Orloff's Rebellion

The news arrived while she was learning to tie her own boots.

It was a small, absurd, domestic skill, one of the many that Berylla had taken away from her and returned only after some firm negotiation. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in her shirtsleeves, with her tongue between her teeth, wrestling a stubborn lace through its eyelet, when the door crashed open and Crane strode in with a courier at his heels. The courier was a boy of perhaps sixteen, gray with dust and shaking with fatigue. His tunic bore the blue snowflake of the Orloff garrison. There was a long fresh gash across his forehead, and he stood swaying in the middle of the carpet as if the floor were a deck.

"Majesty," said Crane. "Forgive the intrusion."

Kieran looked up from the window. He had been standing there since dawn, looking out at the northern hills, as he did most mornings now. His face did not change.

"Say it."

"Orloff," said the boy hoarsely. "Duke Orloff. He's raised the banner. Three days ago, at the keep at Harrowmere. Six thousand men, Majesty, and more coming in. The northern garrisons have gone over to him, all but two. He has declared... he has declared that the Throne is in the hands of a demon, and that all true sons of the Church are released from their oath."

"Released by whom?"

"By the Cathedral, Majesty." The boy swallowed. "There was a letter. With the Holy Father's seal. It was read out in the yard before the whole garrison."

A long silence.

"Of course there was," said Kieran, softly.

Solaia put down her boot.

"What do they have?" she asked.

The boy turned his bloodshot eyes on her. He did not seem to know what to do with her presence. He bowed awkwardly, and the movement made him sway.

"Lady, I—Your Majesty. Forgive me. I'm not... they have the Holy Lances, Majesty." His voice dropped. "A hundred of them, from the Cathedral armory. Silver-shafted. They glow. They say the tip's been dipped in the Light."

"The what?" said Crane sharply.

"The Light, Commander. They say it burns a dragon to the bone."

Kieran turned from the window.

"Then," said the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom, in a voice of perfect courtesy, "we must be sure to go and see for ourselves."

…

She had never seen him ride to war.

She had seen him in the tower, and the council, and the garden among the leeks, and she had thought she knew what he was. Now she watched him walk across the courtyard in black plate with his visor up, and saw that she had known one-third of it. The man who walked through the ranks of the Black Guard with a dozen words for every captain was a stranger. He moved like a blade being drawn. The soldiers fell silent as he passed, and when he lifted a hand, ten thousand men stirred together like a field of wheat.

"You do not have to come," he said, quietly, as they reached the foot of Gron's ramp.

"I'm coming."

"It will be ugly."

"I know."

"I am not asking you to fight. I would not, if I could prevent it." His eyes searched her face. "But the Lances are the Light. If they are as the boy says, then Gron cannot fly against them. He will burn."

"Not if I'm there."

"Solaia—"

"The fire knows me." She said it gently, but without room for argument. "Marenne's lamp knelt. The collars cooled. I don't know why, but I know that it's true, and I'm not going to sit in a palace and wait for you to find out."

His jaw worked. He looked as if he would say a great deal. In the end he only reached up and tucked a stray lock of her hair behind her ear, and his fingers lingered at her temple.

"The ring stays in my pocket," he said. "I will not put it on you unless you ask."

"Thank you."

"Do not thank me." His mouth twisted. "I should like very much to never be thanked again for something I should have done at the beginning."

Gron rose into the morning with a long, thrilling roar, and the Imperial army began to move.

…

Harrowmere was a gray fortress on a gray hill.

It rose out of a flat, bleak plain of heather and standing water, a great square keep with four round towers and a curtain wall forty feet high. From the air it looked like a toy. As they came in over the marsh in the early afternoon, with Crane's battalions strung out in a long dark column far behind them, she saw the banners on the walls: the blue snowflake of Orloff, and beneath it, new and white and very bright, the silver circle of the Church.

The yard was full of men.

She had never seen so many. Six thousand, the boy had said, and she had not understood the number. They stood in ranks along the battlements, in the courtyard, in the shadow of the gate: pikemen, archers, knights in blue, a ragged crowd of priests in white. They were looking up. She could see their faces tilt, row on row, small and pale as coins, as the great scarlet shadow slid over the wall.

And in the center of the yard, on a raised platform, stood a hundred men in white tabards with spears.

They were tall spears. They were silver from the point to the butt, long as a man and a half, and along the length of every shaft ran a thin pale line that glowed. Not a bright light. A soft, steady, clean one, the color of milk. She had seen it before. In Marenne's palm. In the lamps of a thousand shrines. In the great tank beneath the Cathedral that Hester's trembling voice had described to her in the back room of the Archive.

It's mine, she thought, with a sudden shocking clarity. They're holding my fire.

"Gron," said Kieran, behind her, very low. "Back. We are too close."

No, said the dragon.

She felt it in her bones, like a bell: a vast calm refusal. He was not afraid. He was not even angry. His wings drove down, once, twice, and he stooped, with a long glide that took them straight over the wall, so low she could see the faces of the men in the yard, the open mouths, the white-ringed eyes.

"Fire!" someone screamed. "Fire the Lances! Now!"

A hundred spears came up.

She stood in the stirrups. She did not think. She had not decided what to do. She only knew that the white light on the silver shafts was drawn toward her, like iron to a lodestone, and that she could feel it, a hundred threads of it, thin and sweet and homesick, tugging at her heart. She flung out both hands.

Come, she said, in the old tongue.

Nothing happened for the space of a breath.

Then every Lance in the yard went dark.

It was as though a great hand had snuffed them. One moment they burned, a hundred pale stars; the next, they were only silver rods, dull and dead in the soldiers' hands. The light had not gone out. It had left. She saw it go: a hundred threads of white, drawn up out of the spears in a single shimmering stream, and running up through the air in a long curve to settle in her open palms.

It was warm. It was dear. It sank into her skin, and was hers.

There was a silence in the yard like the silence after a thunderclap. A hundred men with dead spears in their hands looked up, and up, at the girl on the dragon's back, with white fire running in her veins.

"Witch!" cried a priest. "Witch! The Demon-Queen—"

She did not hear what else he said.

…

It was not a battle. She would tell herself that afterward, many times. It had been a slaughter, and she was the one who did it.

The first volley of arrows went up in a black cloud. They never reached her. The air about Gron's flanks rippled and shone, and the shafts turned to ash and fell like snow. A second volley. A third. Behind the walls, a catapult groaned and loosed a boulder the size of a cart. Kieran, behind her, put out a hand without a word, and the stone burst in the air into a thousand pebbles of black glass.

Then the ranks broke.

They broke in a single wave, like surf on a rock. Men were running. Men were screaming, pushing, trampling one another in the yard. A knight in blue plate went down under a stampede of his own pikemen. A priest dropped to his knees in the mud with his hands over his head and began to babble a prayer. At the gate, someone had gotten the great doors open and was waving frantically at the dragon, a white cloth tied to a spear.

Enough, she thought. They're beaten. They're surrendering.

But the fire in her would not stop.

It had been so long caged. It poured through her, white and fierce and glad, and she could not hold it. It spilled out of her hands in a long ribbon and struck the wall of the keep. The wall did not burn. It melted. Forty feet of dressed stone slumped like wax, and ran down the slope in a glowing river. A tower leaned, and fell. Men ran from it, shrieking, and she saw one of them, a boy no older than the courier, with his hair on fire and his mouth open, tumble in the slag and not rise.

"Solaia!"

She heard her name from very far away.

"Solaia! Stop!"

Arms went around her from behind. A hard black breastplate, a familiar heartbeat. Kieran caught her wrists and pulled them down against her chest, hard, so hard it hurt, and the fire leapt and snarled and tried to turn on him, and did not. It flowed over his armor in a pale shining sheet, and went into the plate like water into sand.

"Enough," he said in her ear. "Enough, love. It is over. It is over."

The white light dimmed.

It dimmed slowly, like a lamp being turned down. She stood in the saddle with her hands pinned to her ribs, and the world came back in pieces: the stench of burning, the cries, the heat on her face. Below her, the yard was a ruin. A smoking hole in the north wall. Bodies, some moving, some not. A hundred silver spears scattered in the mud, dull as lead.

"What did I do?" she whispered.

"You won."

"Kieran. There was a boy."

"I saw."

"He was sixteen." She heard her voice break. "I killed him. I didn't mean to. I couldn't stop it. I—" She twisted in his arms and looked up at his face. It was white and set and entirely without reproach. "It wanted to. It was so happy."

"I know."

"It was happy to do it."

"I know." He held her. "I know, my love. I know what that is."

And there on the dragon's back, in the smoke, above the ruins of Harrowmere, she began to shake.

…

They found Duke Orloff in the chapel, kneeling at the altar with his sword laid across his knees.

He had not run. When the Black Guard broke the doors, he lifted his gray head and looked at them with a kind of dazed, empty calm, and handed over his blade without a word. They took him out in chains. His daughter was not with him. The servants said that she had left the keep three days before, in the night, with two grooms and a sealed letter, bound for the north. No one knew where.

There was one other survivor.

He lay at the foot of the chapel steps with a spear-shaft through his chest, a thin man in a white surcoat, with a priest's gray cord at his waist. He had been dragged there by someone who had meant to save him. His eyes were open. They fixed on Solaia as she came in, and the pale lips began to move.

She knelt.

"Don't," she said. "Don't speak. We'll fetch—"

"My lady." It was barely a breath. "The Holy Father. He sent me. To see if you'd... if the Light would..."

"Hush."

"He said you'd kill them all. That it would prove." A bubble of red rose at the corner of his mouth. "He doesn't want the Duke to win. He wants you to... to show the world. He wants you angry. Afraid."

"Why?"

The dying man's eyes slid sideways, past her shoulder. To the tall figure of the Emperor, standing in the doorway with his helmet under his arm.

"Because he already has what he needs," whispered the priest. "From... him. The Ridge. The Emperor... the Emperor already gave his word."

"What word?" said Solaia.

But the light had gone from the pale eyes. His head fell back on the stone, and his hand, which had been clutching her sleeve, loosened and slid away.

She stayed on her knees for a long moment, looking at the dead man's face. Then she looked up.

Kieran had not moved from the doorway. The wind from the broken wall stirred his hair. His face in the gray light was perfectly composed, perfectly empty, and there was no expression on it at all.

"He was delirious," said the Emperor.

"Yes," said Solaia.

She stood up, and brushed the dust from her knees, and walked past him out into the ruined court. She did not look back. And behind her, in the chapel, in the long silence, the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom stood alone beside a dead priest with the folded paper in his coat feeling suddenly like a block of ice against his heart.