The Fire Queen

Chapter 25

Alfred left to begin working on a table of values for the system of bartering that we would soon be implementing. He assured me that this would not take long as it was simply a matter of determining the value in coins of each good and service and assigning those values to the bartering system. Before he left, I asked him why it was that he was jailed while others were exiled. His answer was that when the queen exempted the nobles from taxation she blamed the resulting collapse of the treasury's revenue on theft by the Royal Treasurer and had him jailed. It seemed that there was nothing that Esmeralda had done as queen that would not disgust me, and my thoughts where Esmeralda was concerned turned to making sure that she was made to suffer a punishment commensurate with the horrors of her reign.

Mostly what occupied my thoughts was Volstaff's likely invasion and our preparations for it. I had decided not to use Myra in the battle. This being my first battle as queen I felt that it would set a bad precedent if I simply used Myra to overwhelm the enemy with flames. We needed to show that the kingdom's strength was in its people, not just its ruler, and that if anybody should commit an act of aggression against Aseron they would be coming up against the full might of the kingdom, the embodiment of which was its people.

I had some ideas for how we might overcome the shortfall in our numbers. My ideas were the product of knowledge that I had acquired from the Okwari; to explain my ideas to Uther I needed to go north to collect a particular item. I told Uraia to keep an eye on things while I was gone and I told her to give a message to the prison guards: that they were to kill two of the syndicates that we were keeping prisoner in the palace prison and that they were to ensure that VanBilt saw them and knew what they were doing. My expectation was that once he had seen the syndicates being killed as their punishment for committing many of the same crimes that he himself had committed it would push him to agree to cooperate with me.

"I hope you're not developing a taste for ordering people's deaths," Uraia said to me jokingly as I was preparing to take off with Myra.

"I'm only doing this because I have to break VanBilt's resistance, and we were going to kill the syndicates anyway, so I might as well get some use out of them."

"As long as you're not turning into the tyrant you're always saying you don't want to become."

"That's why you're here, to keep me honest."

On my way to the Northlands, I wondered if Uraia was only half joking about me enjoying giving the order to have those syndicates killed. When I had come up with the plan to use the penalty of capital punishment to apply stress to VanBilt to secure his cooperation I hadn't given any thought to whether doing so was the right thing to do and whether it should be weighing more heavily on me that I was ordering the taking of lives. I realized that in addition to being careful about not becoming intoxicated by my power I also had to be careful not to become desensitized by it. I meant what I said when I said to Uraia that she was to keep me honest. She was the only person to whom I could entrust such a responsibility, the only person whom I couldn't bear to lose. I wondered if Uraia fully appreciated her importance to me. Since arriving at the palace we had spent little time together and I worried that my elevation to the throne had altered the nature of our relationship and made it impossible for us to continue being as close as we used to be. It felt strange giving orders to Uraia, as I was sure it was strange for her to take orders from me. It had always been the other way around, it was always me following Uraia and looking up to her as something dazzling and unattainable. The sudden reversal of our roles had destabilized our relationship, just one of the many problems I was facing that needed addressing. I was going to the north not only to retrieve an important item but also to clear my head and get my thoughts and feelings in order.