47. Tabitha
Tabitha
I’ve seen the scout. I thought I was ready for the army.
I wasn’t ready for the army.
They come over the northern horizon like a tide of cold light, rank on rank on rank of them, robed and hovering and terrible, and where they pass the realm dies, the red soil greying, the fires guttering out, the whole living warmth of Sanguisca frosting over and cracking.
Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. A world’s worth, Valerian said, and he wasn’t exaggerating, the Sorcerers don’t do things by halves.
They folded a whole realm into a book once.
Now they’ve come to make sure it never opens again, and they’ve brought enough cold white power to unmake everything I’ve bled for.
And behind me, my realm answers its Queen.
That’s the thing claiming the throne did that I didn’t fully understand until this moment.
I stand on the wall of my Palace and I feel them at my back, all of them, every demon in Sanguisca, high and low, the whole realm turned towards its sovereign and armed and waiting.
They pour out of the shadows, out of the wastes, out of the fortresses and the groves, a legion of the dark, and not one of them comes for me now.
They come to me. They range themselves below my walls, thousands of them, an army of hell that recognises its Queen at last, and they look up at me on the wall with my four men beside me, and they wait for the word.
“Well,” I say, and my voice carries the way a Queen’s voice carries when the realm wants it to.
“That’s a lot of ghosts come to switch us off.
” I look out at the cold white tide. “They folded us into a book once. They think they’ll do it again.
They think there’s nothing here but monsters and a bookseller playing at Queen.
” I let my HellCat rise, gold and hot, and my fire runs up both arms and lights the whole wall.
“Let’s show them what a claimed realm does when someone comes for its home. ”
And my legion of hell roars, thousands strong, and it’s the most frightening and the most glorious sound I’ve ever heard. The two armies crash together below my walls.
The sound of it is like nothing on Earth, nothing in any story I ever shelved in that little bookshop a lifetime ago.
The scream of cold light meeting hellfire.
The shriek of demons and the awful silence of the Sorcerers, who make no sound at all as they unmake, which is worse, so much worse, than any war-cry.
Two worlds meeting on the ash of mine, heat against cold, desire against order, everything I’ve come to love against a thing that thinks love itself is a wound to be closed.
And I stand on my wall above it, the HellCat Queen with fire running up both arms, and I feel the whole of it flow through me, every death and every blow, because that’s what a claimed Queen is now, I’m learning, in the worst possible classroom.
I don’t just rule this realm. I feel it.
Every demon that dies below me, I feel go out, like a candle pinched between my own fingers.
It’s unbearable. It’s mine to bear. So I bear it.
It’s carnage. There’s no pretty way to write a war and I’m not going to try.
The Sorcerers’ cold light unmakes whatever it touches, and my demons die by the score, greyed and cracked and gone.
But my demons are legion, and they’re fighting for their home, and they have something the Sorcerers have never once had to reckon with in three centuries of certainty that this realm was safely shut in a drawer.
They have a Queen who fights at the front.
And they have a general. He shoulders up out of the legion before I’ve given a single order, a demon the size of a barn door, grey-skinned, tusked, one eye gone milky over an old scar, and he drops to a knee below my wall so hard the ground shakes.
“Krael,” he rumbles, in a voice like rocks in a bucket. “War-leader of the eastern wastes, my Queen. Three hundred years I’ve waited for a sovereign to serve. Give me the word and my legion is yours to spend.”
“Krael.” I look down at this enormous, scarred, ancient thing kneeling in the dirt for me, and something in me sits up straight.
“I don’t want to spend you. I want to win with you.
Hold the flanks, keep them off my subjects where you can, and when I open a hole in that cold tide, you drive through it. Can you do that?”
His ruined face splits in a grin full of tusks.
“For a Queen who says win with you and not spend you? I can do anything, little sovereign.” He rises, hefts a hammer the size of me, and bellows an order in the old demon tongue, and half the legion wheels to his voice like they’ve been waiting three centuries to be told where to stand.
They have.
So I don’t stay on the wall. Of course I don’t.
I never could, and now I don’t have to, because I’m whole and nine-lived and claimed and my family’s beside me.
We go down into it together, the five of us, the tip of the spear, Krael’s legion at our flanks, and I burn a path through the cold white with gold fire.
The realm’s power pours through me endless, and my men fight around me the way they were always meant to.
Luka, a mountain of hellfire panther, tearing Sorcerers out of the air.
Azaan aloft on his storm, matching their hovering with his own, turning their cold light back on them with walls of wind.
Gavriel, freed at last, fighting without the weight of my dying on him, a golden shield and a black ax carving a hole in the tide, and God, he fights lighter now, I can see it, a man who finally gets to risk only his own life.
And Valerian, half a husk still but pouring violet death into everything cold that comes near me, my strategist, my blood-mage, my arse-face.
And me. I stop holding anything back. There’s no ghost to be careful of anymore, no fraying to fear, no lives to hoard. I let the whole of it out, the HellCat, the throne, the realm, a thousand years of a claimed Queen’s inheritance, and I burn.
The battle breaks into pieces the way battles do, no shape to it, just moment after moment.
A Sorcerer’s cold light lances for my back and Gavriel’s shield is there before I’ve even felt the chill, the bolt sliding off gold.
A wall of them advances in a line, unmaking everything in front of them, and Azaan drops out of his storm and rips the air from around their hoods so they falter.
Luka and I pour fire into the gap. Krael’s legion holds the eastern flank, his hammer rising and falling, his voice bellowing the old tongue over the screams, and for a while, a good while, we’re winning.
Then the cold takes Krael’s second, a lieutenant whose name I never learn, greyed to ash mid-swing, and Krael roars and overreaches and takes a bolt to the shoulder that turns half his arm to dead grey stone.
He doesn’t fall. He switches the hammer to his good hand and keeps swinging, one-armed, grinning through the pain, because that’s what my subjects do now, they get up, they keep going, they’ve caught it off their Queen.
I burn a Sorcerer off his back and he bellows a laugh at me through blood and we keep fighting.
But there are so many of them. That’s the thing.
We fight for what feels like hours, and for every Sorcerer we unmake, three more come over the horizon.
My legion thins, and even the realm’s endless power runs through a Queen who’s only one woman, and slowly, terribly, we start to lose ground.
They push us back towards the Palace. The cold spreads. The red dies.
“There are too many!” Azaan shouts down from his storm, grey-faced. “We’re holding, but we can’t win a war of numbers, they’ve got a world to spend and we’ve got one realm!”
He’s right. I can feel it. We can bleed them for days and they’ll still have more. My realm has an edge, a limit, and theirs, apparently, doesn’t.
And then, across the battlefield, the cold white tide parts, and I feel it before I see it, the way you feel the biggest wave coming.
Something rises up out of the back of their army, taller than the rest, colder, brighter, so cold it hurts to look at, a Sorcerer that makes the others look like candles next to a sun.
Their king. The one who folded us into a book three centuries ago. The one who’s come to do it again.
And he looks across the whole screaming battlefield, over all of it, and he finds me, the Queen, the one thing that matters, the one death that ends the realm for good.
And he comes for me.