The Reforged Trilogy: Book 1 — Crucible of Stars
Chapter 18
Blind Eyes
“No matter who you try to take with you, death will always remain a cold and lonely bed.”
– Nomusa Udo, Mirran writer (230 MA)
Maeve lay in a slanting ray of golden sunlight with her head pillowed in Orthain’s lap, her ink-black hair spilling over his thighs. The garden of Morningfire Court was full of singing birds, but Maeve was only listening to one song.
“Time lay in its cradle quietly
Once upon a day long ago
Not the song of Erris is heard
Yet voices carried on the wind faintly.”
Orthain sang the ancient ballad of her family in a smooth, sweet voice that wove seamlessly with nightingales trilling in the apple tree, the velvety drone of bees humming from flower to flower, and the whisper of the distant sea.
Laughing spring winds come whispering
To find that Aes lays no longer
In her high, heavenly bower
But in a mortal wing’s embrace so lovingTwo hundred eighty-eight days of light
Will be desired by a Night
If you would dare lay claim to the right
To ask a gift of the White…”
Orthain brushed a strand of Maeve’s hair back from her face and she felt the heat there in her cheeks. After seven years, it was still so strange. The lightest brush of Orthain’s fingers made warmth surge through Maeve, but he had pushed the bounds of their new romance no further. The knight would bide his time. One did not rush the courtship of a princess, after all, even a princess as far removed from the birchwood throne as Maeve Cavainna.
Orthain’s dark green eyes sparkled in Aes’ bright sunlight and Maeve’s heart skipped a fluttering beat. He sang the ancient story of Cavain’s birth, his victory over the fiery pyrads and the early founding of the White Kingdom. Finally, the last chorus faded away into the garden’s song.
“You have paid your respects to me for more than the promised year, enarri,” Maeve said. “We have shared three oathsongs. You are within your rights to make at least one request of me!”
Orthain smiled. He wasn’t wearing his glass armor here in Morningfire Court. There was no duty here in the garden, only songs and gentle touches. So Orthain wore a flowing skirt of House Fyre red and purple, leaving his chest and feet bare. His wings and long blond hair were damp from bathing, drying slowly in the sun.
“There are few things that I desire which we have not yet shared, Maeve,” he said. “And I would never use the rules of the Lay of Cavain to obligate you, enarri.”
Orthain’s eyes lingered on the princess. She wasn’t wearing her armor either, but her soft golden silk dress covered more of her body than Orthain’s skirt. Yet Maeve blushed under his scrutiny.
“Will you come with me to Caith’s initiation tomorrow?” she asked.
“Of course, enarri,” Orthain said. “It was, I admit with the utmost modesty, my suggestion that he study spell-singing at the Ivory Spire. I would not miss his graduation, and your father would never forgive me if I did. It has been half a century since I was Sir Arlinn’s squire, but I still fear the man’s spear.”
“My father? What about my mother’s reproach?” Maeve asked. “She is the king’s sister, you may know.”
Orthain laughed and plucked a small blue flower off a nearby bush. He trailed the star-shaped bloom over Maeve’s lips.
“Princess Beltain is a standard of grace and diplomacy the worlds over, enarri. I do not know that I would even realize if she were actually angry with me.”
“And what of me, my enarri?” Maeve plucked the sky-colored flower from Orthain’s fingers and tucked it behind one of her pointed ears. “Do you have such confidence that you could face my wrath?”
“None,” Orthain said with a grin. “I have taught you too well. I would not risk battle against you.”
But the knight sobered quickly and Maeve sat up, frowning.
“What is it?” she asked. “I was only playing…”
Orthain sighed. “I know, Maeve.”
He reached out to trail his fingers through her black hair, then down her cheek.
“You will be leaving soon,” Orthain said. “Caith will be assigned to the Waygates and you will go with him. That is all both of you ever wanted.”
“I love my brother.”
“More than you love me?” Orthain asked. “No, that is an unworthy question. Caith is blood. I love you and would see you both happy, enarri. But I will miss you.”
Maeve could think of nothing to say.
Maeve woke with a groan, trying to push away the clinging threads of her dreams and memories. The past could never stay quiet, even a century gone. It was no enemy that Maeve could fight or flee. Or even endure.
She unfurled her sweat-sticky wings and arched her back. Her spine popped, protesting a night spent on the ground. By the dim light filtering through the glassless window, Maeve guessed that it was not long after dawn, but it was already swelteringly hot inside the black cathedral.
Perhaps more accustomed to the cloying heat, the rest of the Church of Nihil’s congregation still slept. Only a few others were awake at this hour, milling aimlessly around the cathedral. Elsa was up, carrying servings of thin porridge on a tray. The Mirran woman offered one of the bowls to Maeve. Even though her stomach rumbled, Maeve declined. She needed to think.
Her com was still aboard the Blue Phoenix. It was programmed with the ship’s frequency, as well as the crew’s personal channels and those of some of her more often frequented chem dealers. If Maeve’s fraud was uncovered, it didn’t seem like a good idea to give the potentially violent Church of Nihil such an easy way to find her co-conspirators, so she had left it behind.
Maeve couldn’t call back to the Blue Phoenix to report her few findings or request help. If she left to go speak with Tiberius or Gripper in person, it might arouse suspicion from the Nihilists. Maeve was on her own for now.
Bren was also awake, checking on those who lay too still and smiling when he found an old man who would never rise again. Maeve picked her way across the church to stand beside the Nihilist doctor.
He smiled at the fairy as she approached and gestured toward the body of the dead man, already stiffening in the morning heat. Maeve resisted the urge to cover her mouth and nose. In death, the man had messily emptied his bowels and bladder in the dirt. The stinking mud oozed across the cathedral floor.
“All that remains is a husk,” Bren said. “Empty and perfect.”
Perfect? Maeve had to disagree. The corpse was dressed in the same robes as everyone else in this place, but in his final convulsions, the man had raised his hands, perhaps in supplication or merely the misfiring of his failing nervous system. His ragged black sleeves had fallen back to reveal sores, old and crusted with blood, and dark veins extending down his forearms. Maeve looked reflexively at her own arms, at the sleeves covering similar discolorations.
“He is beyond pain and sorrows,” Bren said.
Bren took her hand and pressed it to the dead human’s chest. Maeve’s skin crawled and she wanted to shriek in disgust. But she was supposed to be like him now and Maeve made herself remain still.
“Listen to the perfect silence of death,” Bren told her. “Have you ever heard anything more beautiful?”
A thousand things, Maeve thought. The songs of the nyads as they beckoned men to them from the water’s edge. The crystal bells of the Ivory Spire rung at golden dawn. Orthain’s voice singing to her in the gardens of her home. Caith’s laughter when she told him a joke.
But Maeve shook her head at Bren. She gagged on the stench of excrement, felt the Nihilist holding her hand to a dead man’s still chest. But she deserved this, she knew. The core races believed in a multitude of hells, but not a one of them was deep enough for Maeve’s sins.
Finally, Bren let go of her hand and stepped back. The Nihilist’s gaze swept over Maeve, looking deeply disappointed at her health. He sketched a mocking little bow, turned and left to continue his morning’s work. Maeve stood beside the corpse, not knowing what else to do.
Not much later, the rest of the congregation had roused themselves. Most of the Nihilists seemed no busier than Maeve, simply sitting or lying wherever they had slept the night before.
There was a polite cough behind her. Maeve turned and looked up to see Elsa, a bundle of folded cloth in her arms.
“To wind him,” Elsa explained, hefting the fabric and pointing to the body.
Elsa found a relatively clean patch of dirt and worked with surprising speed and care, winding the corpse in three long sheets that covered him from head to toe. On her knees, she was about eye level with Maeve.
“Can you help me get him out back?” she asked.
Out back…? The Nihilist church was on the very outskirts of Gharib. What could be behind the cathedral other than empty sand? But Maeve nodded and took the dead man’s cloth-swaddled feet. Elsa grabbed his shoulders and together, they dragged the corpse off the stone and away to the back of the cathedral.
The waking congregation in the crowded church cleared a path for Maeve and Elsa, standing aside and watching the tiny mortuary procession pass. One by one, then in a huge huddled group, the Nihilists began to follow. Many prayed aloud, some to the god of the Union of Light, others murmuring to themselves in other languages to other deities, grasping at the forgotten psalms of religions that predated Aver.
The Arcadians fell in at the back of the procession and sang a hymn to the Nameless. The fairies always sang. Even as the Devourers ripped their wings off and split bone in their fanged maws, the Arcadians sang.
By the time Maeve and Elsa reached the back of the cathedral, about half of the Nihilists were following behind them. Though most eyes were on the body they carried, Elsa seemed to enjoy the attention. Maeve kept her head bowed behind a curtain of bleached blonde hair, hoping that no one studied her too closely.
Elsa paused, set down her burden and peeled aside a sheet of fibersteel from the back of the church.
If Maeve expected to see a door cunningly concealed behind the metal, she was disappointed. The jagged piece of fibersteel was the door, bolted inelegantly above a roughly rectangular hole in the cathedral wall. Elsa hefted the limp weight of the dead man’s shoulders once more. No one else had come forward to take up the burden. Maeve and Elsa carried him out of the cathedral.
At first, Maeve wondered if the Nihilist congregation intended to just heave the body out into the desert dunes that forever lapped at the edge of Gharib like the waves of a dry, hungry ocean. The ground behind the Church of Nihil was a rocky, flat expanse that covered at least an acre. Gavriel must have chosen the stoniest ground in all of Gharib on which to build his ramshackle black cathedral, Maeve reflected sourly. Dust had blown up over the rocks, obscuring them from sight. But the sandy mounds were laid out in ordered rows.
Tombstones.
There had to be five hundred or more headstones, but it was almost impossible to count them beneath the sand. Rows of dusty graves stretched off in every direction. The wind whipped up clouds of sand, unhindered by the windbreaks surrounding Gharib, and stung Maeve’s eyes.
Anthem had told Xia that the church wasn’t very old, or at least had not been in Gharib for long. Where did so many graves come from? Surely one or two deaths a night couldn’t account for such a vast graveyard. Who else lay buried by Nihilist hands in the dry dust? The Sisterhood? Not unless the Sisterhood was far larger on Stray than the vast city-world of Axis. Kessa’s gang wouldn’t have filled more than a corner of the Nihilist graveyard. Was Elsa’s husband out there, too? How many had the Church of Nihil killed?
Nihilists poured out of their church like maggots from a corpse. At Elsa’s instruction, they found a tiny plot of unmarked ground and began to dig. None of the Nihilists had shovels or even cruder digging implements. They tore into the loose dust, then the hard-packed ground with their bare hands. It wasn’t long before there wasn’t room for more than a single digger to work in the deepening hole. They scrambled one by one down into the ground to dig in the dirt their hands were bloody.
Every Nihilist who took a turn in the ground did so with religious zeal, tearing away at the last bonds of life with fingers bruised and bleeding. What was this to them? Punishment? Worship?
When her turn came, Maeve couldn’t risk refusing the Nihilists’ twisted honor, so she squeezed down into the hole. The other death-worshipers had been at their business for hours and the grave was deep enough now for the crumbling lip to rise up over her bleach-blonde head. Maeve held her wings close to her back, but there simply wasn’t enough room. Stones jutting out from the wall of the narrow grave caught at her long feathers, bending and breaking them. The close air stank of blood and sweat.
Maeve scratched and clawed at the rocky ground until her back and fingers ached. The prayers and songs of those outside of the hole above were muted and echoed in the narrow grave. Down under the sand and stone, time stretched like the spun sugar that Maeve had loved so much as a child. She couldn’t see the dim red sun as it measured out minutes or hours.
Her hair, her eyes, her mouth were full of choking dust. Caith had been less fond of candy… right? He always gave Maeve the larger share of any treat. But he would have done anything for his sister. Maeve would have done anything for Caith… and had.
Maeve dug her fingernails into the ground to pry up thin handfuls of dry dirt, which she flung up and out of the hole. It wasn’t long before her nails were torn raggedly and blood oozed from beneath them.
Maeve kept digging, surrounded by the dead. Only thin walls of brittle dust separated her from the next grave, from the corpses all around her. From their staring eyes and slack jaws, open to ask horrid, idiot questions.
What happened?
Why am I so cold on this hot world?
Maeve dug faster. Sweat poured down the back of her neck and between her wings. Maeve should have been down here, too. She deserved it. Eight million other Arcadians lay dead in the broken remains of the White Kingdom. Ten million dryads and thirteen million nyads all consumed, eaten raw like carrion. Every life in the White Kingdom was gutted and torn apart by the Devourers. All dead… Maeve hurled fistfuls of salty mud from the grave with wordless, sobbing cries of rage.
“Maeve! Enarri, listen to me! I have to go! I have to close the Tamlin gate!”
Orthain was shouting over the whine of laserfire and screams of dying knights. There were dead among the Devourers, too, but so few. The monsters didn’t scream when twenty knights finally managed to bring one down, or even leave a body behind. They faded into shadows of shifting black dust and vanished like something out of a nightmare.
Orthain was flying close enough to Maeve that she could feel the brush of his wings against hers. His hair was tangled by wind, sweat and blood, and Orthain’s left eye was darkly bruised. Both knights’ armor was smeared with gore, some once belonging to Devourers and some to fae, and the glass was webbed with fine cracks. The rainbow of tourney and questing ribbons hanging from their spears were stained red and black by battle.
“No!” Maeve cried. “Get through the Waygate! Evacuate with the others!”
They circled the westernmost Waygate plaza. The mosaic below was laid out in the crimson likeness of a setting sun, but the design was lost under the storm of white wings as Arcadians pushed and shoved their way through the Waygates. The gates flickered with blue light as fairies fled through them. The smells of blood and smoke were thick in the air.
“Go with them,” Maeve said. “Get away from here!”
“The Devourers will follow us!” Orthain shouted. His spear was broken in half and blood ran down his face. “If we let those monsters into the core, trillions will die! But the Spire adepts have an idea… If we can close the Tamlin Waygate, it will banish the Devourers.”
“But there is no way to get one of the spell-singers close to the Tamlin gate. It is suicide! And they are needed here, to get our people to safety.”
“You are right,” Orthain said.
Maeve could barely hear him over the screams and sounds of battle surging through the streets of Arcadia. But she saw the resolve in his expression.
“Orthain, no!” Maeve cried. “You cannot think to go to Tamlin! You are no Spire singer. You will die and for nothing!”
“I will die trying to save what is left of our kingdom,” Orthain said. “The Spire adepts have told me what to do. I can only hope it is enough, but I have never worked a Waygate protection.”
Maeve’s heart turned to ice inside her.
“But I have,” she said. “I will fly to Tamlin with you, Orthain. I will close the Waygate.”
“Maeve, no! You are a princess of the House of Cavain. You are needed here, with your people! Get through the Waygates!”
“I am not their queen!” Maeve shouted.
Orthain wheeled through the air and caught her by the arm, pointing to the closing lines of roiling black moving through the city below. Glass and blood shone in the sunlight.
“King Illain is wounded and we cannot locate the crown princess,” Orthain said. “My enarri, your mother and brother are dead. Before today is done, you will be all that remains of the royal house. Your people are frightened and lost. You will be their queen and they will need you!”
Maeve pulled her arm out of Orthain’s grasp and beat her wings hard to regain altitude.
“Whatever else I may be, I am a knight of Arcadia,” she told him. “If you are right, and if there is ever to be anything left for our people to return to, then I am going to the Tamlin Waygate. Tell me what it is the Spire adepts instructed you to do.”
“No, I will not!” Orthain shouted against the hot, fetid wind. “I cannot send you to Tamlin to die! I love you!”
“If I am to be your queen,” Maeve said, “then consider it a command.”
Orthain’s eyes flew wide and his steady wingbeat faltered, but he bowed his head. “Yes, Your Highness. I will tell you all that I can, but you will never reach the Tamlin gate alone.”
“No,” Maeve agreed. “I will need your help, Sir Fyre, and any knights that can be spared from the evacuation.”
“We will die,” Orthain said.
Maeve wiped the tears out of her eyes and nodded. “Yes, we will.”
