The Empire of Ash

The map covered the whole of the table, and it took her an hour to understand that she was looking at the world.

It was a good map. The Ashborn cartographers had labored over it for a century, and their work was fine and dense and exact, in black ink on pale vellum, with the mountains drawn as small hatched triangles and the rivers as thin blue threads. The coastlines were clean. The roads were red. And across the whole width of it, from the northern sea to the southern desert, from the grey cliffs of the west to the burned and broken eastern marches, there lay a single enormous word, in black letters a hand high, written over every border and every name.

ASH.

"It is the whole of it," said Teodra, behind her. "There is nothing else left."

Solaia did not turn. She stood at the head of the long table in the council room of Kessavar, in a borrowed gray gown that was too short at the wrist, with both hands flat on the vellum and her hair still damp from the bath. Night had come down outside. A fire burned in the hearth. On the settle by the window Veyran lay curled in a nest of furs, fast asleep, with his wings folded over him like a blanket and an empty bowl of stew beside his head. He had eaten four helpings. Gron had eaten a goat.

"When did it begin?" she said.

"After the Fortress fell. In the first year." Teodra came to stand at her shoulder. She laid a gnarled finger on the map, on a small black mark in the center of the continent: a ridge, a tower, a crown. "He rose from the ash. That's what the old accounts say. The Emperor Kieran Vael Aldren, last of his line. Your man."

"He isn't my man."

"No, Majesty." A careful pause. "Forgive me."

She almost laughed. "Don't. I don't know what he is."

"He is the Black Emperor. The Ash King. The Lord of the Bone Palace." The finger moved, slowly. "He took the north in the third year, and the western provinces in the tenth. The great Houses fell one by one. The Church lasted longer, but it was a shadow of itself, and when he had finished with it, it was a shell. By the hundredth year he held every city between here and the sea."

"And the Thrones?"

Teodra was silent.

"The Seven Thrones of the Sky," said Solaia. "The seats of the Queens and Kings. The old aeries. I felt them, when I flew in. I felt for them, and there was nothing. Where are they?"

"Broken, Majesty."

"All of them?"

"All but one." The Wardmother's voice was low. "The first he found was in the high Aldwald, in the south, a ring of standing stones on a hill. A great white seat, with wings carved on the arms. They say he stood in front of it for three days. Then he went forward, and he laid his hand on it, and it cracked from top to base." She drew a breath. "He broke the next in the spring. And the next. It took him nine years to find them all."

"Why?"

"No one knows. Some say it was malice. Some say he was looking for something inside." The old woman shook her head. "The scholars of the Hold have debated it for centuries. The best guess is that he was trying to open the Veil."

"By breaking the thrones."

"By breaking whatever might be a door." Teodra's mouth twisted. "He was not thorough in his methods."

…

She read for hours.

The Ashborn kept their records well. They had a library cut into the rock of the volcano, three tiers deep, and an archivist named Ferren who had gone gray and half-blind among the vellum and was visibly overwhelmed at the prospect of showing his treasures to the Queen. He brought them in armfuls. He laid them on the table in careful stacks, and stood wringing his hands while she turned the pages. There were chronicles and ledgers. There were maps and census-rolls, orders of battle, a thousand letters smuggled out of the Bone Palace in the hems of servants' cloaks.

It was not a pleasant history.

She had expected cruelty. She had come braced for it, knowing the shape of the thing that had been in his chest, knowing what the Hollow could do. But she was not ready for the dry, flat, accumulated weight of it. Nine hundred years of it. The towns, the cities, the harvests burned in the field. The scholars questioned and left to die. The Cardinal who had written him a letter. The village of Marrow Cross, where four thousand had perished in a single night. The great Lowland dikes, broken on his order in the nineteenth year, so that the sea came in over a thousand farms.

She read the numbers. They went on and on.

Nine million, three hundred thousand, said the last page of the last ledger, in a neat clerk's hand. By the Archive's best reckoning. The total may be higher.

She closed the book.

She sat quite still with her hands on the cover. The fire had burned low. Ferren had crept out, after a time, with a murmured excuse. Teodra remained, silent, patient, at the end of the table, her face in shadow.

"He did this," said Solaia.

"Yes, Majesty."

"All of it."

"The Hollow did the most. But he was in the room." The Wardmother spoke carefully. "I have been thinking, these last years, about what I should say if you asked me. I find I have nothing. He was a man who lost someone, and then he lost himself. It is the oldest story in the world. I do not think it is an excuse. I do not think it is not one."

"No."

"My people loathe him. My great-grandmother lost three children to his Guard. I lost a brother to a famine he made." Teodra's hands tightened on the arms of her chair. "But I have read his letters. The ones he sent us, in the first decade, when he thought we'd help him. He asked Kessa's heirs for forgiveness. In his own hand. And in the margin of every one he wrote the same line."

"What line?"

"Is she there?"

Solaia closed her eyes.

…

"There is one more thing."

Teodra had risen. She went to the great iron-bound chest that stood beneath the window, and drew a key from her belt, and knelt. The lock turned stiffly. She lifted the lid, and rummaged, and brought out a single sheet of paper, wrapped in a square of oiled cloth, and brought it back to the table with the care of a woman carrying a lamp.

"I did not wish to show you at once. It seemed cruel."

"What is it?"

"An edict." She unfolded the cloth. "Issued in the first year of his rule. It was never repealed."

Solaia took it.

It was a plain sheet of cream vellum, a foot long, written in a bold black hand she knew. She had seen it on a hundred letters. It was cramped, quick, and slightly slanted, with long tails on the gs. At the top was the seal: a black dragon on a field of ash, the arms of the Empire. Below, in four short lines of text, there ran a command.

By Order of the Emperor.

The name Solaia shall not be spoken in the lands of the Empire.

Nor the titles Vraelyra, Queen of the Sky, or Rider of Obsyra.

Any who say or write them shall be put to death.

Her breath stopped.

She read it again. She read it a third time. The lines swam. She felt her fingers grow cold, and the paper tremble, and a sound go up in her ears like the rushing of the sea.

"He banned me," she whispered.

"Yes."

"My name."

"It was the second decree of his reign." Teodra's voice was gentle. "The scholars argue about it still. Some say it was hatred. Some say it was fear. A few say it was sorrow." She paused. "There is a note, at the bottom, which the clerks were told to omit from the public copy. We have the original."

Solaia looked down.

There was a line at the foot of the page, in the same hand, smaller and blacker than the rest. It had been pressed so hard that the nib had torn the vellum.

I cannot bear to hear it said.

She put the paper down.

She stood and walked to the window, and pressed her forehead against the cold glass. The night was very clear. A dusting of snow lay on the terraces, blue under the stars, and far out beyond the wall the mountains stood black against the sky. She thought of a man in a gray coat, writing at a desk. She thought of a hand that shook. She thought, with sudden piercing clarity, of what it must be to love a person so much that her name became a blade.

I have forgotten his, she thought. And he has forbidden mine.

It was the most unbearable symmetry she had ever known.

…

"Mama?"

The voice was small and thick with sleep. She turned.

Veyran had sat up on the settle, with the furs sliding off his shoulders and his hair standing on end. He was rubbing his eyes with one fist. In the firelight his wings looked dark violet, and his eyes, half-lidded, were two slits of burning color. He looked at her for a long moment, and at the paper on the table, and at the grey, tired face of the old woman by the hearth.

"You found him," he said.

"Not yet."

"You found something."

"I found his name written down." She came back across the room and sat on the edge of the settle, and he leaned against her, warm and heavy. "It's all right. Go back to sleep."

"I can't." He yawned enormously. "I keep hearing it."

"Hearing what?"

"The bell." He frowned. "It's louder, here. It's almost like a voice. It says— It keeps saying..."

"What?"

He shut his eyes.

"Is she there," said Veyran, softly. "Over and over. Is she there. Is she there. Is she..."

His head fell against her shoulder. His breathing deepened. She sat quite still, with her arm about him, and the fire cracked and settled, and the old Wardmother looked away.

In the silence, Solaia whispered the name that she could not remember into her son's hair, and found, to her astonishment, that she could say it.

It came to her as easily as breathing. It slipped out of her mouth like a stone out of a stream, round and heavy and warm.

"Kieran," she said.

The room did not change. The fire burned. The Void did not take it. She sat there, with her heart pounding, and said it again, to be sure.

"Kieran."

He had come back.