“You think he’s gonna fuck her?” one of Gunn’s men––the big, calm, thoughtful bastard Fia had learned was called Breck––asked.
“I don’t think it’s a question of whether or not he’s gonna fuck her, I just want to see if he’s gonna act the gentleman and give her flowers first,” came Boni Woe’s acid reply.
Fia didn’t turn in her saddle or acknowledge that she’d heard.
There was some rough laughter, but there was no real heart behind it. It was the brittle mirth of men and women, of longriders and soldiers, who could see the shadow of death charging down the race and weren’t sure as to whether it had its eye fixed on them.
The grass was high and brown, but not high enough to hide the tumbledown shepherd’s cot that Fia had organised to meet Redmond by, half a day’s ride from both Castle Dreymark and Redstone. She had told Cutter to wait three dawns before delivering the message to her half-brother, so as to give Gunn and his errand riders time to gather as many fighters as they could.
The shepherd’s cot sat at the edge of a small copse with the nodding, scrubby sea of grassland lapping up against it. Motes of pollen floated in the air like gold dust. The land breathed; long gusts of wind hissing through the dry stems and picking out gaps in the fallen masonry of the ancient hut, whistling through through them like an exhalation through gritted teeth. Insects droned, not giving a fuck for counts or tribelands, revenge or greed or duty.
Fia envied them.
She eyed the little dilapidated stone building, standing some hundred yards away, feeling the tide of memory tugging at her. Sunlight dappled the lichen-covered stone. The air smelled today just as it had on the day that her old life had fallen away; hidden herbs, dry soil, and distant snow.
“What’s the significance of this place?” Gunn asked her.
He was sitting beside Fia on his horse. His hands were crossed on his saddle pommel. Unblinking eyes watched Marr’s delegation of stationary escort riders, where they were sitting their horses in the shade of a belt of young pines across the meadow. Behind him were Breck, Boni, Darach Lees, and Cleric Vass.
Fia breathed deep. Felt the early afternoon light flicker and trace lines across her narrowed eyelids as the clouds moved across the sky. Shadows chased each other over the meadow, as Fia’s past finally caught up with her and worried her like a dog at a hare, ringing her future out of her.
“This is where I hid after I killed Arlen,” Fia said in a voice of frosted iron. “This is where I hid, scrubbed the blood away and cried until I was sick.”
She clicked her tongue at her brumby and the beast walked out towards the heart of the meadow. None of the others followed her. Behind her, she thought she might’ve heard the sound of Gunn scribbling down a line or two on one of his ubiquitous scraps of paper.
As she rode alone, out into the middle of that swaying lake of dusky green, the world seemed to sharpen, almost painfully. Clearer, harder, more vibrant. Her senses became more acute. She could feel the touch of the spiky tussock grass as it pressed against her breeches. Could hear it scratching against her boots. Could smell the heady perfume of the pines and the nervous tang of the horses up ahead. Her intuition too, the sense that few people recognised and fewer still listened to, spread out its net of phantom threads around her. Each breath tasted fresh and clear and new; filled with powdered ice crystals blowing down from the peaks, heather flowers, and honeycomb. A blue and red bee landed on her sleeve, waggled its abdomen, and then took off humming a song that she couldn’t understand.
She had her hair tied in a low tail so that she could still wear her hat. Kynnish tattoos on display. Swirling designs punctuated with runes. Runes denoting pain, grief, sorrow, loss, and joy taken. Runes of forgiveness and of healing. Her broadsword hung comfortably at her side. She touched at the powder horn that Arlen had gifted her all those years ago. Traced the words with her sword-callused finger.
“Often times a man’s mind will set upon a thing he cannot get,” she whispered.
A man detached himself from the company opposite. As his mount stepped out, the man made a signal that he should not be followed. He rode a fine bay stallion, seventeen hands at the withers as if it was an inch. Sat it with the uneasy grace of a man who had been taught to ride by the best, but was not a natural horseman. Red hair oiled back. Pale, smooth face set with sapphire eyes. Dressed in greys and blues that echoed the uniforms of the Frekifold soldiers that would spend their lives for him should he will it.
“Redmond,” Fia said, as the Viscount of Frekifold drew his mount to a stop some ten yards from her. “It’s been quite some time, ain’t it.”
Redmond Marr did not answer. His clever, quick eyes were running over Fia’s face. Little of what was passing through his mind could Fia make out on his countenance as he scrutinised her, but she saw the flat mouth twist slightly as his cobalt eyes came back to settle on her own.
“That’s right. It’s me,” she said.
“I mightn’t have believed it had I passed you in the street, Fia,” said Redmond. He swirled his hand around his own head. “I would’ve taken you for some half-breed spawn of a Painted Kyn.”
“They found me after… After what happened,” Fia said in the same unruffled voice, ignoring what Redmond clearly thought of as a barb. “I stayed with them for a long while.”
“What would our mother think if she could see you now?”
“You’d have to answer that one, Redmond. I ain’t seen her in quite a little bit. Not like you. How is she? Judging by the way you’re bereft of anythin’ resembling the Corrival Guard, I surmise she’s alive at least.”
One of Redmond Marr’s eyelids flickered.
“She lingers,” he said.
“Well, what do you expect? She’s strong.”
Redmond raised his chin. “She might be strong, but not strong enough to see you reduced to this,” he said superciliously. “Life looks like it’s been hard on you.”
“Ain’t been soft.”
“As if discovering that you were alive wasn’t shock enough. To see you brought so low…”
Fia pushed her hat a little further back on her head with her finger. “Ever since that day––the last day we saw one another––I’ve thought it ridiculous to be shocked ‘bout anything in this life.”
Redmond regarded her for a long while. So long that his horse started shifting agitatedly under him. He hissed at it. His lip curled back from his top teeth.
“You’re alive,” he said.
“Don’t think I didn’t try remedying that when I first ran. Hawked everything I had, or was, and bought a shitload of rot-gut whisky and a cabin by a river. Never managed to drown myself in the damn thing though.”
“You’re alive,” he said again. “And you’re here.”
“‘Fraid so.”
“And you took up with that heathen, Torsten Gunn. How very sad. How very predictable.”
Fia cocked her head to one side and regarded Redmond. Not with anger, judgement or impatience in her eyes, but curiosity.
“You ever noticed how most heathens are vilified, and labelled as such, because they have the temerity to worship something that they can actually see or touch, Redmond?” she said. “That’s always been where theology kinda lost me. Besides, it was you who brought the two of us together. Your man hired me to find the bastard.”
“Captain Gray.”
“That’s the boy.”
Redmond leaned forward. Fia noticed a fat vein bulging in his forehead like a parasitic worm under the skin.
“And tell me, did you help in the dismembering of my captain, dear sister?” he spat.
“Half-sister,” Fia said without rancour. “And no, that was all Gunn. But I watched. Had to be done, though maybe not in quite such a fashion as that. I needed to understand what was going on. What I’d been swept up in.”
Redmond’s face was very white. Fia could see fury and fear waging a war to a dead heat in his cold blue eyes.
“And now you think you know, do you?” he said.
“I do.”
“And that’s why you’ve come back?”
Fia nodded slowly.
“Talk about irony,” she said, her eyes never leaving her half-brother. “You needed Gunn to hang so that you could crush a rebellion your new master, this Imperator, feared would slow his quelling and taming of this land.”
“He’s not my master,” Redmond said. “I recognise no master.”
Fia grunted. “You needed Gunn to appease your new liege lord’s wishes, so that you could hold the door open for him while he put the licks in and took this country over with his Vansgriman army before anyone could do anythin’ to stop him. Your boy, Gray, tracked me down, recognised me, and got this creaky old wheel turning again so that you and I came full circle, Redmond. You brought me here.”
Her half-brother’s jaw was set so hard Fia was surprised she couldn’t hear his teeth cracking.
“If only you’d been patient enough to let our mother die in peace,” she continued. “You might’ve succeeded her legitimately without ever having to mix yourself all up with this son of a bitch Imperator. Could’ve ruled our tribeland unopposed, if that’s what you’d wanted.”
“Is that so?”
“You don’t have to walk this path you’ve started down, Redmond. If you want, we can work together to build up the fire and drive back this night, force back these wolves that you’re on the verge of letting run riot in Frekifold. We can stand against this Imperator.”
Redmond snorted.
“You see, that was always the problem that I had with you and Arlen,” Redmond said. He must have given the flanks of his mount a gentle squeeze and let the rein out a touch because the animal took a couple of nervous steps towards Fia’s brumby. “The two of you never had any real ambition. I recognised that, even as a child,” he said, lowering his voice. “Honour. Calling. Duty. I think back to how fucking naive we were, not realising that for every good and decent thing that is perceived to be done in this world the price is always that something else must be dishonoured. The pair of you were so busy and happy getting lost in your feelings that you neglected thinking. Ruling Frekifold would’ve been easy, but uniting Fallaros under one tribeland banner… That’s forging history!”
Fia shook her head. Touched at the powder horn that sat on its strap over her heart.
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“I could have happily lived out my days walking the wilds, seeking to expiate what I did to Arlen. But you, Redmond, you and your greed and your fear and your grasping plotting brought me back.”
Redmond laughed then; the ill-sounding, unpractised noise jarring in the sleepy meadow.
“Ah dear, the paradoxical nature of all this would be amusing, if it wasn’t so gods-damned infuriating!” he said, and his ugly chuckle twisted into an uglier snarl. “All this wasted time. All these wasted lives. All because Fia Marr was labouring to redress the balance. Trying to atone for something that she didn’t even do.”
Fia’s eyes widened slowly. Abruptly, her body felt like it wasn’t hers anymore. She felt cumbersome and slow, but her heart was working itself into a sudden lather. She went through the motions of asking the question that she knew she should ask, but she wasn’t really there. She was watching herself act, while her heart thundered fit to burst in some dark corner of herself.
“What do you mean didn’t do? Didn’t do what?”
Redmond tilted his head to one side. The moment stretched.
“You didn’t kill Arlen, Fia,” he said. “I did.” His lip curled up to show his hard, white teeth. “You just helped.”
Fia sat very still in her saddle. She felt paralysed, yet instilled with a sudden awful burning strength. Felt she could’ve squeezed the horse between her legs in half. In her mind, her hands were reaching out to seize Redmond by the neck––her thumbs pressing into his eyes and not stopping until they met the back of his skull––but the weight of his words pinned her.
She forced herself to relax. Heard her mouth say, “Tell me.” The words came out like snow, somehow making it around her heart, where it was pounding in her throat.
Redmond scrutinised her for a long, agonising moment, his mouth open in a half smile. He snorted softly. “Gods, you really didn’t know, did you?” he said. “All these years. The guilt you must have felt. The anguish…”
“I know what I did. The arrow—”
“Was convenient. Lucky.”
“No,” Fia said, the word coming out as a breath, her strange eyes searching her half-brother’s face. She shook her head ever so slightly. “No.”
Redmond’s countenance was burning with that fire that men get in their faces when they’ve taken the first step in something and decided to go all the way.
“Why do you think I looked so scared when you came charging down that slope?” he said. “I didn’t even realise at first that you’d shot Arlen. I thought that you’d just seen my knife. The blood. His blood. That you’d seen me stab him in the back and push him.”
Fia’s breath rushed in and out of her as she watched her half-brother lay his story out amongst the grass, under the afternoon sky.
“I fell over—do you recall?—my legs were so weak. I’m amazed you didn’t see the happiness in me. Then I saw the arrow and knew that the gods had laid before me my one big chance. My chance to rid myself of the two people I hated most in the world.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I’d loved you and aspired to be like you for years, Fia, for years! As only a younger sibling can. But always you treated me as an outsider, with barely concealed disdain. I came to love you and hate you in equal measure and in the end, when I was handed my chance to rid myself of that pain I fucking took it. I stabbed Arlen and I loaded you with the guilt of it, and away you ran. And I was… happy. Free.”
Fia’s eyes were fixed on Redmond’s as he talked. She saw the echo of the rapture he had felt after what he’d done bloom in his face as he spoke of it. Realised that any hope she’d had of talking the son of a bitch away from the precipice he’d been edging towards was futile; he was already falling.
Had always been falling.
Had been pushed over long ago.
She realised that silence had fallen. Redmond’s words had been replaced by birdsong and the breeze amongst the gorse. She perceived that her hand was on her sword hilt.
Redmond’s gloved hand dropped to the elaborate basket-worked hilt of his own sword.
“Even if you were able to do it,” he whispered, “would it bring you comfort? Arlen would still be dead. You’d still be the guilt-riddled product of every rum-hole in Fallaros. And the Imperator would still be here in a matter of months with an army that is not all of flesh and blood. An army that it would be folly to try and fight rather than join with.”
“Can’t let you do it, Redmond,” Fia said. Somehow, her voice was quite steady. She felt hollow. Like she had on the day Arlen had died. Only it was different now. A hollowness scoured out with the fire of fury, rather than frigid fingers of culpability. “Can’t let you join that Imperator fuck. I couldn’t when we started this little chat, and I sure as shit ain’t going to let you now.”
“You mean to stop me?” Redmond sneered.
“Gods know that I can’t be arsed, but it’s fallen to me. So, yes, I mean to stop you if I can.”
“Bullshit. You’re lying.”
“You know the difference between a bullshit artist and a liar, Redmond? A liar don’t want you to see she’s talking shit, while a bullshit artist doesn’t give a fuck if you think she’s lying so long as you can’t prove it. As it is, I ain’t either.”
“Hm. You always had a double spine in your back, Fia, but now I see you’ve a set of balls to match. Tell me though, you and what army, sister? Gunn’s bunch of outlaw dogs, all of whom are on first name terms with the bottom of the deck?”
“You do enough bad and you come to recognise it when you see it,” Fia said simply. “This ain’t right, Red. And I think you know that.”
Redmond flinched slightly at the nickname that Fia and Arlen had once given him, took his hand off his sword and turned his horse.
“All that time away,” he said. “All that time playing dead, and you never learned a thing about this shitbucket of a world. You never learned that righteousness never had anything to do with it. The strong and the quick and the ruthless survive, and it is they who write the histories, Fia.”
“Redmond?” Fia said. “Redmond, stop.”
Redmond paused. One blue eye looked at her over his shoulder.
“What?” he asked.
“Let me see our mother,” Fia said. “Let me see her once, before whatever hell we look to be brewing up between us spills over.”
“Our mother thinks you’re dead, Fia,” Redmond said, turning away. “And by the end of today, I’ll be bloody well glad to tell her it’s so. Goodbye.”
A ways behind her, Fia heard Cleric Vass cry out in a voice of shattering urgency, his deep, booming bass rolling out across the grassland.
“Miss McCrae, run! You are betrayed!”
Fia didn’t know much, maybe, but she knew enough to trust the warning of a witch when it was yelled at her.
She wheeled her brumby and gave the sable animal her heels, even as Redmond was spurring his horse back towards the thicket where his delegation waited for him, waving a signal as he went.
The tumbledown crofter’s cabin exploded outwards in a burgeoning anemone of flame. Chunks of stone flipped down out of the air, thudding into the dry earth and sending up starbursts of dust.
As Fia galloped to rejoin her crew, she let loose the reins and gave her brumby her trust so that she could look back over her shoulder and see what was going on.
A woman dressed all in worn leathers of brown and green stepped from the wreckage of the shepherd’s hut. Her hands were raised. Her fingers crooked as a hound’s back leg. Her eyes were wide, mad and fierce under black hair that writhed slowly in the air like kelp in a gentle swell. The fire wafted away from her hands like flour dust before the breeze. Unnatural flames, golden bright and hot as the hinges of hell. They spread out, racing and roaring through the dry grass. Man-high and then double and then five times the height of a man. Sparks exploded up into the air, ash floating up in the wake of the rampant inferno. Dead branches hissed and crackled as fingers of thick grey smoke clawed heavenward, leaning in towards Fia and her companions.
“Ride, ride! Don’t wait for me, you bastards!” Fia yelled at Gunn, Cleric Vass, Darach Lees, and all the rest. “Witchcraft! Ride!”
Fia’s brumby churned dust as she raced away from the meeting spot, while the witch-fire ate up the dry meadowgrass behind her. She urged it on, more with her mind than with her body.
Save yourself, save yourself! Any death is better than burning. Run!
The witch, who’d been hiding in the shepherd’s cot, guided the fire, impelled it on, with sweat streaming down her face, but Fia didn’t see it. Neither did Gunn nor Boniface Woe nor any of the others.
Fia knew fire. Knew it like anyone who had grown up anywhere near the wide plains of Frekifold or Aldinfang, with their winter-dry pastures that could ignite at the touch of a careless pipe ember, knew it.
She could hear the wildfire roaring behind her. Could tell that, even if it was being guided by witchcraft, it was being fuelled by nature.
She could hear it.
She could hear the chorus of the flames.
“Pray you never hear a wildfire’s voice,” her father had once told her, as they looked out on a night sky made orange by a distant blaze. “You hear a wildfire, it’s already too late. If you can hear it, you’re already dead.”
Fia’s brumby overtook Darach Lees and Breck. Lees was whimpering through his luxuriant moustaches as he rode, slapping the flanks of his poor horse like a fucking desperate idiot, not realising that the mare was already giving him more than it had.
Fia didn’t bother urging her brumby on. It was running for its life already. For a horse, unlike a human, there was nothing more precious than that.
“To Redstone! To the river!” Fia cried, her horse surging under her. She had drawn abreast with Boniface Woe, Gunn and Cleric Vass. “Even witch-fire cannot best the water that comes off the Jarn Mountains.”
“And then fucking what?” Boni snarled.
“Then we do what we can,” Fia said.
There was a savage, high scream from behind them, a scream that permeated the languid afternoon air even over the thunder of the hoofbeats of their horses and the ululation of the inferno.
Darach Lees.
Fia turned in her saddle, as the brumby galloped on. On her tail, Gunn’s man, Breck, rode his frothing horse. Behind him there was simply a wall of roaring, hungry fire. And, in front of that wall, was the moustachioed former Keldland infantryman, Lees.
It was an arresting sight: horse and rider cutting a black silhouette from the tapestry of billowing, roaring, furious hellfire eating up the pines and bush and grass behind them. Ash fell like snow. Embers big as cart hubcaps flew and drifted through the air. Propelled miles ahead of the main blaze by the gusting, eyeball-searing winds, they landed and birthed little spot fires of their own.
“No!” Darach Lees screamed.
The fire took him and his horse without pausing. Engulfed them.
There was no writhing and screaming, no last minute flapping as they attempted to escape their fate. They were there and they were gone, and the fire swept on like a wind made solid.
“He’s gone up the flume!” Fia heard Boni Woe crow.
Fia, Gunn and the others spurred their mounts on, while in their wake the dry pastures were reduced to soft ash. Ancient ironbark trees cracked and shattered, small pools hissed into steam, and any animal that called that scrubby swathe of grassland home was roasted alive.
Through a belt of fir wood they fled, the stink of smoke thick in their nostrils, raw in their throats. Panic gave their mounts wings, goaded them on through tight packed trees that it would’ve been folly to gallop through if death wasn’t the only alternative. When they emerged from the belt, Fia looked up to the ridge on her left and saw a waterfall of fire, running up the side of a two-hundred foot cliff face. It was the sort of sight that she thought of when she speculated on what falling in love might be like; something that caught her eye and held it, took her breath, and was equal parts beautiful and awful.
They rode, and they rode the combined potency of the spell and the wind out. Fia’s brumby splashed through the Raun River, glacial-cold water foaming almost over the tops of her boots, that ran out of and encircled Redstone. Behind her the rest of her delegation followed across the ford.
When they were safely across, Fia reined in and turned to watch the conflagration as it ate up the belt of firs they’d fled through. There were flurries of sparks as the witch-fire toppled the old trees. The smoke haze looked like a storm, a storm that’d sprung out of a clear autumn day and promised thunder and lightning.
“Your half-brother doesn’t fuck about, does he?” Gunn said.
“It appears not,” said Fia.
Gunn’s face was soot-streaked. “This was your bread and butter not too long ago, wasn’t it, McCrae? Wildfires. Heeding nothin’ but nature itself? That sort o’ shit was all you used to answer to, wasn’t it? No Count or Countess. Only the gods. That’s the creed wanderers like us adopt, ain’t it?”
Fia sat, watching the rampaging wildfire. She didn’t reply.
“You’re really thinking o’ givin’ all this good stuff up for the sake of the rest of the fuckin’ fools on this isle? To take back some position you left years ago just so you can scrap it out with some foreign fuck you’ve never even seen?" Boni cackled, as she reined in and waited for Breck and Cleric Vass to catch up. "And they call me mad."
“Here we are, racing a fucking wildfire to a river, with the fate of the Five Isles resting on our shoulders, and you’re asking me whether I’m really considering giving this life up?" Fia asked.
Boni looked at Fia with cruel, sharp eyes. “Yeah.”
Fia watched the hellish orange glow bathe Boniface Woe’s face, even in the afternoon light, washing away and hiding the hard lines. She could feel the heat of the stymied inferno on her forehead and lips even from that distance.
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m fucking thinking about it right enough.”
Fia wheeled her mount and addressed Gunn.
“Gather those who’re willing,” she said. “We’ll make our stand at Redstone. Viscount Marr will be following on as soon as he may. You can bet your arse on that.”