The Rumor of Return

The first thing his mouth did was not what he told it.

He stood on the dais with his hand on the arm of the throne, and four hundred silver faces watched him in the silence. He had opened his lips to give an order. He knew exactly what the order was. He had known it from the moment Corvin said a boy, with wings, and it was a simple thing, a single sentence. Saddle my horse. He drew breath for it.

"Burn the north," said the Emperor of Ash.

The voice that came out was his own. It was smooth and cold and perfectly level. It rang across the Hall like a struck bell, and the whole court flinched.

"Majesty?" said Corvin, in a very small voice.

"Burn it." He heard his own mouth go on. "The Ashborn Hold. The wall. The plateau. Raise the Third Army, and the Seventh, and the whole of the southern host. Strip the garrisons. March within the hour. Take no prisoners, and spare nothing that breathes. Let it be done before the week is out."

No, thought Kieran.

He tried to close his mouth. It would not close.

He felt it as one feels a hand over the lips, a firm, courteous, immovable pressure. He felt the tongue move in his mouth like a thing that belonged to someone else. He felt a smile spread across his face, gentle and reasonable and vile. And in the back of his skull, very distinctly, in a voice as smooth as cream, Valerian said:

Forgive me, little prince. But you were about to do something unwise.

Let go.

I think not.

I will not allow you to touch her.

You will not be asked. The smile widened. I have waited a very long time to be rid of this wretched Queen. Nine hundred years. I will not let a bout of sentiment stand between me and my work. You are tired. Let me do this. It will not hurt.

Kieran stood quite still, in his own body, and watched his own hand rise from the throne. It lifted, and turned, and the long fingers curled in a gesture he had never made: an economical, elegant, priestly little sign, the sign of a blessing.

"Go," said the Emperor's mouth. "In the name of the Light."

Corvin rose.

She did it slowly, staring. She had never heard those words from his lips; the Light had been proscribed in the Empire for five hundred years. Her face, beneath the burn scar, was white. She looked at the Emperor, and at the hand, and at the ring on the smallest finger, which had begun, very faintly, to glow.

"Majesty," she said. "Are you—"

"I am perfectly well."

"You do not sound it."

"Captain." Gently. "Do as you are told."

…

He bit his tongue.

It was all he had. Valerian held his lips, and his hands, and the muscles of his throat, but there was a small hard knot of resistance at the root of his jaw that the old man had not thought to reach. He drove his teeth together, with all the force of nine hundred years of hatred, and felt the tongue split like a ripe plum.

The pain was enormous.

It was clean and white and absolutely his own. Blood flooded his mouth, hot and salt. He heard the priest-voice in his head cry out, a thin startled yelp of outrage, and the grip on his throat faltered. He got a breath. He got another. He swallowed blood and spat it, red, on the white floor of the dais, and the entire court gasped.

"Majesty—!"

"No," said Kieran.

His voice was thick, mangled, almost unintelligible. It did not matter. It was his. He grabbed his own wrist with the other hand, as though it were a stranger's, and wrenched the glowing finger back against the arm of the throne. "Not— not— the north. Never. Do not touch the north. Never."

You fool, hissed Valerian.

"Corvin. Listen. Listen to me."

"Majesty, you're bleeding—"

"I know." He spat again. "Hear me. Not a man of mine. Not a horse. Not a scout. If Voss's army wakes, send them home. If anything flies, let it fly. I will go myself."

"You?"

"Myself." He was shaking from head to foot. "I will go. Alone. On the swiftest horse in the stable. And if I am not— if I am not— if I say anything, if I send any word or token, in my own hand or in a voice you know, that tells you otherwise..." He drew a breath. "You will not believe it."

She stared.

"You will not believe it, Captain. You hear me? If I tell you to burn the north, it is not me. It is the thing in the ring. And you will take your sword—" He stopped. His eyes were streaming. "You will take your sword to me, and you will not stop until I stop."

"Majesty—"

"Say it!"

"I'll— I'll—" The woman's mouth worked. "I understand, Majesty."

"Swear it."

She dropped to one knee.

She laid her hand on her heart, and her cap on the stone, and said in a low steady voice that carried to every corner of the hall: "By the blood of Pip and the Black Guard, by the house of Aldren and the names of my dead, I swear it. If the Emperor gives such an order, I will treat it as treason. And I will see it undone."

The court breathed.

Charming, said Valerian, very softly. How very noble. And what do you imagine she can do against me?

Nothing, thought Kieran. But she'll try. And that's more than you ever had.

…

He did not remember leaving the hall.

They told him afterwards that he had walked out between the pillars with his head high and his hand pressed to his mouth, leaving a trail of small bright drops across the polished stone, and that the courtiers had parted before him like grass before a scythe. They said no one had spoken. They said the silver faces had watched him go with an expression that could only be called awe, the stunned and reverent silence of a congregation that has just seen a statue weep.

What he remembered was the stable.

It stood at the foot of the palace, a long low building of black stone, warm and dark and smelling of straw. He walked down the central aisle with his boots ringing and the horses stirring in their stalls. A groom stood at the end, a small gray man in a leather apron, holding a lantern. He had gone white when the Emperor appeared. He bowed so low his forehead nearly touched the floor.

"Majesty. How may I—"

"The best horse in the stable."

"The, ah— the black, Majesty. Night's Gift. He is a very fine— he has not been ridden in—"

"Saddle him."

The groom ran.

Kieran stood alone in the lamplight, with his hand on the post of a stall. His heart was going like a drum. His mouth was full of blood, and his tongue was beginning, already, to knit; he could feel it, a fierce hot itch, the Night closing the wound as it closed all wounds, with a patience that seemed to mock him. He swallowed. He wiped his lips on the back of his glove.

You are a fool, said Valerian, from the ring. His voice was rusted, thin, shaken. You will die for her. You will go to that plain and she will look at you and she will see what you are, and she will burn you where you stand.

"Perhaps."

And your boy will watch.

"Perhaps."

And all for a woman who has forgotten your name.

Kieran leaned his forehead against the cold wood.

He thought about that. He thought about it for a long time, in the dim smell of straw, with the sound of the grooms' running feet in his ears. It was true. It was almost certainly true. Nine hundred years was a long time, even in the Void; she would have forgotten his face, and his voice, and the color of his eyes. She might have forgotten that he was real. She might think of him, on the odd rare night, as a figure in a story, a man who had once held her hand.

But he had the book.

He took it out. He held it in the lamplight, small and black and soft with handling, and turned the pages with a thumb. They were thin as petals. Some of them were blank, now. Some had been rubbed away to ghosts. But on the first page, on the very first, the one he had written in the winter of the first year, the ink was clear as the day he set it down.

Things I know about Solaia Vraelyra.

She is kind. She is kind to what she finds.

He closed it.

"I know that," said the Black Emperor, quietly. "I know that much. And I know she'll remember it."

Remember what?

"What she said to me. On the platform." He put the book away. "She said: 'I'm choosing you. Don't forget it.' And I did not. For nine hundred years, I did not." He raised his head. "Whatever comes, Valerian, she can have that."

The groom came out of the dark, leading the horse.

It was a tall black stallion, glossy, restless, with a white star on its brow. It tossed its head at the sight of him and blew. He took the reins in a steady hand. He put a foot in the stirrup, and swung up into the saddle, and the horse danced under him, once, and was still.

"Open the gate," said the Emperor.

The groom stared. "Majesty, it is the middle of the— the court— your guard—"

"Open it."

They opened it.

The wind came in like a blade. It smelled of snow, and iron, and the high clean cold of the north, and as he rode out under the arch into the dark, with the stars sharp overhead, he heard the bell begin again in the bones of his skull, high and clear and impossibly sweet.

Is she there, it sang. Is she there. Is she there.

"Yes," whispered Kieran. "Yes. I think she is."

He bent over the black neck, and gave the stallion his head.