49. Tabitha
Tabitha
The Sorcerer-King crosses the battlefield towards me and the world goes quiet around him, the fighting parting, both armies pulling back, because everyone in both worlds understands that this is the only fight that matters now.
Him and me. The one who sealed the realm and the Queen who reopened it. Everything comes down to this.
“Little Queen,” he says, and his voice is the cold between stars, vast and patient and entirely without cruelty, which is worse than cruelty.
“You woke what should have stayed sleeping. Three centuries we kept this realm folded away, harmless, contained. And a bookseller read three words and undid it.” He drifts closer, and the cold comes off him in a wave that greys the ground for twenty feet around, and my fire gutters where it meets it.
“It is nothing personal. You are simply a door that must be shut. I will unmake you, and your realm with you, and this time I will fold the ashes so small that no bloodline, no book, no Queen, will ever wake them again. It is a kindness, in its way. An ending.”
“Yeah, see, I’ve had a lot of blokes tell me my ending’s a kindness lately,” I say, and my voice shakes, because I’m terrified, because he’s the biggest thing I’ve ever stood in front of and my fire is guttering.
“My ex said the same thing right before I burned him to ash in my courtyard. I’m getting a bit sick of it, honestly. ”
“Your fire cannot touch me,” he says. “Cold unmakes heat. That is simply how it is.”
And he’s right. I throw everything I have at him, all my gold fire, the whole HellCat, and it hits his cold and dies, snuffed, useless. He drifts closer, unhurt, unbothered, and I feel the greying cold reach for me, for the warmth of me, to unmake me the way it’s unmade everything else.
My men throw themselves at him and it’s like watching waves break on a cliff.
Luka hits him in full hellfire panther and is flung back a hundred feet, smoking, dazed.
Azaan’s storm bends around the King and dies.
Gavriel gets his shield up and the gold light that turned aside a hundred bolts today cracks down the middle at one touch of that cold.
Gavriel goes down on one knee, arm hanging useless, and for one heart-stopping second I think I’ve lost him even freed of the link.
Only Valerian’s violet holds at all, and only because Valerian is pouring the last of himself into it, grey as death, swaying, spending the drops he swore to me he’d hoard.
“Stop!” I scream at them. “All of you, stop, you can’t, he’ll unmake you, get back!”
Because they will. They’ll die on this cliff of a king, one after another, throwing themselves at the cold to buy me a second, and I will not, I will NOT, watch my family unmade in front of me to buy time I don’t know how to use.
Fire won’t do it. I feel that, cold and certain. Fire’s not enough. He’s a world’s power and I’m one realm’s Queen and heat against cold is a losing trade.
Go deeper, the Oracle said. It’s not about the fire. It was never only about the fire.
And I understand, in the last second, standing in front of the thing that sealed my whole world in a book, what I actually am now.
I’m not just the HellCat. I’m not just a Queen with a nice line in gold fire.
I claimed the throne. The whole realm runs through me, both ways, Queen to realm and realm to Queen.
Every demon on this battlefield, every fire geyser, every scrap of the living warmth this hell is built on, all of it flows through the woman on the throne, and I am the throne now, I’m the realm’s own heart, and this cold king thinks he’s fighting a bookseller with a torch.
He’s fighting a world.
“You know what the mistake was?” I say, and I stop throwing fire, and I plant my feet.
I reach back, all the way back, through the throne, into the realm, into every single demon fighting and dying at my back, into the whole living furnace of Sanguisca, and I open myself up as the door it all flows through.
“You keep thinking I’m the door. I’m not the door, sweetheart.
I’m the whole house. And you’ve just walked into it. ”
And I don’t throw fire at him.
I pull.
I pull the realm through me. Every demon on that field pours their power up through the bond to their Queen, willing, roaring, a whole legion feeding the throne, and the realm’s own furnace beneath us, three centuries of banked hell, all of it, up through me, focused, aimed, and I don’t make heat to fight his cold, I make more.
More realm than his cold can unmake. A world answering a world.
I become the point of a spear made of an entire realm’s living heart, and I drive it straight into the cold between his stars.
He unmakes the first wave of it. And the second. And then there’s a third, and a fourth, because a realm is deep and its Queen is claimed and its people are fighting for their home. His cold, vast as it is, is one king a long way from his own world, and mine is all around me, endless, home.
And they give it to me. All of them. I feel Krael pour in his fury and his broken arm, feel every demon on that field empty themselves into their Queen without being asked, feel my men blaze up the bond, Luka’s hellfire and Azaan’s storm and Gavriel’s stubborn devotion and Valerian, Valerian spending the last careful drops he swore to hoard, all of it, because this is what a claimed realm is, not one woman with a torch but a whole world with a single point to pour itself through.
I am that point, and I am not tired, because a world does not tire.
I drive it into him again. And again. Wave after wave after wave, more than one cold king can unmake, more than one starved winter of a realm should have left in it, and still it comes, because they want to live, my people, my family, my home, they want to LIVE.
They’ve poured that want into me and made it fire.
His light cracks.
I feel it, the moment his certainty breaks, three centuries of a sealed and harmless realm coming apart in his hands.
I pour the whole of Sanguisca through the door of myself, and I burn the cold between his stars until there’s nothing cold left, until the Sorcerer-King who folded my world into a book comes apart in a silent shatter of white, and the cold goes out of the world.
And his army, leaderless, a world’s-worth of Sorcerers a long way from home who’ve just watched their king unmade by a realm that was supposed to be safely shut in a drawer, breaks.
They don’t die to the last. That’s not what happens, and I’m glad, because I’ve had enough of endings that are total.
They break, and they pull back, the cold white tide receding over the northern horizon the way it came, retreating across the veil to the world they came from.
I feel the Oracle there suddenly at the edge of it, and the Gatekeeper beside her, the two guardians of the fabric of the realms, and I understand that they’re sealing it behind the Sorcerers as they go.
Not folding my realm away. Mending the border.
Restoring the balance. Sanguisca on one side, the Sorcerers on the other, and the veil whole between them, and a Queen on the throne strong enough that they’ll think very hard before they ever try the door again.
The cold recedes. The red rushes back. My legion, thousands of them, hell’s own army, turns as one to the woman standing alone in the middle of the greyed battlefield with a whole realm still pouring through her, and they roar, and it’s not a war-cry this time.
It’s for me.
I sink to my knees in the ash and the returning warmth, wrung out, emptied, alive, and my four men are there before I’ve finished falling, all of them, catching me, holding me. I look up at the horizon where the white light is gone and the red is coming home, and I start, helplessly, to laugh.
“We won,” I say. “We actually won. All of it. The ghost, the ex, the doom cloud. We won.”
“You won,” Valerian says, and his voice breaks on it, three centuries of a sealed realm ending in a bookseller’s laugh. “My Queen. You won.”
“We won,” I insist, because it’s true, because I couldn’t have thrown a single spark without the four of them and the whole realm at my back.
“Now somebody carry me, because I have claimed my throne and evicted a ghost and killed my ex and won a war against a whole other dimension, all in one day, and I’m absolutely not walking home.
A Queen has limits. On foot is off the table. ”
And Luka scoops me up, laughing, wet-eyed, and my realm roars around me, and we go home.