The Providence of Fire

7

The blessing of the pilgrims felt more like a death sentence than a celebration.

For one thing, Lehav had practically marched Adare to the Temple of Light, allowing only brief stops at the stalls along the Godsway for her to buy a small pack, a change of clothes, some dried fruit and salted meat, and, of course, the golden robes of one of Intarra’s pilgrims. It was all part of her plan, but she had expected more freedom in executing the design, less scrutiny, the chance to pause and go over each step before taking it. Instead, she felt as though she had fallen into the Chute all over again, swept along by a force beyond her control, a force that, if she faltered once, would kill her.

Not that Lehav had been rough or ill-mannered. After his first threat, he had contented himself with small talk during their long, muddy trek to the Temple of Light, asking the sort of questions Adare had prepared for, while she responded with answers she had rehearsed a hundred times over. Her name was Dorellin. She was the daughter of a prosperous merchant. The blindfold? A consequence of the river blindness that had struck a year earlier. Yes, she could see, but her sight was failing month by month. At first it was only the sun that pained her, but more recently she had to shield her eyes from fires, even candles. No, her parents didn’t know where she was. They insisted she was foolish, but Adare had faith in the goddess, was certain that if she made the pilgrimage to Olon, to Intarra’s most sacred shrine, the Lady of Light would restore her sight. No, she hadn’t fully considered the difficulties of the journey. Yes, she was prepared to walk for weeks. No, she hadn’t planned farther than Olon itself, had no idea whether or not she would return to Annur, had thought no further than this one terrifying act of devotion.

The soldier only nodded at each response, but she caught him looking at her from time to time, judging her answers, weighing them. She wasn’t sure if she wished she could see more of his expression through the blindfold, or less. It was a relief when they finally arrived in the massive square before the Temple of Light.

The temple itself was one of the wonders of the empire-a huge, glittering structure, more glass than stone, like a great cut gem set into the earth beside the Godsway, panes flashing in the midmorning light. The Godsway itself stretched out to the east and west, wide enough that fifty horsemen could ride abreast without brushing the shops and stalls to the north or south, the avenue cleaving the city like a sword stroke. Both the temple and the Godsway, however, shrank to insignificance beneath Intarra’s Spear. Even a mile distant, it loomed overhead, a terrible, impossible splinter. The priests of Intarra had tried to build their temple outside of its shadow, but nothing in Annur was beyond that shadow, and Adare found herself staring at it, trying to make sense of the scale. It was hard to appreciate the Spear’s height from inside the Dawn Palace, but standing in the center of the Godsway, gazing up at the tower’s top, she felt dizzy, as though she might lose her footing and fall upward into the open sky. With an effort, she looked down, finding the flagstones, then over at Lehav, who was studying her intently.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Adare said, extending a hand.

“Thank the goddess instead.”

Adare nodded piously. “No doubt it was Intarra herself who sent you. I will be forever grateful, Lehav.”

He didn’t smile or take her hand. “You speak as though we were parting ways.”

“No,” she replied, hastily shaking her head. “We will be sharing the path together.” She gestured to the pilgrims thronging in front of the temple. “I hope to come to know you much better in the days to come.”

“And I,” he replied, narrowing his eyes in a way that made her shiver, “will hope to know you better as well. Dorellin.”

* * *

Hundreds had gathered for the long trek, some young and alone, carrying no more than a light pack over the shoulder, some in families of four or eight, wagons piled high with rickety wooden furniture and food, crates full of clothing, everything necessary to start a new life in Olon, hundreds of miles to the south. Farmers had tethered pigs to their carts, filled cages with squawking ducks, yoked teams of two or four water buffalo to haul the whole mess. Lean dogs threaded through the crowd, sniffing and growling, snapping at one another, ignoring the calls and commands of their owners in the chaos. The group-those leaving and those come to bid them farewell-had snarled traffic on the Godsway for hundreds of paces east and west, blocking porters and horses alike.

And this happens every week, Adare thought to herself.

Uinian’s death had occasioned the largest migration inside the empire in decades, and yet, though she’d been following the reports, she hadn’t really understood the numbers until she approached the assembled crowd. The gathering was intended as a celebration, a joyous valediction for those following their faith to a fertile land beyond persecution. It was intended as a bold gesture of defiance, and yet, even through the thick cloth of her blindfold, Adare saw desperation everywhere: in the men joking too loudly, the neighbors slapping shoulders too often and too vigorously, the couples trying to drown their fear and foreboding in mindless, jocular patter.

“When you’re freezing your nuts up here next winter, I’ll be lazing by Lake Sia,” a young man called over the noise, while immediately to his right a youth that could have been his brother buried his face in an old man’s shoulder, body shuddering with sobs. Not everyone could make the trip, of course: the old or infirm, those too poor to start over in a strange new city, or too frightened. In an hour or so, just after the priest’s blessing, parents would leave their grown children, brothers would bid sisters farewell, friends of two score years would part.

It was a sobering spectacle. One old man cursed at his horse when the beast refused the halter, struck it across the nose, then buried his tear-filled face in his hands. Two young children, a pale-faced, saucer-eyed boy and girl, stood silently in the midst of the chaos, holding hands tightly, obviously torn between excitement and fear. Olon wasn’t that far. Merchant caravans could make the trip in a few weeks, canal boats even more quickly, and yet these people were not merchants, not canal captains. Most would never set foot in the capital again.

Because of me, Adare thought, feeling awed and sick at the same time.

Uinian’s disgrace had seemed like a perfect opportunity to geld the Church of Intarra, to seize back the rights and allowances so foolishly granted hundreds of years earlier by Santun III, to recapture decades of lost revenue, and perhaps most importantly, to cripple the power of the Sons of Flame. With il Tornja’s backing, she had moved quickly, drafting up the Accords of Union over the course of two days and two sleepless nights, then shoving them through the various ministries.

On the surface it looked like a fair deal, even a magnanimous one on the part of the Unhewn Throne; after all, the Chief Priest of Intarra had murdered the Emperor-or so everyone believed. The Accords offered a gracious reconciliation between Intarra’s faithful and the larger empire of which they were a part, including a seemingly massive gift to the Church, ten thousand golden suns, “to greater glorify the goddess and her servants.” Il Tornja, in his role as regent, had placed the golden amice on the stooped shoulders of the new Chief Priest himself.

It was all a sham, of course. To be sure, ten thousand suns would widen the eyes of most merchants, but the figure was less than a rounding error for the Ministry of Finance, a meager pittance compared with the amount the throne would claw back every year by reinstating taxation on Church rents and tithes. The glorification of the main temple on the Godsway was only a distraction from the forced shuttering of the smaller temples spread throughout the city. And the Imperial Blessing, that newly instituted ritual in which the Emperor would give his formal sanction to the Chief Priest, required the priest to kneel in supplication before the entire court. The rankest scribe in the Dawn Palace saw the Accords for what they were, but then, Adare hadn’t written the measures to mollify the throne’s scribes; if she could convince the common folk of Annur, the petty merchants and laborers, the fishermen and farmers, that the Unhewn Throne continued to support the Church of Intarra, then she could have her triumph while avoiding a backlash from those eager to scream religious persecution.

It almost worked. The new Chief Priest, Cherrel, third of that name, was a weak, watery-eyed, bookish man. Devout, but utterly lacking in the sort of political savvy and ambition that had made Uinian so dangerous. He had caviled momentarily at one or two of Adare’s demands before caving utterly, obviously relieved that his Church was not to be scrubbed from the streets. According to the observers Adare had placed inside the temple, Cherrel counseled his flock on personal purity and political obedience, counsel they may well have heeded had Adare herself not overreached.

The problem, as always, was the Church’s private army. As long as the Chief Priest, any Chief Priest, was permitted to keep thousands of men-soldiers both well trained and well paid-under arms within the borders of the empire, within the borders of the ’Kent-kissing capital, all the genuflection in the world wouldn’t lead to true submission. The Sons of Flame needed to be disbanded, and so Adare had drafted the edict disbanding them, allowing only one hundred for “the immediate protection of the temple and the greater glory of Intarra.” It had seemed a prudent step, a necessary step, and yet she had not considered the consequences.

Many soldiers found difficulty in returning to civilian life, and the Sons of Flame were no different. In fact, they were worse, their martial experience compounded by single-minded religious fervor. In drafting the Accords, Adare had hoped the Sons would simply melt away-join the bakers’ guild, or ship out with a fishing fleet. It was idiocy, in retrospect. Her father would have recognized the problem, would have avoided it, but her father was dead, and if she didn’t clean up her own mess, it would soon start to stink.

There was no outright rebellion. In fact, it seemed at first that the Sons of Flame had simply drifted off, dissipated, like smoke before a stiff breeze. Then Adare received the first reports from her tax collectors on the road to Olon: the soldiers were headed south. Not in a single group, to be sure. Not marching down the road in rank and column. Had they been so bold, she could have sent the legions after them for defying the terms of the Accords.

No, the Sons of Flame were moving south in a nebulous body-half a dozen here, two or three there, retaining their armor and weapons while discarding the banners and uniforms. Hundreds and hundreds of men like Lehav, leaving Annur. Evidently one of the bastards, a man she’d never heard of, named Vestan Ameredad, was behind it all, urging the men to regroup quietly in Olon, the ancient seat of Intarra and the site of her first temple, to leave Annur for a holier city farther from the grasping claws of the Malkeenians. The exodus of soldiers seemed to have kindled similar sentiment in the more devout civilians as well. Hence the weekly caravans to the south.

It was a disaster, Adare thought, staring at the crowd pressed around her, a disaster for those leaving their homes and for the empire itself. She had incited something perilously close to open rebellion in the very streets of the capital.

And the irony, she thought grimly, is that without this ’Kent-kissing rebellion I’d have no stones left to play against Ran.

What she was planning felt like madness, a desperate gambit to leverage the instability of the empire itself in order to reclaim the Unhewn Throne for her family, and yet it wasn’t really the end of the Malkeenian line that worried her. Despite her own eyes, Adare had no illusions about Malkeenian sanctity. Over the centuries, her family had furnished dozens of emperors, some capable, some less so. The idea of leaving the empire to il Tornja, however … that seemed both a dangerous and cowardly course.

The sedition of the Church of Intarra, dangerous as it might prove, was predictable, comprehensible. The Intarrans, like dozens of religious sects before them, wanted power. They resented the encroachment of secular government into those spheres of life they deemed holy, and they deemed everything holy. It was an old story and a familiar one, almost comforting beside the mysteries of il Tornja’s coup.

Adare had no idea why the kenarang had murdered her father, no idea what he intended toward her, no idea if he had already killed her brothers, no idea what he planned for the empire. She’d been over and over the matter, coming at it from every conceivable angle, but there just wasn’t enough information. It was possible that il Tornja was some sort of foreign spy, that he had been suborned by Anthera or Freeport or the Manjari Empire. Maybe he was acting alone. Perhaps he wanted to destroy the empire or maybe he just wanted to milk it for his own material gain. There was just no way to know.

Her ignorance was infuriating, but as her father had said many times over, Often there is no good path. That does not mean we should not walk.

In the end, Adare kept circling back to the same basic point: the Church of Intarra, so recently her deadly foe, could well prove the salvation, not just of the Malkeenians, but of Annur itself. Only the Sons of Flame had the training and the numbers to pose a plausible threat to il Tornja. If she could bring them under her aegis, if she could incite them to turn against the regent, she would have a ready-made army of her own. If. The word was like a knife pressed against her throat.

This, however, was not the time to flinch. She was committed now, had been since she fled her own guardsmen, which meant going south, meeting with Vestan Ameredad, humbling herself, admitting her error with Uinian, then trying to piece back together an army she had done everything in her power to destroy. The only good thing about the situation was that the outflow of pilgrims to Olon gave her the cover necessary to hide her flight from the city.

It had seemed simple enough to join the group-a matter of good boots, a pilgrim’s robe, and the muslin cloth to cover her eyes. Now that she was a part of the throng, however, her stomach knotted inside her. The odds of being recognized were low, especially with the blindfold; nearly a million people lived in and around Annur, and those emigrating to Olon were not likely to have spent any time in the Dawn Palace. On the other hand, Adare had ridden in dozens of imperial processions over the years, spent countless days sitting before the court. Just months earlier, thousands upon thousands of citizens had seen her at Sanlitun’s funeral. Her newly cut hair and pilgrim’s robes felt like a meager disguise in the midst of so many eyes.

She wondered what would happen if she were discovered. It would be insanity for them to kill a princess, certain treason, but then, no one in the Dawn Palace had any idea where she was. Her fellow pilgrims could beat her bloody, slit her throat, and toss her in the canal without anyone the wiser. Bodies washed up in the Basin all the time. She imagined her corpse, bloated and rotting, face disfigured. One of the canal tenders would fish her out with a long iron hook, toss her body on a cart, and dispose of it in some shallow pit outside the city, all without a second glance. The missing princess would remain missing. Ran il Tornja would remain on the throne.

She set her jaw, shoved the thought from her mind, pushed into the crowd, searching for a wagon that wasn’t too overloaded. She’d bought only a few changes of clothes, a decent-sized water skin, a wool bedroll, and a supply of fruit and nuts in the event that the caravan didn’t pass through a town for a day or two. It didn’t look like much-plenty of the men and women clustered on the Godsway were laden with three or four times that weight-and yet Adare could already feel the leather straps of the pack biting into her shoulders, the muscles of her neck and back clenching beneath the unfamiliar load.

She had no idea how long it would take her body to adjust. It was tempting to simply grit her teeth and carry the pack herself, but the thought of walking fifteen miles a day already had her nervous. The group of pilgrims provided both her shield from il Tornja and her protection from bandits along the road. An injury that forced her to leave the caravan partway could well prove disastrous. Better to be cautious. For a few copper flames, one of the families would be willing to toss her small pack on the back of a wagon each day.

Most of the carts were piled so high she didn’t even bother to approach. A converted carriage seemed a likely choice until she drew close enough to see the way the boards bowed at the sides, the warp of the wheels. She didn’t know much about transport, but the thing didn’t look as though it would make it past the Annurian walls, let alone all the way to Olon. She was sizing up a low farmer’s cart when a vicious cursing cut through the conversation around her.

“Ya’ve cross-lashed it, ya shriveled nutsack! Straight-lashed, I said. It’s t’be straight-lashed.”

Adare turned to find a tiny, wizened woman, well into her eighth decade judging from the bone-white hair pinned up on the back of her head and the wrinkles etched into her weathered skin. She was cursing at a crabbed, gray man in a voice so loud it seemed impossible such an instrument could issue from such a tiny form. Despite her stoop, the cane in her right hand appeared superfluous: rather than leaning on it, she used the worn length of wood to stab at the provocative lashings.

“I swear,” she continued, spitting as she spoke, “if our mother hadn’t’a squoze us out’a the same fuckin’ cunt, I’d knock ya on that fool fucking head of yours, take the cart my own self, and have done with ya.”

“Please, Nira,” the man replied, muddling with the straps. “We are part of a religious pilgrimage now. This is no way to speak among these devout folk.” His language was more precise than hers and a good deal more polite, but there was a vagueness to his voice when he spoke, an emptiness in the eyes, as though he had just woken up, or were immensely weary.

“Pilgrimage my withered, bony arse!” the woman replied. “It’s a bunch’a fucking cretins never spliced a yoke or mended an axle in their lives.”

The words produced an eddy of discontent in the crowd. People paused in their work or their farewells, turning toward her angrily. Several appeared on the verge of speech, but the woman’s advanced age seemed to earn her a reprieve. The old man had not so much as glanced at the other pilgrims or looked at his sister. He continued to tug with obvious futility at the wrong knot. His mind was going, Adare decided, irritated at the woman for so abusing him in his dotage.

“I will fix the lashing, sister,” he said quietly, “if you will cease prodding it for a moment.”

The old woman snorted, but she lowered her cane and turned from the wagon as though searching for another target. Her eyes lit on Adare.

“And what in the fine fuck is wrong with you?” she demanded, squinting beneath her wrinkled brow.

Adare froze, uncertain how to respond.

“Ya blind?” the woman pressed. “Dumb?” She took a step closer, waving her cane in the air before Adare’s nose in the way a horse breaker might show a beast the halter. “Sweet ’Shael, ya ain’t sluggish in the head, are ya?”

“No,” Adare managed finally, trying to keep her voice low. The old woman had drawn too much attention already.

“Good,” she snapped, “’cause I got more than plenty a’ crazy with this brain-buggered arsehole.” She jerked a thumb at her brother, shook her head in irritation, and half turned back to the wagon. Adare started to blow out a sigh of relief, but the woman hesitated, cursed under her breath-something about letting the fool girl wander-then, with obvious reluctance, rounded on her once more, stepping in close this time. “What’s with the cloth on your eyes?”

“Nira,” the man interjected, shaking his head and peering suddenly up into the sky, “the young woman’s attire is really none of our business. The clouds,” he waved a vague hand, “they are our business. The clouds and the sky and the rain…” He trailed off, staring blankly into the distance.

“Oh bugger off with your business, Oshi,” the woman snapped. “Child’s standing ’ere like a poleaxed steer, baffled as a bitch in heat, and you’re on about business. What about fixing the fucking lashing while you’re at it, eh? What about that business?”

She turned back to Adare, waving her over imperiously.

“Quit standin’ there like a silly slut and let me have a look at the problem. River blindness, is it? I’ve seen plenty river blindness, and a strip a’ cloth is no way to handle it.…”

Adare tried to back away, but the knot of people had tightened around her as more pressed in from the periphery. She could try to force her way free, but that seemed likely to draw more attention than the old woman herself.

“It’s not river blindness,” she muttered. She knew as soon as the words were out that the lie was foolish. She’d already told Lehav that she did have river blindness, but this woman seemed intent on checking the injury for herself. Adare raised a nervous hand to the blindfold. “I don’t think it’s river blindness,” she said again, a little more loudly. “I don’t have the bleeding or the lesions.”

“Let me have a look,” the old woman said, stretching up and frowning. “No good hiding from the truth.”

Adare jerked back. “I’m not hiding,” she snapped, more loudly than she had intended. More heads turned and she cursed herself silently. “It’s a normal case of dimming,” she went on more quietly. “My physician said binding them, shielding them from the light, would slow the damage.”

The old woman spat on the broad flags. “Physician, is it? How many pretty gold suns ya toss his way for that fine piece of fuckery?”

“He knows his work,” Adare countered.

“Bilkin’ the rich, ya mean?” The woman shook her head dismissively. Something that might have been the shadow of pity flashed in her shrewd eyes. “No way ta stop the dimming,” she said. “Sorry, girl, but the light’s going, pretty cloth on your eyes or no.”

Adare nodded slowly. “I know that. It’s why I’m joining the pilgrimage, to show my devotion to Intarra. Perhaps the goddess will hear my prayers and restore my light.”

It had seemed an elegant solution-her disguise was also her motivation. With one story she could explain the blindfold and the journey both. Nira, however, seemed less than convinced. She cocked her head to one side, fixing Adare with one unwavering dark eye, a stare that seemed to stretch on half the morning.

“That’s what he thinks,” she said finally, waving the cane at her brother. “Hopes the goddess might unscramble his egg. I told ’im she’s just as likely ta hoist up m’tired old tits, and I ain’t countin’ on that, either.”

“Sister,” Oshi said, turning from the lashings. “Leave the girl her hope. Intarra is ancient and her ways are inscrutable.…”

“I’m ancient,” Nira snapped, “and I’ve screwed on a few tables, and I’ll tell ya this for free: better to ’ave a pig than a goddess.” She waved her cane at one of the black-bellied beasts nosing for scraps around the wheels of the wagon. “A pig’s real. You can hit a pig,” she said, thwacking the beast across the flank and earning an outraged squeal in response. “You can kick a pig. If you’re lonely and not particular, you can fuck a pig, and then, in the mornin’, butcher it up for bacon. A pig’s real,” she said again. “Realer than your flim-flammy bitch of a goddess.”

Oshi shook his head. “I have explained to you, sister, the importance of faith in these matters.”

“Yes,” Adare said, nodding eagerly. “I, too, have faith in the goddess. With her divine care, all will be well in the end.” It sounded like the sort of mindless patter a naïve young pilgrim might well believe.

Nira rolled her eyes. “Better a limp fuck than a whole bucket a’ faith. Faith gets ya killed, and you,” she continued, stabbing a finger at Adare, “oughta pay attention ta that little lesson. As for all bein’ well in the end, th’end’s gonna come sooner rather than later for you, ya don’t smarten up.”

Adare nodded hesitantly.

Nira waited for her to respond, then grimaced, glancing around at the milling crowd. “C’m’ere,” she muttered, lowering her voice, gesturing to the far side of the wagon where a crush of squealing black pigs had forced away the pilgrims. Adare didn’t move.

“Come over here, ya willful little slut,” she pressed, glaring. “’Less ya want me saying what I got to say right out here in the open, which I’m thinking ya don’t.”

Adare hesitated. What she wanted was to slip away from the woman as quickly as possible, but slipping away didn’t seem to be an option. Worse, there was something knowing in Nira’s tone, something almost accusatory, that pricked up the hairs on the back of her neck. After a moment more Adare nodded, then followed, clutching at her dress, trying to keep it clear of the press of muddy pigs. When they had stepped far enough around the wagon that the sideboard obscured the closest pilgrims, Nira rounded on her.

“Listen,” she hissed, voice low, eyes shifting vigilantly over Adare’s shoulder. “You want to leave your palace and play poor little blind girl, I’m sure you have your reasons.”

Fear took Adare by the throat. “I’m not-” she began.

Nira waved down the objection. “Quit it. I’m not in the secret-trading trade and I’m not looking to join it now. A girl’s got a right to her lies-’Shael knows I’ve learned that lesson a few dozen times over-but,” she continued, stabbing Adare squarely in the chest with a bony fingertip, driving her back against the rough wood of the wagon, “you look likely to step squarely in the shit without any pushing on my part.” She shook her head, jabbed at the mud with her cane, and muttered angrily under her breath. “I’ve got enough to do keeping Oshi’s cracked nut in one piece, and now I’ve got you, too.”

“You don’t have-” Adare began, heart slamming against her ribs.

“Oh, ’Shael’s shit I don’t,” the woman snapped, raising her voice once more. “Without me, you’d be fucked up the arse with a thick, crooked dick before we slipped past the city walls. Now toss your sack on the wagon and move outta my way before I get cross.”