by Grace Draven
“I don’t know if I succeeded, Ataman.”
“You did,” he said. “And you’ll be rewarded. You honor your family with your bravery and your skill.” He made sure to learn her name before he spurred his horse to catch up with Erakes.
It would be too much to hope that the arrow had killed Dalvila outright. Azarion could hardly believe it managed to hit her at all. His need for revenge against the woman who had debased him in ways his mind still shied away from was blade-sharp, though the archer’s arrow had blunted its edge a little. With any luck, whatever wound it made would poison and kill the Spider of Empire.
They returned to the camp and had barely come out of the saddle when another scout arrived with different news.
He gave a quick salute. “I have news, Atamans. We’ve captured a group of women and children fleeing the city. They made it outside the walls but were caught trying to reach the river. All of them say they’re from Beroe. That Azarion Ataman keeps his promise.”
The blood still singing through Azarion’s veins from his brief confrontation with Dalvila rushed even faster through his body. Gilene. Those were Gilene’s words. The scout’s eyes widened, and he took a hasty step back when Azarion stalked him. “Where are they?”
“Just outside. Riders brought them here when they mentioned your name.”
“This has been an eventful day,” Erakes said and followed Azarion and the scout to where a small crowd of Savatar clustered around a ragged group of women and children. They held on to each other for support, their faces bleached of color, eyes rounded with terror as they stared at the fearsome nomads surrounding them. None wore illusion. Gilene didn’t stand among them. The tiny hope that flared to life inside him at the idea she might be here, in his camp, died.
Azarion approached carefully, hands at his sides, body relaxed. It would do him no good to scare them more than they already were. “Who speaks for you all?” he asked in a quiet voice.
There was a long pause, in which no one moved, before a tiny woman with big eyes and a generous mouth stepped forward. She folded delicate hands in front of her and lifted her chin before addressing him. “I do.” She spared a quick glance behind her. “I think.”
“Who told you to say you were of Beroe?” He knew. Knew in his gut but wanted to hear this woman say it. He didn’t get his wish.
A graying redhead stepped up alongside the petite woman. “She never told us her name. She was a Flower of Spring like us. She gave me the message before we escaped the catacombs.”
Secretive, suspicious Gilene. That wariness had served her well on numerous occasions. “Was she tall with dark hair?” And beautiful. The most beautiful woman ever born. Those words Azarion kept to himself.
The tiny Kraelian woman answered this time. “Tall, yes, but with light hair and blue eyes.” Awe altered her expression. “She can wield fire.”
His eyebrows shot up. Her powers had replenished then over the winter months. He knew they would, but that she had revealed them to those who would recount what they witnessed had been either an act of desperation or one of dark resolve. Neither lessened his worry. “She isn’t among you.”
“She stayed behind to face any guards who would follow us. If she escaped, we didn’t see.”
Erakes spoke up this time. “How did you escape?”
The Kraelian paused, reluctant to answer. “There is a tunnel forgotten by all. My father told me about it. It leads from a storeroom in the catacombs to the city’s outer curtain wall. You can’t see the entrance because of the wall’s angles and the growth of bushes there. It was barricaded. The barricade has collapsed.”
A rush of bitter laughter rippled up Azarion’s throat, and he clamped his lips shut to keep it from escaping his mouth. What he wouldn’t have given during his ten years of enslavement to learn of that tunnel.
An insidious voice entered his thoughts. But would you have met the fierce agacin?
Fate was a vicious taskmaster of cruel, arbitrary humors, but every once in a while, it granted a boon in its own twisted way.
He glanced at Erakes, whose eyes glittered, before returning his attention to the Kraelian. “You all made it through.”
She nodded. “Aye, though some spots are narrow and low. We had to crawl in places, one behind the other.”
Erakes grabbed his arm and pulled him to the side out of the women’s earshot. “Six armed Savatar. That’s all we need to get inside. Three to kill the soldiers manning the catapults and destroy the devices, three to kill the guards at the main entrance and open the gates.”
It was the perfect solution to victory without catastrophic losses to the Savatar horde. It seemed fitting that it was a Flower of Spring who handed them the means by which to sack Kraelag.
He might have celebrated more if Gilene were among the women who escaped. Maybe he could follow the tunnels as well.
Erakes must have read his thoughts. “You’re too big, and you know you can’t be the one to go in there. Your place is here with the warriors you lead.”
It was a stray thought, nothing more. A temptation to torture him while he stood with Kraelag in sight and Gilene so far out of his reach. Azarion sighed. “We step up our arrow attacks, keep the army and the guards on the ramparts occupied while the six sneak into the city.”
Erakes gestured to the Flowers of Spring. “What do you want to do with them?”
Azarion eyed them for a moment. Children among the women, and the women themselves both older and younger than what the Empire usually required of its sacrificial tithes. They were desperate, fearful. The Empire had demanded more sacrifices in the hopes of earning the gods’ mercy by virtue of number. “Keep them here for now. They’re safer with us than trying to flee into the forest, and we don’t need one of them to regain a sudden loyalty to the Empire and run back into the city with tales to tell.”
“We could just kill them.” He grinned at Azarion’s glare. “I’m jesting, Ataman. We owe them a debt, not death, and your agacin would never forgive us if we did such a thing.”
Erakes gave instructions to have their captives-turned-guests housed and fed and given blankets to warm them. He and Azarion gathered with their captains in Erakes’s qara to plan based on the new information offered by the Flowers. They had little time. The first volley from the catapults had taken everyone by surprise, but it wouldn’t be long before the Kraelian heavy infantry used the Savatar’s retreat to march forward and retake the ground Erakes and Azarion’s forces had claimed in the fighting to reach the gates.
When they were finished, he once again sought out the Kraelian woman who had acted as the escapees’ mouthpiece. He found her standing not far from where the others huddled around a fire, her back to them as she stood on the remains of a tree stump and surveyed the battlefield where dead men and dead horses lay strewn. She didn’t turn when he came to stand beside her, and her voice held a far-away quality, as if his presence was nothing more than a vague interruption of her contemplation.
“When your battle is over and the fields replanted, the crops that grow there will whisper the names of the dead. Most don’t stay, but those who linger will speak to the living when the wind blows and the rain falls.”
Another time, and a worm of unease might have crawled across Azarion’s skin at her words. Now, he barely noted them. “The fire witch. How was she when you last saw her?”
Her focus turned from the far place to settle on him. “Are you Azarion Ataman?” He nodded. “She was well. She burned a guard to gain the keys that opened the cell door.” She cocked her head to one side. “You know her better than the others do.”
He liked to believe he knew her best. “Yes.”
Her round eyes gleamed for a moment. “I’ll pray for you both that she survives to return to you.”
“She doesn’t believe in the gods.”
The Kraelian woman’s smile en
hanced the strong line of her jaw. “That’s all right. Most of us don’t.”
He had nothing else to ask her that wouldn’t be a repeat of his earlier questions, so he left her to her odd notions of crops and spirits and returned to the camp’s center. He found the six Savatar who volunteered to sneak into the city standing outside Erakes’s qara, among them a familiar and beloved face.
“Why did I know you’d be one of the six?” He scowled at his sister.
Tamura tied her braids into a knot at the back of her head, shoving a pin into the mass to hold it in place. She wore an unapologetic grin. “You would have been shocked if I weren’t.”
She and the other five had removed anything on them that shone or might catch the sun’s glare. Their long tunics were gone, replaced with short leather doublets and tighter breeches. They had set aside their bows and quivers full of arrows, carrying instead a myriad of short knives that made them lethal but didn’t hinder them as they traversed tight spaces.
Erakes eyed the six with satisfaction. “You all understand what to do?” At their nods, he said, “May Agna be with you then.”
Amid half-hearted protests and empty threats to emasculate him if he didn’t let her go, Azarion embraced his sister until her back cracked. “Be careful,” he whispered in her ear. “For my sake and our mother’s as well.” He set her away from him, and she shook like a wet dog before glowering at him.
A solemn affection softened the glower. “If I find Gilene, I’ll bring her out of there. I swear it.”
She saluted before turning on her heel to follow her companions through the camp to where their horses waited to carry them to a rendezvous point. From there, they would go on foot to reach the vulnerable entrance described by the Kraelian woman.
The Kraelian army, its ordered lines broken at first by the catapult volleys and the empress’s shocking injury, had quickly re-formed. Shields staggered by the perimeter’s soldiers formed a shield wall against direct arrow hits. The interior fighters followed suit, raising their shields above their heads to create a roof against the storm of arrows the Savatar would fire into the sky so that they fell down in an arc on the formation.
The sun had not yet centered itself in the sky when the catapults on the ramparts fired more shrapnel into the air, this time to land on the edges of the Kraelian formations where the Savatar light cavalry circled, darting in and out on fast horses to fire directly into the shield wall.
Azarion’s reduced squadron of heavy horse was broken up and re-formed under the remaining three squadrons. They stood at the edge of the encampment, waiting for the signal that the catapults had been disarmed.
He stared at the city walls, fancying that, if he just looked a little harder, he could see through them to the arena where Gilene stayed behind. What had she been thinking not to escape with the other women? She’d been brave to protect them in a way they couldn’t protect themselves from any who might pursue them, but she could have followed once they were no longer pursued.
“Why, Gilene?” he said under his breath. “Why did you stay?”
The moment Tamura and her group opened the gates, he’d be the first to charge through. He cared nothing for looting or pillaging or burning the buildings. All he wanted was his agacin.
The horses and warriors around him grew restless with the waiting, and the armor and barding they wore grew ever hotter in the sun as it approached midday.
An inhuman wail suddenly split the air and set the horses to whinnying and rearing. Below the Savatar encampment, the Kraelian line rippled with a collective shudder, and the shield walls wavered. Horse archers clutched the manes of their mares and abandoned their arrow shots to stay in the saddles and control their frenzied mounts.
It was an unearthly sound, vast and piercing. Another followed, and every man and woman around Azarion gasped and covered their ears. The horses went berserk, many of them throwing their riders before bolting away, either into the forests or to the rolling hills behind the Savatar encampment.
Azarion instinctively raised his arms to cover his face as a colossal whirlwind of fire suddenly blasted up from the center of the city on an invisible concussion wave of pressure that made his ears pop. The air around him sucked in toward the city, bowing nearby trees, before exploding outward, shattering the city’s outer barbican walls.
The damage the catapults did was nothing compared to the catastrophic destruction of masonry debris and wood shrapnel flying through the air. The Kraelian formations collapsed, obliterated by a howling gale that hurled them about like leaves in an autumn storm.
The monstrous column of fire expanded, and within the gaps of the broken walls, Azarion saw people running and screaming as they fled before the onslaught of what was surely holy retribution.
This fire moved with purpose. Fast, destructive, it devoured everything before it as it spun through the city, leaving conflagrations in its wake. Kraelian soldiers still alive and mobile ran into the wood or vainly sought to capture horses racing past them. The Savatar fled the field as well, their mares stretched low to the ground as they strove to outrun whatever monstrosity had just erupted from the center of Kraelag and turned it into fiery rubble.
When his horse fought him hard enough to nearly buck him off its back, Azarion dismounted and jogged farther down the slope leading to the deserted battlefield, ignoring the warning cries of his people behind him. His frantic gaze swept the path his sister and the other Savatar had taken, praying they hadn’t yet made it to the city when it literally exploded before everyone’s eyes.
The heat radiating off the burning city kept him from drawing closer. Every tree, bush, and weed nearest Kraelag’s periphery had been reduced to blazing silhouettes.
Flames spiraled out of the moving whirlwind, hideous and graceful. Azarion squinted against the heat and light as the last of the Savatar archers raced past him for the uncertain safety of the camp.
That vortex of fire drew Azarion closer, despite the burn and the pain of blisters erupting on his exposed skin. A face coalesced in those flames, beautiful and terrible to behold. That face collapsed into the conflagration only to re-form once more, this time with a different woman’s visage. It did it over and over again as the twisting maelstrom turned Kraelag into an inferno.
A chorus of voices rose behind him, and he turned to hear what they said. Savatar lined the slope, calling out to the whirlwind.
“Agna! Agna!”
Azarion pivoted back to stare at the bright, destroying beacon with its many changing faces. The Great Mare, creator of all the Savatar, the goddess of fire. She had manifested before Kraelian and Savatar alike and changed the world in the span of an indrawn breath.
His wonder changed to horror. He knew now why Gilene stayed. Only an agacin could call down the fire goddess. What had she done to capture the attention of a deity? What had she sacrificed?
He shouted her name, but the hot wind barreling off Kraelag shredded the sound. He called out again and again until he was hoarse and tasted blood at the back of his throat.
The spiraling column halted in front of the remains of the city gates. Behind him, every Savatar dropped to their knees in supplication.
“Gilene,” he said in an almost soundless whisper, and this time, the goddess heard him.
A sliver of fire separated itself from the main column and floated across the littered battlefield to where Azarion knelt in the drying mud. He stayed on his knees, mesmerized. The entity stopped a short distance from him, close enough that he felt the heat it generated but not so close that he would burn from its proximity.
The splinter changed, taking on the face and form of a woman, and Azarion groaned at the sight.
Gilene, made of flame now instead of flesh, stared at him with eyes the color of luminous gold coins. She raised a hand, outlining his form in a loving caress that sent ripples of heat over the grass to buffet his face
and arms.
Grief threatened to suffocate him. He’d found her again, but she was forever lost to him now. No longer a handmaiden of Agna but part of the goddess herself.
“Gilene,” he said once again, and this time it was a prayer more than a name.
Her smile, wistful and sad, danced across her mouth. “I can say it now,” she said in a voice that crackled like burning wood in a hearth. “I won’t falter.” Again her hand caressed the air in front of him. “I love you, gladiator. Always.” She floated back a little, leaving a scorch mark in the dirt. He reached for her, and she darted back even farther. “Farewell.”
He leapt to his feet, reason scattered as he lunged to capture her, only to embrace empty air. She drifted away again, and this time she no longer pulsed with living flame. Instead, she faded, bit by bit, until there was nothing more than a single spark that winged away and finally disappeared from sight.
As if the goddess had bided her time until her handmaiden said goodbye, the giant column of fire suddenly collapsed, cascading down to a sheet of flame that flared twice before winking out completely. It was over.
Azarion stared with dry eyes at the smoking ruins of the once great city of Kraelag and her shattered walls, her battlefield a graveyard of charred bodies.
The Savatar had won. His place as ataman of his clan was secure. He and Erakes would return home as heroes.
There was much to celebrate. And far more to grieve. He closed his eyes, remembering the agacin whom he loved and who loved him in return. “I will not falter,” he said and turned his back on the city to trudge toward the camp. He had Tamura to find, hopefully alive and unharmed.
“I will not falter,” he said once more and climbed the slope to where the Savatar awaited him, wearing expressions of awe, reverence, and pity. They parted before him, a few reaching out as if to touch him before drawing away.
“I will not falter.”
If he said it enough, he might not break.