Chapter Forty-Six The Villainess and the White Knight
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The Villainess and the White Knight
“Someone should do something,” wept Lady Lia.
Emer had not wept since her mistress Rahela died, but she found herself in agreement. They cowered in the little room at the top of the tower, watching flames rise from the roofs of houses across the city as well as from the abyss. They said the king was lost. They said Eyam was lost with him.
But Emer knew the way of the world. Nobody ever did anything on hearing the desperate cry “somebody should do something”.
Key the guard, watching Lia’s tears, said: “I will.”
“I will, ‘my lady’,” Emer corrected.
She frequently asked the gutter guard to call Lia “my lady”. He always refused.
His eyes danced, reflecting the red flicker of abyss flames. “It’s sweet of you to call me that when I have such a bad reputation, Emer.”
“You will be swallowed by the chaos,” cried tender-hearted Lia.
“I am chaos,” said Key, with his disturbing smile, and left. They heard his footsteps echoing on the stone steps of the tower all the way to the world below.
They did not realize how far down he would go until they saw him climb into the abyss. Down into the consuming fire and all-enveloping smoke, into the hungry moans of monsters and the terrible heart of legends.
Emer had always hated him, but as she saw him disappear into the flames, she knew they were lost.
“I saw the atrocities and I said, ‘That’s my man and I support his hobbies’,” Rae told her sister, when Alice paused in her reading. “I saw the red flags and I said red’s my favourite colour. He’s simply the greatest and sexiest character of all time, and nobody appreciates him as they should.”
Excerpt from a reading of the now-revised Time of Iron by ALICE PARILLA, age sixteen
As a hostage, Rae wasn’t allowed to attend the Tagar high council.
After the dragon took wing and flew away, the royalty and aristocracy of Tagar withdrew to the royal tent, an edifice that was half austere, shining with subtle Starost silver thread, and half ostentatious, hung about with Merac furs and straps secured by gold.
Rae sat outside, attempting shamelessly to eavesdrop through canvas, but heard only the loud hum of debate and not the words.
So she sat, with her chin on her fist, and thought of Key, and enchanted light-sources.
She looked up when they all filed out: the king with Princess Vasilisa beside him; Torhell, the count, and the dowager countess Lady Mabeth; and the Ascendant walking alone in her white robes and grief.
Ivor announced: “Something seized control of my dragon. Even your Emperor was not able to do that. The situation has gone beyond our control and I will not risk my people. We are leaving.”
Rae stared at him with fresh horror. “You can’t go.”
“You must come with us,” Vasilisa urged. “Marry my brother, be my sister and our queen. We will make you happy in Tagar. This is a cursed land of evil gods. Only pain and death lives in Eyam. Let’s escape together. It’s what my love would have wished.”
She took Rae’s hand.
Lady Mab, brightening and ignoring the mention of Vasilisa’s love, suggested, “We could have two weddings aboard ship.”
Sail away to a land of ice with strangers, where no dead walked or gods rose, where Rae hadn’t created a disaster of blood-soaked betrayal. In some ways, it would be an escape.
In another way, it would be giving up. Rae didn’t do that. Key belonged to this land. So did Lia, Emer and the Cobra. Rae wasn’t leaving them to deal with the horrors alone.
“Stay,” Rae told Ivor. “We need you. You have different magic, different gods. You have a chance to take back your dragon.”
Ivor looked furious at the mention of his dragon, then crushed the fury. “How could we even begin to think about fighting whatever did that? We would need another army!”
“Lady Rahela,” said a cold voice behind them. “Ivor. It seems I came at the right time.”
Escorted by harassed-looking camp guards, Lord Marius stood at the head of a wildly strange band. From farmers holding scythes to probable bandits armed to the teeth, from knights in armour to ladies in very little clothing at all, it was a force Rae would never have imagined Marius leading.
They had never liked each other for an instant, and the sight of his icily perfect face filled Rae with delight. The stalwart hero, arriving with an army in the nick of time. Suddenly she saw why Marius had always been her sister’s favourite character.
“Where’s the Cobra?”
“Consulting the Oracle,” replied Lord Marius. “The Great God has risen and is coming to take the city. We felt we required the aid of the goddess. What are you doing among the raiders, Lady Rahela? Have you been taken hostage?”
“I’m betrothed to their king,” Rae said brightly.
Marius’s frown suggested a headache coming on. Rae feared they weren’t going to get on any better this time around.
“Did you fail to properly comprehend the term ‘engage the enemy’?”
When away from Lord Marius, you remembered the towering presence and chilling assumption of perfect morality. After a moment in Lord Marius’s presence, you remembered he was a huge bitch.
A new idea struck Rae. “You called him Ivor. Do you two know each other?”
Ivor and Marius exchanged a glance. “Yes,” said Marius. “We studied together at the Ivory Tower, on the Cliffs of Ice and Loneliness. The prince was always tinkering with strange contraptions.”
“Marius was always confessing his many sins of thought and deed to our tutors, and getting whipped,” Ivor countered.
“Hours sometimes the whippings took, in the ice, with a thorned lash. They were trying to get him to stop confessing, I believe, but he’s relentless.
He should have died under the lash. He didn’t.
He’s Valerius, and I saw what that meant. This changes things.”
The great sabretooth tiger made an interested sound in Marius’s direction. Marius ignored the tiger.
Torhell leaned forward, face brightening with hope. “Fight me!”
The look Marius directed in the count’s direction was a wintry blast. Rae was used to Lord Marius’s disapproving looks. At court, he did not usually follow them up with action.
This Lord Marius, his white cloak gone, his white sleeves smoke-stained and rolled up for work, moved forward and in a whirl of efficient motion grasped Count Merac’s elbow before the count could reach for his axe.
Then the Valerius threw the raider over his hip.
Faster than the instant it took for a wind to change, Lord Marius had Tagar’s general on his back, hurled full length upon the ground with the point of Starving for Blood at his throat.
“Insolent puppy. You’re commanding troops, and you challenge a potential ally? I saw in the first attempt at an invasion of Themesvar, your archers are a disgrace.”
“They’re not my people,” objected Torhell. “They’re Starosts!”
“You command the army, including the archers. If your army is untrained or will not obey you, that is a stain on you and your leadership. Do better, or die of shame.”
Torhell leaned up on one elbow into the blade at his throat, eyes taking on an avid gleam. “The archers are bad, aren’t they?”
Ivor and Vasilisa both gave Marius an approving nod. All the raiders regarded Marius, towering over their leader in a way that suggested ice cliffs rather than towers, with an air that suggested here was a man to suit their ideal of a warrior.
“Eyam’s gods might prove a problem later. Best to smelt the impure metal now, rather than letting it become part of your mechanism to break at some future point,” murmured Ivor.
Still prone, Torhell winced. “Don’t talk like that, sire. You’re embarrassing us in front of Lord Marius.”
Vasilisa stepped up, her hand on Ivor’s arm. When she spoke, Rae remembered that in the books she was the Ice Queen, and would give speeches to rally troops against the Emperor.
“What my brother means to say is this. The gods are set apart. They live in the heavens or the underworld, they influence but do not engage in the affairs of men. A single god ruling in barbaric Eyam is one thing, though even then I did not like the term Emperor. Which of our lands did he wish to swallow to make this empire? Now we hear another god is coming. This so-called Great God has stolen a weapon of Tagar, our king’s great dragon, and we do not know how or what he means to do with it.
I call this Great God a thief, and his son the Emperor a murderer. I say we stay and fight!”
Under the sound of cheering and rattling sabres, Ivor muttered: “We had better get my dragon back.”
“I could fight a god.” Torhell seemed charmed by the prospect.
“Death to these foreign gods,” the Ascendant declared. “We who follow the Captive Goddess have hated them always.”
With a pang Rae remembered Glacia, shy and faltering, calling upon the Captive Goddess for strength. She loved the gods of east Tagar as much as she loved her books of romance and adventure, but in the end the Captive Goddess had not saved her.
The moment of union between Meracs and Starosts shattered as soon as it was forged.
“Death to all false gods, including the puny Starost spirits of light and air.” Torhell gave the Ascendant a boyish, taunting smile. “Especially the Captive Goddess. I hate her the most.”
The two factions of the ice court began to shout at each other about disgusting beast gods and pathetic spirits not worth the name of divinity. Rae worried this army would always be at their fellow’s throats, never able to be pointed in a common direction.
“SILENCE!” Lord Marius’s command was an avalanche. “Cease your petty squabbling. Do you not see? The gods are coming.”
What Valerius eyes saw first, they all saw soon after. From their vantage point outside the city walls, they watched the light change. The gates to Themesvar opened, and onto the Waiting Wastes stalked the Emperor.
Even now Rae’s heart sang at the sight, as if her heart was a minstrel or a bard telling an epic tale.
She always loved the battle scenes, where the Emperor became a whirling one-man army no mortal could withstand.
She watched him prowl through the dust and changing light, suggesting that thunderclouds gathered above though the sky was clear.
Key was all blaze and midnight, as if he leaped from a page charred by fire from another world, still burning.
Every delighted spark coursing through Rae chilled under a breath of fear. No mortal could stand against him, but the foe he faced now was not mortal.
The ice raiders would not have to fight gods if the gods killed each other first.