Chapter Twenty-Seven The Lady and the Rebels
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Lady and the Rebels
When the rebels came to the gates, Lia walked out to meet them. Soft as a shadow, sweet as the last mercy of a sufferer, clad in diaphanous white and beaming welcome. The rabble stilled to hear her.
“I love you,” said the beautiful queen. “I hear you. I will answer your grievances. Let us take them to the Emperor together.”
So the rebellion ended.
Time of Lies, ANONYMOUS
They found Forge Strike attending a meeting in a shadowy warehouse. The place smelled as though meat had hung here once, and hung for too long. A rough makeshift platform had been built on which people stood in turns, making speeches about the world being unjust. Emer didn’t see how that was news.
Nobles hoarding treasure, the war with Tagar dragging on, money spent on an imperial procession when the common people did not have meat, and an Emperor with so much power they could not hope to fight him.
Everybody at the meeting agreed the world was unjust, so that was settled. Did they intend to do anything about it?
Anger seemed to prowl this room, as though enough fury could become beasts made of shadow, deepening the darkness, lending a growl and a hiss to every speech and every whisper.
These people didn’t have a plan, but Emer thought they might do something.
She thought if the nobles had a single throat, they might lunge for it.
Right now, wasn’t everybody’s hatred for the nobles, their fear of the Emperor, being pinned on Lady Rae? If a single throat was in danger, it was hers.
Emer and Lia crouched behind empty crates that smelled like rotted fruit.
Emer, by far the taller, had to crouch down so low her thighs burned.
Rahela’s mother, Lady Katalin – or far worse, her grandmother – would be horrified if they ever learned their family’s dutiful maid was attending a gathering of political radicals.
It was certainly illegal to plot against their monarch and government. But they were in the Cauldron. Speech-makers seemed less horrifying than the cut-purses and cut-throats.
“What if we stormed the Palace on the Edge?” shouted Forge, jumping to her feet.
These people were searching for certainty, Emer thought, because they couldn’t find it in themselves.
A faint hungry cheer rose from the crowd, shadows lit by the fire of Forge’s enthusiasm.
Emer approved of Forge more than the rest. She was a woman of action.
The next moment, Emer hated action.
Lia stood and let her golden hair shine like a beacon over the empty wooden fruit cartons. As Emer scrambled up, clutching the hilt of her axe and ready to defend their lives, Lia called out a question to the platform.
“What if storming the palace does not go far enough?”
Forge frowned like a thundercloud. “What are you doing here, Lia?”
“I followed you,” Lia told her. “I’ve been listening to your speeches with great interest, and now I have something to say. If you good people will be so kind as to listen?”
Lia’s eyes caught the silver firelight leaking through the high windows of the warehouse.
The rabble around the platform had whirled on them when they appeared, but gradually their attention seemed less threatening and more like flowers turning towards a sun.
From all sides came assenting murmurs. At the mere sight of Lia, they were charmed.
“Stay close to me,” Lia whispered, as they walked up the rough-hewn steps to the platform.
It made Emer remember a timid golden-haired little girl in the country, who she had never known well and who had disappeared under layer after layer of suffering as Lia hardened, and the Pearl of the World emerged.
She took Lia’s hand in a protective clasp. Nobody would think it anything but a maid supporting her lady.
Lia lifted her voice to fill the darkness with a sound like bells.
“Storm the palace, and then what? The Emperor commands the skies. If we rise against him, he could bring our homes and our lives crashing down around our ears. He can send us back to the dust. Worse, soon the Emperor’s forces may double.
Rumour tells us the Divine Order is coming, with Lord Marius Valerius leading them, and the fury of a Valerius is greater than the fury of the dead. ”
Forge glared from the other end of the platform. “So you’re suggesting we despair and surrender?”
“What I’m suggesting is this. What if we had power of our own?” asked Lia. “And we made a plan to use it wisely.”
The warehouse walls seemed to shake with muttering, the crowd as puzzled as Emer herself.
Then Emer the fool, who had held Lia’s hand thinking Lia was frightened, found herself pushed in front of the audience.
“Do you know this woman?” Lady Lia’s clear, sweet voice rose to the rafters.
“Did you see her fight a manticore at the first Queen’s Trials?
Did you hear the tale of the women who fought the dead and won with no man to aid them, in the Court of Air and Grace, in the heart of the palace?
The mark on this woman’s face is no mark of sin.
It is the mark of the gods. She is Valerius! ”
Lia’s delicate hands cradled Emer’s face, on a stage as they had once in her bed. She turned Emer this way and that, swivelling her about as if she were a wooden mannequin. Numb with shock, Emer let her lax limbs be puppeted. She had absolutely no idea what else to do.
“I asked an old nurse who laid out the Duke of Valerius’s mother when she died, and she told me of the mark each Valerius woman bears.
The woman before you dreams the dreams of those chosen by a god, dreams of other lives and the future to come.
This woman has the superhuman senses and the fighting skill of a Valerius.
This woman has all the power of a Valerius, but she’s not a noble.
Perhaps she’s the last of a secret illegitimate line.
Perhaps she’s the duke’s bastard. It matters not where she came from but what she is.
She is one of you. Think what the people can do with our own berserker. ”
The sound of the crowd was rising like flame from the shadow of the abyss. A hungry sound. In the throng, Emer saw the face of the woman she’d saved from the ghoul at the marketplace, and saw the woman’s face shine with belief.
In Emer. In what Emer could do. Seeing that belief convinced Emer: Lia spoke the truth.
Dimly through the mist of shock, Emer made out the shape of her own rage. She couldn’t feel it yet, but she could see it coming. Lia was showing Emer off like a bear in a fighting ring. What big teeth she has. Big enough to kill your enemies.
Then Lia turned her back on Emer, as though Emer was a bear on a chain who could not follow and would attack her master.
Lia walked to the edge of the makeshift platform and stretched her arms out to the crowd. Soft as a shadow, sweet as the last mercy of a sufferer, clad in diaphanous white and beaming welcome. The hungry fury of the riot stilled to hear her.
“I love you,” said the beautiful rebel leader. “I hear you. I will answer your grievances. If we work together, we can do anything. We could kill the Emperor.”
So the rebellion began.