Page 11

‘ ARE YOU CERTAIN THIS IS WISE, SUNbrINGER? ’

Arren didn’t answer his guard, as she trailed him down to the Reach gaols.

He didn’t need to. The long halls, barely lit by the dawn light, were filled with the clatter of preparation as Arren’s cobbled-together army made ready to leave.

Half of Daesmouth was all but rubble, the harbour fully taken, and Vittosk spies in the Bennites said the Talician army was moving west at speed.

If they did not race to meet them, they would be pincered between two claws.

They could tarry no longer waiting for weapons and plans and people.

Those they did have were disorganised, chaotic, loyal only to their Houses.

Or, they were mercenaries, glory-seekers, thieves and cut-throats dragged from the gaols in return for offers of reprieve or pardon.

He was a half-beggared king, and he couldn’t be choosy.

But there was more to war than bodies. An army that did not trust its leadership would tear itself apart, and if Elo wouldn’t give him his counsel, then Arren needed to seek power elsewhere. The power that moved nations. Faith.

He needed it now more than ever. Hseth was a deadly weapon of war because each victory made her followers believe in her more.

All their sacrifices, all their pain, they could see it rise before them in fire and death.

His own victories were few now, and tainted.

He needed his people to believe in him. In his alliance with the Craiers and the rebels, in his ragged army that barely knew the back end of a horse from its front.

Faith was what fired an army to face death on a field of war.

He had seen it in Blenraden: lost, regained, remade, till the city of gods was won, then his country, his throne.

Even if it had turned to blood and ruin, treachery and rebellion.

You leave only blood and chaos in your wake.

Elo had meant it to hurt, and it did. And for the first time in a long while, Arren remembered the voice of his mother. You’re born from nothing and will amount to nothing. Everything you touch is tainted with failure.

Queen Aletta’s loathing had been cold, disinterested. He embarrassed her as the unwelcome result of a dalliance with some House’s lowly cousin, long banished now, and long dead.

Arren almost missed the days when his god’s jibes had drowned out his mother’s memory, like spirit on an open sore, cleaning putrefaction from a wound. Now the god was silent, and his mother’s memory was not. Did Hestra intend to stay neutral in this fight forever?

Arren continued down a spiral stair, past the receiving hall where the winter tapestries had been brought down in favour of summer banners.

His guards hurried behind him, holding the flaming torches he had bade them bring.

They were not ready to leave, but Arren was.

He had barely slept. He spent most of his nights awake, thinking, planning, waiting for footsteps at the door, daggers in the dark.

He knew what it was like for death to come for him, but it was not death he truly feared: it was losing. Losing everything he had built.

They reached the gaols in the bowels of the palace, and all was quiet. Even as the summer warmed, the air remained cold and damp, and the rising sun did little to lift its chill weight.

Arren took one of the torches. ‘Wait outside,’ he said, but his guard looked troubled.

‘Sunbringer … it is not safe.’

‘The prisoners are in chains,’ said Arren drily.

‘No, my king, I mean the roof.’

Arren lifted his torch to brighten the vaults before them, and saw the sag in the ceiling, the cracks in the arches.

Craier’s blackfire had caused damage in unexpected places.

The once-beautiful gardens had been shored up, stitched over with wooden planks and salvaged stone, but in the Reach some floors still sank, beams groaned, and walls crumbled after weeks of seeming stability.

The ancestral home of the House Regna, the House of the monarchs who had united Middren, was falling apart. If he wasn’t careful, Arren would fall with it.

He hesitated. To die crushed by the falling stones of his own palace felt too bardic to bear. But that reminded him why he was here: to tap into the kind of faith that drove people to throw themselves at danger, murdering in his name.

And not just Sunbringer. Another name he had not chosen: Fireheart. He touched his chest, felt the heat of it.

‘If it is safe enough for our prisoners it will have to be safe enough for me,’ he said, stepping into the dark.

As he approached the occupied cell, he could hear ragged breathing.

The flicker of flame from the torch and his dimmed chest landed on white dresses browned by dirt and dried blood.

One of the women had struck her head falling into the harbour water, and was in a bad way.

Her eyelids fluttered but did not open. The other winced and raised her hand against the light, then gasped and fell to her knees on seeing who had brought it.

‘Sunbringer,’ she breathed, the chains at her ankles clinking as they settled. ‘You have banished my darkness with your fire.’

Arren hesitated, not sure what to feel. Elo had been right: this was what he had desired. The love given to gods. Still, it made him feel … discomfort. Wrongness. When faced with devotion, he still doubted that he had earned it.

He banished the thought. These were his mother’s thoughts, that he was not deserving, that love was something he could never have. He tried not to think of the anger in Elogast’s eyes.

‘Why did you attack the Craier ship?’ he demanded.

‘They turned against you, my king, and all you have done for us,’ whispered the prostrate woman, her words kissing the stones beneath her lips. ‘Now they flee to foreign shores and false gods, leaving behind a mess of their making.’

Arren relaxed a mote.

‘I am allied with Lady Craier,’ he said, not hiding his bitterness very well.

Bitterness he had nursed, locked in his own palace until the godkiller’s report was confirmed.

Then he had been forced to negotiate for his own throne, his leadership.

Craier had only capitulated when the Vittosk strongholds fell, and Knight Commander Peta threatened to kill prisoners.

‘She goes to summon armies to my aid, to Middren’s aid. ’

He would have killed them, Craier and her troublesome daughter.

He would have found a way. But the Irisian council had refused to treat with him since he had banned the gods, and yet had signed Lessa’s petition demanding he reinstate them.

No wonder the rebels followed her. She made a good leader, with connections across the Trade Sea and beyond it, and a reputation for ruthlessness.

She had returned as if from the dead to House Craier and its lands, pulling them out from financial ruin into wealth and success.

How he hated her. And her little brat with strange powers. But he knew in his soul that if he touched a hair on the little one’s head, Elo would never forgive him.

‘You do not need her , ’ hissed the woman, her hands balling into fists in the ground’s muck.

The antlers she had worn were gone, her braids falling apart into woebegone snatches of gold-blonde hair, reddened by the firelight.

‘Traitor. Rabble-rouser. Doubter of your magnificence. You need only the fire of your heart, the light of your eyes, the power of your mind. Middren has long stood on its own.’

She looked up at him with a shining gaze, and Arren felt Hestra warm slightly in his chest.

‘A small army that believes in you could lay thousands low,’ she said. ‘Your flame could overwhelm the Talician terror, if we let it burn as brightly.’

Arren swallowed. This is what he needed. More than anything. This passion, this certainty, Arren had seen it before. People willing to do anything for their gods, to sing, to kill, to die. Faith.

‘What is your name?’ he asked.

‘Methsme,’ she breathed. ‘My companion is Hariet. The one who died was Yeomi.’

‘I do not appreciate sacrifices without my consent, Methsme.’

The woman lowered her head again. ‘My apologies. Our intention was pure, but we did not see the wider art at play.’

We?

‘How many are you?’ he asked. He could put her to the rack: he knew his staff still remaining used fire, metal, wires and tools to extract the freshest knowledge from any prisoner. But he did not have time for torture.

‘A growing number,’ said Methsme. ‘The rebels have their connections, and so do we; in each and every land we have clerics who love you, Sunbringer. Without question, without hope of return. Because you can save us. Only you.’

Arren narrowed his eyes. The woman had perfectly balanced her breathy devotion with vulnerability and anger. He was no fool, and he could see when he was being manipulated. ‘What do you want in return?’ he asked.

The woman shook her head, looking again to the floor. ‘Only your safety,’ she said. ‘You as our only king. Our only god.’

Arren tutted, pulling back the torch to cast her in darkness. ‘Try harder.’

‘Then …’ she floundered. ‘Your protection. Legitimacy, for us speaking your word. So we can go on loving you.’

A flicker in his body, a tongue of flame running along his human ribs where they were bound with Hestra’s nest of moss and twigs. His god was listening.

Arren thought fast: Elogast had used archivists against him in Lesscia, holding hands and singing. Why shouldn’t he also use his faithful?

‘Then,’ he said, ‘perhaps there are songs you can sing for me, cleric, on our way to war.’