Prodigal - Book III

Black Smoke and Starlight

She remembers begging for food. Standing on the side of the street, dirt-streaked and feeble-handed, counting her ribs like stars, dreaming of graying bread and clear water. She remembers how pain was her first teacher, first with nicks and bruises, snapped fingers and skinned knees. Then, when that became too much, when she turned herself out of the orphanage and into the dark, tumbling streets, the hunger, the thirstiness. She remembers what it's like to eat dirt and drink puddle water, to exist in a lost, dwindling haze and watch those further along that road fade away into a quiet pile of unmoving bones.

She knows what it's like to understand, too young, that survival only delays the inevitable.

That's the one thing this queen, the one thing Allayria, never really understood. Couldn't really understand, no matter how many times they kipped in bushes or along lonely, winding roads. They look at this chaos, at the fire, the screams, and the blood, all this blood, and they only see the fear and the rushing, crushing darkness. But in between all of this is the starlight spark of hope, glittering through raining ash, twinkling through the smoke. The orphaned like Meg can endure pain, have been built, molded to endure it, and this way, through this violent frantic pain, is their staircase to a chance, an opportunity, a moment.

Because the way those like Fae Urilong want to go is quiet, tranquil, but its night is black and, for the starving, the low and lonely, it holds no stars.

It's what he never understood either, even when he had understood so much. The old Skill master had understood the count of Meg's ribs, the crude but quick stone blade, even the unbridled, crackling rage simmering inside that tiny child's frame. He understood when she had first set her lure, distracted him—an unknown but clearly well-fed quarry—with a sudden sprout of water in an unattended bucket and tried to pick his pockets. Unlike all of the other respectable people, the other staid lords who would have seen her beaten or hanged, he hadn't yanked when he caught her wrist.

He'd held it instead.

"I believe that purse is mine," he had said calmly, gently even, not a trace of censure or anger in his face. "I would prefer if you gave it back."

He'd held her gaze, watching as she'd contemplated it, how difficult it might be to wrench her hand away, to Skill the rock by her foot at him. She had concluded the inevitable, had released the bag into his unoccupied hand, but he had held onto her wrist a moment longer.

"That trick with the water in the bucket was very clever," he had told her then, his grip loosening so that, had she yanked hard, she could have freed herself. "How old are you? You seem very young."

"Ten," she had said a touch defiantly, for she wasn't young at all—she knew more about these streets than he could ever imagine, and besides, it really wasn't her fault he was so old.

He didn't seem to feel so, but he let her go when she pulled, stayed motionless when she scampered, but he did return the next day, and the day after that. To the same spot, near her bucket. She couldn't possibly pickpocket anyone with him lurking around like that.

And suddenly days were a week, and other kids, bigger kids, were circling and Meg was scaring them off because, well, if anyone was going to pick that old fart's bags it damn well was going to be her.

The ribs she counted started growing again, growing, so when he started leaving bread rolls her first instinct wasn't suspicion; it was simply hunger.

Ruben had understood enough about hunger to use it against her. But he hadn't really ever understood the current underneath it, the imprint it makes on your bones, beneath all the meat and sinew. He thought if he fed her, if he took her in like a wandering duckling, pruned her feathers and gave her space in a quiet, tranquil pond, the hunger would wash away.

"Patience," he'd tell her, whether it was on the sparring mat or in the classroom, catching the book thrown from her desk. "Patience."

He understood the broad strokes, thought that because he'd seen what it meant to be poor, he could understand it.

Patience.

The air already smells like rancid smoke when Meg pulls the mask up over her face. He had meant well, her old master, her mentor... her friend. But Ruben never understood that the desperate and unfortunate, those with nothing to lose, always choose blood and pain and fear.

They always choose the stars.

So when Halften's might marches through the streets of Solveigard, when they carry their swords, their weapons, and their steel, it's not fear that Meg and all those who follow her feel.

She has understood, for a very long time now, that survival only delays the inevitable.

The Halften army feels differently; they tense, swords shifting forward, up, locking into an advancing attack position when they see the crowd that awaits them at the end of the road.

Halften advances like soldiers on the battlefield when they should move like thieves on a street; they move swiftly, pushing through that faltering, that wavering question because the horde awaiting them isn't moving, isn't raising their weapons in defense, and they're still wondering why.

Why.

Meg can already smell the ash. It burns strongly, a phantom heat of what is to come, as she raises her one gloved fist up, the back of her hand to the advancing army so that the front line can see the antlered symbol on it, can understand why this is happening to them.

The Cabal follows suit, and the street turns to fire.

It's an explosion of heat, of smoke, and dark, tattered things flinging up into the nighttime sky. The sound is like nothing she's ever heard before, a pounding of rush, like a punch to the ears which leaves a hollow ringing, a dulling of the sudden rise of hysterical screams. Through the black smoke, the street ahead is nothing but sunken, molten fire, crumpling in toward the twisting sewers where the gray powder had first been lit.  The dark shapes inside the liquid flames melt down into it, folding, as they can't endure the pain.

There is one, one trying to crawl his way out of the inferno, one whose fine coat she recognizes, whose long sideburns and dark brown hair she had marked well at Bear's Spear.

It's easy to aim the boltcaster.

It's easy to pull back the lever.

It's easy to let it loose.

A/N: Time for blood and pain and fear.