Page 115 of Golden Queen (Idrigard #1)
Franca didn't hesitate though. Didn't spare a single thought for whether she should wait for her—try to help Gierta. Franca used her long legs, the ones her mother had compared to an ocelon, whose powerful jumps could carry the deer over the tops of the godsgrass stalks.
She ran and ran, leaving the terror behind her. She kept going until she was in the godsgrass so deep that it covered her head. She didn't stop to listen, didn't stop to look. She didn't even stop when her lungs screamed out in agony and her sides cramped.
Franca willed her legs to go fast and far.
She placed one in front of the other, pushing off with the powerful muscles in her thighs—honed by years atop her big horse, Cato—whom everyone claimed was much too large a horse for a lady.
Cato would likely be taken back to Albiyn, and she hoped they would treat him well.
The godsgrass streamed past, slicing tiny cuts across her skin. Still, she ran. On and on.
Franca eventually heard the hooves behind her. Her teeth were clenched in agony as she bore down on the pain of her cramping legs. Her ankles felt like they would shatter under the pressure as her feet pounded across the ground.
And then she fell, her foot twisting sharply under her. The force of her momentum sent her face grinding against the ground, one shoulder digging in, nearly turning her head over heels.
When she came to a stop, she was in a slight depression, lower than the surrounding fields, and that was where she stayed as the soldiers raced past.
"Morrigan Mother, blessed of the angels and warrior of peace. Guard me from the forces of darkness. Morrigan Mother, blessed of the angels and warrior of peace. Guard me from the forces of darkness. Morrigan Mother, blessed of the angels and warrior of peace. Guard me from the forces of darkness."
The horses' hooves missed her by only a few feet where she was curled into herself in a ball, praying in a quiet whisper.
She stayed there, with her eyes tightly shut, repeating the litany of the prayer, letting the words constantly streaming through her mind shield her from the horror of what she had seen on the Godsway. She did not move through all that day and all that night.
Lady Franca Mandelian, sole surviving member of the House of Mandel, picked herself up from the godsgrass as the sun rose over the plains.
She made her way back to the road where the carriages still sat, doors open and contents plundered.
The horses were gone. Cato and Etreyiu were gone.
The wheels of the carriages had been broken so they sat disabled in the middle of the Godsway.
Gierta, her maid, was lying dead in the road, her skirts pushed up over her pale white backside. But her parents' bodies were gone. Her grandmother was gone. The soldiers had taken them, no doubt to provide proof that they were dead or maybe even to spike their heads over the gates of the city.
A raw, hoarse sob escaped her throat as she saw Talia's discarded body by the side of the road, thrown aside like garbage.
She stumbled across, bile rising in her throat at the sight before her. Talia's ruffled white dress was spotted with blood.
Franca wanted to run again. Every muscle in her body screamed to turn away and leave the sight of that broken child behind her.
But she steeled herself, gathered every shred of resolve she had left in her body, and went back to the road where the contents of her trunks were strewn.
All her fine gowns were shredded. The soldiers had painstakingly ripped or sliced apart every article of clothing to ensure that no one who happened upon them could hope to gain a single copper penny from the expensive fabrics.
None of that mattered to Franca, though, as she selected the softest one; a pale yellow gown that Edriana had made for her to wear at Aelia's wedding—the one that was supposed to happen at the end of the month and would have preceded her walk through the godsgrass arches in the rites of ascension.
That had been before everything fell apart though, in the days when Franca had believed she was a few weeks away from being a lady in waiting to the queen.
She could never have imagined that this gown, with its fine gold stitching, would be the funeral shroud for sweet little Talia.
Using the dagger that her father had given her when they first set out from Albiyn, Franca scratched a hole in the earth in the middle of the field and laid her baby sister into the ground between the tangled godsgrass roots
When she was done, she knelt beside the hastily dug grave and tried to think of something to say to make her sister's little life mean something.
She had barely even begun to live, and now her body would feed the godsgrass in a shallow grave that would be lost to even Franca's memory once she walked away from it.
"I love you," she said when all the other words failed her. Franca knew the words were also for her father, who had always been so proud of her, her mother, who could never hide the joy she got from simply looking at her.
“My most beautiful girl,” her mother, herself an extraordinarily beautiful woman, would say. “You are like a diamond among pebbles. You put us all to shame.”
But mostly they were for Talia. Sweet blue-eyed, Talia, with her round cheeks and all her wild curls. Talia, who looked at Franca with unconditional love and trust. Talia, who was betrayed by the world that had quickly turned out to be so much more dangerous than Franca could ever have imagined.
"I'm sorry," she added in a whisper.
And then, because it felt like her tears had all been spent, she rose, dry eyed from the grave and reached out for the godsgrass that had been pushed aside. She swept it back in to cradle her little sister in her final resting place.
Franca gathered what supplies she could, a skin of water, a few articles of clothing that had escaped being too badly torn, and the purse of coins that Gierta always kept in the bodice of her gown for emergencies.
Franca set off across the godsgrass, keeping the sun, now angling down across the sky again, to her right, heading south. She had only taken a few steps before she remembered.
She turned and raced back to the carriage, heart thundering in her ears as she yanked open the door and lifted the cushion that covered the secret compartment.
There, nestled in its ancient scabbard, was the golden Sword of Lithaway.
Franca had once asked her father why Mandel carried the Lithaway blade.
“You are too young to understand it, birdy,” he said, using her least-favorite pet name. “But someday I will tell you the story of why Mandel is the steward of the blade.”
When Franca was older, she’d asked him again. “Will you give the sword to Aelia when she’s crowned?”
“I have already tried, more times than I can count,” he chuckled. “The blade will go back to Lithaway when it’s time. It is meant to be in the hands of the godsgrass throne.”
“So, why do you have it? Why did Queen Laisera give it to you?”
“That is a story for another time, Franca. It is not something you would understand.”
The words and the mystery had infuriated her then, especially as she knew he believed her too immature to comprehend whatever led the Windemerian queen to gift him the blade her own husband had gifted to her.
But as Franca walked away with the ancient golden blade wrapped in one of her old skirts and slung over her back, she surmised that the story had died with her father.
She didn’t even care. She would offer the sword to Aelia, as honor dictated. But all she really wanted to do was learn to use it, learn to fight—so that she could find the guard whose foot had broken Talia’s head and put the Sword of Lithaway in his heart.
She stayed off the road. She tried to make her way through the grass without leaving a trail for anyone to follow.
The soldiers had taken their supply wagon and all the food they carried from Albiyn, so all Franca had to sustain her was a tin of butter cookies and a few hard candies in the pocket of her skirts.
She walked without stopping, only laying down to sleep in the godsgrass whenever she felt herself stumbling with exhaustion.
When the butter cookies ran out, Franca began eating raw godsgrass. It sat heavy in her stomach for the first few days. Eventually, though, she became accustomed to the grain and could stomach eating enough of it to maintain her energy through the day and much of the night.
She ran into trouble when she reached a small stream meandering across the plains and stopped to fill her water skin.
A man in soiled and tattered clothes tried to take her pack, telling her she had no business being in his fields. "Get out!" he screamed, as though she was standing in the middle of his house.
"I'm leaving!" Franca tried to back away but the man made another grab at her bag. She swung it away, unwilling to give up her few meager possessions to some insane man screaming that the empty godsgrass plains belonged to him.
Franca's hand went to the dagger in her pocket at the same time the man reached down for a large rock.
Before he could lift the rock high enough to threaten her, hoofbeats thundered behind them.
The man shied back, dropping the rock and holding his hands up placatingly as a riderless horse came racing across the field. “Back you devil!” the man cried.
Franca did not shy away from the massive beast, though. She would recognize Aelia's big Artaxian stallion anywhere.
Franca had ridden Etreyiu herself several times during the journey from Albiyn. Each time, he had been as gentle as any horse had a right to be—nearly reverent, in the way he bowed to allow her to reach his back.
Etreyiu stopped just in front of the man and raised his front feet off the ground in warning.
His long mane whipped around his head as he approached, snorting and pawing his massive hooves, kicking up clods of dirt as he dragged them through the sparse godsgrass that lined the edge of the stream.