Chapter Twenty-Five The Lady Fires the Silverthorn Pyre #2
The Emperor stepped over the ashes to Lady Rae.
He whirled his cape off his shoulders to wrap it around her, glancing briefly at her face as Key the guard used to do when he hoped to receive a sign of approval.
He usually received a warm response. She’d been more than fond of her guard, but even from a distance Emer saw fear in Rae’s eyes.
And she saw no hope in the Emperor’s gaze.
She saw nothing in the Emperor’s eyes but burning.
So be it. The time had come for a burning.
At times of great celebration, the Divine Order would come light a bonfire in the last square that ended the Chain of Commerce, their capital’s main street. The Emperor’s procession had reached the end of the chain.
The Square of Sacrifice’s walls were painted fresh, gory red every year.
Frescoes screamed scarlet on every side, showing how the Great God had killed his only child so that he might have power independent of all believers.
The Emperor’s thoughtful gaze moved from red wall to red wall, from the axe to the Great God’s stern, pale painted face, to the child on the altar.
A ripple of unease stirred the crowd like cold wind through barley.
Symbols and paintings of divine sacrifice must look different depending on your point of view. For instance, if your point of view was from your place on an altar.
The Emperor did not comment on the religious frescoes. Instead, he walked with his lady, his winged monster crooning at him from an overhanging rooftop, towards the faintly gleaming pile of wood set for the bonfire.
Silverthorn trees grew where the earth was reddest. In Emer’s childhood home of Shroud Valley, folk called those the hungry patches, land which had drunk the most blood.
Nothing else thrived where silverthorn grew.
Criminals used to be hanged and quartered from silverthorn branches, to feed the roots, long ago when the Divine Order still made sacrifices to imitate the Great God’s sacrifice.
On first arriving in the capital, Emer had been shocked to see silverthorn used for celebrations. The other maids laughed at her country-girl superstitions. So did her newly sophisticated mistress, determined to fit in with the ways of the court and her lover the king.
Strange, that the word “mistress” meant both a superior who must be obeyed and a great man’s toy.
Emer could see her mistress across the square, but Lady Rae had never seemed so far away. Lady Rae’s face looked drained above the glare of the Abandon All Hope Diamond at her throat, its livid red shining like a heart freshly cut from a chest.
Representing the rule of law, from soldiers to the city guard, the commander general should now place a burning torch – and symbolically, the safety of the city – into the hands of a member of the Divine Order.
But apparently the Emperor had insisted he would light the silverthorn pyre with his own hands.
The Divine Order were fanatics from a bygone age.
They had never been important. Emer was more concerned that Commander General Nemeth was nowhere to be seen.
Lord Fabianus Nemeth wore the sword insignia of his father’s position uneasily on his violet-sheened blue silk garments, and fading bruises.
Naturally, a son must fill his father’s place if his father found himself temporarily unable.
But the fool of the court, who cared only for fashion and frivolity, representing the rule of law? It made the law seem a joke.
Rumours at the market whispered the Emperor had done something horrible to the commander general. At Lady Rahela’s command.
Lord Fabianus, face set in impassive lines, placed the burning torch in his Emperor’s keeping.
The Emperor brandished the silverthorn torch in a wide circle with such wild abandon that the cage at its top, filled with burning pitch, overflowed and spilled fat sparks onto the darkened cobblestones.
The sparks didn’t go out, but burned like tiny coals in a simmering circle around the Emperor and his lady.
He held Lady Rae tight, a column of evening blue and the colour between stars, encircled in red-touched steel.
Only the night wind could touch her, moving her long dark hair so it lifted from the Emperor’s cape and streamed out to the stars.
“The Beauty in Bruised Midnight,” called out a voice. The name caught on, travelling from tongue to tongue as a flame through a forest.
The Emperor put the burning torch in Rae’s hands. The silverthorn torch which meant the safety of the city.
“Radiant Son!” It was one of the few members of the Divine Order remaining in the capital, their insignia of the axe and altar embossed on his breastplate, which rose and fell with his outraged breath. “She cannot hold the torch.”
The Emperor arched a brow. “She appears to be doing so with ease.”
“It is blasphemy for a woman to touch it.”
“Can a god commit blasphemy?” The Emperor’s smile leaped like fire, enjoying a personal joke deeply upsetting to others, and he was Key again, simply Key, Emer’s horrible friend. “I leave it to the holy men to determine.”
When he looked at Lady Rae this time, Emer recognized Key’s warmth, always too intense but not yet raging out of control.
Key’s focus was always unsettling, but sometimes when he focused on Lady Rae he betrayed alongside fascination a puzzled tenderness, as though he too was startled to find himself capable of feeling anything tender.
Emer remembered he used to watch Emer’s lady that way often, back when they were all vipers together.
When the Emperor spoke to others, he took command. When he spoke to Lady Rae, he offered it. “I am a sacred thing, too, so they tell me. If I am felled, let it be by you. If I’m a weapon, I wish be held and wielded by you. Use me to light the pyre of your enemies.”
Rae’s lip curled. “Might be an awfully big fire.”
“Let the world burn. If you wish it.”
The people grew still; not an audience, but prey under the shadow of a wing. Lady Rae smiled as if charmed by the Emperor’s cruelty, and set her burning torch to the silverthorn.
The sacred pyre alchemized the red tongue of flame to sudden bright silver.
Sparks flew as if the branches were hot metal struck in a forge.
The triangular stack of wood became a silver tower, building taller than any stone tower ever could.
It made you imagine towers scraping the sky, in dreams of impossible cities.
The Emperor watched the flames from the silverthorn pyre rise until it seemed they would lick the moon. “Now for the Cauldron.”
“Sire! There are fearful folk in that sinners’ den,” exclaimed a suicidally thoughtless lord. “Will you drag your lady into the midst of foulness?”
Key glanced at Rae, who winked, her eyes still full of silver fire. If you asked Emer, he did not need the encouragement.
“I am Key of the Cauldron,” said the Emperor of Eyam. “All the fearful folk in that sinners’ den fear me. And my lady fears nothing.”
He handed Rae into a fresh litter from which some noblewoman had, Emer presumed, been hastily evicted.
Rae laughed as Key helped her into the litter. Emer’s lady and the gutter guard were a pair of reckless fools, as careless as they were terrifying, but the Emperor had said, I am Key of the Cauldron. They had all been vipers together. If this was still Key, maybe they could all be vipers again.
For the first time in history the monarch’s procession wound its way into the narrow, shadowed streets of the Cauldron. As the procession’s bright flames and flags waved their way, Emer stepped out of the shadow of the burned and twisted guild.
“Stop,” Lia said, in a voice of cold terror, but Emer didn’t stop. She wanted to speak to Key herself.
Key didn’t see her. Instead, through the veil-thin curtains of the litter, Lady Rae’s dark eyes caught on Emer’s face. Against a backdrop of silver flame, silenced by the roaring of fire, Rae’s mouth shaped Emer’s name. The look on her lady’s face was not relief, but terror.
The next moment, Rae launched herself from the litter.
The Emperor’s gauntleted hand shot out, with speed a human couldn’t match, with speed a human couldn’t follow. He grasped at her garments, to stop her getting away.
The gauntlet tore cape and skirt to black shreds. The crowd watched as the Emperor’s chosen bride fought free of his hands and escaped in a flurry of darkness, as though she were a crow bride shedding feathers as she flew.
The people of Themesvar watched the beauty flee from the god, into the lawless shadows of the Cauldron.
Chaos swallowed the imperial procession. Courtiers on fine horses tried to trample down those on foot to escape the Cauldron. Emer saw one minister pulled off his horse and divested of his chains in an instant, as though Cauldron folk were the kind of fish who could flense flesh from bones.
In one hand Emer firmly grasped her axe, and in the other Lia’s hand.
The girl’s quick when she wants to be, Lady Katalin had once said of her daughter’s maid, but Emer never showed Lady Katalin how fast she could be.
Too much ability only earned you more tasks.
Emer felt she ran around after her lady enough.
This time Emer raced through the shadows of the Cauldron. Faster than the surging crowd, faster than the ministers’ maddened horses. She ran faster after her lady than ever before.
She caught Lady Rae on Lockpick Street, racing in the direction of the Night Market.
She dropped Lia’s hand to grasp the back of Rae’s jet-embroidered bodice, whirling Rae around.
Emer only realized what she had done when Rae gave a thin scream, lifting her silver-gauntleted hands to try and catch the axe blade before it fell.
“Emer, no!”
Emer stepped back, bewildered. “It’s me, Lady Rae. Don’t you know I would never hurt you?”
That was the worst part. Rae had known her, had said her name, and still cowered, expecting the axe to fall.
Lady Rae was plainly terrified and exhausted. She had been in the Palace on the Edge all alone, without anyone to help her. Small wonder if she panicked at the sight of a weapon.
But Lady Rae did not panic when Lia leaped at her.
Breathing like a bellows from being dragged in Emer’s wake, Lia dashed from the shadows of the Cauldron into Rae’s arms. They clung together, the dark head bending towards the gold.
Nobody would ever have known that for years the stepsisters couldn’t stand the sight of each other.
But that was Lady Rahela, and this was Lady Rae. They might not be the same person at all.
“Little funny-face,” Rae said, as if using a pet name from childhood, and dropped a kiss on Lia’s brow when it wrinkled.
“Don’t call me that. I’m pretty, everybody says so.” Lia was crying, very prettily. “Are you well? Has he hurt you?”
“I was the one who hurt him. Remember?”
Lady Rae looked to Emer. She knew Emer did.
Lia said, “He wants revenge.”
It wasn’t a question, but Rae tried to answer. “I don’t know. But I know he doesn’t love me. I know he took a terrible revenge against somebody, once.”
That sounded like something Key might do.
“Come with us,” Emer urged. “A friend of Lia’s has a house near here. Number Five, Sharp Elbow Lane, with the green door. We can hide you. Then we will all run away together.”
Lady Rae’s dark eyes were haunted hollows. “He will find us. He sent ghouls after the Cobra. I don’t know why his ghouls haven’t found you.”
Because Forge Strike made the Emperor promise that if she let him inside to re-forge Longing for Revenge, neither he nor his ghouls would ever darken her door again.
“Because it’s safe where we are,” Emer promised. “Come.”
Rae stared wildly around at the shadows, as though something might lunge at her from them.
“I can’t. I made a bargain with a god, and must keep it.
If I don’t, doom will come. Listen. I jumped from the litter and ran into the Cauldron so I could tell you this.
You two need to leave. Blend in with the crowd, slip away.
Don’t let him see you. The only good thing I’ve done in this world was getting Lia out of the palace.
I don’t want either of you to be part of this. I need to keep you safe.”
She shoved Lia back, viciously hard, so Lia fell and Emer had to catch her. Lia’s arm snaked around Emer’s neck, and for a moment Emer was caught in her dazed blue eyes.
By that time, Lady Rae had disappeared around a corner, a whirl of bruises and midnight. Emer started after her, but Lia wouldn’t loose her hold.
“Rahela said we must blend in with the crowd, or he would find us.”
When they returned, the Square of Sacrifice still teemed with people. Emer’s eyes raked the throngs for any sign of the Emperor. Instead, she glimpsed a familiar face, taking advantage of the chaos to slip away into a side street.
Lia followed Emer’s gaze. “There’s Forge. Quick, follow her.”
“What about my lady Rae?” Emer demanded.
“There’s nothing we can do for her now.”
“Then is there something we can do for her in the future?”
Lia whispered urgently into Emer’s ear, “Didn’t you hear her? She couldn’t go with us, because she made a bargain with a god. He’s holding her against her will.”
Emer remembered how the Emperor lunged when Lady Rae tried to flee, the lover turning hunter in an instant. The Emperor was holding Lady Rae, and he intended to keep her.
“What can we possibly do about that?”
In her sweetest, softest voice, Lia answered, “I am going to kill him.”