I stared at the map and it didn’t change. The sunset light through the arrow slits was red like poppy juice and a shaft of light struck the table, struck the map, struck the city of Orissa. It painted my city in bloody contrast.
“My lord?” Medeav stood in the doorway. “She’s here.”
My heart sank, and as it did fear moved up from my stomach to fill the space.
I was not ready. We were not ready.
I wanted my mother, my father, my brother.
But there was only me. I nodded to the city commander and rose. The armor I wore was heavy, but not any heavier than the crown on my head. I made my face the cold mask of a king, and forced the fear from my chest.
Or at least I tried.
When I stepped out onto the barbican, the sun was setting into the sea, bathing the Orissa plain in light. The Orissa plain and the army that had marched down the road. Marched down all the roads, and left emptiness behind it.
It filled the valley, up into the hills. Men and women, horses and caravans, rough-built siege towers and fine-wrought catapults. An army that had broken city after city, leaving only the dead behind it. It had come for my home. It had come for Orissa.
“What news of my brother?”
“No word, my lord,” Medeav said.
He had donned a helmet of beaten bronze and would command the defenses, as he had for my mother. The old man would lead our warriors, and show the invaders that ours was not a soft city. Good men and women stood ready to defend Orissa with their lives. We were ready to die for the people who could not fight, those that hid behind our walls, in the towers and manor houses, in the slums and along the canals of Orissa.
They were mine, and I would be damned if I let the city fall.
Beneath my feet, I felt them all.
I felt them when I rested a hand against the rough stone of the wall. I felt Orissa, as alive as any warrior, prepared to wage war to protect its people. Its song was a carol, a war song, a chant. It whispered in the language of cities to our warriors. It whispered out down the road to the enemy. I was its King, and it whispered to me.
Orissa was the Heart of the World, and the Heart of the World would not fall to the woman who had brought her army to us.
I expected the enemy lines to part, but when they did, it was like a river parting around a stone. Her soldiers bowed as she came forward. I watched them clutch their hearts and dip their heads to their queen, hands across the crimson badge they each wore.
Althair the Red came to Orissa.
Her red hair free in the wind, her gown wrapped around her like an ocher breeze, I could say that she was beautiful. Perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
She had snuffed the lights of other cities, had left aching wounds on the face of the world where good places had been.
As her army parted around her like a great ocean wave, she burned.
I did not know her, but I hated her.
“Hail to the people of Orissa!” she called.
Her voice was strong, the lilt of her words gentle, toying. But the City shuddered beneath my feet and I tasted the power of Althair the Red. It was bitter juice, tanged with blood. I let it roll on my tongue as if it were wine and when I drank it down, Orissa rumbled and the power inside me roared.
“Hail to the Red Queen,” I said, and every rock and cobble and stone spoke with me.
My hands shook with power.
I was my mother’s son, and would not bend to an invader. I would not bow to a queen who had not birthed me, nursed me, bled me. Althair was not Queen Vast, and though she was a terrible beauty, I was not cowed.
“Open your gates, my lord,” she said. “Open your gates and let us be friends.”
I laughed. It was not a kind sound.
“You are no friend of Orissa. No friend brings death as her drumsman. No friend brings blood as her herald. Only Althair. Only the Red Queen. No, we will not open our gates for you.”
She laughed in return, and the bloody sunset clung to her until her hair sparkled, as though it had been woven with bright rubies and dark garnets, as though she dripped in burning, crimson light. She stood like a bonfire. It hurt my eyes, but I did not shut them. I stared into the woman who had come to take my city and forced myself to see nothing more than a woman, nothing more than an army.
“I have come to the city, my lord,” she called. “I may come in peace, or I may come in war. Throw open your gates and welcome me. I am your Queen!”
There was more of her bloody magic on the wind. The soldiers on the wall felt it. Old Medeav felt it beside me. But when her magic tried to swallow me, there was Orissa beneath my feet, against my hands where it held the stonework.
I struck the stonework of the wall with the flats of my hands. When my heart beat a second time, I struck again. On the third heartbeat, Medeav joined me. Again, and it grew. The men and women in their armor struck the rock that defended them. The ranks at the gate stomped, or clashed their swords against their chests. It grew until Orissa thundered to my heartbeat.
I did not look away from Althair’s great magic.
“I am Orrin, son of Vast,” I said, and let the magic flow to the beat of the gathered arms, down into the bedrock, in the dark places of Orissa that I didn’t dare go, not even as king. I drew it back as the beat grew louder, until Orissa was a bell and defiance was our peal. “I am King in Orissa.”
“King no longer,” Althair said. “The Red Queen comes!”
The magic of our refusal was almost too much.
Sweat dripped down my face and my heart thundered with it, pulling it tighter and tighter. Orissa was the Heart of the World, the hub around which all cities turned.
It was mine, paid for with sweat and blood. It was mine, in oath and deed. It was mine, honor and responsibility. The air tightened into one last agonizing moment.
I nodded and Medeav roared.
The archers on the walls loosed their bolts. My magic followed in a torrent, soaked into every arrow head and fletched-feather.
Her magic rose, but not enough. All along the invaders’ line, the arrows found their marks, and as the enemy fell, my magic gripped the wood. And as Althair’s army died in ones and twos, the arrows sunk roots into the ground and I forced them up.
The soldiers had just enough time to scream before they died.
The thorns grew higher, their dagger-studded vines climbing toward the sky from trellises of flesh and blood and bone.
But they did not touch Althair.
The thorns grew around her, but she did not look away from my eyes. The rear line of the army did not move. They held as their fellows died.
I pushed again with my magic and the battlements answered.
Every stone, every joint burst into light, as blue as the queen was red. The air chilled as the front lines broke, throwing themselves into the light,I heard more screaming. The soldiers’ flesh gave way to hoarfrost and ice.
I did not look away from the queen in red until she turned and strode back up the lines.
There was a call from the rear of the lines, and a second figure moved forward. It was taller—he was tall—and armored. His helmet was a jagged obsidian piecework. He raised an arm and the army at the feet of my city tensed, as though they were an arrow and he the archer.
The Butcher. Althair’s Beast. Her General.
I gathered the last of the magic, enough for a third push.
The thorns still grew, but slowly. The soldiers were slow to throw themselves against the ice-rimed wall. There were enough in the valley for Althair to build a siege wall with the bodies of the fallen to break Orissa upon her knee.
The Butcher threw his sword forward and the army charged.
I flung my power into the ground.
The road moved beneath them so their feet brought them no closer. It flowed backward as my magic made land between us, as it forced the army back. It grew grassy hillocks and fields between us. The magic was a wave and it drove them back. Adding distance, farther and farther. Not far enough, but it would buy us time.
A little time.
My knees buckled, but I clung to the stone.
“It won’t be enough,” Medeav said.
Beneath us the army cheered.
“Have the walls reinforced,” I said. My voice was thin. It was hard to breathe. “See if we can’t get a breast wall in between. Make sure the scouts are careful. There was maybe ten leagues in that spell. It won’t take long for them to march back. Mother could have done better.”
“My King,” Medeav said. “It still won’t be enough.”
I smiled at him and placed a hand on his shoulder.
He had been a father to me when I was a child and heir to the throne. I looked into his eyes and let myself feel what I was forbidden. I wanted Mother, my terrible, awful, powerful mother. I wanted magic enough to keep my city safe.
I wanted to not be King.
“Have hope,” I said, instead.
Medeav nodded and turned.
“Medeav?” I said. “Get a messenger out before she closes the road.”
“It will be done, my King.”
I shut my eyes. Althair stood there in my mind all in bloody light and magic.
“Tell my brother that he will be king after all.”
Most of all I wished that I was not alone.
* * *
I walked the streets as night fell. People watched me pass. Some called out my name, some begged for aid. But most locked their doors, barred their windows, and prayed. I could feel those prayers, like tiny licks of fire inside my chest.
They prayed to the city, to the unicorn, and to the phoenix.
But there was only the City left. The City and me. Orissa had no phoenix, no unicorn. We were not enough. Not when the unicorn and phoenix had fled Vast and her cruelty. Not with an army like a red-metaled ocean at the feet of the battlements.
I walked the streets, though my mother would not have done it. It was as important as battle planning that every person knew—-every person in Orissa-—that they were not alone. I would not abandon them to the witch at the gates.
“Bless you, my lord,” a young woman said as I passed her. She carried a small child on her hip.
“Bad night to be out,” I replied. “Best get home.”
She nodded and moved faster. There were a handful of people farther down. A few shopkeepers trying to sell their goods. A few alehouses and wine shops in the Old Quarter doing good business.
We were facing death, who could blame them?
I stepped inside the Cobalt Weaver, its blue spider dangling from the sign, legs against the handle of a beaker.
“If I die tomorrow, I might as well say that I’ve drunk my fill,” I said to myself. I’d been young the first time I’d passed into the tavern’s cramped interior. It had been Medeav who’d found me, sweet-to-bursting with honey mead, and Medeav who had been unsympathetic when the mead-sickness started.
Life comes full-circle.
A half-dozen men sat at the table near the hearth. The ceiling was low, and one of the men slammed a tankard onto the scarred wood, and stood.
“Old Vast, she’d’ve ‘et that red-haired creature. Would’ve gulped her down and picked her teeth with the bones. Not like that stripling. A king? He ain’t no king. I heard it from my cousin who was on the wall. He only pushed them back. Waved his hands and made a right fool of himself.”
I shook my head.
The night I decided to get drunk at the Cobalt Weaver, Vast had threatened to get me herself. People liked to forget that. They liked to forget that Vast was her name, and vast was her hunger. Vast was her cruelty.
She might have ‘et Althair the Red, but she’d have eaten Orissa to do it.
The tavern had one other person at it, shoulders hunched forward, front pressed against the bar. I couldn’t see his face, but as I sat and the barkeep pushed a full tankard in front of me, he leaned back. He smiled, nodded, took a sip of his own drink and promptly ignored me.
We were quiet for a while as the table by the hearth grew louder and louder. They cursed the city as their voices slurred. They cursed my mother. They cursed the phoenix for her desertion, the unicorn for his absence.
I sighed into my cup.
The man beside me turned on his chair.
“So loud, a man can’t even hear himself think,” he said. His voice was soft, like snowfall. His face was wide, with a strong jaw. I noticed his hair, dark, falling across his face.
A fist struck me hard. Followed by a second, forcing me off the stool and onto the floor. The boot that followed wasn’t fast enough and as I twisted, the loudest of the table drinkers fell cursing.
But he had friends and they were on me fast. Each one drunk and cursing.
“Phoenix burn you,” one hissed. I did not let him hit me. I did not let the others hit me. My cheek was cut and my nose was bleeding. “Don’t need your kind in here.”
No, they didn’t need my kind in here.
I couldn’t draw my sword. Drink tainted the air, and I could see how scared they were. Scared like a child without a mother, and twice as angry.
I couldn’t let them beat me, or the barkeep, or the other man, either. But as I pulled for the flicker of power deep in my chest, the man at the bar stood. He was taller than I was, and broad.
“Tonight’s not the night for fighting,” he said in his snow-fall voice. He touched the shoulder of the man coming up behind me. “Not when there are enemies at the gate.”
He touched my shoulder too, and I felt myself relax. He helped one of the fallen men—the one who said my mother would have ‘et the witch’—from the ground and set them on their way.
They left without a protest, not even looking back. The man returned to his seat, hunched over his ale.
“Thank you,” I said as I took my own seat back.
“Guess you shouldn’t complain about them complaining,” he said, smiling.
“I think that was you. I was just minding my own business,” I smiled back at him.
“Is that how you Orissa folk treat people just looking for a drink at the end of a long night?” he asked.
“Not usually,” I said. “What brought you to the city?”
He took a sip from the ale. “I had been traveling. The army was marching, and I needed somewhere to go. Orissa seemed as good a place as any.”
“Aside from the locals,” I said, looking back to where the small group had huddled over their cups by the hearth. Now the cups were scattered and there was mead on the floor.
“Can’t blame them though,” he said. “No one expects an army at their gates.”
“No. But it doesn’t change that there is one.”
“Not quite the gates, I hear.”
“By the morning.” The ale burned as I drank it. It wasn’t enough to stop the slow burn of fear. Dawn wasn’t far off.
“You’re one of the defenders?”
I caught myself looking at the curve of his chin and the shape of his eyes. Then I was looking for the color of his eyes. They were pale, but deep.
He smiled when I nodded.
“They say the army has never been stopped.”
I sipped the ale again, embarrassed. “We’ll stop them.”
“How?”
I didn’t know. And when I shut my eyes, I saw the army like a blood-specked wave and Orissa a seashore about to be overrun. I jumped when I felt him touch my shoulder.
“Lost you there for a moment.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking. “It’s been a long day.”
His eyes were pale circles of silver, dappled, like pitted metal.
“Tomorrow will be worse, if I’ve ever seen a siege. And I’ve been through my share.”
“Tell me your name,” I asked. Because he was beautiful. Because I liked how he smiled, because there was no reason not to. And when I looked at him, I had forgotten—-for a breath-—what waited with the dawn.
He smiled. “Ask me tomorrow.”
“I might not be here tomorrow.”
“Survive and ask me again.”
He set the mug down on the counter, as though it were the most precious thing in the world, and then left the quiet tavern, the cold of new snow behind him. Like first winter. I didn’t even mind when the barkeep asked me to pay for his drink.
* * *
I was thinking of him as dawn came too soon, and I was atop the battlements again.
The spells on the stones had held through the night, but no longer. The brambles fell in the first hours of sunlight, and the cold lasted a bit longer.
Althair’s force-marched army drove ladders into the corpses of its fallen, and tried to scale the walls with ropes. We did not let them. Althair’s soldiers were brave, but we were braver. As the red-badged soldiers made the wall, they were cut down. Their ladders broken, and their lines shattered.
I thrust the point of my sword into the chests of the men and women who would hurt my people. Who would raze my towers. I did not stop until they had all retreated, or were dead. The world collapsed down into blood and battle and desperation.
A cry rose up around me as I cut down another red-badged soldier and looked for the next.
We had held.
Medeav was quick to find me as he directed the disposition of the fallen. Our soldiers were brought off the wall, wrapped in samite and laid in state. We ripped the badges from Altair’s forces and threw the corpses over the battlements to join their siblings below.
And feed the crows.
Unicorn remember, I hurt. From a sword thrust I’d barely parried, from cuts and scrapes and the weight of armor, and of so manydeaths. The sun was setting and there were friends of mine among the fallen.
“Where was your head?” Medeav said in a hiss too quiet for anyone else to hear. “You let them take the wall!”
I swallowed hard. The old man was angry, and there was a cut bleeding down from his eyebrow.
“Let’s get you looked at—-” I started.
“It’s a war, boy! A war! And where were you last night?”
He was getting louder. Loud enough for the healers and the soldiers to start looking at us.
“King of the city and no one can find him. You should have been planning with the generals. You should have been helping keep watch. Yet you wander in at dawn! How foolish are you?”
“I was walking the city,” I said. “Seeing people.”
“You were in a tavern. You were in a brawl. If your mother were still alive—-”
Something brittle snapped inside me.
“If my mother were still alive, I would answer to her. I do not answer to you,” I said.
My words were cold.
I was tired, so tired.
Things were not what I’d imagined them to be when I was still my mother’s heir. Kingship was heavy.
“If my mother were still alive she would still be eating sapphires like blueberries and powdering phoenix feathers onto her morning chocolate. You will excuse me, Lord Medeav. We both have business to attend to.”
I left the man who was almost my father stuttering and angry and bleeding. I left the battlements and the aftermath of a hollow victory. Althair’s force had been outriders, whoever had been fastest. The rest were coming.
Still coming.
My footsteps were light and quick as I made my way to Old Town.
* * *
The stars were out by the time I made it back to the Cobalt Weaver. The inside was quiet. Only the barkeep, running a rag up and down the counter, kept watch.
He looked up when I walked in. As I sat he put a thin cup of beaten bronze in front of me. Inside were three fingers of dark drink.
I smelled it.
Blackberry.
The barkeep poured another three fingers into his own cup.
“Ale’s run out. So’s the mead. Only thing left is the kind of drink no man looking Sabbaeus in the eye would want. But I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. Seems like a special enough time, don’t you think, your highness?”
I shook my head. “Just Orrin.”
He drank his blackberry wine in a single long draw.
I sipped mine more slowly and it unfurled on my tongue. It tasted of autumn and the promise of bronze leaves and the air coming crisp after a warm summer. If I were chasing death’s city, I wouldn’t be sipping it either.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen the man from last night?” I asked, pointing toward the seat he’d taken the night before with my chin.
There were footsteps behind me, and when the barkeep looked back, I turned. My stranger was heavier on his feet than he had been the night before. He still wore dark clothing, and a vest of tooled leather. He smiled at me, and I felt myself smile back.
“Looks like you made it,” he said.
“It’s good to see you again.”
Oddly enough, I meant it.
He sat beside me, and he still felt like snowfall. The barkeep poured him a copper cup as well, but the man didn’t take it. Instead he turned his pale eyes on me.
“I’m Jerrod,” he said and smiled, the bow of his lips curling at the edges. “How bad was it?”
“Bad enough,” I said. I tried to forget the ache in my arms, in my legs. I was tired. So terribly tired and I didn’t want to think about what dawn would bring.
“You could join her, you know,” Jerrod said.
“What?”
“Just slip out. People have done it. There were some in the tavern before you came in. They say all you have to do is walk out and they’ll take you to her. You promise to fight for her and her cause, and she’ll tear a piece of her own gown for you to keep as a token. Until the war is over, or you die, or forever after.”
“Did they say just where you might join up?” I asked.
He laughed and shook his head. “I think they would notice the King of Orissa coming, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. My cheeks burned, but Jerrod kept smiling. “If you’ll excuse me.”
I stood and turned. Embarrassment curled in my stomach, followed by shame. How had I been so stupid? Death was camped at the gates of my city and I was in a tavern. What was I doing?
My mother would have been appalled.
Before I was two steps away, he grabbed my hand.
“You came back,” he said. His smile had almost disappeared, except for the corners of his mouth, which curled.
His hand was warm in mine.
“It only seemed polite,” I said, not pulling away.
He laughed. It was the sound of ringing bells.
The world was falling apart around me. We would die when Althair’s army came again. We couldn’t last. But Jerrod’s hand didn’t leave mine.
“Have you seen much of the city?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Can’t say I have had much time for sight-seeing.”
“Would you like to?” I offered. “You don’t have to feel obligated. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“I’m not someone who does anything I don’t want to,” Jerrod said simply. “Not for kings, or queens, or baronets who think they’re beautiful.”
He stepped close to me. I could feel his warmth. His hand moved, and as it did, he wove his fingers between mine. I had never felt anything like it before. Vast had never let me, and there had not been enough time for joy as a King.
“Then perhaps I might show you some of the sights?” I asked.
“A private tour by the King? I am both honored and delighted.”
Not as delighted as I was. Not as happy as I was as we left the Cobalt Weaver and passed into the star-stitched darkness, into the quiet Orissa streets.
* * *
No one wandered the cobblestone thoroughfares but tightly formed squads of soldiers, fast marching their patrols. No one trusted Althair and her army. I did not think that they would be able to penetrate the wall, not yet. The magic of the ramparts still hummed in my bones.
“Where are you from? I asked.
“A little village that was nothing more than a handful of houses beside a riverbed and a road,” he said. “Nothing so grand as this.”
I laughed.
There had been days, growing up, and since becoming king, that I had wished for a hovel and some chickens. I wished that my greatest concern was whether the birds would lay enough eggs to feed me.
“Do you miss it?”
“Never,” he said, “and if I did, there is nothing there to go back to. It didn’t even have a name, and in the years since I left, it’s withered and died. Anyone left is there because they are too scared of what the road or the world might have beyond their mud walls.”
“I’ve never been too far from Orissa,” I said. “My brother—-he’s the adventurer. We get letters from him, sometimes. He’s in Aspice or Ellyson. He’s on the road from some place you only hear about in stories, doing things that become stories.”
I smiled, thinking of Scander. I missed him. I did not know if he would like Jerrod. He would have challenged Althair in single combat. Odd thoughts for so dark a night.
“I’ve heard of the Scander Prince,” Jerrod said. “More than a few minstrels and bards seem to favor his adventures.”
I laughed.
“I hope they get the good parts right when they write songs about us. I’m sorry you weren’t able to see the city at its best.”
“Who says I’ve not seen the best Orissa has to offer?”
The lilt of his voice made my heart beat faster and my head grow light. What was I thinking? There was an army at the gates and my people fought and died. Dawn was coming.
Another troop marched in front of us.
Their boots rang off the cobbles.
“They didn’t even look at us,” Jerrod said.
“The patrols are perfunctory. Nothing’s getting over the walls.”
“You seem pretty sure of that,” he said. He grabbed my hand again, but I pulled away.
“The city will hold,” I said, and then softer, to myself, “It has to.”
He nodded, the smile gone from his face. “I’m sorry. This is your city. Your home.”
I sighed.
“If they break the wall, my people will die. There aren’t enough soldiers on our side. We’ll be overrun. Althair the Red will take Orissa. I can’t give my people over to her.”
Jerrod said nothing. He was still, like a pond, like the first snowfall of winter, when the world is quiet, sleeping.
“They’re just people,” he said. “They love and bleed and die and dream. But they’re just people. They’re not any more special than anyone else. There were people in Valdez and Foy and Rasia, too. The Queen came, people fought, died, and the city fell. The Queen remained.”
“She cannot have Orissa,” I hissed. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
I had wanted him to understand, though. But I couldn’t explain why.
“The shopkeepers? The children? They can’t fight. Not the way I can. Not the way my brother can. Or my mother. They don’t deserve to be hurt because one woman thinks she can rule the world.”
We walked more, in silence, not touching. We walked along the canal, beneath the Old Town towers, and threaded our way to the docks, which were as quiet as the rest of the city. There were no ships along the quay. The counting houses were shuttered. If a ship could be bought, traded, or pirated, we had packed who we could aboard, and let them sail out into the Ossean Sea. There had not been enough.
He stood beside me. Close enough that I could feel him. His eyes were pale in the moonlight.
“My mother used to bring me here,” I said. “We would watch the ships and she would tell me that our salt came from quarries up the coast and that our sugar came from Cadien on the ships. I always liked to watch the sailors. I thought that they had the most amazing job in the world. They touched the things that other people wanted, and helped them get what they needed.”
Jerrod was quiet, but I felt him in the dark, almost against my skin. Standing, but not quite touching me.
“They wouldn’t let my mother work. My grandfather was a vinter. He made blackberry wine. But he couldn’t help us after I was born. So she did what she could to keep us fed. When I was old enough, I went hunting. And when I was old enough, I left.”
I leaned into him, just a touch of shoulder and elbow and wrist. Barely anything, but something in the dark, with only the stars to see us.
“My mother—-” I started, but I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t get the words past my mouth. I loved her and hated her and feared her all in equal measure.
Instead of pushing, I felt Jerrod move and suddenly he was behind me, a warm weight, his chin resting on my shoulder, his arm wrapped around my waist, pulling me tight to him. He was warm, so terribly warm.
I leaned back into that weight and let him hold me. Because we stood at the shipless dock. Because Vast and Althair and the Butcher were far enough away as to be a memory. I let out a hiss of air and leaned back into the strength of him.
We stood there, wrapped in one another, for a time. I didn’t know or care how long. I did not think about the dawn or the blood. I only thought of the firmness of him, and the ache inside my chest that,for a few stolen moments, had eased. I was not alone.
Jerrod kissed me.
I leaned back to meet his lips. They were thin and cold, but warm too. I kissed him in the darkness where we could be just the men we were, where there was no reason at all not to, and a great army of reasons to take what little joy we could have.
He pulled away. My heart sank for a breath as Jerrod’s head turned from the sea and toward the shuttered counting houses, the dark-windowed warehouses.
Jerrod’s eyes reflected silver in the moonlight.
His nostrils flared, the way a horse’s will sometimes.
“I smell fire.”
“Fire?” I asked, pulling away and turning too. “I don’t smell anything.”
He was scanning the buildings with his eyes, his head turned until I could only make out the profile of his face in the darkness.
“Footsteps,” he said, and he pulled away from me. “Oil.”
“I don’t—“
Then I saw it. A flicker of red. A moment passed and the flicker grew, along the roof edge of a warehouse.
I ran toward the burning buildings.
Jerrod was a step behind.
“They’re grain houses,” I said. They were holding bags of grain, piled almost to the ceiling inside each building. They were siege rations, in case Althair tried to starve us out.
If the grain caught, it would explode.
I reached for the place inside me where man and city blurred. Where I was Orissa and Orissa was me. Before Vast, there would have been a Phoenix and a Unicorn as well. Each of us bound in service to the city, but no longer. I was alone, except for Jerrod, who stood beside me like a pool of silence.
Orissa’s cobblestones were my skin. Its ramparts were my bones. I could feel the fire and I reached out to it with magic, cold and still. I reached for it as a city, I reached out for it as a king, but nothing happened.
The fire was spreading, licking along the timbers of the storehouses.
But there were footsteps. A dozen of them.
I lost hold of the city.
“Watch out,” I said to Jerrod. “They’re coming in fast.”
They came out of the darkness like wolves. Their feet were quiet on the stones, but their swords were sharp. I had enough time to pull my sword loose from its scabbard before they were on us.
I blocked the first blade, and turned into the second. The third I ran through, tangling the attack up as I moved. As the warehouse fire grew, I could make out the attackers better. They wore the motley armor of Althair’s troops.
My blade struck fast. I opened one of them across the stomach and blocked a mace with my forearm. It hurt. Hurt enough for me to miss the downswing of a knife. I saw its edge reflect in the firelight and took a breath, knowing that I couldn’t stop it.
Jerrod charged them.
He was faster than anything I had ever seen, and he was bare-handed.
I watched, dumbfounded, as he struck the blade out of the attacker’s hand. He grabbed the arm that had held the knife and twisted it. There was the unmistakable snap of bone, and Jerrod threw them away.
I pulled my sword back up, bracing against the pain that radiated down my forearm.
We were surrounded and the warehouse was burning. It lit up the cobbles and chased away the smell of the sea.
“You cannot have this city,” I snarled. They wore mismatched armor, but a red patch of fabric was stitched over the heart of every one of them.
Jerrod had his back to me.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I leaned into him, so that I could feel the weight of him against me.
“Don’t give up yet.”
There were too many. Even though cries were rising as the fire spread, it wouldn’t be enough. It would take too long for the wall guards to make it so deep into the city.
The world slowed as the soldiers rushed us.
I stepped into the nearest attacker, bringing my sword under his guard. It cost me momentum, but I brought the man down.
Behind me, there was a sound I had never heard before. I turned, then stopped dead.
It was black.
A great mane of silver ran down its neck like moonlight. Its tail was just as silver. Four legs ended in hooves like dinner plates. From the center of its head, a single horn rose like a spike. The unicorn was as tall in the shoulder as I was.
And where it danced, death followed.
I couldn’t speak, even as the attackers rushed it.
They fell to the unicorn’s hooves, its teeth. The swords struck against the horn. But it was not enough. I could feel its magic, pulsing out as its feet struck the cobbles.
I watched as it slit a throat with the tip of its horn. As it trampled another man’s body. As it brought its great forelegs up and dropped its weight on a fallen attacker.
When they were dead, it turned to look at me with eyes ringed with molten silver. There was blood on the unicorn’s muzzle. Darker things coated its horn.
It stepped forward, a hoof crunching bone.
I stepped back, unthinking, then realized. But it was too late.
The fire in the warehouses had razed the roofs.
I turned my back on the unicorn and reached for the flames again with my magic. But even as I did, I could feel the heat. There was too much of it, and it resisted. I struggled, trying to snuff the fire, drive it away, anything. But it was not enough.
The unicorn stepped past me.
I watched as it tossed its head back. Watched as it pawed the ground. Watched as it danced, black-pelted but etched with firelight. And with it came magic again, but stronger. So strong it drove out the scent of burning wood and grain the way the fire had drowned out the sea.
It smelled of the first snowfall of winter, when the ground hadn’t quite frozen.
“Jerrod,” I said.
But the unicorn didn’t stop. His power rose as his hooves rocked off the stones. As he lifted and jumped, the power built and built. And finally, he hurled himself up. When he landed, the magic broke.
The flames went out. Snuffed as if they had never been.
And where there had been a unicorn, there was a man. A man I had kissed in the starlight. A man I had held, and let hold me.
I crossed the space between us in the time it took Jerrod to get to his feet.
“Are you hurt?” I asked. But when I tried to take hold of him, to draw him close, he held me back.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This was unbidden. It was forbidden. How dare they?”
“Jerrod—-”
He didn’t look at my face. Instead, he looked back at the carnage. A dozen bodies bleeding in the dark. There was noise, too. More footfalls. The Orissa soldiers were coming.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said.
I could not name the look in his eyes when he finally gazed at me. Gone was the smile on the edges of his lips. Gone was the self-assured languorous humor.
“It’s all right,” I said.
Jerrod laughed, but it was hollow and strange. He shook his head. “No. No sweet king, it is not all right.”
He pulled away from me.
“I need to go,” he said.
“Please,” I called after him. That time it was me who pulled his hand, drew him back to me. “Stay.”
He shook his head.
“Then meet me tomorrow,” I said.
“It will be magic tomorrow,” he said.
“What?”
Jerrod brought my hand up to his mouth. He laid a kiss on the back of it, not caring that it was dirty with dust and blood and grime.
“She will attack with magic,” he said. “Be safe, Orrin. Please be safe.”
He pulled away and left.
I tried to follow him, but couldn’t. He moved too fast and between one breath and the next he was gone. Leaving me with the dead and the burnt and more questions than answers.
And an ache inside me that I could only name to myself.
* * *
Dawn found me bleary-eyed. I felt like a too-taut bit of string. As though I was one bard-strum away from breaking. But I had planned with my generals. I had eaten, I had slept. I had thought and thought. I had dreamed.
I greeted dawn on the battlements.
Althair’s army had lain camp. They had felled whatever was left of the brambles and they stood like a silent, unmoving sea. Shifting as heartbeats passed, but waiting.
Medeav was beside me.
He looked as grizzled as I felt. He had not slept. Instead he had spent the night scouting the city. Cajoling. Demanding. Conscripting.
“One of our scouts made it through the lines,” he said. His shoulder was close to mine. I did not look at him. Instead I was looking across the field, trying to make out faces. Searching.
“And?” I asked.
“Prince Scander is on his way,” he said. “Two days out, riding as hard as his mount will take him.”
My mouth was dry. My skin was cold despite the heat of the morning sun and the weight of the armor around my shoulders. It felt like a lifetime since I had walked without hauberk or pauldrons or vambraces.
I nodded, but whatever words I might have spoken died.
Up the hill, Althair’s army parted.
“Here it comes,” I said.
They made a clearing, wide enough for anyone on the Orissa wall to see. It was empty, except for a handful of figures. They were bound and wore the colors of Medeav’s missing scouts.
Our scouts struggled, but she came.
She came like a bloody heart all in red, in a dress that clung to her like a second skin. I could see it all. She strode barefoot across the hard-packed dirt and I knew as she did it, there was a smile on her lips.
There was murmuring behind me. Medeav’s conscripts shifted on their feet, out of sight from the wall. I would have shifted too, but I watched and waited.
I did not have to wait long.
“Two days have passed, King of Orissa,” she called. Her voice was magic, hot and spiced like perfume. It carried across the field as though we stood barely apart. “Do you not open your gates to me? Give yourself to me and I will leave the city untouched.”
As she had left Valdez untouched, or Orissa. Untouched perhaps, but dead. Dead and emptied, scraped clean of life and love and magic like a pomegranate was scraped of its arils.
I did not speak.
“No?”
Her thin-arched brow rose and the smile faded from her lips.
“And you?” she asked the kneeling soldiers.
Medeav tensed beside me, ready to command our warriors to battle. But it wasn’t the time yet. As much as I wanted it to be, as much as I wanted to cross to Althair the Red, it was not the time. We were not ready.
“Will you swear to me?” she purred. “Will you cast your foolish king aside and take your place next to me?”
The first spat at her. I could not see his face, but pride spiked through me. And rage.
She struck my scout down. And the second. And the third. Seven of them. She struck them down with her own hands. She reached to them and rent their flesh with her fingers until her bare arms were covered in blood.
I felt her magic on the wind, growing with each death.
Medeav ground his fingers into the stonework, still and frozen. We would have our revenge. The lives we lost would not be for nothing. We would survive and the seven fallen scouts would be remembered.
I swore it to myself, to the city. To the people.
Althair’s army cheered. They roared as our captured people fell and died within sight of our city—-their city—-and there was nothing we could do for it.
“Now,” I said.
Behind us were the people we had found as the nighttime fled. A girl still in braids, a man hunched forward, clinging to a staff for balance. A mother who had walked from her house because her city had asked her to. Because if she did not come to the wall, her babies would die like our scouts.
There were not enough. Not nearly enough. But magic had been coming thinner and they were all we had. The strongest magic workers in Orissa.
The little girl’s name was Roura, and at Medeav’s command the magic that flowed off her was the cold of a mountain stream in high summer. It was bracing, and she gave it up without hesitation.
Badric—the old man—followed. He planted his staff and joined his power to the little girl’s. His was different. It was the sharp, mirror-perfect crack of ice-covered snow. It was jagged edges and hidden deeps.
But it was the mother—Zallannah—who forced her power into the sky. She was a glacier, a bottomless crevasse, where the screams of the fallen echoed into the depths.
Their power flowed over the battlements.
I watched as Althair’s magic rose on the backs of our dead.
“She’s using death to power it,” I said.
Medeav nodded.
It was hot magic. The kind of heat that brings disease, the kind that brings delirium and death. It was bloody copper and she smiled as she cast her magic toward the city.
Althair’s spell met the cold of Zallannah, Badric, and Roura. At first, I thought it wouldn’t be enough. How could three stand against the queen?
I ached to put my magic into it, too. But there was not enough left in me. Not if the gambit failed.
The air was heavy as the two powers met.
Between one breath and the next, clouds charged in as the magics roiled in the air above Althair’s army. They were a sickly green, and there was wind. It tore through the attacker’s line. And lightning followed. Except it struck the battlements, and it struck the attackers, and it struck the gates.
Both sides broke as the hail fell. As we were battered by wind and rain. I clutched at the rockwork, but it was not enough.
A blast of wind knocked an archer from their post along the wall. Lightning danced across the ranks of Althair’s soldiers.
“Enough,” I called down.
Roura was on her knees, Badric beside her. Both bled from their noses, their eyes. Both gasped for air that struggled to come.
“Medics!”
The storm grew and grew.
Those at the foot of the wall scattered.
I watched as Althair hissed toward us, but no other motion followed. She turned as well, flanked by her guards, and moved away from the battlefield. Back to wherever she was bivouacked, anywhere but on my doorstep.
“Where is her Butcher?” I asked. But the wind tore the question from my mouth before any answer would come. “Where is her general?”
The medics were carrying away the little girl and the old man. I knelt beside Zallannah, whose magic had been stronger than the rest. Whose children I swore would know of their mother’s bravery. She stared into nothingness. She did not breathe. I remembered her face from the first night. She had wished me well as I walked.
I did not cry. Orissa could not afford a king with tears in his eyes. But I remembered her. I would not forget.
* * *
Medeav did not lecture me as I walked into the night. He said nothing and there was nothing left to say. Not when we had seen the army. Not when we knew that our third day was over. Not with Althair coming.
“Let them do what needs doing,” he told me. “Let them make peace with it.”
But I could not make peace with it. I stalked the parks as the sun set. They were quiet. Whoever might have wandered the tree-lined paths was absent. And that was good.
My heart was heavy.
It was hours that I walked.
He sat beside the canal. Dark except for where the moonlight traced the bridge of his nose, and the edges of his clothing.
“No Cobalt Weaver?” I asked.
I sat beside him, curling my arms around my knees.
“You survived,” he said.
“Others didn’t,” I said. “A woman whose children will only know her from memory. There is a little girl who may never walk again because she gave too much magic. Seven scouts who only wanted to keep their city safe. She tried to use their deaths to fuel a spell to kill the people they loved.”
Jerrod said nothing.
I breathed. Deep breaths that tasted of Jerrod’s snowfall and the brighter smell of herbs along the canal, of trees that hadn’t yet given up their blossoms to the changing of the season.
“You’re a unicorn,” I said.
Jerrod said nothing.
“They say that one of the Herd has joined her,” I said.
Jerrod said nothing.
“Not someone. You.” He was too tall, too slender, too much. No full-blooded unicorn had coiled muscles like Jerrod had. None of them stalked a street like a beast. “You’re hers.”
“I’ve been hers for a long time.”
“You don’t have to be,” I said. “You can choose something different. Here and now, you can choose to be something bright and beautiful.”
“This was not what I planned,” he said. “I didn’t expect to meet you. I didn’t expect to feel—“
I reached toward him.
“I am not a child who needs saving, Orrin,” the unicorn said, pulling away. “I am the darkness against the moon. I am the night your children are told to fear. I walked into the bloody rain with my eyes open. I am a monster.”
“Then I love a monster,” I said. Because there were no other words today, and I felt the sun rising through the trees. Orissa caroled and the light was bright and warm. It painted Jerrod’s face, and even the black of his hauberk turned gold.
“I am not safe to love,” he said, and stood.
I took his hand. “We are neither safe to love. But if not here? If not now? When? She comes with the sunset.”
“We come with the sunset, my king,” he said. He said it gently, but he pulled away from me.
“Then love me,” I said. “Love me, my unicorn. Love me for today, because we are not promised tonight.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said.
“I’m asking that we be happy,” I stood beside him on the bank of the canal. The water trickled behind us and the grass was gold and green in the light. “I am asking that when sunset comes, we can say that we took the time we were given, because we aren’t promised more.”
His hair was gold in the dawn. It reflected off the panes of his cheeks and even the bottomless pits of his eyes were tinged with gold. His fingers were clenched into fists, but I reached out my hand to him. Because he was as lost as I was and it didn’t matter what the sunset would bring. It didn’t matter to me.
“I’ve waited all my life,” I said, hand out. “I didn’t know what I was waiting for until now.”
“She’ll kill you,” he said. “She will kill you and she will make me watch if we do this.”
“I’ll see you again,” I said. “If not here, if not Orissa then somewhere else. Somewhere that even the Red Queen cannot go.”
He shook his head. “There is no such place.”
“Love me,” I said.
Jerrod had no reason to. What were we? A handful of nights, a few stolen kisses. But, oh, I ached for him. I ached for his arms around me and to be strong for him.
“You will die.”
“Then I will storm the City of the Dead, Jerrod. I will remake the world if I must.”
He kissed me, all lips and tongue and strong hands against me.
“I will not stay,” he said.
I pulled the vest from him, and the shirt beneath it. I ran my hands down the pale skin of him. And I kissed him.
“I did not ask you to,” I said. “I only asked that you love me.”
And he did. We did. In a forgotten corner of Orissa, where my mother and Althair were far away. Where the war had not touched, where there was only Jerrod and I and the morning light and the tiny, fragile, thing that had grown up between us.
It was enough. It was all that there was and all there would ever be. But it was joy. At least there was joy. And we were not alone.
* * *
The morning faded to afternoon and we lay on the grass. I ran my fingers through Jerrod’s hair, but he was looking away, out toward the wall and the army and what waited.
“How do I stop her?”
“You can’t,” he said, but he grew still. “Nothing can stop her.”
“She will kill us all,” I said.
He turned to me. Still beautiful. Still broken. I could see it now, in the daylight. I could see the hollow need in his eyes, the desperation. I had felt it in him and he had shown it to me.
“You’re asking me to betray my Queen.”
“I’m asking you to help save lives.”
He shut his eyes. “Lives are replaceable.”
“Not yours,” I said. I traced down the edge of his cheek with my finger. He was warm, so terribly warm.
“She will drink you down,” the unicorn said. “She will drink your life down and it will fuel her magic. If she can drink it down, pull blood and death down inside her, it will fuel her. It has always been her gift.”
“I love you,” I said.
We kissed again. Made love again. And as the sun westerned, we dressed in our armor and were what we had always been.
I watched him walk away, our eyes not leaving each other’s until the distance between us stretched and broke. And then I was alone again.
We were both alone again.
* * *
The gate was breaking. Each crash against it was the sound of thunder, a wall of percussion. I felt it in my magic, felt it with my senses.
“Hold,” I said. The soldiers around me clutched their weapons. Some prayed, but most watched. The great timbers shuddered and the silence was broken by the sound of splitting wood.
“Steady!” I called again.
She was there, on the other side. She was the hot wind that melted frost. She was false-summer in the endless winter. She was coming.
And somewhere, out beyond the gate, was a man with pale hair, who was gentle snow. Who loved me.
The gate broke, the timbers flew and she came.
Her warriors flanked her. They wore mismatched, pieced together armor. Their swords had been honed down to a thin edge.
And beside her, a step behind, was a man taller than the rest, his armor black ink in the light.
“Take it,” she said, and the rest swarmed around her, like ants, like a red-badged tide.
The men and women around me roared.
“For Orissa!” I heard, and it was Medeav, who had been the nearest in my life to a father. They charged. I watched as the gold of his armor disappeared in the throng. I lost sight of Jerrod as I followed my people, and then there was nothing but blood. I didn’t see faces. I didn’t hear voices. I gave myself to the sword and the battle.
If it wore a badge of crimson, or carnelian, or poppy, or rose, I slew it. I slew it until my sword was wet with blood and my side ached where I had been cut, and my chest ached with every breath I took.
I watched Medeav break through the faltering line. We were losing, there were too many to hold. Althair stood like a rock as her attackers continued to pile through the broken gates. Medeav charged her, like a star of gold.
But Jerrod was there before he could strike the Red Queen. He moved like water, his axe an extension of his hands. Medeav was not as fast.
On the downswing, as my old mentor watched the falling arc, the unicorn’s war axe met my blade. “They are not just game pieces, Jerrod.” I said.
I let myself be cold. I let myself be ice and winter and I let the way he looked into my eyes and the memories of him above me, beautiful in the moonlight, freeze in my heart. I would keep them safe forever, but we were not Orrin and Jerrod anymore.
I pushed him back as Medeav rose, and he went.
The tide had slowed, but the Orissa line had broken. We were overrun, but for where we stood, Jerrod, Medeav, and I. And Althair who walked on bare feet, whose eyes didn’t look at the slaughter. Who smiled.
“Do you yield?” she asked. “Yield and I will spare the rest. Yield and learn to love me, Orrin.”
Medeav threw himself forward before her magic wrapped tighter around us. Jerrod followed, and Althair and I, until we fought. Althair ripped the sword from Medeav’s hands, its edge not cutting her skin. Jerrod’s axe was too fast, and it struck the old man down.
“Bring me his head, my Butcher,” she said.
Medeav fell to the ground and the unicorn advanced on me. I watched the light fade from my mentor’s eyes. He watched me until the light was gone, and there was only a man I had held hands with in the moonlight, and the queen who had broken the world.
I did not want to fight him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to wake up and have the fear in the pit of my stomach be a dream and the dead around us be anything but my people and his.
“And you thought he loved you,” she said. “He has always been mine.”
Jerrod made a feint, a half-swing with his axe, and then caught the edge of my blade with the haft of his arm, locking us in close. His face was a mask, but his eyes, his eyes held tears. I pressed my face forward, until my forehead touched the place where a horn would have grown, if life had been different.
I released my sword, dropped my hands away from his axe, and pivoted.
And as I did, I called the cold. I called it up from the flagstones, and the skin of the dead, I called it in my heart and in the heart of my city. I called the magic and it answered.
It answered, and I made myself a spear of magic, one that Althair could not melt, one that would not break or falter.
I could not look at Jerrod, but I met the bloody magic of his queen.
Her smile failed when I closed the distance between us.
“Jerrod!” she screamed, but there was no answer as I grabbed her by the neck. Her power burned my skin and where my fingers met her flesh it leeched the cold from me.
“I will drink you down.” And she tried.
Desperate, I forced the power into her. I gave her the feeling of the ramparts beneath my fingers, the taste of ale on my lips as Jerrod kissed me. I gave her Orissa with its gentle parks and my mother looking down on the docks. And I gave her the cold, and it was too much.
She screamed, and I still forced the power into her, until there was blood in her eyes and in my mouth and I did not know where I began and she ended.
Althair tried once more to rip herself free as the ice and fire gave way to darkness, and even then, I gave her the power that made my legs stand, my heart beat. I gave it all to her. Because there was no other way but to burn her out.
I fell and there was quiet. I saw her, bloody eyes staring into space.
“He is mine.”
And I gave her the last of it. Jerrod and I walking along the quay, his arm across my shoulder, pulling me close. The touch of his lips against my cheek, the warm weight of him behind me, as we looked out to the sea. As the moon turned the wave-caps silver.
“Mine,” I said.
I faded into the dark, the sound of the first snow fall of winter following behind me.
Sean Robinson lives in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire. You can find him on most social media @Kesterian