We’ll Have to Fix the Gate #3
Esme leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.
Song’s balls, she hated this fucking place.
She missed Mina, missed her cooking, the way she cut beans.
Ojalla, how in love did Esme have to be to miss the cut on the woman’s vegetables?
She only had time to send messages to the kitchens and the Lap of Virya to ask if anyone had been injured in the quake.
Thankfully, Ojalla must have held up the buildings with Her bare hands.
Neither the Lap nor the castle sustained any serious injuries, nor did their inhabitants.
In a perfect world, Esme would be home watching Mina ladle dinner out while Esme read Gia’s history lessons over her shoulder and pointed out all the fake parts. Instead, she leaned on this damn wall.
She needed sleep. She’d hate everything less when she was asleep. But just as she settled into a standing nap, Isobel’s mind-shredding voice made her flinch.
“Although we all mourn our beloved King Turiel,” she said—at which the crowd responded with the May he conquer in the Underworld, which made Esme’s eye twitch—“it is time to look forward. To my right sits Balthazar Joh’el, royal general of the Scourge, and to my left sits Prince Janos of the Lake.
One will become your king, the supreme sovereign of the civilized world, and lead Micrea into a glorious golden age.
The other will lay down his life for our kingdom. ”
Esme leaned forward. It was one thing for Urias to suggest that this competition may end in blood. It was another for Isobel, its architect, to confirm it.
“As you may have read,” Isobel continued, glancing down as if to consult the spell on her own throat, “there shall be three trials for the throne. The first shall take place during Wallain, the festival of summer, which will be upon us one week from now.
“The week after, champions from across the world will battle in the Valosia. The heirs will join this sacred competition for their second trial,” Isobel announced to the glee of her crowd.
The Valosia, a royally commissioned bloodbath where nobles dragged their strongest prisoners to the city to fight for the honor of citizenship, took place every five years.
Esme hadn’t even remembered it was a festival year until now.
“The surviving heir, should he win the support of his Wraiths in the third trial, will be crowned your Valos-blessed King of Roses, Lord of Amaris and the Lake!”
The surviving heir… The will had given the Wraiths the power to decide the winner of the third trial, but obviously Isobel didn’t intend to let both men live long enough to give them a choice.
Esme locked eyes with Isobel up on the stage, and the queen raised her goblet and guzzled the whole thing, a toast to stolen choices.
Bony, fleshless fingers wrapped around their knife…
Esme knocked her head against the wall. She should have been used to losing, to sitting back and letting some cunt in a crown decide her future, like they always did. But something foreign blazed up her throat. Not the will, but something deeper, hotter, leaping up from her gut.
Anger. A snarling creature that wanted to rip Esme’s choice back from Isobel with its teeth.
It had been smoldering in her since the funeral, since drowning that boat filled with food and culture and jewels.
Anger wanted to march into the Wyvern and pull it out with her bare hands and clothe every back, fill every belly, and load up every head she could.
Anger burned so hot that Esme almost stumbled sideways, her muscles itching to move.
Usually, the Bond kept her stiff as a corpse.
There was nothing she could do, so she ignored the need to try.
Anger thawed her to action.
Action to do what, though? Fix this place?
She scoffed at the thought before remembering that morning in the temple, wrapping her shadows around crumbling chaos and righting it her way.
Rebuilding, redistributing, relocating. The will made sure that the temple was returned to the condition it had been in before the earthquake, but what if Esme could take hold of this kingdom, and not just return it back to the shit show it once was but make it something better?
Esme’s eyes found Bal and, when she steeled herself for the torture of his likeness, Janos. The general appeared too terrified to drink his wine, and the prince looked like he might throw up into his. Her options were slim, but she had options.
If she could just get the right man on the throne, this life wouldn’t be so painful. Maybe she could even make it good.
Why escape to Uhmer for that village? Maybe she could build one here. Maybe there was a place for her and Mina and Gia. Maybe there was a place for loced hair, for flatbreads, for screaming to gods and dancing in their light. Maybe she just had to carve it out.
Maybe escape was not freedom. Maybe the only way out was through. And if Isobel wanted to steal her shovel, then Esme would drop to her knees and dig until her nails bled, until the bones of her fingers shattered, until all she had left to fight with were the fangs in her mouth.
Because Esme had survived Micrea for longer than anyone in this room had thrived in it. She’d bled for it, she bargained for it, she built it.
She would plunge this country into the flame of her anger and forge it anew because it was hers.