A Torch to Fire the Earth

I was on the road to Blackford when I heard the girl scream, a long high sound that cut through the forest like a Hoshan's bushknife. She sounded young, a child; probably a family being waylaid by bandits on the road ahead. Bad times, when the Earl's road isn't safe, but, then, that's the reason I was there. I drew my sword and spurred on Bella, silently urging the girl to keep screaming, keep fighting. Keep them distracted.

I have long had a distaste for highway robbery.

Bella and I rounded a curve and the tableau unfurled before us: one adult, unconscious on the ground. One little girl, still screaming (kudos for her). Three adults, ragged, armed with rough clubs. One man held the girl, shaking his hand as though he'd been bitten. Another rifled through the prone figure's pockets, while the third-a woman-dug through a reed basket. They heard me coming, but it was too late. The looks they gave me were priceless: fear, shock. Anger. Hilarious.

Hey. I kill people for a living.

I rode the first man down before he had time to recover from his shock, opening the front of his chest in a fine red ribbon and knocking him to the ground. The woman moved fast, snatching up the basket and darting for the woods, but I lodged a dagger in her spine and put a quick end to that. I'd learned to throw from a juggler I fucked once in Pima, and it had proven well worth the investment.

The last man faltered, but when he caught my eye his will just broke. He fell to his knees and the girl scampered to the figure (father? looked like it) on the ground. I slid off Bella.

"Please," he said. "Don't hurt me."

I hurt him. The girl watched in silence.

"Good," she said, when I'd finished. I wiped my sword on his shirt, then let his body topple to the ground. She didn't seem scared. Just flat, like she'd seen too much already. What with the war, she undoubtedly had.

"Is daddy going to be okay?"

"I dunno." That much was true. Unconscious likely meant a blow to the head, and you really never could tell with those. "You got anyone else around here? Mother?" Obviously not, but I wasn't sure what to say. The girl just shook her head.

"I'm Catherine," she said. "You can call me Cat."

"Jayne," I replied. "Nice to meet you."

She nodded. Bella nickered softly behind me.

"I'll have a look at your father."

The man was breathing steadily, and, though his face was covered with blood, the wound was superficial. If he woke up, he'd probably be fine. I felt like moving on.

I knew she would want me to stay.

Goddamnit.

We moved him to a clearing a short way from the road where I cleaned his head-wound with a measure of liquor and stitched him up with the gut I keep on hand for just this sort of thing. In my profession, it pays to be prepared. From there it was up to him. I didn't bother to worry about what would happen to the girl if he didn't wake up. There were very few ways for that scenario to play out, and none of them were very pleasant.

I took care of the bandits' bodies, pocketing their scant possessions before tying them to the trees by the road with strips of their own clothing. Let that be a warning to you, folks. By the time I got back, the girl had built a small fire and was boiling water in a small tin pot.

"I thought I'd make tea," she said. "For daddy, when he wakes up. You can have some, too."

"Tea?" I raised an eyebrow.

"Bush tea," she clarified, quickly. A little embarrassed, maybe? There were as many herbal concoctions as there were grandmothers, but something told me this girl had once been used to real tea.

"Thank you. Did you find a creek? Bella could use watering."

"No, I just used some from our skin. I gave your horse a bit first, though."

I was starting to like this kid. The rest of the evening passed without incident. We ate rice balls from her basket and goat cheese-and just a little bit of actual chocolate-from mine. She told me about the public house her parents had run, until very recently, and I told her about the time I'd captured a pirate skiff off Borne with a sack of potatoes and a Kabo mask.

Hey. She was obviously leaving stuff out of her story. I get to add stuff to mine. She'd never have believed me without the potatoes.

We drank her tea (tolerable) left the last of the pot in a tin cup next to her father's head, and fell asleep to the sound of Bella chewing softly on a tree. She was a big Borge mare-cost me a fortune, but worth every penny. I've never seen her sleep.

In the morning, Cat's father was dead.

- - -

We reached the city three days later. I'd missed the Earl's army by more than a week, and a refugee camp had sprouted in its wake, stretching along the east bank of the Roin like fungus on a fallen log. You could smell it before you could see it.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

The road was clear, though, at least, all the way to the foot of the bridge where thugs in the Earl's colors huddled behind a makeshift barricade. The refugees kept their distance. They'd seen too much violence-some of it quite recently, judging from the occasional vein of red running through the ubiquitous mud-to want to tangle with anyone both well-fed and armed. As we approached the foot of the bridge, a soldier-an officer, by her mien-stepped out from behind a barricade and hailed us.

"What's your business?" Her voice was bored, but her eyes alert.

"Looking for the Earl. Fuck the Queen and all that." I called back, drawing Bella to a stop at a respectful distance. Glassy-eyed Cat sat behind me, silent. She hadn't recovered yet, but it had only been a couple of days and she was a strong girl.

"You've just missed him."

Hah. Just.

"I've got a kid here. Any chance I'll find a room over there?" I must have said it wrong, because she frowned.

"Refugees stay on this side of the bridge. Orders."

"Do I look like one of this lot?" I gestured at the camp, the greyling throng gathered up at its fringe. Watching us. "Is that what I fucking look like to you?"

She frowned deeper and gestured at Cat.

"She's mine."

She snorted. "And I'm the queen of the fucking moon."

"You calling me a liar, now?"

"We both know you're a liar; the question is how you're gonna make me forget."

Ah. Right. This was a language I understood well. One brief negotiation later and we were off across the bridge; a few coins lighter, but not nearly so many as our friendly captain had hoped. I'd learned to haggle from a llama driver I fucked once in Jenn. She hadn't quite gotten the deal she'd hoped for, either. The pretty ones never do.

The streets of Blackford were quiet, but the buildings were full. The place hummed with the tension of being just a little too close to the front. No-one was quite sure where the Earl was marching off to, but they knew that if the Queen bested him in the field, their little town with its little walls and its strategically priceless bridge over the Roin would quickly find itself under siege. Those walls were why the refugees had come. Being forced to camp outside them was a brutal irony.

I found Cat a cot at the Bob and two Bits, and she spoke to me over dinner for the first time in days.

"You're a soldier, aren't you."

"Nope."

"But you have a sword. And a horse. And you kill people. That's what soldiers do."

"All true, kiddo, but still nope."

"What are you, then?"

"A murderer."

She sat silently for a moment, then announced softly that she would like to be a murderer, too. I almost told her that no, she wouldn't, but it would have been a lie. There are far worse things to be than a murderer. A murderee, for instance. She caught my eye and held it and I knew she knew I knew it, too.

"You can teach me," she said. As though it'd been decided.

"Sure thing, kiddo. We'll start tomorrow."

That night she slept like a corpse and I paid the couple who ran the house more than enough to deliver a note and raise an orphan, even during a war. The note read:

"Cat. Look me up when this is over. Try Acreage.

-Jayne"

I was on the road again before dawn. A part of me hoped that she knew how to read.

- - -

The Earl's army was easy to track as it wound its way down the Roin, and Bella and I made better time, riding straight through the next two days like we were back on the dog chain in Quaro. We didn't catch them, though. That would have been too easy, and sometimes the world likes it hard.

Instead we got caught in a brutal storm. The sky grew black with roiling clouds, rain fell on us like sling stones, and Bella and I decided to double back and shelter in the abandoned mill we'd passed an hour before. Only that didn't work out, because the mill was no longer abandoned. Even in the rain, Bella smelled their horses before the mill was in view, and I decided to approach on foot, leaving Bella standing miserable under an ill-used pine. I slithered through the mud to the side of the main building, avoiding the horses under the eaves outside, then made my way up the rusted wheel. Light flickered through the slatted shutter of a maintenance hatch, inviting me in with the promise of a warm fire, but I stood in the rain, balanced on the shaft, and listened carefully instead. There were four of them, though I knew that from their horses. Beyond that, I learned little. The Earl was, indeed, only a day away, his army marching for Highwatch and the pass beyond that. His allies had much of the Queen's forces tied up in the south. She'd become badly exposed, and if he got to the north of her, cut her off from Acreage, the war would probably end right there. If he took the pass, she'd never make it home again.

It was a reasonable strategy. Unfortunately, nothing the scouts said told me who they worked for, and my fingers were starting to go numb from the cold. The wooden hatch was badly rotted, and it offered little resistance as I crashed through, dagger drawn, and leapt down almost a full story to plant it in the first man's back. My sword was out and its damage done before the rest were able to mount much resistance at all.

I am a very talented murderer, and they were obliging murderees.

After that, it was all just corpse hauling and river dumping and making things up with Bella before collapsing, exhausted, by the fire they'd left for me on the dirt floor.

Interlude

That night I dreamed of Hashan Far and I was back in the gravel, smelling the sea. In my dream the rebels' camp was bigger, more organized, more lively. A riot of soldiers and hawkers and whores; the cavalcade of humanity they'd always wished they could be. I wander through the throng, through the endless rows of tents stretching from the shoreline to the mountains in the infinite distance, and I know that I will not find who I'm looking for. She was never there.

Which, really, was probably best for everyone.

The salt-grey tide is loud behind me, and though the sea is no longer in sight, I see the throng begin to push for the boats and the fire begin to rage down the rows of tents, coming for me from the distance. Smoke blots the sky like ink. In the dream, I am unconcerned. I know what happens to the boats on the narrow sea. I know what happens to the people they leave behind. I know what lies behind the fire, and I know that it will never harm me, and so I walk towards it in stately procession, brown hair, impossibly long, flowing behind me like a train, or a flag, or a river, stretching back to the sea.

Historically, I fought in the rearguard. The camp burned and everyone died. Except for me. Because I never die. Apparently. At least I haven't yet.

In my dream, I walk away from it all and towards the mountains where I know she's waiting. The camp gives way and the fires dim and the gravel turns to sand and the sky to white hot sun and I'm half a world away, killing leather-skinned crones over a puddle that doesn't come up to my knees and somehow I can still smell the sea. This place is a sea, or at least it used to be. I see the empty shells, embedded in the rocks that jut from the sand like broken teeth, bleached white and wind-withered. There are thousands of them, tiny and tenacious and they look at me with accusation. It's not my fault. It's never my fault, is it? The oracles are dead, the puddle ruined red. The strands of it float like hair and shine in the sun like flames.

- - -

I woke before dawn, though not by choice. There was a boot in my side, and more on the floor, though they scattered when I spun groggily to my feet, whipping my sword out and around like a kid with a willow switch. Sloppy. I crouched barefoot in the dirt and blinked one eye and then the other. Swords were drawn and steel made a ring around me, glinting red in the last of the light from my dying fire. The man who'd kicked me growled an order:

"Back on the ground."

"Fuck you."

He seemed surprised at this. Uncertain. I bared my teeth in a grin. Feet shuffled, uneasy in the dust.

"Where are your friends?" he asked, dropping the thread of our former dispute.

"I don't have friends."

"There are four horses outside telling me you're a liar."

"And what, you think they're invisible? They're dead, fuckwit."

He glanced around, noting the splashes of red which testified to my claim. "How?"

"How'd you think? Cut their throats and dumped them in the river."

He spat on the ground.

"So," I continued. "We gonna do this, or what?"

"You're not with the Queen," he said. One mystery down.

"Obviously."

"Looking to sign up with the Earl? We've had more than few of your sort."

"What do you think?"

He gave me a more careful appraisal. "Better come with us, then," he said, "and I'll be having that sword."

"You want it in the guts or the throat?"

There was more shuffling. He scoffed.

"Cunny bitch. Fine. Keep it."

That apparently decided, the soldiers sheathed their swords and I refrained from killing them. After all, we were headed in the same direction.

- - -

The Earl's camp was tidy as a graveyard and Sergeant Bale led me to the purser's tent before heading off to trade the scant intel he'd gleaned from the scouts' saddle bags for kudos or whatever. The purser was a steel-gray warhorse who'd been fifty before she was born and a veteran ever since. She looked just like my mother. We haggled for the sake of formality, but I caved early and stamped my chop in her ledger (teehee, dirty, but she wasn't my type) a few lines lower than my pride would normally allow, then set off in search of a tent for me and grain for Bella. Oh armies. They feel like home.

Two weeks later, we'd reached the broad valley below Highwatch, at the head of the pass. Bale stared at the far-off fortress with the studied gaze of someone who wants you to think he knows what he's doing while I set up our tent in the mud.

"How's the Earl going to crack it?" I asked, genuinely curious.

"Rockets" said Bale. "He's hired an illuminator."

Oh. That might actually work. I'd have just come from above on the shepherds' traces with a handful of veterans and opened her up from the inside. But that's me. The Earl had strategy. And money, apparently. Stuff is expensive. I'd learned all about the fire dust from a stage magician I fucked once in Lempol. He'd tried to trap me, with his ewe's heart and a leash of orchids, but I'd never fall for that. The very living model of planning aforethought, I'd cleaned out his crackers on my way out of town.

That night I found the illuminator's tent. It wasn't hard, once I knew to look for it, gleaming like wax in the moonlight, cold blue light slicing at the ground through the slits in its vented walls. There were two guards in the front and one in the back, so I walked up to that one like I knew what I was doing and slit his throat before he got it in his head to ask questions. I crushed the bulb on my last cracker and rolled it in through a slitted vent. Six long steps and one quick dive and then the sky went flat and white and hammered at my back like an anvil. Ears buzzing, I picked myself out of the mud, found Bella in the confusion, and took my leave of the Earl's service.

He came after me the next morning, because of course he did, tracking me up the narrow traces and into the foothills where I'd waited the night. I watched it all through the optics I'd gotten from that grinder I fucked once in Teg. (Ironically, the man was completely blind, but his lenses didn't seem to suffer from it.) I'd situated myself at the top of a gulch where I hid behind a boulder and Bella hid in a thick stand of sagebrush that she seemed to have taken a liking to. She'd been chewing on it for hours. The Earl was an avid hunter, but not, it appeared, a very good one. It took him too long to find the right trace, and I began to grow bored with the waiting. When he and his men finally rode into the streambed below me, I pocketed the optics and carefully prepared my crossbow as they picked their way through the rocks, straining impressively at each of the broken twigs and partial hoofprints I'd left them. They finally closed to a hundred or so paces, and I planted my bolt in the Earl's left eye. After that, it was just a matter of pulling Bella away from her bush and racing the former Earl's retainers to the foot-gates of Highwatch (where, noting that I was being chased, they kindly refrained from shooting me dead) and that turned out not to be much of a challenge at all.

- - -

By the time the Queen arrived, the war was pretty much already over. Those troops of the former Earl who hadn't abandoned the cause had made no headway against the walls of Highwatch, and they surrendered rather than being crushed by the hammer of the Queen's army. There wasn't even a battle. What would have been the point? I sought her out that night while her army feasted on their field of victory and argued with her retainers by the flap of her command tent until she called for them to stand aside. I stepped inside and lost my breath at the sight of her. She looked so young. She always would. She bound across the purple carpet and swept me into her arms.

"I missed you, Hart," she whispered into my hair.

"Me too, Flame. I missed you too."

That night we fucked like hummingbirds, sweet and shy and born aloft by a desperate, nervous energy, and when she finally lit against my breast, I ran my hand through her molten hair and hummed a song our mothers knew.

"Will you stay," she asked, "this time?"

I hummed softly and stroked her hair and said nothing. I knew she knew the answer.

"Do you forgive me?" she whispered.

"Of course."

- - -

I met Cat again a week later, riding on the road to Acreage. She'd found a fine young stallion in whom Bella took an immediate interest, and we locked eyes across their necks as they nuzzled at each other.

"I got your note," she said.

"Good," I replied. "Where'd you get the horse?"

"I killed a man," she said, but I knew she knew I knew she was lying.

"Kudos, kiddo," and she couldn't help but smile. "Ready to get to work?"

She nodded and turned her horse and we rode off together down the road.

Epilogue

Four years later, I sat in a bell tower while Cat did the real work. She'd insisted it was time, and I'd been forced to agree. My inability to see her made the minutes creep by like pickers taking turns at my composure. Sometimes I thought I heard voices borne aloft by the thin swirls of mist in the air, but I'm pretty sure it was my imagination. The streets were dead, which was thematically appropriate.

Eventually they emerged from the winehouse, Cat leading the merchant and his muscle into the street and towards the alley that my tower overlooked (remember that part about planning and forethought?) She had the merchant by the balls (in metaphor only, at least so far) and one of the guards seemed eager to follow, but the other-a big man with a warier eye-looked like he knew what the game was. I made sure to sight on him.