Chapter VII #3
Across the tent, the flap was drawn aside, letting in a shaft of pitiless summer light.
Ariana did not look up from what she was busy with, knowing the messengers from either army had little interest in exchanging pleasantries with a Corrinian soria.
She was considered beneath them, and content enough that they should think so.
Her hands moved rhythmically, braiding together strands of dried meadowstar.
She’d found a few withering stalks of the beloved plant while out scouring the battlefield for survivors, and had collected whatever she could.
The barrenness of the fields pricked her, though surely elsewhere, Corrin remained green and lively.
Still, looking at the blighted earth, she could not help striving to save some part of it.
A shadow cut across her, blotting out the sun.
“What is that?” a harsh, dry voice asked. Ariana peered up but could not make out the face of the man addressing her. All she could see was the Caervallin blade he wore, and that he was armored. The rest of him was cast into silhouette by the brilliant sun.
“Meadowstar,” she answered quietly. “A curative we value greatly. I thought I might—”
Casually, the man reached out and plucked the wreath from Ariana’s hand. He let it fall, and ground it beneath the heel of one boot.
“A curative? There will be no cure for Corrin in the coming days.”
Ariana fell silent. She’d learned it was the wisest course when faced with hostility or disdain from the armies still inhabiting her land.
“Do you know who I am?” the man asked. “You would not remain seated or address me so insolently if you did.”
“Forgive me,” Ariana said, looking down at the seeds of meadowstar now scattered across the hospital tent’s packed earth floor.
She could gather them up later, she thought.
It would be no trouble to sift them from the soil and store them in a leather pouch.
Really, she ought to have done so in the first place, rather than strive to save the plant entirely.
“I’ve been weak with fever; I mean no disrespect.
Your men are to the northward side of the aisle. North for your home.”
“I am the north,” the dry voice said, and the man standing over her shifted so that the light gilded his profile.
He wore a crown of iron and the bear crest on his shoulder.
Ariana had never seen him to know him, but she’d heard Afon described.
How he strode across the battlefield with a greatsword notched and pitted by the bones of those he slew.
How even witchsmoke seemed unable to harm him.
How in the battle’s aftermath, he gutted three of Lyria’s sorias, who dared to question his treatment of recovering Caervallin soldiers.
Afon had strung the women’s kirtles up like standards and dumped their naked bodies among his own dead.
Ariana had known them—Viana, Ylena, and Inora.
Viana had danced her prayers to Lyria, moving like the divine.
Ylena had been their most talented herbalist, white-haired and wrinkled, with decades of knowledge to draw upon.
And Inora had been the youngest of them, barely out of childhood, but sweet-voiced and willing.
Matria Serafine had not so much as made a complaint about their deaths.
It was not the Lyrien way—they were all to understand that martyrdom in the cause of peace might come at any moment.
Her whole life, Ariana had been taught to crave a sword and the opportunity to become a perfect sacrifice. Now, when she turned inward, she found only resistance to the idea of giving this hateful warlord pleasure in any way, and surely he took his pleasure in the suffering and fear of others.
“Forgive me, my lord,” Ariana said, remaining seated. “I did not recognize you.”
Afon let out a disgusted snort. “You know me now. So kneel.”
There was anger radiating off him in waves. Ariana could not have caused such bitter fury, and yet it all centered implacably on her. In that moment, she saw her death.
Corrin had no predators to speak of. An occasional gorhawk came down on drafts of wind to seize sheep, but for the most part, it was a gentle land.
Only once before that summer had Ariana witnessed the work of a creature bent on destruction.
A mountain cat had somehow found its way into the valley and, crazed with the unexpected abundance it found there, killed many of the Corrinians’ yearling horses and young kine.
The cat had not eaten most of them, either.
It disemboweled its prey for amusement, devouring the fallen animals’ tongues and eyes and nothing more.
Matria Serafine was forced to send a missive to Gileta and have a Silithien soria dispatched to poison the beast.
Ariana could remember the way the slain animals looked, smeared with blood, their faces twisted in pain and bewilderment.
She remembered the body of the cat, too, sleek and muscled and frightening even in death.
Its incisors had been the length of her hand, and somehow, there was still fire in its lifeless eyes.
She understood now how Corrin’s sweet, soft weanlings must have felt when confronted and toyed with by that animal.
“No,” Ariana said softly, and smiled despite the fear singing through her veins. “I will not kneel.”
Afon reached down as if to force her to her knees, but at the last moment, he seized Ariana by the throat.
His gauntleted grip bruised into her flesh, and he hauled her to her feet, holding her high enough that she must stand on her toes to snatch each gasping breath.
The Caervallin king’s eyes fixed on her, and they were full of raw fire, just as the cat’s had been.
His gaze was every bit as animal and dispassionate—he was not harming Ariana because of who she was, but because it was his instinct and his nature.
Ariana’s field of view narrowed until all she could see was Afon’s livid face, swimming in a sea of red. She would die here, on Corrin’s ruined ground, like one of the soldiers or like her sisters who had displeased Caervallion’s fearsome king.
“Beg for your life, or for your death,” Afon rasped.
“Which you choose doesn’t concern me. But I want to hear you plead.
The old woman from your coward’s house screamed, you know, when I spilled her guts onto the earth, and the girl child pissed herself, both of them praying to be martyred quickly.
I chose for them to linger, so beg me for the mercy they never saw. ”
In that moment, Ariana found what was at her very core.
At the deepest heart of her, there was a star.
It had flooded her with remote silver light all her life, but now, she came to the end of herself and saw it for what it truly was.
Not an insignificant, yielding thing, but a pulsing, wheeling globe of flame that burned hot enough to destroy any lesser fire.
“No,” Ariana managed to get out, even as the world faded into darkness around her. “I will… never… beg… for you.”
When he cast her aside, the impact jolted Ariana back into wakefulness and life.
She gasped and coughed, sucking in breath after breath of agonizing air, and where everything had faded before, the world was now supersaturated, her senses painfully overtuned.
The light was too bright on the shapes of men struggling above her, the sound of their muffled grunts and snarls too loud, the soil and fallen seeds beneath her like sandpaper.
Ariana watched, cowering, as a newcomer to the hospital tent managed to pin Afon’s arms and draw the foreign king’s own knife.
Pitilessly, he scored the blade across Afon’s face, so that blood flowed down.
It was not a killing blow—Ariana knew better after spending weeks on the fringes of a battlefield.
It was more akin to a goddess mark, something that must be worn on the flesh always from that point on, as a reminder and an admonition.
“Stop!” Ariana managed to choke out as the newcomer fitted the blade to the hollow of Afon’s throat. The Caervallin king’s eyes were wild with panic, as Ariana’s own must have been only moments ago.
Scrambling to her feet, Ariana threw herself forward and tugged at the newcomer’s arm, heedless of the way the men still struggled.
“Let him go,” she pleaded, in a voice as dry and damaged as Afon’s own. “We’ve had enough killing here. Don’t dishonor Corrin with another death.”
“He would have throttled you needlessly,” the stranger said. “You offered him no insult. Did him good rather than harm. And you do not stand between him and any sort of benefit. He had no grounds on which to hurt you, but would have done it for cruelty’s sake alone. For that, he ought to die.”
Ariana felt dizzy with the darkness suffusing the tent. Oh, the sun still shone dazzlingly bright, and she was no longer on the verge of losing her senses. But she felt a darkness of the spirit, thick and menacing as a thunderous night without moon or stars.
Like her goddess, Ariana was made to be light in the dark, no matter how deep it grew.
“I beg you,” she said, sinking to her knees without a thought this time. “I want no claim over his life. Let him be. He will take his men and go.”
For an instant, something unfamiliar and momentous passed between her and the stranger. Afon’s eyes were pits of seething darkness, but the stranger’s gray gaze pierced Ariana’s, and she found longing and admiration there.
“You don’t know what you’re asking me,” the newcomer said, his words low, for Ariana only.
“Please,” she whispered. “Not here. Not now.”