Lesson of the Fire (19 page)

Brack snorted a laugh. “Weard Takraf did not
invent those wands. Farls have known the making of them for
centuries. He could easily claim to have learned it from Weard Wost
when he was at the Academy. I have heard Weard Takraf was one of
his most beloved pupils, before he was forced to resign his post in
disgrace.”

She remembered that. Sven had caught Robert
selling Nightfire’s slaves in the Duxy of Wasfal instead of
returning them to their homes. That Robert had survived Sven’s
wrath was a testament to Nightfire’s ability to keep the peace at
his Academy.

Katla shrugged. “It will take more than a
civil war to draw Pidel or Wasfal into this. Even if they discover
Flasten has broken the Law, they are not going to let the Mardux
break it further by arming mundane with wands.”

“What of this amendment?”

Brack feared her brother, Katla knew, which
could only mean the Delegates did, too.

He is right to fear Sven. I see what my
brother intends. By the time he finishes, it will be too late to
raise an army. His changes will destroy Drake civilization. The
Mass must invade or die.

“It is fen lights and nothing more,” she
assured him. “Even if Wasfal and Pidel radically altered their
policy, they would never agree to such an amendment. Flasten is
hardly going to vote in favor of it, and it would take a unanimous
vote.”

I just need to delay the Mass until Sven has
broken Flasten. Pidel won’t support the amendment, but they can’t
oppose him alone, and Wasfal has no stomach for an expensive civil
war.

Brack stopped pacing. “The Delegates have
given orders to mobilize the Mass.”

“How soon before they invade?”

“The First Wave marches in a month.”

Katla swallowed.
So much for delays.
“First Wave?”

She listened numbly as Brack explained.

There were millions of Drakes, like there
were millions of Mar. Marrishland had shaped the majority of both
into warriors. When the Mass invaded, the sea of bodies would be as
spiky water drowning the land, Dinah’s Curse come to life. Except
the Mass was made of living, breathing beings that had to do a lot
of the same things the Mar did: eat, drink, sleep, defecate, heal.
The entire Mass in one place would starve to death inside of a
span.

Therefore, as Brack explained in his aged
voice, it was broken down into waves of more than twenty thousand
apiece. Each had numerous scouts. The distance between the waves
would vary based on the Delegates.

“The point, Yee Ka Lah,” he finished, “is
that there are more than three hundred waves, and the Drakes are
not afraid to use all of them.”

She gaped at him. The math was terrifying.
The Mar could be extinguished.

But I knew that was a threat when I started
this.

Brack’s ancient face was grim. “I cannot
hold back the river any longer, but I made a deal with them. The
Mardux is still in Domus Palus. As soon as this morutsen wears off,
I will teleport into the chamber with a squad of jabber guer and
kill Weard Takraf and anyone else in the citadel. A headless damnen
is a danger to no one.”

“He has a hundred yellows guarding him at
all times. Their counterstrike will be swift. How do you expect to
escape once the deed is done?”

“I do not expect to escape.” Brack removed
the silver and gold ring from his finger and held it out to her.
“If I succeed, you may be able to convince the Delegates to call
off the invasion. So long as you wear Domin’s Favor, they will
recognize you as my successor.”

Katla accepted the ring,
the weight of the ancient metal heavy in her shaking hand.
How long have I waited for this moment? How long
have I practiced and planned?
“And if you
fail?”

“Then they will leave the Mar in a worse
state than when the Gien Empire fell to the Mass.”

Am I ready? Can I control
the Delegates? Can I make the Mass attack when I need it to?
He seemed to want her to say something.

“You seem to assume victory is inevitable,
yet you said the Mardux might prove powerful enough to destroy the
Mass,” she said.

He turned away again, back straight and
proud. “The Mass has never been defeated in the field. It will
strike before your brother is ready.”

Now, now!
Katla raised her hands, fingers splayed, myst of
every kind already gathered in great quantities along her
fingers.

“By the Oathbinder and by Dinah, my
patroness, this time, they will be, and my brother will lead them.
The Mar will meet the Mass in the field, and they will drive it
back across the Fens of Reur.”

Determination filled her as her mentor
turned, and fear washed away as his brown eyes hardened, so clearly
pained at this seeming betrayal. Even if his magic had not been
neutralized by morutsen, it would have made no difference. No one
could evade morutmanon — a spell whose touch was death to the
wielder’s enemies and harmless to allies.

“With this act of war, you condemn
Marrishland to a dark age. No duxy will be left standing,” he
said.

“Destroying duxies is easy. I do not need
the Mass to do that.”

The eight colors of myst merged together
into a blur of blackness that fanned out into a thousand snaking
tentacles of killing power, seeking her victim.

The black tentacles crawled up and draped
over Brack’s blood-drained face, unaccepting of his fate, then
squeezed. They faded into his bubbling skin, and Katla held her
poise as his eyes exploded and skin popped and boiled. The
blackness seemed to grow within him, and ashes of his bones mixed
with his smoking blood and flesh and the corpse finally collapsed,
being consumed and crushed in its own heat.

Katla stared down at
it.
He was always the enemy.

Brack apparently had triggered spells of his
own active in his home, for the library exploded into flames.
Darkness clouded Katla’s vision as the fire seared her. She
recalled the day her mother had been taken as she blacked out.

I know you remember her, Sven. I know you
remember her sacrifice.

* * *

Katla woke to the sound of her father
putting on his boots, stomping them against the floor, but she
pretended to be asleep. A chill hung in the air in their small
home, and twelve-year-old Katla wasn’t ready to come out from under
the deerskin blanket she shared with her younger brother.

“Be careful, Pitt,” Tyra, her mother, said
too loudly, forgetting the children asleep by the hearth only a few
paces away. “I want you home safe.”

Sven stirred against Katla’s back, and she
thought for certain he would sit up, and then he would start asking
questions.

Her brother had started speaking at so late
an age that their neighbors had wondered if he might be deaf, but
anyone who looked at his green eyes knew he heard perfectly. Other
children began speaking in simple words — mama, dadda, no. Not
Sven. His first word had been “why,” and sometimes it seemed all
his sentences ever since had been questions. From waking until
sleep, always questions, and it seemed he thought Katla was there
for no other reason but to answer them. If Sven woke, Katla would
have to leave the warm blanket and begin her chores, and he would
be at her heels the whole time, asking her to explain the world to
him.

After a moment of rubbing his face against
her back, though, his breathing settled back into the slow rhythm
of sleep. At the door to their house, Katla’s father spoke in a
low, soothing voice too soft for her to understand.

It was his way. Katla had only heard him
raise his voice once, and that had been to stop her from leaving
the house barefoot. She knew he wasn’t quiet because he was afraid
of people. It was something else.

Her mother had tried to explain it to her,
once. “Your dad talks quiet so people want to hear what he’s
sayin’. It makes them quiet. It makes them stan’ close so they can
hear — not just close to him, but close t’each other. Swind’s
whisper, they call it.”

Katla hadn’t understood it then and still
wasn’t sure she did. She knew her parents’ chose the name Gematsud
when they married, which meant “south-spirited” or “as warm and
gentle of spirit as Swind, the south wind that brings summer,” so
maybe it had something to do with that. Her mother had that name,
too, but Katla had heard her neighbors joking that it meant
something else about Tyra.

Her mother tried to speak quietly, but Katla
could still hear. “Domin take those wizards! Snatchin’ people like
we don’t know who’s doin’ it.” She sounded furious.

Katla’s stomach growled, and she risked
opening one eye to look at the fireplace. No soup pot hung over the
flickering remnants of the fire. They had not eaten anything in two
days except a bitter bark tea, and her parents had barely sipped
that.

Pitt murmured something apologetic, but Tyra
would have none of it.

“You couldn’t have done anythin’ if you’d
been there. They’ve magic, an’ you don’t.”

Katla knew the words had not been for her
ears, even though she knew it was the worst winter anyone in their
town could remember. Even during her short years, she had seen
higher snows and felt colder nights, but she had learned many new
words for winter hardships — war, magocrat, slaver, starve. People
went out to hunt or collect firewood, and many of them never came
back.

Her parents whispered back and forth, and
Katla could tell they were arguing about something. Finally, her
father let out a heavy, exasperated sigh. He was so agitated that
Katla caught two words, “be back.” And then he was gone.

Katla’s stomach rumbled again, and a hollow
pain seemed to sink teeth into her whole body. She began to cry
softly into her blanket, hoping her mother wouldn’t notice, fearing
it would only make everything even harder for her parents.

Tyra came to the hearth. Her back was to her
daughter, so Katla watched her stir the dying coals with a metal
poker. It was the last of their firewood, and there were many days
of winter left. Her parents might die. Her friends.

Sven shifted slightly
against Katla.
He’d never get answers to
all his questions,
she thought, and she
couldn’t suppress a sob.

Tyra turned slowly, her face a mask of
concern. She held out her arms, and Katla flew into them, weeping
as quietly as she could to keep from waking her brother.

“What’s the matter, Katla?”

“Are we goin’ to die?” she whispered like a
secret.

Her mother cradled the back of her head and
rocked her slightly. “What kind of question’s that?”

Katla shook her head without releasing her
hold. “I know what’s happenin’, Mom. We’ve no food. No firewood.
There’s bad wizards stealin’ hunters, so we can’t get more.”

“Your father’s gettin’ us food and wood,
baby. Not all the hunters got snatched. I brought you back a
duck.”

Katla relaxed a little. Maybe it was a lie,
but her empty stomach forced her to believe it. “An’ the fire?”

“If you’ll let me go a minute, I’ll show
you.”

Katla released her and looked around the
room as if expecting a pile of sticks to appear out of nowhere. But
there was no firewood or even blocks of peat to burn. Tyra walked
over to a beautiful rocking chair Katla knew had been a wedding
gift from her mother’s father, who had been a carpenter.

Tyra ran a hand along one polished arm of
the chair, traced the carvings at its back with her fingers. She
had nursed her children in that chair, sung them to sleep. She
looked at the chair thoughtfully for a long moment.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, and then she
picked up the chair reverently and carried it outside.

Katla winced as she heard the hatchet fall,
cringed at the splintering of wood meant for sitting. A short while
later, her mother came in, her cheeks wet from crying, her arms
cradling a pile of carved and turned wood like the broken body of a
fond memory.

Tyra set the pile of wood down next to the
fireplace and carefully chose a single, small shard. She caressed
it, cupped it in her hand, and then placed it on the coals. A soft
breath, and the faint orange lights glowed more brightly. Another,
and the hot specks spread across the dark coals. A third, this one
a little more forceful, and sparks flitted and spun in the hearth.
Smoke curled up from the tiny sliver of the rocking chair. A few
breaths more, and a tongue of fire burst out of the stick as if it
had always been there, and Tyra had merely coaxed it out of
hiding.

Tyra went to the door and collected her
hunting bag. To Katla’s delight, she withdrew not just the promised
duck, but two fat rabbits, too. She felt her mouth watering in
anticipation, and her mother smiled.

“Pluck it while the water boils.”

“Yes, Mother,” Katla said, taking the
duck.

Tyra helped her cut up the meat and put it
in the pot of melted snow with a little laurita from their winter
supply of the herb. Soon, Sven was awake and asking his sister
questions. Mostly, though, he spent the day asking when the food
would be ready. Tyra urged him to be patient as she fed one
precious piece of the rocking chair after another into the fire to
keep it burning. By the time the soup was ready, they could no
longer see their breath.

Their father didn’t come home that night,
though their mother was up most of the night waiting for him. He
didn’t come back the next night, either, and the pile of rocking
chair shards shrank to a few chips of wood. Once, Sven asked about
the rocking chair, which made his mother cry, but she comforted him
with a story of how the Mar learned to make food sacrifices to the
gods.

After Sven fell asleep, Katla crept out from
under the blanket to sit with her mother. Eventually, Tyra fell
asleep, but not Katla. She stayed awake, feeding the fire the chips
of wood a few at a time.