The Providence of Fire

50

Adare stood at the end of the dock, back to the still-burning desolation of Andt-Kyl’s eastern island, eyes on the small boats quartering through the waves. There were half a dozen of them, and they’d been at it all morning, back and forth, back and forth, dropping their weighted nets, trolling the bottom, then pulling them up slick and glistening with small fish. They kept those fish, tossing them into wooden barrels before lowering the nets once more. Adare chafed at the delay, the distraction, but she could hardly fault them. She had given the fisherman of Andt-Kyl this task, had asked it of them at a time when such asking was hard. Their town still smoldered. Many of their dead remained unburied. The wounded-both the screaming and the silent-needed tending. And still she had asked these men to go out in their small boats, to trawl for bodies.

“You will want to search for your mothers and fathers swept into the lake, for your brothers and sisters,” she had said, then added silently, shamefully, And for my own.

The fishermen had just glanced at each other, looked out over the waves, then nodded. Half of Andt-Kyl was in flames, including storerooms and root cellars stocked with the last of the winter’s provisions, food intended to carry the townsfolk through to the harvest. It made a certain sense to take to the boats. The living would need to eat, and these men knew their business; they could do their usual work while they searched for the dead.

Adare stood on the docks all morning staring south, staring until her eyes ached with the strain, a stone settling in her stomach every time they pulled another sodden body from the water. She could tell, even half a mile distant, whether the corpse belonged to a logger or to one of the Urghul. The horsemen were stripped of valuables, then tossed unceremoniously into the hold to be burned ashore later-no sense dragging the same corpse out of the water a dozen times. The dead of Andt-Kyl, however, were laid gently on the decking. The living fishermen hovered over them, as though they were spirits slipping clear of the wet flesh. Adare couldn’t hear anything at that distance, but from the angle of the heads, the stillness of the poses, she could imagine them praying.

She had tried to pray herself.

Intarra, she began, over and over, Lady of Light, please …

That same invocation, again and again. She never got any further. There was no way to know if the goddess was listening, if she cared, if she was even real, but none of that was the obstacle, not the true obstacle. There was always doubt in matters of faith, doubt that had never before, even at Adare’s most skeptical, stopped her from praying. No, the reason she could not finish her prayer here, now, staring out over the blue-gray waves of the lake, watching the men in the small boats haul up struggling fish and the calm, unstruggling dead, was not a problem of the goddess, but of Adare herself. She couldn’t end the prayer because she didn’t know what to pray for.

Her brother was dead. She had killed him, or helped to. Valyn, she said silently, the name like a nail lodged in her mind. He was her brother, and she had killed him. The truth scalded, but it was the truth, and so, rather than turning away from the lake, rather than burying herself in the thousands of other matters that needed her attention, rather than drinking until she dropped, or talking until she forgot, or working with her hands until exhaustion delivered her into sleep, she stood at the end of the dock, rehearsing what she had done, saying over and over the name of a dead brother, trying and failing to pray.

“Your Radiance.”

Lehav’s voice behind her. The scuff of his boots on the wooden dock. She closed her eyes, measured out the last moments of her solitude in his approaching steps.

“The town?” she asked, when he paused at her shoulder. “Do they know yet how many died?”

“It’s a mess,” he replied grimly. “It’s hard to know anything. Maybe half.”

Half a town killed. Was that a victory, against the might of an Urghul army? A failure?

“What about the Sons?”

“We took a beating. Not as bad as the Army of the North. I heard you were atop the signal tower.”

Adare nodded, still not looking at him.

“That was foolish,” he said.

Before the battle she would have bridled at the comment, would have argued the point loudly and long, as she had done with Fulton. Fulton, who was dead. Dead because she had insisted on seeing the battle up close. She shook her head slowly.

“It seemed important.”

A cold wind blew through the long pause that followed, nicking the waves, fueling the fires behind them.

“I will leave you,” Lehav said finally. He did not leave.

Adare took a long, unsteady breath.

Intarra, she prayed inwardly, Lady of Light. She had tried so many times already to compose this prayer, had failed so many times that when the last words came, they surprised her: Lady of Light, forgive me.

She couldn’t have said for what transgression she was begging forgiveness. She had failed her father and made common cause with his killer, had taken a leach as her councillor, had raised up an army to fight against armies of Annur, had stolen a throne from one brother and slid a knife between the ribs of another.…

It had all seemed so necessary.

Forgive me, she prayed again, again without entrusting the prayer to speech.

Sunlight shattered on the waves. It burned her eyes. Behind her, the flames still raged. Forgiveness, it seemed, lay far from the providence of fire. She watched a moment longer as the fishermen hauled another quiet body from the lake, then turned to Lehav.

He was studying her-his prophet, chosen of Intarra, Emperor of Annur-with dark, uncertain eyes.

“Let’s go,” said Adare hui’Malkeenian before he could speak again. “There is work to be done.”