50. Tabitha
Tabitha
You don’t get to just win a war and go to bed. I learn that the hard way, in the hours after, when the cold’s gone and the red’s come home and there’s nothing left to fight, because that’s when the cost of it all comes due.
The battlefield below my walls is a ruin.
Grey dead ground where the Sorcerers passed, littered with the ash of my subjects and the stranger, colder nothing the enemy left when they were unmade.
My legion, what’s left of it, moves across it slow, gathering the wounded, and I go down into it because a Queen who fights at the front doesn’t get to swan off to a hot bath while her people bleed.
I find Krael sitting against a broken spire, half his arm turned to dead grey stone, grinning through a face full of blood.
“My Queen.” He tries to rise and I put a hand on his good shoulder and press him back down.
“Sit, you enormous idiot. You’ve had your arm turned to rock.”
“Worth it.” He looks out over the ruined field, over the retreating stain of white on the northern horizon, and his ruined face goes something like reverent.
“Three hundred years I waited for a sovereign. I’d near given up.
Thought the old Queen was the last real one, and she died, and we all got shut in a book.
And I thought, that’s it, that’s the end of it, no one’s coming.
” He looks up at me. “And then a bookseller in stupid shoes walked into hell and set a Sorcerer-King on fire with the whole realm at her back. I’d wait three hundred more for that. I’d wait forever.”
My throat goes tight. “The arm. Can it be healed?”
“Reckon your warlock could manage it, once he’s not the colour of a corpse himself.” He flexes the stone fingers, grimacing. “And if not, well. I’ve got another. A one-armed war-leader’s still a war-leader. I’ll serve you one-armed and glad of it.”
“You’ll serve me with two arms,” I say, “because I’ll have Valerian fix it if it’s the last working he does. You held my flank. You drove through when I opened the hole. We don’t win today without you, Krael. I don’t forget that.”
He bows his great tusked head, and something passes between us that I don’t have a word for, the thing between a Queen and the first subject who ever knelt to her because he wanted to and not because a bond made him.
“Get some rest, Krael,” I tell him. “That’s a decree too.”
“Queens don’t fetch water for their war-leaders,” he grumbles, watching me press a cup into his good hand anyway. “It isn’t done.”
“This one does. New management.” I make him drink it. “You waited three hundred years. You can let me carry a cup for one night.”
He drinks, and mutters something in the old tongue that I don’t understand, but the way he says it, gruff and wet-eyed, tells me it’s the closest a creature like Krael comes to a blessing.
I spend the rest of that long night in the ruin of my own courtyard, not on a throne, not in a bath, but on my knees in the ash beside my wounded, doing what little I can.
It turns out being a claimed Queen means the realm’s power runs through me both ways, and if I lay my hands on a dying demon and pour a little of that warmth back into him, some of them mend.
Not all. I lose some anyway, hold their clawed hands while they go grey, and it guts me every time, because they died for me, for a bookseller who fell through a book a year ago and didn’t know any of them existed.
My men find me near dawn, still at it, filthy and hollow-eyed and shaking.
“That’s enough now,” Luka says gently, crouching beside me. “Kitty cat. You’ve been at this for hours. You’re empty. Let the healers take the rest.”
“A few more.”
“Tabby.” Valerian, grey but upright, kneels on my other side and takes my ash-blackened hands in his.
“You cannot pour out what you haven’t got.
You saved the realm today. Let the realm carry itself for one night.
That’s what it’s for. That’s what they’re for.
” He nods at the demons moving across the field, tending their own.
“You don’t have to hold all of it alone anymore.
That’s rather the point of finally having a throne. ”
I look at him. At Luka. At Azaan hauling wounded onto litters, at Gavriel standing watch over all of us even now, arm still hanging useless from the King’s cold. I feel the truth of it settle in me, warm under the grief.
I’m not alone. Not the frightened bookseller crying in a bookshop, not the vessel, not the countdown. I’ve got a realm. I’ve got a family. I’ve got four men and a one-armed war-leader and a whole legion of the dark who’d wait forever for me.
“Okay,” I say, and let Luka pull me up. “Okay. A bath, and a bed, and about a hundred years of sleep. And then.” I look out at my battered, bloody, beloved kingdom, warm and red and free under a mending sky.
“And then we build something worth all this dying. A realm that’s more than a hellscape people trek across on foot. My realm.”
“Your realm,” Valerian agrees quietly.
And for the first time, saying it, I don’t feel like I’m borrowing the words. I feel like I’ve earned every letter.