’s blood boiled at the casual way in which he spoke with her. As if they were friends in truth. “We are both god-slayers now. Do you think they will sing of our battle?”

Harmony stepped between them. “Do you think they’ll sing about how I kicked your teeth out?”

Konus sniggered. “Quite a verse.”

Harmony drew her blade.

Art stepped forward, placing himself well clear of Konus but in her line of sight. He looked exhausted in a way that she had never seen him. “Harmony, please step aside.”

Brother and sister met each other’s gaze. She had refused to believe before. Refused, because to do otherwise would tear the foundations out from under her feet. He was her brother, he loved her, she knew this. All of her life, he had been there for her when nobody else had. They had lived their lives as exiles together. Always together.

This was not like their silly squabbling. This was not like their disagreements. This was her whole world.

“Art, you can’t do this.”

She didn’t think she had ever seen him look so defeated. Not even when they had been backed into a corner with the Agrantine on one side and the Arazi on the other. “I am afraid that no better options presented themselves.”

She raised her sword and pointed it straight at Konus. If she had hoped that she might capture his attention away from Orsina where his gaze was currently pinned, she was to be disappointed. “There are three of us and one of him. We can take him.”

Art shook his head. “I would be forsworn.”

“You think I give a shit about your honor!?” She had not meant to scream. Truly she had not. She had not meant for her voice to echo back and forth through the broad, empty chamber. Nor for Artemio to look so stricken to see her heart breaking before him. Even now, she felt guilt at putting herself first. It was not how things were meant to be, everything was about Artemio, she was the spare, the flask for him to drink from, the sword to guard his back. She was not meant to have a life of her own, loves of her own. She was meant to be just another shadow dancing behind him.

If it hadn’t been for Orsina, that was all she ever would have been. Another tool for Artemio to draw out when he needed it. And whether she was alive or dead, she would have been bound to him, obedient to him. Nothing in herself. That had been their father’s plan for her.

She would not submit to it.

There was a life beyond blind obedience. Beyond serving Artemio and spilling her blood and soul as he directed. She was not his sister; she was a living breathing person with dreams and hopes of her own. She would not submit. Never again.

She drew up to stand at her full height, and she stared the kings of Espher and the Arazi down.

Once the echoes had faded, Art replied, still feigning sadness. “Perhaps not. But spare a care for the legions of dragons outside our walls and the fact that our army’s strength is spent.”

Harmony sneered. “Orsina can deal with dragons.”

Orsina herself said nothing. She swayed on her feet as though a slight breeze might topple her. Konus stared at her, taking her measure. Deciding when to strike. He had killed gods before, they said, burned them with his dragon’s fire. She was just Shadebound. The heavens had not birthed her. Her power was greater than the average Shadebound, for certain, but she had spent so much, so quickly in her battles. Without her hair to hide it, her skull was visible through her skin. The outline of her jawbone where once she had the gentle heart-shaped face Espheran women were famed for. Even her eyes seemed sunken into their sockets, surrounded by dark shadows. The eyes themselves darkened to almost black in the shadow of her brow.

Whatever ghost of the girl she had been that was still lingering in her countenance had died out there in the sky when she killed a god by rending him apart.

It had not escaped Art’s notice either. He looked at her like a messenger horse fit only to be food for the hounds. “Orsina can barely stand from the looks of her. She’s half corpse already.” He continued, softer, meant only for Harmony’s ears. “Let her go, there will be other girls.”

The tears flowed freely now. Not of sorrow or despair as he might have guessed, but the same bitter burning tears that had burned at her eyes when they were children and she was told that she was not allowed to do as her brother did. Frustration seeping from her eyes.

“I love her.”

He reached out his hand to her then. The one hand he still had. It was empty as his promises had been. Even now, he thought she would fold and obey him. “People like us, we do not have the luxury of love.”

She slashed his palm with the length of her blade.

Hissing, he stepped back, cradling his injured hand to his chest. Royal blood pattered to the flagstones. This had been where their grandfather died, if Harmony remembered the story right. Stabbed in the back by those closest to him. She wondered now if it had been justified. She wondered if he was a complete bastard too.

Regardless of history, in the present, she had evened their odds. “If you run, I can slow them down.” She moved between her love and the dragon-lord. “You can get back to Kagan, you can get away.”

Orsina still had not moved a single muscle. She looked ethereal, so pale and strange without the hair to frame her face, with the ragged robes that had been through her hospice care and warfare. Not like a person at all, but like some figure in a shade-story. A shade herself. The lead lining the stained-glass windows thrummed in harmony with her words. “We do not run.”

Konus gave her a little round of applause at that. As though there were some audience to hear it. As though any of the people in this room were going to be walking away when this was all done. “Courageous to the last. But… you should have listened to her.”

His jaw snapped open with such speed that it startled Harmony, even though she was expecting it, like he was a snake striking. Fire burst forth. A brief gout of smoke drifting up to rest upon the painted ceiling, then the blinding white bar of superheated light that they’d seen too often before.

There was no cunning to the attack, no trickery, only the overwhelming power of his breath. Coming straight for both Harmony herself and Orsina.

There was no time to dodge, no time to think, just the instant of seeing the light and then destruction.

Orsina’s hand was outstretched. The lance of white flame shattered apart prismatically around it.

The beam split into dozens of smaller ones that danced around the room as Konus closed the distance with them, still blasting away. Spinning as the angle of approach changed.

The columns that held up the vaulted roof were sliced apart. The stained glass windows lining the rear wall, depicting all the triumphs of the kings of Espher, shattered at a brush of the light. The throne of Espher for which generations had fought and died slid apart at an angle.

The fact that none of the four people in the room were diced like fresh venison was frankly miraculous. Or evidence that Orsina had more control over what she was doing than it seemed possible for anyone to have.

“Down.” Orsina said it as though it were an afterthought, yet Harmony felt her knees bending of their own accord. A strip of light buzzed through the air over her head as she dropped, searing away the air itself.

Across the other side of the divide, she could see Art on his knees too. But while she was stunned at what Orsina had just done to her, he was affronted. She’d saved his life despite his betrayal, and he was angry at her for pushing him out of harm’s way. Unbelievable.

Plaster fell from above them, the great artistic rendition of the sky above rendered back down to its base elements. Huge chunks of masonry that had been carved through soon followed, and those parts of the flagstones that had not already been divided by the cutting light found themselves shattered instead. After the initial command, Orsina had not spoken again, so Harmony took it upon herself to scurry out of the way of the falling debris, yet even she could not avoid taking some blows when the entire rear wall of the chamber was caved in from outside.

It was as though some great boulder had been fired from a slingshot into the palace, but the boulder was made instead of lashing tails and raking claws. Yelena and the Prophet, Konus’s bondmate, shattered through what was left of the wall after it had been sliced and diced. The larger dragon’s neck reared back and struck time and again, seeking out not the soft underbelly of the dragon, but the comparatively tiny man who was scrambling across her surface.

Kagan lashed out at the dragon each time the Prophet lunged in. Spear in hand, he meant to skewer the beast even if it cost him his life, yet Yelena twisted and turned, bearing the brunt of the monster’s claws and teeth to spare him.

Each was intent on sacrificing their life for the other. A chaotic scramble of codependence with no end.

Artemio struck without warning while Harmony was still stunned by the catastrophe unfolding around her. Blinded by the lights. A lance of flame leapt from his bleeding hand towards her. His forge-shade that he’d collected while she kept watch, now turned against her. Or it would have been if it hadn’t stopped dead just inches from her chest.

She cast a glance to Orsina to give her thanks, but the other woman was completely absorbed in what she was doing. Even if she had saved Harmony, she probably wouldn’t have noticed doing it.

Konus had closed the distance with her, his lips peeling back, his teeth blackened stumps in his mouth. The sound of the air burning away from his breath must have deafened him, and the light must have been blinding him, yet he moved unerringly towards Orsina.

He was seeing things through the Prophet’s eyes.

It set Harmony off running for the destructive tussle of buzzing scales and thumping wings. Konus’s impossible speed may have made him beyond her abilities to touch, but a dragon provided a far more ample target.

Art moved to stop her, but he was a one-armed man with a sliced-up sword-hand. What was he going to do, bite her?

“Stop.”

She swiped at him, sending him staggering back, catching his heel on what had once been the arm of his throne. “Get out of my way, or I’ll hurt you.”

“Harmony, you have to see the danger here.” He was trying to reason with her. He was trying to use his big brain to make her obedient all over again, because he could see what she couldn’t. He was so much better than her, so much smarter than her, she should just do whatever he said whenever he said it. He obviously knew what was best for her. Obviously.

“Oh, I see it just fine,” she snapped.

Her next thrust cut a line along his cheekbone. The kind of showy fencer’s trick that should have scared any sensible opponent into submission. He just brought a hand up to press the skin shut.

“She is too powerful, Harm. People tolerate Shadebound because we have limits. Same with the dragon-lords. We are powerful, but we are not beyond the comprehension of mortal minds.” He was still staggering back, still ducking under the stray blasts of blinding light radiating from where Konus and Orsina fought their quiet little war. “You saw what happened to Agrant when one man went beyond that. You saw what happened to the Arazi.”

“She’s Orsina, Art.” Her scream came out strangled. As though his words were torture, and she supposed that in a way they were. The same way that a man could be tortured by drops of water falling from the ceiling of his dungeon to tap upon his skin. Each drop wearing away at his resolve, over and over again for years, until finally just the sound of a drop of water was enough to send him into paroxysms of terror. “She isn’t some imaginary monster or some god from a story for children. She’s never going to be what the Arazi are afraid of.”

His scrambling escape had come to a halt as his heels struck a fallen lintel from what had once been the arched roof. A swipe of a dragon’s tail as they rolled over each other had shattered it apart. In truth the whole ceiling of the palace looked to be tilting now, perhaps the whole structure. She could kill him where he stood, a single thrust and it would be over for them both. Yet still he would not look her in the eye. His gaze remained on Orsina. Not the dragons tearing through his palace. Not the god-slaying king of the Arazi. Orsina. Always. “She already is that which they fear. Look at her. Really look at her without the veil of love blinding you. Tell me what you see?”

It was a distraction to stop her running him through, obviously, but with the failure of his shades, he’d proven himself entirely impotent to face her.

She did turn to look at Orsina then. To see Konus still unleashing that awful breath, only for it to be no longer deflected, but instead captured by the hand that she held outstretched towards him. What the god of Agrant had done, perfected. The raw heat of it roiled out across the room still, but her pristine hand was untouched. Even as Konus seared his own face away with the intensity of it, she had yet to even sweat.

From beneath her feet a great snowflake-pattern fractal was spreading across the shattered remains of the flagstones. Ice and rock binding together to stretch out into ever wider and more complex designs. It made sense that her shades, things of the cold lifeless world, would hold heat at bay. What made less sense to Harmony was the stillness of her. She was Orsina, despite the loss of her scars and weight and her hair; beneath it all the face was still the same. She was still the girl Harmony had fallen for over one silly little lunch etiquette lesson.

Whatever Art saw, it wasn’t there. It was some figment of his imagination. He was the one who was blind. Orsina squeezed her hand tighter and tighter around the light, and then with an awful tearing sound, she pulled.

The light was torn from Konus’s mouth. The breath, torn from his lungs. He fell gasping to his knees before Orsina, hand scrabbling at his belt for the whip of bones dangling there. As if that would help.

Orsina loomed over him, and in that moment, Harmony saw what they were all so afraid of. For just one moment, she seemed to be shrouded entirely in shadows, the curved blade of burning light that she had summoned seemed to top a great scythe instead of her little sickles.

For just a moment, she was the very image of the Last King they had seen in their storybooks. The reaper of souls. The end of all things.

Then, before the blade could make its descent and end the war with the Arazi in one fell sweep, a bolt of fire struck her.

Shadows that had seemed solid as the stone underfoot burst away from her like morning mist in the glow of Artemio’s fire. Harmony scarcely managed to cry out in dismay before Artemio fired off another, again and again. She drew back her sword to skewer him through, to kill them both if that was what it took to save Orsina, but the blade tumbled from her suddenly numb hands.

Her vision darkened at its periphery, her whole world shrinking in around her once more until there was only Art. Always Art.

He held up his maimed hand and cast fire in a great stream from his palm, dousing Orsina from head to toe until she was hidden from sight, yet still he poured on more and more heat. He was spending more life in a moment than he had dared to spend in a lifetime before, his hair should have been greying. His body shriveling. Yet it seemed to leave no mark upon him. As though he, too, had tapped into some infinite source of strength as Orsina had in Yelena. For an instant, Harmony thought that he might have made some pact with Konus, to achieve the same endless font that Orsina had to draw upon, but it took her only one more faltering step to realize the truth. The font that he was drawing on was that of his impresario.

He was spending her life to kill Orsina.

The world before her eyes swam, but even through that, she could see her hands upon the broken stone of what had once been the palace. Her hands, wrinkled and withered like the skin of a chicken roasted for too long. Bones and veins visible through it as it thinned. Liver spots blossoming like watercolors.

She had trusted him so much that she had put her life into his hands, and this was how that trust was being repaid.

“Art.” Her voice came out croaking. A stranger’s voice that she was not meant to have heard for decades more. “Please…”

He did not even spare her a glance.

From the pillar of smoke and flame, Orsina burst forth. Her robes naught but smoke clinging to her now. The great scythe that she had forged in battle already swinging.

It passed between Harmony and her brother without touching either one. Yet abruptly, the awful drain came to a halt. Harmony’s life was her own again. Her body swelled back into shape. No longer cadaverous. She had lost decades still, but Orsina had snatched her back from the doors of death, severing the connection between her and her brother.

Just another impossible thing that she had done that day.

It meant Harmony had strength enough to raise her head just in time to see the whip of bones wrapping around her lover’s neck.

Konus was dragged forth from the smoke, straining to contain Orsina with nothing but strength of arms. “I have her!”

Orsina had a hand to her throat now, eyes widening as breath wouldn’t come. Straining against the whip, frost creeping along the length of it to blister and blacken Konus’s hands anew.

He spoke in Espheran, so that Artemio might react, but in the moment he was too busy clutching at his own chest as though his heart had stopped beating. There had been an instant, the moment of the severing of their bond, when he was still casting his fire full force without thought to where the power was being drawn from. Perhaps he had killed himself in that moment.

It seemed to matter little. The one whom Konus was truly calling out to heard just fine.

With one last wild heave, the Prophet kicked Yelena clear. She smashed back through what was left of the chamber’s rear wall, dropping Kagan into the rubble, and landed in the pools beyond with a splash and a crack as the stone gave way beneath her weight. Then the dragon was there, head cocked, mouth opened wide, that familiar white glow building in its mouth.

“Finish it!” Konus grunted out.

Kagan did.

From where he had been cast down, he sprinted forward. The Prophet was a giant even by the standards of the aslinda, its head as broad as that giant of a man stood tall, but like all dragons, it was ultimately just an animal, and that meant that enough force applied in the right place could end its life.

The spear that had never left his hand swept up, piercing through the small scales beneath the titanic reptile’s chin, out through its mouth where it hung open, then onwards and upwards into the roof of its mouth. All of the overdeveloped muscles in a dragon’s head were used to bite down. It had no strength to resist as he went on rising, catching his shoulder under the dragon’s chin and forcing its jaws shut.

With its mouth pinned closed, there was nowhere for the fire to go but to wash back down its throat into the very venom glands that had produced it. Konus and the Prophet met each other’s eyes for but a moment before he whispered, “Hayir.”

His head exploded. The dragon’s too. Both showering the chamber with gore, bone, and a wash of flame. Harmony ducked her head as a bloody hunk of scaled meat soared by, and a piece of horn knocked Art clean off his feet.

The usual tickle of life leaving her body to flow into him and heal his injuries was nowhere to be found. Whatever Orsina had done, it was permanent.

Dragging herself upright once more, she finally saw the tableau laid out before her, Kagan on his knees, scorched black down one side. The bodies of the Arazi leader and dragon alike laid at his feet, and above them both, the rising shades of the dead.

It was said that great men and creatures left behind a shade when they departed while lesser folk did not. In truth, Harmony suspected that these allegedly great men were just more accustomed to being seen by others and had an expectation that it would carry on beyond the veil of death.

Konus and the dragon looked no different as shades than they did in life, each one in a physical prime that they had never elected to leave. Harmony could see through them to the glimpses of sky beyond the shattered walls. To the ruins of the throne room too. They were there, but not as real as they had been in life. Not to her anyway.

But to Orsina it seemed the arrangement was different. She drifted up from where she had stood. Shadows fluttering around to clothe her as the last tattered remnants of her robes fell away to ash. She rose into the air, reaching out to both dragon and man, and when they took note of her and tried to flee, she barely had to move to snatch hold of the both of them and drag them back towards her.

They struggled with all of their might, but she had a point of leverage they lacked: She was still anchored in the world of the living, and that gave her all that she needed to drag their shades down.

Inch by awful inch Orsina brought them down, closer and closer to where her lips sat parted, as though she were consumed by thirst. Tremors shook the palace as parts of the building began to collapse above them, the loss of so much structural support finally echoing up. More plaster and masonry tumbled down to scatter across the chamber floor.

Konus himself made contact with her first, chill winds sweeping across the floor in waves as his power became a part of Orsina’s. He was just another shade to bend to her will, like so many before, all the easier for the connection they already had. The dragon Harmony would have expected to be more difficult when it was drawn into the swirl of shadows that spun around Orsina, but it was swallowed down with infinitely more ease, as though there were already a dragon-shaped hole in her soul just waiting to be filled.

The last thing Harmony saw before a fresh wave of cold knocked her from her feet again was Orsina’s perfect face at the center of it all. The corners of her lips curled up into that same secret smile she had always saved only for Harmony. The contentment.

It promised that no matter what darkness her exhausted body dragged her down to, Harmony’s dreams would be sweet.

20 - Let Loose the Wyvern of War
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Kagan had not even waited for the body of his father to still before he ran out into the night air to help Yelena. He had neither the size nor the strength to pull her from the shattered terra-cotta heap that was all that remained of the palace fountains but he did have the presence of mind to reach her, even when she was lost to her own thoughts.

It is finally over.

She was not too badly hurt to move, or too exhausted, she was simply lost in the bliss of the moment.

All these years, these centuries, we have waited for our vengeance upon him, and at last it is done. By your hand.

He slumped down to sit beside her. To let the healing energy of her endless life begin to close the burn running down the length of him. For the first time in what felt like forever, he closed his eyes. “It wasn’t vengeance.”

He stole our lives from us. He stole our people from us. He stole our destiny. Who was better deserving of vengeance than Konus the Headless?

Kagan grunted at the distasteful name but couldn’t deny any of the rest. He couldn’t help but wonder what name his own people would have granted him for such an act. Kagan the Kinslayer?

Kagan the Liberator.

“They don’t even know that they’re free. The minute they work it out, they’ll start burning this place down.”

What care we for the people on the ground. We have all the skies to roam now. All of our people have all of the skies to roam now. The nightmare is over.

“What care… We’re the people on the ground, Yel. We’re the ones who’re going to be burning.”

There isn’t an army strong enough to bring your daughter down now.

“She isn’t…”

Can’t lie to a heart-reader.

He groaned and let his head sink into his hands, even thought that meant disturbing the crusting scabs already coating one side of it. He winced but didn’t move his hands. He’d had worse burns than this before he’d learned to walk.

All of his empathy, he’d pulled back into himself through the fight. The connection with Yelena never faltered no matter what he did, but the rest was coming creeping back in now. The dread throughout the city. The anticipation. Espher might have thought that the fight was done, but the Arazi were spoiling for war. The moment they learned Konus’s fate, they would rain their vengeance down upon Covotana and all of Espher.

He could stop that, he supposed. Go out there. Talk to them. Tell them that their Prophet was a liar and their leader was dead and they could go wherever they wanted but they couldn’t stay here. He supposed he was the leader of the Arazi by rights of inheritance, if anyone north of Espher believed in that nonsense, or by right of conquest, if any of the old Arazi from the days before Konus took over were still lingering.

He dragged his mind back into his head and tried to remember what they were talking of. “She isn’t for war. She’s…”

A soft, kind heart, who tears gods to shreds and claws the air from men’s lungs?

He turned his head then to look at Orsina. She was still just standing there in the midst of all the destruction that he’d brought down on her. If he had just left her alone in her little hut in the woods, none of this would ever have happened. She wouldn’t have become a slayer, she wouldn’t have had to come to the city, she could have lived as normal a life as someone born like her could live, like old Mother Vinegar had. He’d brought doom down with him from the steppes, and in trying to make a life for himself, he’d poisoned hers.

Her fate was her own. Her direction set and her wings beating, long before you spoke a word to her.

“She was just a little girl.”

And you were just a little boy, and I a hatchling. We change. We grow. We grow strong. Why do you fear her growing strong? How else can you be sure that she’ll be safe when we’re gone?

Groaning once more, he settled back against her. He’d done more acrobatic nonsense in the last hour than he had in the past decade or more. His body might still have been fit and healthy, but that didn’t mean that such things wouldn’t take a toll on him. “Wasn’t planning on being gone.”

We should go to the Arazi. Make our case. Offer them the future they were denied.

It was not easy to lie to his dragon, even harder to speak in half-truths. His doubts bled through long before his lips had formed the words, “And if they don’t want it?”

There was no point in trying to close the doors of his mind. They were touching skin-to-scale, everything he thought echoed in her head, everything he felt wormed its way out. He didn’t have the heart to argue with her anymore.

She took that to mean that she had won. Everyone wants utopia.

Despite how bone-deep his exhaustion ran, as his body drained everything from him to close up the massive wound that covered half his body, Kagan pushed with his legs and slid slowly up Yelena’s side. “Everyone wants food in their belly and a warm place to rest.”

Now that he was in motion, she felt the impetus to move too, twisting her long neck around so that she could look at him, even if it was upside down because she remained on her back. They will see the virtue in what I offer them. The whole world will be ours.

Kagan scoffed. “If they don’t kill us on sight, they’ll work out that Konus is dead and kill us then.”

You know how to empty your head.

“I’m good, not perfect.” The dragon cocked her head to the side as though conceding his flaws were real. Still upside down. “Neither are you. If you were perfect, you’d have killed the Prophet the first time you tried.”

She took that moment to roll over, moving as languorously as she could, as though the heap of rubble she had been resting on were a patch of soft moss. More important, the delay allowed her to ignore what he’d just said to her. When she realized that he was still looking up at her, expecting an answer, he felt a tinge of irritation wash out from her. They are our people. They will listen to us.

“That girl in there. She is our people.” Kagan found one of the tattered leather strips that had once been a full harness and started hoisting his way up her, even as she rumbled and complained when it pinched and pulled at her. “If we had any sense, we’d take her, fly away from here, and never look back.”

He stopped abruptly when he reached her shoulders, finding that her long neck had twisted all of the way around so that she could face him head-on. You might have forgotten your own kind, but I have not.

There was a challenge there, but it wasn’t one he meant to answer. He had forgotten what it meant to be Arazi. He’d pruned it away so that he could go on living alone in the world beyond. And the rest of them… He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it had been like to live under his father’s thumb for all of this time. The contortions they must have put themselves through. The ways that the word Arazi itself would have changed to reflect Konus’s whims.

Instead of rising to her challenge, Kagan sighed. “They’re going to riot.”

Amusement tickled over his skin like feathers. Itchy where he’d been burned, but otherwise a pleasant sensation that just didn’t fit. Then let them riot. It is their right after centuries enslaved.

She wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t blind. She knew exactly what he’d been saying. “And Covotana?”

They are not our people.

Her breath vibrated through his bones as she started to beat her wings. As she readied herself for flight once more. No matter what he said, she meant to go to the Arazi and make her grand stand, she had better odds of survival with him there to speak her thoughts into words. To take the weight of her meaning and translate. As with so many things with Yelena, it was inevitable. As she took flight, Kagan cast one last glance back to Orsina, only to realize that she was gone. While he had been off arguing with Yelena, she’d slipped out of the room, leaving the brawling twin idiots to sleep it off. Probably for the best.

“Your territory. Your people. Your plan for the world says that’s exactly what they are.”

They rose, oh so slowly they rose. And as they rose, the city spread out before them. All those people, still simmering with fear. It prickled at Kagan’s senses. It was a tinderbox just waiting for the first spark. Still Yelena was making her justifications, as much to herself as to him. This was temporary. A landing, not a roost.

Kagan was not so willing to let her vague excuses slide. “Not sure that’s what you had me promise them.”

They rose until the Arazi came into sight. All about the city walls they lingered, waiting for their leader to return with the head of their greatest enemy. Instead, they would find Kagan and Yelena. Ancient betrayers brought back to life as harbingers of the end. Because this was the end of the Arazi, one way or another. From this day on, everything would change.

Another army would have borne torches by which to see, but wyvern and dragon alike saw well in the dark, and the once human Arazi had co-opted that trait. It was how Kagan could make out the sheer number of them. Pressing in from all sides.

What do you want from me, Kagan? You want me to die for them? Yelena snapped her jaws at a passing dove. We will offer the Arazi peace and freedom, and if they choose otherwise, then they will bring war to your girl, and she will reap them.

He had shamed her, and now she meant to antagonize him in turn. Kagan growled, “I already told you…”

Another snap of her great jaws. The hissing shift in pressure as her venom glands began to refill. What you want doesn’t matter. There is only that which is.

“And your dream,” he scoffed.

My dream, the future for our kind, that which is. That which will be. I shall make it so.

They soared high above the city now, riding the thermals still rising from the houses down below. The heat captured in the terra-cotta roof tiles. The hearth fires and the flesh-and-blood people who tended them, all giving her lift.

People that she knew were going to die when the Arazi found out about Konus. People that she did not care were going to die, because they were different enough from her that she did not see them as people. The words slipped out before he could stop them. The sentiment already clouding around his heart where he knew she could feel it.

“How are you any different from Konus?”

On any other day, at any other time, she would have taken those words like a dagger to the heart. But now, still basking in her glorious victory against her oldest foe, Yelena almost took pleasure in mocking the idea. I will set right what he did wrong. I will free them to live according to their nature.

Kagan still wasn’t willing to let it go, even as the vast thunder lizards grew larger and larger at their approach, until he realized that the greatest of them stood level with the walls of the city, its muddy brown eyes peering at the terrified defenders. “Your version of it.”

Nature does not change.

“Everything changes, everything grows,” he replied, reaching for a fresh spear as they approached the wall and realizing too late that they had all been spent. “You just said that.”

Her conviction was deafening. A lead weight dropped into the conversation. Something so unshakable that she felt like nothing Kagan could say might dislodge it. Aslinda are eternal.

“Rain wears mountains into new shapes.” He was not the same as he once had been either. Where before he would have taken the warrior’s path every step of the way, he was older and wiser now. He did not need to attack everything head-on. He did not even need to fight. He could simply slip around most problems now that he didn’t feel the need to hammer his way through them.

We are not so pliable as stone.

Very deliberately she tucked her wings in tight against her sides and began her descent towards the gathered Arazi. Kagan would not have guessed that they were the Arazi command, or even chieftains of any rank, but they were the closest, and if all went to her plans, then such things as rank would no longer have any meaning. Yelena probably believed she was making a statement.

Rising in his stirrups as they dropped, Kagan held himself upright as she swooped to a halt above the gathered wyvern-riders, then he opened his mouth and let her use him as her mouthpiece.

“Konus is dead by my hand.”

She had a way of breaking news gently.

Whatever she had meant to say next, he would never know. Shouting and screaming picked up among the Arazi, spreading slowly out among the ranks. Rippling faster than his eye could follow. But with his other senses, he could track the wave of dismay, disbelief. Disbelief proven wrong the moment that he was recognized. The one who consorted with the Adversary. The one who slept under the mountain. An enemy that Konus would never have let live if he still lived. Their very existence proved her claim.

Dismay gave way to horror, to confusion, and then, with inevitability, to anger.

Kagan opened his mouth to speak once more, only to find the breath stolen from him as Yelena banked aside and a spear as thick around as a tree trunk soared by where she had been, launched from some thunder lizard’s thagomizer, repurposed into a great arrow-throwing sling. Natural spikes filed down to make room for the new fittings.

This was the world Konus had made, living flesh carved into weapons of war, and Yelena thought everyone would just return to their nature now that he was gone?

She beat her wings hard and fast then, trying to gain height, but in the night sky with no city beneath her, it was not so easy a feat to rise. Spears were being flung up at her now, and she had none of the maneuverability to escape them. Some struck off her scales harmlessly. Others stuck between. She was too high for the earthbound throwers to have enough force for a killing throw, but that did not mean it hurt her body nearly as much as her ego.

“We need to go. Now.”

Still she flapped and lingered, and he could feel her indecision. This was not what she had wanted. It was not what she had expected. At long last the monster who had haunted her dreams was dead. Why weren’t her people celebrating? Why weren’t they applauding her great victory?

He had to bellow to be heard over her thunderous wing-strokes. “Yel, we need to go!”

His certainty carried more weight than her indecision. Snapping in a wing to her side, she spun away, letting gravity force some speed into her motions and then spreading wide to glide up past the snapping jaws of the long-necked thunder lizard already stamping its forelegs against the walls of Covotana.

The walls shook as the Arazi assault began. Walls built to withstand siege engines and millennia of storms, crumbling apart under the weight of the vast beasts of war come to crush them. As they fled back to the safety of their roost with spears soaring after them, Kagan saw the first charge of the vast wyverns with their armor-plated heads lowered to the eastern gates.

Wood could hold off a battering ram for a time, but not creatures like this. Only a moment after their passing he heard the gates splinter. The guards beyond it would have been crushed alive, either by the toppling of the gates or by the stampede that followed.

Whatever accord Artemio had made with the Arazi was over; the invasion of Covotana had begun anew.

There was no real comparison for the sounds of a city being laid to waste. The screams were familiar enough, the clash of steel, the crackle of flame. But run together with the battle cries, and the roars of the war beasts, the thunderous stampede of feet on streets, the walls cracking and the roof tiles raining down, invasion had a sound entirely its own.

It echoed in Kagan’s ears.

For all that he had argued with Yelena, the truth remained: These were not his people. The only one he cared about at all was Orsina, though he supposed that her little friend was growing on him too. There would be no defense mounted against the Arazi because they were already inside the walls. There would be no peace that could be reached with them because they were a headless snake, writhing around in paroxysms of death.

This is just the beginning. They will calm. They will come around to…

For not the first time, Kagan wished that Yelena was human-sized for a moment so he could slap her and have her feel it. “We killed Konus. Being a slayer was bad, imagine what this is going to be like. A crime so high we didn’t even have a word for it.”

There is still hope. All that we need to do is…

He cut her off before she could launch them into another argument when they really had no time for it. “There! Orsina.”

Before her battle with the Agrantine god and Konus, he would have recognized her anywhere, but now anyone would be able to tell at a glance who she was. Even in the dark of the night the shadows around her were thicker, an almost luxurious velvety darkness like you might find in a cave somewhere that the sun had never touched, a darkness so deep it seemed more like the absence of all things than the obstruction of sight.

Without prompting, Yelena began to dive towards her. Perhaps she did not mean to push Orsina into combat, perhaps it was simply instinct, making her want to be close to her bondmate in a time of crisis, but Kagan did not trust it.

He was thrown from the saddle but a moment later. Yelena had stopped dead as though they had ploughed into a cliff-face. Her whole body contorted in an agony that spread through their bond to him. He tumbled along her neck and would doubtless have fallen if she had not jerked her head around to catch him in her mouth.

He caught hold of her pronounced incisors, still twisting and falling as she too began to tumble down from the sky. All it would take would be one jolt to snap her jaws shut and split him in three. Hitting the ground would definitely constitute a jolt. He could not see how it was done, but Yelena pulled them out of their chaotic pirouette to the ground, claws hooking on rooftops as her wings frantically hammered up and down. He slipped farther into her mouth as she desperately tried to gain height once more, and he considered it to be an improvement.

Disgusting.

He laughed even as he slipped and struggled to stay out of her airway. “Doubt you taste any better about now.”

They hit the ground, and the jaws that could have sundered him into pieces snapped shut up ahead. Leaving him for one moment in a world of dark, warm, moisture. Then she disgorged him with all haste, the muscular tube of her throat rippling and inadvertently spritzing him with venom as he was tossed up and out.

She repulsed us.

“Might not know which dragon was swooping her.”

We live, so she knew.

The thunder lizards had not made it so far into the city yet, but the wyverns and aslinda who could fly were already beginning to fill up the sky, and dragon’s breath was already bathing where they passed. At least there would be no difficulty in catching a thermal when the time came to escape.

We are not leaving.

“No, we’ll just stay here and fight off the whole Arazi army ourselves.”

We do not need to. We are protected.

A blinding light passed over them then. That same dazzling white of Konus’s breath, forged into a sickle blade and flung through the sky. Each wyvern that it struck fell into parts. Each aslinda that it brushed went tumbling to crash into the already half-ruined city.

It was hard to deny that Orsina was protecting them after that.

The deepest shadow where she dwelled moved on across the city without even a backwards glance. She was not heading for the eastern wall where the Arazi ran riot, but somewhere else. Disoriented from their fall from the sky, it took Kagan a moment to realize where.

“Heading for the school. The House of Seven Shadows.”

Perhaps she means to rally the necromancers.

Kagan didn’t believe it, and in her heart, neither did Yelena, but all that they could do was follow after her, maintaining a respectful distance.

Atop the shattered walls, around the curve of the dormant volcano on which the city lay, the defenders were being slaughtered wholesale. Dotted among them were the Shadebound who had been committed to the battle, and as far as Kagan could tell, they were putting up a stalwart defense, but they were so few and the enemy so many. Sheer weight of numbers bore even the most potent of them from their posts. The much-vaunted necromancers of Espher, capable of stilling whole armies with their command of the dead, were helpless in the face of the titanic beasts that the Arazi called kin.

They needed a miracle.

The grand avenues of Covotana with their fountains and canals were more than wide enough for Yelena to walk along freely, though Kagan could feel her discomfort at walking instead of soaring. Aslinda had strength and stamina enough to walk hundreds of miles, but not one of them would ever choose to. Being pinned to the ground by the pull of the earth always felt wrong to them, tantamount to the kind of imprisonment they all loathed so deeply.

More flashes of light seared by. Lightning without the thunder. Making it abundantly clear that the sky was no safe place to be right now. Kagan, having clambered back into his natural place, now lay low against Yelena’s back as they wove their way through the city.

In the beginning the streets had been clear. The citizens of the city trusting in their walls to protect them, cowering in their homes and hoping that someone would come to save them. By now it must have been becoming apparent that they were on their own. The walls had served less as a dam against the coming tides of war and more like a tide break, slowing the flow of Arazi into the city, breaking up the unstoppable force of their approach but leaving the streets flooded all the same.

Now even the most humble citizens of the city seemed to have recognized that the situation was beyond hope. That the people they had debased themselves for in exchange for protection had failed them utterly.

They had no swords or shields, no armor or horses, yet they came out holding what they had, broomsticks and pans, kitchen knives and chair-legs. Their worlds were collapsing around them, and instead of cowering in fear, they had taken to the streets.

More than that, though, they seemed to be organized on a level that Kagan would never have predicted. There seemed to be leaders among them, already designated and guiding them. As though this spontaneous militia had been arranged long before the war came to the city.

They parted with all good grace to allow Kagan and Yelena through. There was no hint of a threat from them, yet still he could feel the scales down the back of his neck shifting uncomfortably in their gaze. There was something strange going on here, and if it were not for more pressing matters it would have concerned Kagan even more. As it was, he had to keep moving, and he pretended not to notice the peasants of Espher closing into ranks behind him, positioning themselves between the Arazi and Orsina.

Yelena must have felt the same discomfort, as she picked up her pace until they were close enough behind Orsina that she was actually in earshot. Kagan called out to her the moment he could but received no response. It didn’t even surprise him at this point, only made him sad.

She was practically on the doorstep of the House of Seven Shadows now, where he had delivered her back when they first came to the city. There outside the gates was the old Prima, just as had been there on that first night. She was talking to Orsina. Orsina was talking back. All too soft for Kagan to hear. They went on creeping in closer, trying to work out what was going on, but in an instant it became all too clear.

The shadows around Orsina twisted out, and the old woman went soaring through the air. Barely touched by the shades but overwhelmed by their power.

She is not taking from us.

The old woman managed to find her feet again, out on the brown grass between the city and the House. One arm dangled limp and useless while she held up the other as though she were pleading and begging with Orsina to stop.

Orsina did not stop.

A lash of blinding white tore out from amidst the tide of shadows around her, and only an abrupt burst of lightning from the Prima was able to deflect it from its course, sending it skittering off across the gardens to rend the outer wall from its foundations.

She feeds her shades for this power, but the life is not coming from us.

Kagan frowned and pressed the palm of his hand to his chest, where he had always felt the tug when Orsina was calling up fire and wind. There was nothing. He closed his eyes, tried to reach out through their empathic connection, but there was nothing there either. As though the bond had been cut. And cut so cleanly that he hadn’t even noticed its absence until now. “How?”

She has found another source.

The Prima of Septombra was fighting for her life, bringing every one of her shades to bear. Walls of stone erupted from the earth, lightning struck down at Orsina from clouds freshly formed overhead, and the old woman had even drawn a blade from the cane she had been leaning on and held it ready, as though the battle between them would be settled with fencing.

Of all those frantic attacks, only the lightning struck home, hitting Orsina square in the chest and then vanishing entirely. It should have killed her, but she had already walked through so many things that should have killed her that day that one more scarcely seemed to matter. Coils of the lightning flickered within the dark cloud of shadows around her, coruscating up and down her bare arms.

With the distance closed, the Prima made one desperate thrust for Orsina’s heart, only to have her catch the blade between her palms.

The lightning discharged then, carried along that length of metal to strike at the old teacher. All of the damage it had failed to inflict upon Orsina was paid back to the one who had cast it. Her skin blackened and burned, and blood poured in copious dollops from her ears and her eyes. Then just as she began to scream, Orsina seemed to grow bored of the little game.

Stepping past the Prima, she headed for the House of Seven Shadows itself.

Whatever else the old woman might have been, Kagan felt certain that she was a warrior. Even crushed by an enemy of superior strength, she did not hesitate to launch one final bolt of lightning at Orsina’s back as she walked away.

Once more, the lightning struck home, rippling out across Orsina’s bare back. Driving the darkness away for a moment.

When Orsina glanced back, Kagan could have sworn that his blood had been switched with ice. There was nothing of the girl that she had been in that expression, none of the kindness or compassion, none of the curiosity or rebellious spirit. Only disdain.

The Prima tore apart at the seams. Skin sloughing off her back and her front as her limbs were torn from their sockets. Blood filled the air in a cloud around her, and then as abruptly as it had been done, it was over. The flayed skin flapping down to land in a wet heap on the gravel path, and Orsina moving on.

Experience had gone up against raw power, and power had won out, the same as it did every time.

Kagan had been pinned in place by the stare, but now he managed to mumble out, “Something is wrong. The shades, they’ve taken her over. This isn’t her.”

Rain wears mountains into new shapes.

Just one good slap to the face. It would set so much to rights.

“It doesn’t turn stone to water,” he growled out, urging Yelena on though she seemed quite intent on staying back from Septombra while Orsina had already slipped inside out of sight. “She isn’t… she was never cruel. She never had that in her.”

It is now.

Even over the catastrophic sounds of an invasion in progress, the sounds from within the building were deafening. Just as the beams of light that she had fired were so bright they left afterimages still burning across Kagan’s vision, the concussions from within Septombra were so loud that all else fell to silence in their wake. The fighting was still going on, the dragons were still strafing the city, and the people were still being burned alive, but all that Kagan could hear was a high-pitched whine in his ears. He reached up to cover them and his hands came away wet and bloody. “What?”

Another explosion threw the House’s roofing clean off the top as though the old stone had shrugged off a cowl. It came clattering down into the new silent world where Kagan stood.

You cannot hear?

Rubble scattered all around them, and Yelena had to raise a wing to fend off an offending piece of shattered tile winging its way towards Kagan.

“What is happening?” He may have been whispering or shouting, it mattered little. Yelena would hear him even if he made no sound.

The dragon lowered her head until it was level with him. Screams. Inhuman. Not her. Something else. Suffering.

Once more, Kagan felt the earth shake beneath his feet and gawked as the wooden additions to the old stone building caught alight, not like a spreading fire, but like a dragon had just exhaled across them all at once.

From the exploded roof there emerged a blur of papers, feathers, and motion, only partially visible as it distorted his view of the clouds beyond. It made it a good distance from the House before it struck upon the same invisible barrier that had knocked Yelena from the sky and followed much the same trajectory that she had. It recovered well and was airborne once more before the vast shadows stretching up from the hole where the top half of the House used to stand latched onto it.

Here and there Kagan thought that he could see hands grasping at it, claws raking at it, but just as likely there was nothing there at all but tendrils like sea-jellies. It was impossible to tell after an instant anyway, shadow and formless shapes all blending together as the bird, if that was what it had been, was drawn down into the mass and vanished.

Another great concussion swept over them, knocking Kagan flat onto his back and making Yelena wince down and dig in her claws.

Those few students who had been still lingering in the school while the rest of their kind went to war were flooding out of the doors now, some injured, others carrying their dead friends with them. They saw Yelena there, looking like every nightmare that they’d ever had, and they ran right for her all the same. Kagan had pulled himself back upright and was wishing for a spear to throw, but he need not have bothered. The students split as they reached Yelena and flooded past her. Tears stained down sooty faces. Blood ran from every ear. Some seemed to be screaming or wailing, others looked as though they were hemorrhaging years, hair turning white even as they tried to escape. Maybe using what shades they had bound to accelerate their departure.

She is hunting shades.

“How could you know that?” Kagan’s head was beginning to pound now, in time to his heartbeat. The silence of his burst eardrums may have been a small blessing, rendering him immune to the screaming around him, but the pain of the injuries was beginning to gain on him, even with his palms flattened across Yelena’s back and all of the healing and regeneration that they could muster flowing back and forth through them.

The little humans screamed it as they passed. She is hunting them, eating them.

“That makes no sense.” Kagan pressed his hands over his ears, groaning. “You can’t eat…”

The aging ones, she tore theirs away.

Kagan opened his mouth to argue, but the scene up the slope distracted him. From out of the main doors of the now crumbling House of Seven Shadows lurched a suit of antique armor. The helmet had been lost somewhere in whatever scuffle had brought it to the outside, and with its absence, the fact that the suit contained no human became immediately apparent.

Of all the strange sights that they had seen that day, the living armor scarcely registered as strange, but what followed was enough to fill Kagan with dread. What followed was Orsina.

The House of Seven Shadows collapsed into a heap as she departed, as though she were the only load-bearing wall still intact in the place, and she moved now not like a girl, but like the predator that Yelena had been trying to describe, like a wyvern on the hunt, stalking after the moving armor as it stumbled away. They were closer to her than Yelena wanted to be. All her scales rippling in discomfort as Orsina spoke, still in that sweet soft voice that Kagan had always known, “Not good enough.”

The armor held up its gauntlets, trying to fend her off, but with a slash of her hand, the greaves were torn out from beneath it. Legless, it hit the ground, arms still working, trying to drag it backwards across the grass to be away from her. As though it still had any hope of escape.

“Now who isn’t good enough?!” she called after it, plunging her hands forward. The chest-plate of the armor shuddered and then tore right down its center, right down its strongest point, and inside there was the suggestion of a shape, barely visible to Kagan’s eyes.

Orsina shucked it from its armor like an oyster and then swallowed it down. Her physical body never coming into contact with any part of it, the shadow-hands of her shade doing all of the work. As the half-seen mote of light passed between her lips, she bit down. The world shook again. Another great shade, a spirit that had persisted through the centuries, destroyed and devoured.

“Orsina, stop.” Kagan blurted it out without any rational thought. Only horror at what she had become.

“I’m not yours to command, Kagan.” She met his stare head-on, with none of the self-effacing courtesy that a life of being small and weak had taught her. “I’m nobody’s.”

Yelena spoke through him then, overwhelming him in her excitement. “You are your own, a ruler in your own right. Queen of All.”

Orsina spat on the ground. “No. No more queens. No more kings. No dragon-lords or gods.”

Kagan’s jaw cracked as he tried to fight against the words being spoken. “Whatever you want to be called, we will follow you.”

Orsina shook her head, as though she too were fighting the awful buzzing in her ears that rendered him deaf, hearing only through Yelena. “Kagan… you were the best friend I ever could have hoped for in this world. You demanded nothing and offered everything that you had.”

Kagan managed to force his own words out, though Yelena fought him for every syllable. “I’m still your friend. But you need to—”

She cut him off with a glance. “Because you were my friend, I am giving you a head start.”

He stared at her mystified for a moment, until she made her meaning clear. “Run.”

She pushed him. Her power, raw and unshaped, washed over him and Yelena, and the dragon was torn from the earth and sent skidding back. All the way back to the gates of the House gardens. Yelena, furious to be manhandled so, tried to take a step forward only to freeze in place as shadows flitted over them, not the impossibly dark shades that Orsina commanded, but something vast on high, casting a pall over all three of them.

Orsina cried out once more. “Run!”

The aslinda descended upon her en masse. All that remained of the legions that had once blotted out of the sky, still numbering in the hundreds. They came one after another, swooping down to bathe her in flames. One, then the next, then the next, flights crisscrossing over the point where she stood pouring all of their ire and wrath down upon her.

A pillar of flame filled Kagan’s vision, burning bright as the sun as the Arazi added more and more venom and flame to the mix.

The ground where they had stood was blackened and lost in the waves of smoke. The claw marks Yelena had dragged across the earth filled with burning venom. If Orsina had not cast them aside, they would have been consumed, yet still Kagan urged Yelena on.

“We have to save her!”

It is the Arazi who need rescue.

21 - The Wake
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Pain was Artemio’s first attendant. A deadening ache in the heart of him. Like some organ had been plucked from beneath his ribs. His breath hitched as it came in and rumbled as it left him. If pain had been the only one to greet him as reality ensued, then he would have been grateful, but once pain arrived, it dragged him kicking and screaming out of the pleasant abyss into which he had sunk and back to awareness. His eyes shot open, and he jerked up to sitting, almost skewering himself on the tip of a sword.

His half-awake brain could not comprehend how this blade came to be there, until his eyes followed up the length of it and saw Harmony at the other end.

“I woke up first.”

Gummed up as his eyes may have felt, he could see clearly now, the razor tip of the blade aimed squarely for the middle of his neck, not a tremor in his sister’s hands. Unsurprising, but still a little disappointing. He had hoped that when it came to this, she would have felt at least a twinge of sorrow.

“Then may I offer thanks that you chose not to skewer me in my sleep.”

The blade darted in closer but didn’t quite cut into him. He could feel the sharpness of it against his skin, but it did not press hard enough to part it. She was truly skilled in the blade, not just talented or trained, but skilled, the way a master of an art became with endless repetition. At the other end of the blade that occupied all of his attentions, her eyes narrowed.

“I wanted you to die knowing who had done it. I wanted you to know that in the end, you deserved it.”

He pushed himself up onto his elbows, aching all the way. She drew the blade back. So for all that she was bitter, she still wanted to talk about it. Probably wanted him to talk her out of it. Except, of course, he couldn’t. He had betrayed her trust in possibly the most brutal way imaginable, and he would do it again without hesitation if it meant Espher would survive.

“Less of a comfort, but my thanks all the same.”

One step brought her closer, and the next put her boot on his chest, pushing him back painfully into the heap of rubble that he gradually realized had once been his throne.

“Any last words? Pleading? Apologies?”

He looked up into her eyes and felt truly that she was the one pleading. Desperate for him to offer her some way out of this. With their connection severed, she no longer had the justification of self-preservation. He could die, and she could go on now. She could live without him. Flee this place. Do whatever pleased her. Yet here she was begging him to give her a reason not to follow through.

There was no reason to give. “I have done nothing wrong.”

She laughed out loud at that, but there was no amusement in it. Only bitter regret. Regret that she had trusted him for so long. “You betrayed me. Betrayed us. All the promises, all the—”

“I promised nothing.” He cut her off and pushed himself up again. She had to either crush him down into the stone once more or step back, and she chose to let him rise. “Now stand aside, I’ve a kingdom to save.”

“What kingdom?” No longer was she conflicted about letting him live, now that the part of her that wanted him hurt was in agreement with the part that wanted him to live. There was such cruelty in her laugh as she let him up. She was delighted to tell him the bad news. “It’s all gone, Art. I told you, I woke up first. I looked outside too, before coming to check if you were dead.”

Artemio had assumed his absence from the waking world had been only momentary given how badly he still ached, so he revised his mental timeline. “The Arazi learned of Konus’s demise and began to assault the city.”

“They’re pretty much finished assaulting it, actually.” She smirked, as if the end of their kingdom and the slaughter of their people had no effect on her at all, delighted to be scoring points against him. She had truly become obsessed with Orsina in a way he had not foreseen but should have predicted. Her entire life she had been conditioned to focus all of her passions externally, onto him, so it was small wonder that she would transfer that same fixation onto the first subject of affection she encountered beyond him. At the time, he had been so pleased. “I’d be amazed if there were two bricks still atop one another anywhere in Covotana.”

Everything he had worked for, everything he had strived for, all of his life, it was all laid to ruin. One miscalculation and everything was finished. Yet still he could not see where he had made a mistake. The correct course was to kill Orsina, there was no other interpretation of the facts that allowed her to live and Espher to thrive.

Emotion threatened to overrun him, to make him weep or scream or despair, but he would not allow it. There was no place in a king for such weakness or such sentimentality. This was a problem to be solved, nothing more. More information was required. As casually as he could, he remarked, “The palace seems none the worse for wear.”

“I suppose that the rampaging monsters got distracted on the way here.”

The grin had dipped ever so slightly as Harmony spoke. Easy to read.

“Orsina, I presume.”

“Yes, you’re so bloody clever, you’ve got it all worked out.” She began clapping her hands together, as if to remind him exactly how much all of this had cost him. “Well, congratulations, you’re king of a pile of ashes, and you tried to murder the only one keeping us from being ashes too.”

He crouched carefully to retrieve their family sword from among the ruins, sliding it into its sheath at his belt as though never doubting Harmony would let him. It was difficult with the slice down his palm still bleeding, but not impossible. She had not cut deep enough to sever tendons. Only to draw first blood. Showing fear would encourage a violent response, so he had to proceed as though all was well. Just as he always had.

There had been little opportunity to explain his decision to Harmony ahead of time, and in truth he had intended to deceive her about it if possible. But now he was being given a chance to make her understand the danger Orsina presented. He just had to be careful not to overplay his hand.

“It is not murder if it was self-defense.”

“Oh yes, of course, some clever assassination plot by Orsina that somehow everyone else in the world failed to see.” She was not attacking him, but neither had she sheathed her weapon when she saw him doing so. He was still ostensibly her hostage, and she was still blocking his immediate exit from the room.

This conversation was not merely an attempt to persuade her as to the correctness of his choices, it was the key to leaving this room alive and saving what was left of the city. “It was not a matter of plots but a matter of nature. She has become too dangerous by far.”

Harmony’s contempt was thick enough to be spread with a knife. “Because the people actually love her?”

With another king such a statement might have stung, but he had been actively co-opting Orsina’s popularity from the beginning, so it hardly hurt his feelings to have it acknowledged that a young, pretty girl who spent all of her time trying to be empathetic to the plight of others while also wielding immense power that could make lesser mortals quake would prove more popular than him. It was inevitable.

“Because her power is unbound. Nothing is free, nothing is created from nothing. For a time the font of the dragon may have sustained her, but the things she does now would have drained even that deep well.”

“So what?” Harmony’s sword had dipped down to her side now. If it did come to a fight, she would still have the drop on him, but her guard was slipping. “You want her dead because she isn’t limited like you?”

“We are limited by the fundamental rules of the universe.” He couldn’t help but allow some small tinge of his irritation to slip into the conversation. The reason he had become so capable of solving mysteries was that an unsolved one grated on his soul. This particular puzzle was aggravating beyond measure. “You cannot create something from nothing. She is drawing strength from somewhere; I just cannot understand where.”

For a time, they were quiet, the distant sounds of battle and death echoing in through the missing rear wall of the palace, the stone that remained intact creaking and groaning. The whole place would come down soon enough, on top of them if they did not get moving. It was ridiculous to think that he had presided over Espher for less than a year and already lost the entire palace, all in one brief stretch of moments.

Finally, Harmony offered up a proposal. “Shades.”

Perhaps his assumption that Harmony had ever listened to a word he’d said through the years had been mistaken. As he’d proceeded through his education with both tutors and the House of Seven Shadows, he had been sure to keep her informed of each new development of his learning, so that she might better understand his capabilities and the form that their future would take after his graduation. It was his belief that she had absorbed at least the basics required to understand what he was talking to her about. Which was why this latest statement somewhat beggared belief.

“They are the tools through which we expend our life, levers with which to move the balance of the world, not sources of power in themselves.”

But Harmony was not to be shamed. “Not to you, but I just saw her eat Konus and his dragon.”

He cast a glance around the ruined chamber. “The corpses seem remarkably intact for such a thing to have…”

“Their shades, Art.” She cut him off. He very carefully did not smile when she used the diminutive of his name that was normally reserved for their private conversations. It would have given too much away, but her use of it meant that she was failing to emotionally distance herself from him as she would have needed to if she meant to kill him. Everything was progress. “They died, their shades left their body, she… swallowed them.”

It was only after she had finished speaking and he had finished resisting the urge to grin at his small victory that he ran back through what she had just said and realized what it might mean. A shade contained some small measure of life, typically retained from when it was a living creature. If it did not have this spark, then it would simply dissipate into nothing. Providing shades with additional life increased their stability and strength, while also allowing them to exercise such power as they had over the world in specific ways. Inverting that equation so that the shades being harnessed poured their life into the Shadebound would typically have been utterly useless. There simply wasn’t enough of the vital spark within them to make it worthwhile. The only way Orsina could make it work would be to consume such a ridiculous volume of shades that it would counterbalance the energy she was expending. And none of this could possibly work unless she was not forming pacts with her shades at all but simply allowing her current shades to run riot, absorbing whichever shades were the most akin to them without their consent, which in turn would require an expenditure of power that would be counterproductive. A net increase of nothing.

Absorbing even the most powerful of shades would fail to produce any increase in the font of her power, as the effort to forcibly absorb them would always be at least equal to what they could provide. More often it would likely be a loss. She should have burned herself out by now.

All of these thoughts were buzzing through his head rapid-fire as he approached his inevitable conclusion, but his body was already in motion even as he pieced the final parts together. Her shades would be starving, overwhelmingly strong compared with even the great shades of old, but desperate for more life, and she had learned how to extract that life by force from others. How long would it be until she and her residents recognized that there was a far more ready source of life available to them than the spirits of the dead?

“We have to stop her.”

Harmony, all but forgotten since he’d latched onto this puzzle, was standing in his path, blade to his throat once more. “Since your last attempt to stop her involved assassination by dragon, you’ll forgive me if I’m a little reluctant to carry through with your plan without a little more explanation than that.”

“Then walk and talk at the same time, dear sister, and we may still have some hope of seeing dawn.”

They delayed for just a moment. She met his gaze then, and in it, she seemed to find the confirmation that she needed, that he was still going to provide her with the answers that she needed. That she could still trust him.

That was the wonderful thing about earning the trust of others through their reliance on his brilliance. In the end, no matter how his choices harmed them, logic prevailed.

Harmony fell into step beside him, and he resisted the urge to throw his arm around her shoulders for support. He had never drawn deeply upon her life when they were bonded, but now that the connection was severed, he felt not only bereft but decaying. So much of his strength had been spent trying to stop Orsina before he had even understood what he faced, and even now he felt as though there was some missing component in the puzzle that he could not grasp. Still, his understanding was sufficient to convey the key points to his sister, so that she might be convinced.

“The mechanism by which she is gaining power is fundamentally flawed. The shades cannot receive the sustenance they require to continue. The only way for them to support a continuation of the system is by directly consuming living creatures. Tearing life out of them directly. If she has not already begun doing so, she will reach the limit of her reserves soon and instinctually reach for survival.”

Whatever guards had still been lingering in the palace in the midst of the battles outside had fled as the building began its slow collapse. The courtiers who had not retreated to cower in their chambers and await the inevitable had fled for the hills at the earliest opportunity. When the building fell, the cowards would die. He could not bring himself to feel much sorrow over that.

Still, it meant that the way was clear for them to head straight out through parts of the palace that were usually clogged thoroughfares in record time, despite the lack of spring in his step.

Harmony’s face was clouded with doubt, but all that she could manage to voice was, “Orsina wouldn’t do that.”

Such faith in her lover, even after all she had seen. Even knowing what the girl had become, she still thought only the best of her. Trying to disillusion her would have been pointless, even counterproductive. Artemio would not attempt it. “Nor would she breathe if it were left to her rational mind to manage, but in matters of survival, instinct takes over without our conscious decision.”

They emerged into the night air to find that it had not cooled. Normally the rising mists from the fountains around the palace bathed summer nights and brought them back down to comfortable, but tonight all of Espher burned. Blazing pyres made of the homes of Covotana filled the skies with smoke and the air with a heat that was almost choking.

It took only a glance at the dragons swooping down from on high to judge Orsina’s position. They set off with all immediacy towards the shattered husk of Septombra.

So much had changed in the time that they had been inside, the great victory snatched away and all of Artemio’s worst nightmares had come true. His only hope was that with Orsina’s defeat, the Arazi might find some comfort in the idea that their leader had been avenged and take their rampage elsewhere. If they did, then Artemio would have been starting over, all of Espher rebuilt from scratch with all the most deadly enemies arrayed against her neutered. It would take centuries to rebuild, but he had plans. Plans for reformation and reconstruction. A new Espher, better and brighter than the one before. He could remake this kingdom into something that could last the test of time.

But first, they had to stop Orsina.

One thing that had not changed was Harmony’s stride. They moved through the city together in perfect synchronicity. Shoulder-to-shoulder despite all that had passed between them. “So how exactly do you plan on stopping her?”

The thought had crossed Artemio’s mind, and he suspected that it was going to involve the kind of sacrifices he had never wanted to make, but revealing every detail of his plans would once again unravel his tentative truce with Harmony, so he took a different tack. “Me? I mean to do nothing. You are the one she is so smitten with. The one she trusts. You will convince her to stop channeling whatever shades are within her and return to a state of calm.”

“Which is when you’ll stab her in the back.”

The idea that Harmony was entirely witless had never entered his mind. She had been easy to manipulate because he held the weighted emotional levers of her history at the ready. Not because she was without guile.

He diverted. “Which will be the moment she no longer constitutes a threat. If she will stop, if she can stop, then what she is becoming is not something so fearful. She will be… powerful beyond all measure, but she will not be what the Arazi feared.”

Their progress down the boulevards was slowed as they had to pick their way over the corpses of dead peasants and dead Arazi and their mounts. Typically Harmony would have sprung over them like a deer, but it seemed she, too, was feeling sluggish after their earlier conflict.

Eventually she asked, “And if she can’t stop?”

He spoke softly. Careful not to spook her as they drifted near to dangerous conversational waters. “Then we must stop her.”

Harmony scoffed. “You couldn’t even touch her. Even trying to kill me and feed me to your shades wasn’t enough.”

“You must reach her.” He tried to redirect her again, keep her focused on the goal. Infighting would serve them no good.

Their progress, slow as it had been, now came to a complete halt as Harmony crossed her arms. “So I’m meant to just forget that you tried to kill me?”

Why was he always the only one to see the necessity of discussing matters of importance first and emotion second. There was too much at stake for them to be dithering at the last moment over who had attempted to murder whom. “It was the only means I had to—”

“You tried to kill me, Art.” She cut him off before he could even begin bloviating.

It seemed that until she felt that she had a sufficient answer to this accusation, the rest of the world could just go to hell for all that she cared. He almost admired her ability to focus so intently upon entirely the wrong problem.

Mustering up what he could of a normal human reaction, he tried for an apology. “For that, I am truly sorry. I never wanted for it to come to this.”

Her answer came in a roar, all of her frustration and fury finally loosed. This was what she wanted, what she needed to get out of her system so that they could proceed, and Artemio would allow for the delay. Better now than in the heat of battle.

“You brought us to this. You could have just…”

The hair upon the back of Artemio’s neck began to prickle, and his gaze was drawn to the side. Looming over them was one of the mongrel-men they were so accustomed to politely ignoring. Part pig, by Artemio’s estimations. Behind him lingered a trio of other men in varying states of filth. They may have been entirely human underneath the caking of mud and soot, but who could tell?

“How can I assist you gentlemen?”

The pig man spoke. “You go no farther.”

Artemio looked up into his snout and sneered. “I go where I please. Espher may be beleaguered, but I am still her king.”

From behind them, another voice called out. Younger, clearer. “There is only one king, and his name is death.”

“Oh, you’re one of those people. Well, that is rather unfortunate.”

“One of what people?” Harmony whispered all too loudly by his side. “What is this, Art?”

He cast a glance back over his shoulder. From the ruins and the rubble of the once beautiful city, the traitors and peasants had emerged. With the top of Covotana laid to waste by dragon fire, he supposed it was unsurprising that the underbelly should now be turned up to face them.

“The cult that was murdering nobility in the last year of the Cerva reign. We encountered them beneath the city…”

Harmony wet her lips. “So…”

“So we fight, dear sister.” He drew his sword.

There was a sparkle in her eye that he had not thought to ever see again. “Just like old times.”

22 - Dragonfall
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

Kagan clung to Yelena’s back as she launched them up through the maelstrom. “We have to stop her.”

We need do nothing of the sort. She has come into her power at last. All that we have loaned her until now shall be repaid threefold.

Blades of blinding white light ripped screaming through the air all around them. Crescent moons rising from earth to stars. The dragons they touched were split asunder without a drop of blood spilled. Their riders falling to the ground unnoticed.

Yet still the Arazi came on, one after another after the next, an endless cavalcade of suicidal assaults that could do nothing in the face of their adversary.

Far beneath them in the charred circle that had once been the House of Seven Shadows, the flames did not touch Orsina. The venom sprayed down, hit that which had been sprayed before and froze as just another layer. Endless strata of it encasing her. A shield of frozen flame.

Kagan spoke aloud though he could not even hear the passing of the wind. It had become habit in these southern lands, and he found that now he had no desire to break it. “This isn’t her, she wouldn’t want this. She’s lost control. We have to put a stop to it before…”

Yelena spun suddenly, avoiding a descending wyvern by a matter of feet. It had no rider upon its back, but the saddle was still visible as it shot by.

Before what? Before she proves her majesty to all of the world. Before she fills them with such fear that they will never dare try to harm us again?

Her admiration for Orsina sickened him. All of this time, he had thought Yelena saw in the girl what he had seen, the kindness in her heart, not the potential in her ghosts. “This isn’t about us! She’s everything Konus feared and more. She’s like the Burned Ones reborn. A terror.”

Down beneath them, the Arazi now tried to crush Orsina with weight of numbers, to drown her in their blood. They flung themselves down at her, and those that made it past the interlocking sickle blades being flung out in every direction simply found the shadows waiting for them, to grasp at them, to rend their wings with clawed fingers. To pry scales from skin and dip deep inside, reaching, to strum tendons like lyre strings and pluck organs from beneath bones.

She did not kill them, she rendered them down to their component parts, as though she were searching for something in them. And each one that died released a shade, and each shade that fled was swallowed back into the shadows.

Do not tell me that you have succumbed to his old deception after all this time. You know that his Adversary was a fiction. You know that she is just a girl. A powerful girl, but a girl nonetheless.

Even Kagan’s eyes were only so good. The awful details of Orsina’s work on the ground faded from sight as they continued to rise. “Whatever she is, it makes the prophecies Konus used to tell around the campfire sound tame.”

From up here, every part of the city was laid out like a map beneath them. The palace collapsed in on itself, the weight of all that stone tricked up into the sky by human hands finally returning it to where it belonged. It toppled in parts, one side crushing a building to its side, another vast shard slipping down into the heart of the old building like a stiletto into its heart.

The Arazi on the ground were slowed and stopped at every turn as they tried for Orsina. Collapsed buildings and fires had narrowed the routes through the city down to a handful, and each one of those now bore the telltale marks of barricades. The people of Covotana had been rallied in Orsina’s defense, and he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride that despite everything that had occurred, she was so loved.

So what do you want? You want to turn on her, as the wingless king turned on her? You want to make an enemy of her?!

There were fewer and fewer wyverns up so high, they lacked the strength in their wings and the capacity in their lungs to pass to such lofty zephyrs. The only ones up here were Yelena and the other aslinda.

They recognized Yelena, recognized Kagan, began shifting in their flight to curve in towards him, none making a rapid flight to attack them, but positioning themselves so that they might attack in a flock.

Kagan kept his eyes to the sky above. To the distant unwavering stars. “I want to help her remember who she is. Before she’s too far gone to regret.”

Yelena’s emotions thrummed as though he had struck them. The old wound festering between them ripped open as he deliberately turned all of his attentions towards it. There was no hiding how he felt from her. No hiding his thoughts, and no point in making plans. But there was this.

She snarled, and smoke poured back from her mouth, blinding him. What do you know of regret, you who walked free under the open sky while I rotted?

“Walked free? I was exiled!” He let his own bitterness wash down through her. Letting her know just how badly she had hurt him that night. Not only by her actions, but by her lack of trust in him. The one who was meant to share everything with her. “You were the one who decided you couldn’t wait, who chose for both of us. You decided to try to kill my father in his sleep, and you expected me to go along with you willingly?!”

The reality was much more complex. Their thoughts had been flowing back and forth through the months building up to Yelena’s breaking point, and though Kagan had always leaned to caution and waiting to see how things would unfold, there could be no denial that he was possessed by the same thoughts as she was. She might have planted the seed of rebellion in their partnership, but he had watered and tended it each and every day. Yet in those final moments, when he had realized what she was doing, and that she was trying to do it without him, he had been enraged. Betrayed by the one creature in all the world that was supposed to be incapable of betrayal.

She hammered her wings all the harder as rage flooded through her. He took it in, processed it as though it were his own, and let it flow back down into her. Stoking the fires. Making both of them all the angrier instead of playing mediator to their emotions like he’d always been forced to do before.

If it wasn’t for you, the Arazi would have been free.

He hadn’t even betrayed her back, if truth be told. Konus had read his concerns out of his mind without him ever getting the opportunity to voice them. The Prophet had been prepared for Yelena’s coming. Finally living up to his title by knowing what was going to happen before it did. “If it wasn’t for me, they’d have killed us both as slayers, and every tribe would have gone to war for the throne.”

That would have been better, she raged, unable to believe that he still couldn’t understand this most basic principle of being aslinda. That was our nature.

Through the final wisps of smoke and cloud they rose, into the vast and empty sky where even the aslinda feared to rise. The air was so thin that Kagan felt like he was being choked, yet still he spoke, croaking out his condemnation of her. “We are more than nature. We think, we learn, we change. Just because our blood sings to us to fight and kill, we don’t have to listen. Just because you couldn’t stand the feeling that there was anyone stronger than you in your territory didn’t give you the right to attack…”

Yelena roared. He made slaves of us!

“He did! He was a monster, and he had to be stopped.” He was laid out upon her back now, clinging to her with arms and legs alike as the strength was drained from him by their height. “But you weren’t the one to do it. You were never strong enough to take the Prophet. You were never smart enough to outthink him.”

Her jaws snapped, as though she would have bitten him in two if he were in reach. An old threat never played out. If you hadn’t interfered…

With one last gasp, he said, “We’d both be dead.”

And now at last their great height began to rob her of breath too, and she realized where they were. Hunting back through her memories to try and decipher why she had brought them there. Why are we flying so high?

He tightened his grip one last time. “Because you’ve never been smart enough to outthink me either.”

Finally she knew she had been deceived, that the will to fly higher and higher had not been her own. While she had been distracted in their argument, he had guided their flight, but now her full attention was turned to her actions. She pushed back against him with her will. Driving him back towards his own body.

It was dying. There was no air so high up, and with his death would come her own. She had no choice but to clamp her wings against her sides and drop like a falling star.

The aslinda gathering to attack reared back as Yelena plunged by. The clouds themselves rippled apart, and Kagan felt the concussion as their acceleration outpaced sound itself. They were in a dead-drop heading right back down on top of Orsina, back to where the air was rich and they could fight out their differences amidst the flames and despair of Espher’s dying throes.

Judging that now was the time, Yelena tried to spread her wings—and could not.

Just as she had forced her will upon him time and again, using him as a mouthpiece, now he seized control over her. He could not hold her for long. It was not in his nature to dominate and demand the way that it was for her. But he did not need to hold her for long. In a plummet like this, a fraction of a second made all the difference between life and death. All he needed to do was hold her still for just a few moments more.

She broke free of his control, spread her wings, nearly ripping them from their sockets, pain burning through the both of them, and she beat them with all the strength she had. The power of flight that had carried them for a thousand miles, over mountain and forest, across oceans and deserts, throughout all of the centuries that they had shared one life, failed.

Her wings snapped back, broken and useless, and she fell.

In his final moments, with the walls of his mind raised as high as he could muster to block out his bondmate’s futile screams, Kagan could have sworn he saw Orsina look up. He hoped she understood what he was doing. That he was just trying to break her out of this frozen shell and remind her of who she was. If it cost his life to free her from her current course, from making a decision as terrible as Yelena’s that would ruin her for all time, then it was a small price to pay.

Orsina raised her hand before the dragon struck, and darkness reached out to swallow him whole.

23 - The Last King
Caldo, Regola Dei Volpe 1

There was no vast explosion when Kagan and Yelena died. It felt as though there should have been more drama to it, but there just wasn’t. They fell, they struck through the frozen lattice of dragon’s venom, and as they came into Orsina’s reach, they simply ceased to be. Dissolving away to nothing from the dragon’s snout to tail as it plummeted close enough for her shades to touch without leaving her body.

Harmony, softhearted as ever, had turned her head away from the final catastrophic moment as the exiled Arazi tried to do what all of his kind had failed to. She had been close to the man after their travels, or closer than Artemio himself had ever mustered. If she were fighting competent opponents, they would have leapt upon the opportunity, but she was not. These peasants knew nothing of warfare beyond barroom brawls and made a poor showing. How they had slowed the Arazi at all, Artemio could not have guessed.

His concerns were focused elsewhere. Orsina had just committed the very act he had feared she might be capable of. Consuming the life force of a living creature to feed her shade. It was somewhat tragic that it had been her childhood friend whom he had hoped might assist Harmony in applying emotional pressure to her and ending Orsina’s rampage, but otherwise he would shed no tears for Kagan or his pet.

For a moment, all was still, then the fighting resumed. He and Harmony were a few strides apart, being set upon by what felt like every peasant in the city. They had left a bloody trail all the way here from the palace, but both were beginning to falter. His own strength had never truly recovered after the loss of his hand, and he seemed to be dwindling ever more now that his connection to Harmony had been cut.

Orsina pulsed with power now, her shades freshly fed, a new trick learned to quench her endless thirst for life. He could feel it wash over him, over the city, and it was like a beacon. Every Shadebound still living must have felt it, but it was not for them. It was for the shades.

Turning about himself in a lull between haphazard attacks, Artemio opened his senses fully and felt them all flowing by. Every shade in Espher had been called here now by whatever vacuum was at the heart of Orsina. They were beckoned by the promise of all the life that she contained, and they were lured inside of her like sheep to the slaughterhouse. As they came down upon her expecting an easy meal, her own shades reached out and snatched them, making them a part of the immense amalgam that now grew too vast for her mortal vessel to contain it.

Orsina’s head lolled back, an expression of bliss writ upon her features.

With a parry and a swift thrust, he dispatched another cultist, even as the next charged in, bellowing, “There is only one king, and his name is death!”

The first few times it had been a most impressive battle cry, but now it was beginning to wear thin given how utterly every one of them had failed to deliver him to this one king.

Harmony was making far swifter work of her foes than he. She must have left near twice the number that he had managed scattered through the streets, and of course she had. He was used to relying upon his own shades for assistance in battle and calling upon them now would risk draining the very last of his life away. Wrinkles marred his hands, and if he had found some reflective surface, he suspected he would see someone much like his father looking back at him now.

The last of the true dragons descended upon Orsina. Following the same trajectory Yelena and Kagan had plotted. And just as the first dragon had been wisped away into nothingness, so too were these. The tail of the plunging formation tried desperately to pull up when it became apparent that nothing could make its way through whatever force was protecting Orsina, and some even managed to pull level before her shades lashed out once more, fed with the souls of the living and empowered.

The burning air turned ice-cold in an instant as Orsina’s power swept out from her body to encompass them all. The dragons in the sky were caught, but so too were the cultists who had been fighting him. Where they had stood now only dust remained.

Beside him, Harmony staggered as the hulking opponent she had been crossing blades with abruptly departed, and she looked about herself in dismay. So many people dead in an instant, and Orsina was not even trying.

She took her opportunity, calling out, “Orsina!”

It did not seem to gain her lover’s attention.

Another wave of shadows washed out from the girl, passing over the Volpe twins where they stood. It should have killed them. Turned them into naught but dust and a meal for the amalgam shade, but it did not. Because there was a shade entirely devoted to their protection, and Bisnonno Fiore, the last Volpe king of Espher, flung himself into the shade’s path.

For one glorious moment, he was as great as he had once been, a giant of a man, protector of all the land, holding back the tide by his will alone, and then the amalgam tore into him, shredding his ermine cloak, cracking his crown asunder, and then taking those parts of him that had once been human and absorbing them into the mass.

The wave pulsed out of Orsina once more, and once more Artemio’s own shades reared up in answer. Each one of them caught in the same barbed net of disembodied hands and torn away from him.

When the final wave came, he had nothing left to throw between himself and death. He had not a single shade still bound to him. He was as useless as any common man might have been in the face of this waking nightmare.

The shadow passed over him, and he braced himself for death, but it did not come. Fiore was a part of it now, and Fiore would never allow a Volpe to come to harm.

Ashes were drawn by in the wind, burning embers turning to motes of blackened snow as they came into Orsina’s sphere of influence. Silence hung over the city.

Harmony staggered forward once more, old and exhausted after the day’s trials. “Orsina, you don’t want to do this.”

At last it seemed that the girl at the heart of the blossoming shadows could hear her. The expression of satisfied bliss faded from her face, and she turned to look upon Harmony with a vacant stare.

“Orsina, please stop! I love you.”

The empty dead face of Orsina fractured, the death mask that had been forged in place of her face softening into an expression of great sorrow. She tried to speak, but the words would not come. The same shades that enveloped her were tangled about her throat in a viny snare, tightening as she resisted their hold.

“I…”

The words would not come, but in her eyes, Artemio hoped his sister found some solace.

Harmony reached out to her. Orsina pulled free of the entangling shadows to reach back. And the shadows leapt forth.

In an instant, Harmony vanished from sight, the relentless stream of shades flowing out from Orsina completely blotting her out of existence. The buildings behind her shattered and crumbled, all across the city in one great line as far as Artemio could see. Then as abruptly as the shadows had poured forth, they were stoppered once more.

He rolled his shoulders to loosen them, then stepped forward. “You must be stopped, Orsina. It is my hope that there will be no hard feelings as a result.”

A sound like nails upon a chalkboard vibrated through him, down his sword-arm, up his spine, echoing in from all sides. It was her laughter.

“You are powerless.”

“It certainly does appear that way,” he conceded, strolling closer, judging his timing and his distance.

“No more wars. No more kings. No more dragons.” The blissful smile had returned to her face. Some vision of the future that only she could perceive replacing the rather tawdry reality they stood in. “Only peace. Eternal peace. Within me.”

“And you don’t feel that people might object to being consumed to be a part of that peace?”

“Resisting the inevitable. I am the end of all things.” Her smile looked strained for but a moment before the accumulating shades poured some fresh vision of utopia into it. “And after, nothing. Peace. Nothing. Forever.”

“I must stop you, I’m afraid. Much as the peace of the grave does appeal sometimes, there is still too much work to be done.”

“How could you stop me?” The awful laughter again. Artemio’s eyes felt wet, and a brief brush of his cuff showed that they were bleeding. “Shadebinder without a shade?”

“That is where you are incorrect, I’m afraid.” One more step towards her. Close enough now that she was almost in striking distance. Fiore within her would prevent her from tearing his life away, so he only had to contend with the more direct applications of her power. “You may have taken those shades bound to me, but not all of the shades that I can command.”

“Riddles. Always you spoke in riddles. Trying to prove how much more clever you are. How much better. As if clever could stop me.”

“While you may have accounted for my personal shades and those within the confines of Septombra, I’m afraid that there is a final great shade within the city of Covotana that remains unaccounted for.” He reached out, letting the dried-up thread of a connection that he had once nurtured slowly fill up with his life. Letting the flow of it down deep beneath the earth go from a trickle to a flood. The last red hairs upon his head turned white. The muscles still clinging to his bones began to wither.

“So many wasted words when you could be pleading for your life.”

With a strength born of desperation, he readied his blade. “I’m afraid you have not accounted for the Fire Below.”

It was a fact commonly known by the citizens of Espher that Covotana had been built upon the top of what had once been a volcano. It was a fact known only to students of the House of Seven Shadows that a Great Shade dwelled down there within the volcano, strangled of energy so that it could not become overly excited.

Artemio excited it now. All of the life that he had left to give, poured down into the shade, and the shade, all those miles deep beneath him, exploded into action.

It had been millennia since the volcano beneath Covotana had gone dormant, but dormant did not mean dead. It meant waiting.

From beneath Orsina the explosion tore up through the earth. Molten stone, pressurized throughout its long journey to the surface, now bursting out in a great plume of burning death. All across Covotana the lava began to burst through the crust. The palace collapsed into the depths of the volcano’s now gaping maw first. Then the houses of the wealthy and powerful, then the rest. In one slow ripple, the whole city began to fall into the jaws of the earth and burn away.

Orsina had already killed thousands, but those few that remained, Artemio sacrificed, wishing he had her trick of stealing lives so that he might feed them into the Fire too. Lingering Arazi, thunder lizards too slow to have made their escape, citizens or enemies, everyone.

When the eruption came, it was swift and catastrophic. There were no words to describe the sudden rush of heat burning the air above it away. The lava below leaping up to fill the suddenly empty space that seemed to be beckoning it. The weight of stone made liquid, surging up to consume them both.

Orsina’s shades could not let her die. She was their anchor to the world of the living. Without her, they had no foothold. Yet it seemed in the explosion that was rising from beneath them, even the vast powers of her shades had met its match. They swept down, abandoning her tiny pale body, and plunged down into the earth below, the chill of the grave and the fire at the heart of the world fighting for dominance.

She was cast down on the burned earth, hands pressed against it, as though she could hold down the coming eruption by the strength of her arms. Curled over on herself, every shade abandoning her, hair all burned away, body quivering with the power that had flooded through her, Orsina looked like nothing so much as a discarded baby lying there as Artemio approached.

He had not closed the distance when the battle beneath them began to turn. Solid spikes of chilled basalt jutted up from beneath their feet, a crown of dead stone thrust up out of the ground all around them.

Still the volcano pressed on. Around each jutting spike, the lava began to erupt, first bubbling out in thin streams, then flooding across towards them. The chill aura that surrounded Orsina was enough to hold it off at first, but it did not take long before the sheer weight of molten stone overcame the cold air, and the circle around her began to close.

Beyond those standing stones, all of Covotana was aflame. Those parts not already collapsed into the volcano’s mouth were burning and melting to become a part of its contents when the crumbling stone beneath them sloughed off.

Beneath them, another explosion rocked the ground, sending Artemio tumbling and stumbling towards where Orsina still knelt in supplication. She raised her head at his approach, eyes wide and terrified. Artemio believed that she knew how this had to end, but she lacked the means to enact it herself. He took it upon himself to help her.

With the stump of his missing hand, he took her under the chin, raising her up until her arms were fully extended. And then with an awful slowness born of exhaustion and a desperate need for precision, even in this final moment, he drove the Volpe family sword down through her collarbone and into her heart.

He wondered if she might have thanked him, had she the breath in her lungs. He wondered if she might have cursed him, the way Harmony surely would. There was so much in this world that he would never know. So many mysteries that he had never even encountered, let alone solved.

The shades lost their anchor, and the lava rose, unrestrained, to consume all.

24 - The Remains
Caldo, Regola Ultimo Re 1

Covotana was wiped off the map in a single night, but that did not mean the city herself had vanished. Smoke shrouded it on the first day, and all attempts by the survivors of the catastrophe to enter were thwarted by the still-flowing lava that had supplanted the streets. It would be yet another day before some brave souls ventured past the crumbled and melted remains of the city walls to see if there were any survivors or, more pressingly, any materials that might help the survivors who had escaped before the city was destroyed make it through a few more days.

It was only luck that they found Harmony. Only luck that beneath the soot they did not recognize her. The name Volpe was not currently being spoken in any kind tones, given that the family had presided over the death of the kingdom.

A week would pass, with some kind soul pressing sips of broth to Harmony’s lips to keep her strength up. Some old half-blind woman who was more beast than human by this point in her life. There were a great many soup kitchens like hers dotted around in the commandeered tents that had once belonged to the nobility of Espher. Inherited by those who survived.

A month passed all too quickly. Supplies shuttled in from nearby villages, a fraction of what they were accustomed to turning over to Covotana for trade. Caravans arrived, and feeling sympathy for the people of what had once been Espher, they turned over their goods to them almost at cost, earning them many lifelong friends and many more marriage proposals.

It helped that Harmony had only been displayed to the public in dresses and finery. They could not recognize her in the more common shirt and trousers that she had always preferred to wear, and if there were those who looked on her red locks and had their suspicions, they kept them to themselves because the old woman was as good a worker as anyone could hope for and had the courage to go deeper into the City of the Dead where none but the mad dared to tread, coming out not only with the supplies that were so desperately needed, but also keepsakes and trinkets that families had thought lost. Little things nobody else would have even thought to rescue.

Slowly but surely, the stone cooled, the Fire Below slipped back into its endless slumber. Perhaps if there had been a Shadebound about, they might have been able to rile it up again, but those magicians seemed to be in short supply nowadays. All dead in the war or fled far from the city carried in the arms of their spirits.

Yet the remains of what had been Covotana were not of a safe place to go venture just because it was no longer aflame or afloat on a vast pool of magma. The footing was uncertain, the fragmentary remains of the buildings prone to collapse without any rhyme or reason, but mostly, the spirits of the dead were what put the fear into people.

Even months after the fall of Espher, people would not enter it by night, claiming they saw specters roaming the streets and dead dragons in the skies. It was a haunted place, a vast sepulcher in which all the dead of three nations had been laid to rest in graves aflame.

Yet still, the old woman who had once been known as Harmony returned to it again and again. Even when the sightings became reports, and the reports became warnings, and the scavengers who had once roamed the ruins became too afraid to risk it when there were so many other prizes just as sweet to be plucked from the fields of battle beyond.

Harmony wore a saint’s sword on her back, but there was no mistaking her for Agrantine, even if such distinctions no longer mattered. She wore it more as a talisman against the dead, even though everyone was sure that a woman would have had no idea how to swing such a thing if it did come down to a fight.

And despite all the dire warnings, it was under the cover of darkness that she went back into the city one last time before the last caravan leaving the ruins packed its bags and made off for pastures new.

She did not want her new friends to see her cry, if she did come to tears, and she did not want to have to deal with their dire warnings about shades abounding.

That night she traveled along her well-tread paths through the city, dipping into what had once been the canals before they had been filled with basalt rock to avoid the worst collapses blocking her path. She went on as the night dragged by and the full moon rose, into areas nobody had the courage to explore except her. Not the palace, which had been picked as thoroughly clean as the cowardly scavengers could muster, but the other ancient building with just as long a history. The place where the war had ended.

Vast spikes of stone jutted up out of the surface, unexpected and exotic additions to an otherwise flat expanse of settled and cooled lava. Rows after rows of them, like the curved teeth of some nightmare beast rising up from below to bite down on them all. Harmony pushed such thoughts aside. She had faced real monsters; she did not need to imagine any.

She stood upon what was doubtless her brother’s grave, and she shed no tears for him because there before her, cast in stone, was Orsina. The lava had risen up around her, even as her shades had fought to keep her from burning, and drip by awful drip, it had landed on her skin and sealed it off from the world. And there, thrust into Orsina’s heart, was the sword of her ancestors. She reached out to touch it, half expecting to find it still warm, but it was not. There was an awful chill in it that shot up the length of her arm to her elbow before she could pull her hand away.

A shiver ran up the back of her neck, and despite herself, she whispered, “Orsina?”

But the statue, or the shade of her lover, gave no answer. Only one thing told her where to go and what to do next, and that was the voice of instinct gnawing at her hindbrain. Telling her to run.

The air all around her was filled with motes of frost and slow-forming snowflakes despite it being midsummer. The shades that had been summoned to Covotana by Orsina still seemed to be coming from all across the world, all of them feeding into this one courtyard of desolate stone. To this one spot.

Harmony could not see them, just as she could not have seen them when she wore her blindfold in the House of Seven Shadows, but she could feel their presence. Like a breeze, like a draft blowing through a barely cracked window, just a tickle of awareness as they all flowed by her and into the statue where it remained still and silent.

Feeling like a sentimental fool, Harmony bent down to press a kiss to the statue’s cheek, then she succumbed to her screaming instincts and turned to depart. To leave behind this place that had once been a city, in what had once been a kingdom. What had once been her home.

And if she felt the weight of a gaze upon her as she walked away, she could pretend that it was only her imagination.

The End

Thank you for reading The Last King: Thronebound. We hope you’ve enjoyed your journey with Artemio, Orsina, Harmony, and Kagan. Please consider rating and reviewing the book on Amazon, as well as any of your other favorite book-discussion sites. Thousands of books are published around the world every day, all competing to gain traction and attention from readers. If you enjoyed this book and want more like it to be published in the future, then reviews are one of the best ways you can support us.

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