Rift in the Races (89 page)

This time, the Hostile home world really could be destroyed.

Chapter 72

O
rli’s pleas to Queen Karroll availed her nothing. The monarch sympathized with her ardor, appreciated the passionate nature of the appeals, but Her Majesty was implacable. Victory over the Hostiles was at hand, and if the War Queen had one vanity, it was her ability to win. She always won. And she was not about to stop now based upon the addled, post-traumatic dreams of a blank woman from Earth who had suddenly begun assigning sentience to an entire world.

What galled Orli even more than the dismissal of all claims involving Blue Fire was Her Majesty’s staunch unwillingness to take her back to her ship. “You don’t have a ship, young lady,” said the Queen. “You’ve been assigned to
Citadel
, which, as you will recall, is mine.”

Orli recoiled from that, so unexpectedly had it come. This was certainly not the Queen she’d come to know during her first days on Prosperion. The woman was changed, armored, putting up a battle face that was hard and unfeeling. Orli was scared of her now. There was something different about her in her every attitude. A distance that seemed a façade, but a familiar one, a fortress impermeably royal.

“What about my father?”

“We are seeing to his wounds, and the wounds of his men. There is a matter of his assault on a member of the royal family to be attended to, but …,” she sucked on the roof of her mouth, choosing her words carefully, “but I am sure the solicitor that has been provided for your father will find the proper loopholes to get him off with leniency, given the … nature of the case.”

Orli knew little enough of Kurr culture and law, but she did know with absolute certainty that the Queen could order anything she liked. There was no parliament at work in this place, no congress or other governing body. There was a bureaucracy that did the complex bidding of the Queen, and a court system that adjudicated things beneath her, but that was it. Not one letter on one legal parchment page held the tiniest ounce of power above the Queen, and every subject in the kingdom knew it well. So did every member of the fleet. Her father’s case was not beneath the Queen.

However, Orli was wise enough not to say more. Doing so might only make it go worse for her father.

“What of Thadius,” she asked then. “Can’t he be spared? If my father, and your very own Sir Altin, attacked him in some criminal way, surely he should be given leniency. Why have you sent him away?”

“You and I both know why I sent him away.” She grew impatient, and Orli could tell she was about to be done with this gracious audience.

“But I love him,” Orli said. The truth of it was painted plainly on her face. “What he did was done for me. I have no charges to press. I swear it. Please let him stay.”

“Miss Pewter, please. You have suffered a trauma. You’ve also made a great show of affection for Sir Altin, which I am troubled to see you cast off so easily, particularly given the scandal it caused you early on. But you have cast it off, so clearly, your love is at best a fickle thing, and hardly something I’m going to continue to let operate as a principle of governance. I indulged you once, and that was all you will get. I confess that I may have been too soon in pulling my assassin off of looking after you after the … issues following the ball, but we all thought the foreseen danger had passed. The diviner responsible for the mistake has been released from my service and counts himself lucky that’s the worst he received.”

“But surely Thad can be given asylum on one of our ships. You know there is no place for him to go. If he truly is a blood relative of yours, you can’t possibly really want him to die.”

“You have no idea what I really want, insolent child.”

“I beg of you, Your Majesty. At least let me plead his case before the fleet. His magic could be incredibly useful on our ships. And you could have one less magician on your payroll as well. He’d work for Earth, toward your common goals, but not one ounce of your gold.”

The Queen nodded that this last part would be true, but it was such a trifle it hardly made a difference. However, she was not without mercy either. Orli was presenting her with an option she hadn’t considered before. And Thadius, idiot that he was, did have a touch of royal blood. The gods did not take lightly to the spilling of it, no matter how thin it might run, or how she might equivocate about how she herself would not technically be the one spilling it when Thadius landed on Duador or String. It was not a precedent she liked setting either.

“You may make your case to the fleet,” she said at length. “I’ll have Thadius taken to the dungeons on
Citadel
and arrange for you to accompany me when I go. I’ve been advised recently that your
old
ship, the
Aspect
, has just completed a successful attack on the Hostile home world. I intend to be there to congratulate Peppercorn and Captain Asad when they get back.”

Orli, at first relieved that she had a chance to save Thadius, became suddenly horrified. “An attack?”

“Yes. One of your exploding devices has been enchanted with my new anti-magic. It worked famously, according to reports. We intend to enchant as many of them as your people need, and both our worlds will be done with the Hostile problem for good.”

Orli staggered back, her jaw dropping. She clutched at her chest where her heart seemed to have stopped beating. “You can’t have. Please tell me it isn’t so.”

“My dear, it is so. This war will be over in less than a score of days.”

Orli’s pale flesh became even more so as blood drained from her face. Blue Fire would think that Orli had lied. She’d think she’d betrayed her.

“Did she even fight back?” Orli asked. “Did she even try to defend herself?”

“Who, child?”

“Blue Fir—the Hostile world. Did she do anything at all to prevent the attack?”

“Why no, Miss Pewter. That was the entire point. The Hostiles rely on magic to see everything, it seems. So, they mustered not one bit of defense. They never saw it coming. Which is why this victory will be swift and effortless. All the sacrifice is behind us now.”

“What sacrifice? You haven’t lost a thing. You haven’t lost a single soldier in this war. How can you not see?”

“They attacked our allies, your people, and have killed thousands of them already. And there is the small matter of them having eradicated the population of an entire world.” She smiled sarcastically. “What else do I need to see?”

“She didn’t defend herself because I told her we would stop.”

“Well, if we entertain your delusion for a moment, that was foolish on your part, wasn’t it? What could possibly have made you think you had that kind of authority? Did it not occur to you that was the sort of thing to bring to me?”

Orli started to speak again, to point out the Queen wouldn’t have believed her, but the Queen waved her off.

“Miss Pewter, I’ve indulged you long enough. You need medical care. My doctors or those in your fleet, whichever you prefer, but someone. On that, I will relent, for now, but I have not got time for this foolishness any longer. I will send for you in two days when the
Aspect
has returned. Perhaps you’d best consider what you are going to say on behalf of your most recent lover, and make a better case of it than this one you have made for the Hostile world. If you can’t pull it off, your dear Lord Thadius will likely be the uninvited guest of String. I should like to see him try to win his way into elven hearts as easily as it was for him to win his way into yours.”

Orli bristled, but she knew it was pointless to argue. She bowed, forcing herself to be happy with the ground she’d won, then remembered she was supposed to curtsy, so she did that too before she silently withdrew.

Back in the rooms she’d been given upon being brought to the Palace, she threw herself into a massive loveseat and curled up in a ball. She clutched her knees to her chest and tried to calm the storm of frustration churning there.

Everything was going wrong. Altin was against her. The Queen was against her. The whole world, the whole universe, was turning upside down, and it hadn’t been so long ago that she’d thought things might finally be going her way. But not now. Everything had changed. In the span of one day, one terrible day, one that seemed so long ago now, so much emerging happiness had been instantly undone. And not just for her. Now her father was in it. For some reason, he was being given the legal runaround. He might end up in jail, or worse, given the temperament of the Queen, beheaded or some other antiquated form of punishment. And that was her fault. The price of her having sought happiness.

And, making it all even worse, she’d somehow managed to break Altin’s heart. She hadn’t intended to. She hadn’t even known it was happening. That was still a strange jumble in her head. She could clearly remember the torrential emotions she felt for him before, could still feel them in a way, but they were like an ocean trapped in a vast glass box, the surf beautiful and magnificent, great shimmering waves of it crashing and foaming wonderfully inside the panes, but merely something to look at. She could feel the waves thump against that impossible barrier, feel the pulse and the physicality of it, knew it was real, and yet, it did not wash over her any anymore, did not fill her as it once had. Somehow that was simply boxed up and put away. Gone. The place where it had been was filled with thoughts of Thadius.

She closed her eyes and let herself drift into the images of him, the memories of her rescue. She could see him riding across that rocky shelf, the gleam of his armor, the sound of his warhorse’s iron shoes sparking across the stone. The flash of his sword and the dull, meaty thump of falling ogres and crunching bones. She could hear the fire crackle, see him silhouetted against its brilliance as he darted in and out of the fray. So many enemies to kill. And yet, there he’d been. For her. Brave and heroic against them all. Her rescuer.

How could she not love him? And his beautiful house. And his horses in the stable. It was everything she’d ever wanted. He’d even promised her a pegasus someday. She smiled as she thought it. Imagined herself flying on one, like the Royal Sky Knights on their gryphons, high above the ground, in the cold air thousands of feet high, cutting through the icy wind, higher than the birds. She saw herself diving down, hurtling so fast the tears coursed straight back along her temples into her hair. Flying through canyons, feet dipping into snow-cold melt waters, skimming the tops of forest trees.

A gray shadow passed over as she flew, as if the sun had blinked. She looked up and behind her. A great green dragon was swooping down at her out of the blinding glare. It roared at her as it dove. A silhouette of man upon its back had his hand up in the air, but she couldn’t see who it was so bright was the sun’s radiance.

The dragon’s mouth opened, and she saw the orange light of the oncoming fire. The gasses reached her first, heavy and acidic, the smell of them strong and suffocating, tinted with the stench of bile and digesting flesh.

She screamed and then Blue Fire was there.

The great black orb filled her vision even as she realized she was dreaming again. Blue Fire, once more, had found her in the heart of the dream. She saw the shape of darkness, the pinkish glow, and with it all came the sense of betrayal and lies. The sense of pain. A burning pain of body and the searing of a soul. Agony wrought by truth that was not truth. A thing that was but was not. There was accusation there.

Blue Fire had no image for a lie. No context to understand.

Orli had to plead with Blue Fire through dream images to explain. She had to try not to wake in her sense of urgency. The awareness of the dream, in her frustration, and despite weeks of practice now, nearly made the contact disappear.

She carefully reined herself in. She recalled the desperate emotions of her conversation with the Queen, tried to shape the image of the Queen denying her request, the sense of helplessness, her ignorance of the attack and, in that, the inability to stop it. She couldn’t have stopped it anyway. She tried to shape Altin’s face for her, to show her she’d tried to let Altin know. She tried to feel the frustration outwardly, to project it across the space between her dream and Blue Fire’s reality. But the vision of the dragon, of Taot, swooping down on her, of the shadow flitting across the sun, somehow came back into it, overbearing the things she wanted to convey. The dragon came at her again. That was Altin on his back. She knew it had to be him. It was Altin, and it was Blue Fire putting him there.

Betrayal
, swelled the black mass of Blue Fire.
Betrayal of Blue Fire. Betrayal of Orli Love.

She knew immediately what it meant. Definitely an accusation. A condemnation. And such a brutal absolute in it. Orli’s mind staggered beneath the weight of it, the spite of it.

Betrayal of Orli Love
. It came again, and there could be no doubt. Blue Fire knew about Altin. About their love. Altin was “Orli Love” and Blue Fire knew about them somehow. Orli felt her awareness of it like an electric shock. A black dumping of scorn and hatred.

No, no, it wasn’t me
, she tried to send back.
It wasn’t me
. She woke shouting it. “It wasn’t me.” But it was too late. Blue Fire had let her go. Set her adrift back into the cold spaces where she’d found her. Betrayed.