Revolving Door: Volume 2
Ashes to Ashes
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts colonisation/military conquest, deadly infectious diseases, massacres, and bereavement.
Amaranthia— Talurn— What is my name?
There are pieces, scattered through her memory, of the person she once thought she would become. That version of her still lives parched by the desert, flees from volcanoes, and sleeps in the heat of her husband’s arms.
None of that will ever be her again.
She is here, in a corner of a city a world away from where she was born—colder than night, greyer than red. Across her tiny apartment, pots, paper, and lacquered chairs lie in piles around her tear-washed feet. Every time she looks, she pictures it all burning away, watching the ashes scatter in the wind.
It must have been a week now—or more—since she woke to find Freesia’s bed empty. It has been a week since she realised, fingers cold, that her daughter wasn’t playing a game of hide-and-seek.
For three sleepless days, she has beseeched the palace to find Freesia. When they would not hear her, she went to her brother, to speak to the Duchess himself. The palace does not have a face, but Dorian does; that face was stern with worry as he said, “I will, but I do not know if she will hear me.”
For three sleepless days, she lay alone with her grief. Then her brother came back to her on the third evening, with a parcel wrapped in silk, pink as the final blossom of spring. And he said, “I am leaving the Queendom for sixty days.”
“What for?” she breathed.
“To find Uri,” Eirucan answered.
She gripped his arm and cried, “Why? Where, where is she—?“
He shook his head, face falling, the way it always did when there was something he could not say. “Take care of yourself. Talk to Narsi. He will be happy to help you whenever you need it.” He held out the parcel with a nod, pressing its cool silk into her motionless hand. “This is from my duchess. I hope this will be enough to last you through the months I am gone.”
She watched, wordless, as his back disappeared into the dusk. The pattern of her life was repeating again. She was watching her last tether burn. Everything she touched still withered away.
But if Uri was so far away, and if her brother had even a sliver of a chance to find her, then she had to let him go.
This time, she did not plead, and she did not scream. And by morning, as promised, Eirucan was nowhere to be found.
It has been a week since that day, and by now, in the silence, she knows there will be no end to this all-engulfing fog.
But lying among the pieces of her apartment furnishings, still unrepaired, she thinks of her husband for the first time in years. In her mind, he is still alive, picking urana in a valley, lit by the sun forever.
This morphine of not-knowing holds her together. As long as she doesn’t know why he no longer walks with her, she can never be destroyed by the agony.
Yet she remembers being told he died. And though she has tried—and how she tried—the knowledge persists, that he is gone, and is still gone. Like a stain that resists scouring, there is always that mark on her memory, betraying the lie in every story she has told herself since.
She looks so much like you, Caric. Why must you haunt me so?
On the grounds beneath her window, the hedges are green with springtime vigour. It is so very quiet, and she can hear it again, a distant cry she has not heeded for years—as of some creature she caged in the caverns of her mind.
It wants to be found again. It wants to be answered.
*
In the Queendom, Amaranthia has few friends, but friends there are indeed—most of them like herself, taken or driven from the next world over to this strange, glittering land. There is Narsi, the postman, whom the people of this world call Cedar—for you see, I am tall and stately and my face is lined like its bark, he likes to say—and Manus, the basket weaver who has never told her his birth name.
It is Narsi who whispered to her the secret route to the Cracked Land. “Once a day, at dusk, there is a wagon that takes letters between the worlds,” he says, “and sometimes, the driver will take a person, too, for enough coin.”
Now standing in that rickety postal depot, palming some of Duchess Orobelle’s gold to the woman watching the wagon, his words prove true. “Swan of the Outer North Quarter, at your service,” she declares with a flourishing bow, too chipper for this hour of the day. Then she points Amaranthia up into her two-mule cart, to keep company with two sacks of letters, a ceramic vat and a bale of hay. “You could do us the honours of pouring drinks. Which way-station are you headed for?”
“Whichever will get me to the village of Licur,” she replies.
“Station Twenty Two on the Queen's Road! You must ask the station master to call you a ride to the village.”
Amaranthia does not know where station twenty-two is. She supposes she might know its location by a different name, but Swan was born in the duchy, and there is little chance she knows what it is called in Tysian.
With a lazy braying of mules, the wheels begin to roll out of the depot, and soon they are coursing down city roads, watching the towers and houses grow sparser.
“Why are you going back?” asks Swan as the beasts hit their stride. It is the first of her many offerings of conversation before nighttime descends.
“To resolve unfinished business relating to my husband.”
“Is he still there? In the next world?”
She pauses. “I want to believe he is.”
“Poor dear,” murmurs Swan. “I ought to warn you, it could be hard to return without a permit.”
She nods. “So Narsi told me. I brought my letter of invitation from the Duchess. The one that first let me through the gate.”
“That could do it. But be careful who you ride with, some don’t take well to your people trying to return…”
As their ride wears into the night, Amaranthia shivers with both the cold and the dread. Head on the hay, she drifts in and out of sleep, waking briefly in the lights of the world gate before her driver’s cart lurches through, and into her homeland’s balmy night.
“There was a time when I believed I would live all my days Dorna,” Curia begins, the crackle of campfire flames punctuating her words. Leaves ripple over the humid clearing. “A dreary life that would have been, too. You see, my left shin—I lost that in a volcano run. It is only because my dear friend Faran pulled me onto a boulder that I am alive at all…but never again would I be of use to my clan. A one-legged woman cannot run, and they had few ways of improving my condition.”
“But then her Grace saved you.”
Curia turns at Calibra's interjection, and shakes her head. “I s’pose that’s what they would like to tell you…but no, it was not like that…for you see, there is a lot about the duchy’s rule that is not spoken of.”
Around the camp, the scout vanguard huddles closer to listen. Among their bright gazes, Eniun continues to speak.
“I was too young to remember this myself, and I only know of it from what our elders told us. But the Queendom first announced its arrival in our lands with great fanfare. The guards of our village ran to look, and the reports returned—there were hoofed beasts pale as bone, pulling carriages, and the people carried swords, and inventions never before seen by Dorna. Explosive blowpipes that fired pellets, trinkets that kept time to the second…and among them was their young leader, Duchess Adamanta. And, she spoke our tongue.”
“Our Duchess Adamanta? But you’re much older than her.”
“Yes, but you forget. Adamanta became duchess at sixteen. And a year in the Queendom is two years in the Cracked Land. She was youthful, but sharp beyond her years. And when she first came to our patriarch, she invited our village to ally with her. She said she could bring great prosperity if we complied, and ruin if we did not.
“Aside from brief skirmishes with Acse, we in Leyse had never seen hostilities before. There was no need for war in our homeland…not when the great volcanoes might kill us on a whim. Death was theirs to give and take.
“But when our patriarch received Her Grace’s words, he heard the threat in them. The villagers grew uneasy, and angry, and in a matter of days, anger turned to belligerence.”
There are glances about the fire. Perhaps they know how this story ends, but with a nod, she continues.
“Like I mentioned, the village of Dorna was never warlike. Our weapons were made for beasts. And the gentler way to put this is, when our best warriors tried to drive the Duchy out, they made an example of them. They tied our warriors to a dead tree and fired pellets into them until we could no longer recognise their bodies. Even as young as I was, I would never forget the sight—or that sound, like rain, as their blood hit the ground on the square.”
There were gasps and winces around the campfire.
“Witnessing this with his own eyes, our patriarch’s demeanour changed. But who could blame him? This was not like anything he had seen before. He called upon our chief, and she, Tanahor…she made the calculation that we could never defeat Adamanta. When she went to negotiate, she went without armed guards, and surrendered.
“The Duchess graciously accepted the surrender. In three short days, we had learned two things about this conquering queendom. First—they played by rules, and would comply if we did so too. And second—we stood no chance against them.
“Well, that's not fair,” Maura mutters. “If Dorna has never seen war before then you had no fair chance to defend yourselves. You were taken by force.”
Curia shakes her head with an inward smile. “The duchy never meant to let us choose. This was how they won all their other lands: by rule of might…and death. Perhaps we were lucky, that our chief saw that there was no victory to be found, and decided that the death would end there.”
Through the windows of the Arkalyk Hotel, Dorian can see where the streets give way to plains, the city’s buildings placid and grey as cattle on the edge of a meadow. “Hong Yi tells me we are in a land called Kazakhstan, in his home world,” he says, gaze resting on the horizon through the glass.
“Kazakhstan?” asks Marcia, glancing up at him with dark brown eyes. “I do not know that name. Is Hong Yi from here?”
“He does not seem to know their language.”
“Ah…where are you from?”
“Nowhere you would know, I believe. But I was born to the clan of Licur, on a plain by the foothills of a volcano. There is little to know about our village, except that we lived by the cycles of their eruptions, farming on their lava plains, and letting them bury our old huts.”
“Does Orobelle come from the same place?”
“She could not be farther.”
“Ah, then how did you come to serve her?”
“She bought me,” he answers simply. Pity and wonder fleet over her face. “The landscape of Licur was unforgiving, but I loved it dearly. Then these strangers appeared in our land, and when my chief sold me to them…I knew it was not my choice to make, and so I went with them. But much as I wanted to keep my head down, there was a bargain I had to make—so I did. I asked to take my twin sister along.”
Watching the peaks rise from the horizon, Talurn feels her heart crack again, like the crust swelled by new lava. Himac, Darmun, Turan, she can name each mount, and its spirit—the ancient ones who give life and destroy it, and the one thing the Queendom can never subjugate.
It was in a valley among those peaks that her husband first found her, picking urana in the late afternoon heat. He first announced himself by calling out from behind her, and then she turned to find a red-haired man watching her, his face half-lit by a golden sun.
“I see your clan has found the secret field too,” he said.
“It is no secret, then,” she answered, dropping a few leaves into her pouch with a toss of her hair.
They harvested side by side, filling their pouches with the fleshy leaves, and then they did so again a week later. He was Caric of Acse, and every time their paths met, he lingered with her, both slowly pinching leaves off stalks. He always had a quick wit and a winning grin, his long hair tied loosely at his nape.
The tragedy of beauty so arresting was that she knew it would be gone too soon. But still, she endeavoured for him, and flirted, wildly gambling. Then some spark caught, and they kissed and held each other in the shelter of those peaks. They returned each week, and their villages knew there must be something afoot, for they were harvesting so often and bringing home less than they normally did.
Then at last, Talurn said, “Our lives are short. Volcanoes erupt. Strange people are passing through our lands. The world may change soon, and it may not be so frightening if we were together.”
“I would love to be with you,” he answered, sweeping her into an embrace. “But I am of Acse, and you are of Tyse, and I do not know whose tradition we follow.” In Acse, weddings did not mean moving away, while in Tyse the men went to the women’s villages.
“Then we shall ask,” she replied, “if you are willing.”
“I am.”
So they went home to her village of Licur, and saw Corcaro, the patriarch. “If you wish to be wed,” he said, “then you may be wed, in our tradition. And Caric, you must become of Licur. Would you accept?”
“Only if I may perform the departure rites with my clan,” Caric replied.
“Of course…do what your spirits bid you. And we shall see you again soon.”
Then they went to Acse, where all clans lived in a growing cluster of villages, and they told their patriarch of their intent.
“It is not unheard of,” he said. “We have had our people leave for other nations, and others join us. But we shall celebrate you, if you do depart.”
“And I would miss you too,” he said. So the village celebrated him for two days, and drank in his name, and Talurn’s, showering them in what little urana they could spare. Then, the couple returned to Licur, to be officiated by Corcaro, and he became part of the village family.
The first outbreak of violence between Leyse and the Queendom came a year later, in the village of Dorna upon the foothills of the Turan Mountain: an insurrection that turned into a massacre. On that day, ten Leysian warriors were hung and shot to death.
The day the news came, Talurn entered her birth throes. Through that blazing, unquenchable afternoon, she brought a child into the world. Her screams gave way to her daughter’s, the piercing cry that heralded the evening.
On that day of pain and joy, the thought of the subdued village was far from her mind. As she and Caric brought the wet newborn to her hut, she could feel the bristling around her, only quelled briefly by the sight of the child.
“You have saved a rotten day,” said Gama, the basket weaver who lived beside them, as she laid a gentle hand on the forehead of the sleeping infant.
Talurn wrapped her in grass linens, and laid her in the cot they had made. Her name was Uri: to quell.
“I raised Uri, as did every adult in Licur,” says Dorian. “Once she was old enough to walk and eat, she joined the village nursery, where we adults took care of our children in turns. We all shared in their nurturing—all as parents to each one. I was a volcano watcher, and my duty was often at night, so I was often at the nursery in the day.”
“You enjoyed it?” Marcia asks.
Dorian nods. “Very much. I learned all their favourite games, and the foods they hated, so I knew what not to give them. I played their games with them, like the ones where we sat in a circle and passed messages. I never had an interest in marrying, but I loved being a parent.”
“Most people I know feel the opposite,” she laughs. “Does Orobelle know about any of this? The things you enjoyed?”
“No,” Dorian answers, and casts a glance up the corridor. “She has never asked, and I have never felt it necessary to mention.”
“People of the Queendom had passed through our lands for centuries before our first altercation, or so the stories say,” Curia continues. “It was only recently that they began claiming pieces of it for themselves. They came through a hole in the air, and they built a glowing gate to mark it. But while they crossed freely, our people were not allowed to so much as approach, on pain of death.
“Before the battle, Leyse’s encounters with the Queendom were few—first with scouts like yourselves, none of them speaking our tongue. But things began to change after our tribe became their vassal. They brought builders, who began to pave a new road through the land. It grew over the months, snaking between mountains. To this end, they brought machines, wonders of engineering, which tore up the soil.
“Then, with those machines, they began to uproot the urana fields. Those plants are one of the cornerstones of our lives. They draw groundwater up with taproots, and store it in their leaves. They water and feed us in the months when no rain falls.
“Perhaps without knowing it, the Queendom was threatening our existence. The chiefs of Tyse, Leyse and Acse met over it, remembering the violence they visited upon us. It was the chief of Tyse, who relied most upon those fields, who sent his spokesperson to plead for a change of their route. The builders had diverted roads around mountains and chasms, so surely they could do so for our fields.
“But the Duchess’ councillor replied: ‘No, you misunderstand. We only avoid mountains because it is costlier to clear them than to build around them. These fields are easy to remove, and so we remove them.’
“They would listen to none of Tyse’s entreaties. They thought only of what the road would cost in stone and hours of work, and not of the life they gave us, and the decades of tales spun around them. They did not cease their work. We knew the terrors that they would wreak upon us, so rather than resort again to violence, we offered up everything: our lands, our knowledge of the volcanoes, a share of our crop.
“They scoffed at our offers. They had no need of our crops; they had crops in plenty. They cared not to know our wisdom; we could not teach them anything they didn’t know. So we watched, and mourned, as the Queendom uprooted an urana field and finished their road. New laws were passed around: all the land the road covered, and an equal width on either side, was the Queendom’s territory. None of us were to set foot upon it, except where permitted.
“Not long after, we received tidings that the Duchess would send a diplomatic envoy to our patriarch. When we accepted the invitation, the diplomat rode into our village accompanied by ten guards—you might know her by the name of Hiscera, Councillor of Correspondence.
“Now that they had a foothold in our world, the Queendom had come to propose a trade. They offered us their wagons and their water. But had they not just rejected all our offers of trade? What could they want in exchange? ‘Your people,’ said Hiscera. The one thing we had never thought to give up.
“Our patriarch spoke to Chief Tanahor about the terms, and she knew, at once, that we were not being asked to make a choice. The next time our patriarch met Hiscera, I was brought along, though I did not understand why until they discussed it before me. I was the first one my chief would offer to them—a woman with a peg for a leg.” Curia closes her eyes to the firelight, letting the silence was over her. “There were some on our side who squirmed at the choice. But the Duchess considered me with a gaze as hard as stone, and said, ‘This one will do fine.’
“And so, that is how I, poor Eniun, was traded from Dorna to the Duchy. I was taken across fields I knew and fields I didn't, to be the Duchess’ servant, and now, here I am.”
As Curia reaches the conclusion of the tale, there is not the merriment that normally accompanies one at the campfire. There is still talk, but with that talk are glances about the clearing, at the ones they know to have a part in this story, distant or uncomfortably close.
“It makes one wonder about the other places the Queendom once subsumed,” Maura finally says. “My homelands were not always part of the Queendom…but little is said of how they came to be so…”
“Oh, I think the answer would surprise us all,” Curia chuckles. “If it were known…if it were talked about, there would be a reckoning. But I only speak of this because I was there. I was there, and we are two worlds from the Duchy…and even then…she is all around us.” She points at the diamond badge on her cowl. “She is the reason I have my left leg, after all…poor me, who had no good use outside of caring for children, while I had a peg for a shin…”
Talurn and Caric were, for the first four years of Uri’s life, happy. It was a happiness so rare that the village’s spirits lifted around theirs, and they welcomed Caric into their basket weaving and the milking of urana, lifetimes of stories exchanged for fresh ears.
Four years, too, had it been, since Dorna became a client of the Queendom. Their doings had gone all but silent. Nothing was heard of these otherworldly arrivals for decades, besides the occasional news of a Leysian man or woman being sold.
When Eirucan and the other watchers gave word that Himac was about to erupt, the people of Licur packed up their lives and fled—away from the peak, closer to their stark grey road. Only as they settled upon a quiet field did they see that horrible snaking thing in plain daylight, its paving stones alien beneath the desert sun. Around it, urana fields had moved and spread and been culled at the edges, like beasts herded across the land. Licur watched from afar as carriages rolled along the horizon.
One day in the boiling belly of the year, a messenger came to Licur’s gates from Acse. She did not speak to anyone but Caric, who returned from their meeting to Talurn’s hut with a dulled gaze.
“What tidings did she bring?” she asked, knowing that twinge of his cheek too well.
“My parents,” he replied simply, unable to keep his gaze steady. “Their funeral. They have passed away from illness.”
In Acse, unlike in Tyse, couples raised their own offspring; the children of these unions would in turn care for their parents in old age. Talurn, who had met Meturi and Parnas and heard tales of their camelops husbandry, had never thought that Caric’s gravest fears, in all those years of guilt and night terrors, would come true.
Had the grief worn upon them? Had they been frailer than Caric remembered? Her husband was reluctant to speak, but this he did say: “It must be my fault.”
He left with the messenger’s cart, once their tearful goodbyes were over. But the tears were the extent of Talurn’s outward sorrow, for she knew he would return soon.
Caric did not return. A week passed, then two. The funeral should have ended, and he should have had the time to make the trip home. But perhaps he had chosen to stay longer, and she would not hold it against him.
It was four weeks before the questions became impossible to ignore, and that was when the roiling dread in her chest burst free, into a rampant terror.
Skin cold as ice, she could not settle enough for sleep, and slept only in the nursery where her daughter, too, slumbered. In the mornings, her twin brother came to wake her, and she would weep in his arms till he had to leave again. At last, Eirucan offered to seek Caric out himself, but she begged him to stay.
“I cannot let you,” she cried. “I cannot let you ride the same road he did.”
From the day the news came that her husband had been found dead, Talurn's life floated in suspension between dreaming and waking. Always, in her dreams, he was alive, yet impossible to reach or hear. She slept and woke, slept and woke again, yet still he was not there.
The world had reached a dead end. This world—a world that always strove to kill—had seemed less frightening because she had shared it with him, her lone bulwark against despair.
But now, there was nothing where he had once been.
There was nothing. It was the next best answer. She did not attend his funeral. She would not hear anything the villagers had to say about him, or his death. He was nowhere, and she could live if she believed he could someday be found, if she could have happy dreams where the taint of death did not walk…
“We were lucky, loath as I am to say it,” Curia murmurs. “Lucky the Queendom kept us as a reservoir of humans, of blood and flesh. We were bought, and our people were changed. I was, too.” She laughs. “We are no longer truly Dorna, now they have reached their fingers into our heart. But we are…alive. Acse…Acse was not so lucky.”
“I used to tell my sister I would ride for weeks in her name. We were born together, and inseparable since then. And she only wanted me to remain at her side, just to be sure she would not lose me, too,” Dorian sighs. “She became afraid to leave the nursery. I only saw her there. And I never told her of the way her husband died…”
Amaranthia waits at the way-station, amid the sandpapery gusts and sun-lit mountains, with a mounting sense of fear. Once she hears the truth, she can never close this door again. Everything that will pour through, sorrow and grief and hope, she will have to stand and take, like lava coursing down the slopes of a volcano, down the mountain cracks faster than any horse can run.
Swan had left her with a few parting lines of advice, most prominently that the cart to Licur would come twice a day, and that the next would arrive at the first crack of dawn. And my wagon returns at sunset, if you wish to ride with me again.
As promised, the cart to Licur peeks over the horizon in the first seeping of daylight heat, rolling up towards the station. When the driver’s face resolves from the darkness, Talurn sucks in a gasp.
“Gama,” she breathes.
“Talurn?” answers the woman, the same woman, with a shaved head, who once sat with her and taught her how to weave baskets. Her face is lined with age, and her eyes are sad. She lifts a hand—perhaps by reflex—to obscure the hat upon her head, and the gleaming Queendom’s crest upon it.
But Talurn sprints to meet her, and throws both arms about the cart-driver as she listlessly dismounts.
“Gama, you’re still here.”
“Talurn! I have not seen you so alive in years,” Gama croaks, hands resting on her shoulders. “How are you? How is Eirucan? Your daughter?”
She shakes her head, eyes welling up. Her jaw aches. “I don't know. I don't know.”
Gama's face sinks. “Oh, Talurn, why did you return?”
“To finish what I was afraid to.”
Acse stood upon a plateau that housed, in its heart, an aquifer. Water was priceless, in this land of heat, and anyone with free access to it could venture farther than any other.
When the Queendom found a Tunnel atop that same plateau, their next move became a foregone conclusion.
Acse was too close, or so said the Queendom’s interpreter, with a face as stony as a mask. The village had to move. From the day the Duchess made her demands, they made their choice, too: they chose to sink their heels in, to hold their line.
You see, Acse was not like the other two nations: it did not move. When their forebears had found this territory, a short plateau with a cache of water that lava could not reach, they had put down their roots and learned to live upon it. They drew water from wells in the ground. The time they no longer spent watching volcanoes, they devoted to cultivating urana farms.
Acse, whose people had spent generations carving lives from the plateau, whose bond to the land had been hard-won, would not budge. There were—as with Dorna—disputes, not debates so much as vitriol met with coddling non-answers. But Acse’s patriarch quickly learned that all they had to do was stay put where they were, for if the Duchy massacred a village while it existed peacefully, no one would ever come to their bargaining table again.
They stood their ground, and without enacting violence, the Queendom could not retaliate. Or, that is what they believed.
It was in the weeks prior to Caric’s return to his town that some strange new illness began to creep through it. It began with coughing and fever, no different from any other illness. Then the coughing became bloodied, and the bleeding spread, until the sufferer dwindled to coma and death.
It took their elderly first, killing them swiftly but not before spreading to their caretakers. Your husband’s parents were some of the first who took ill. The village was like many others: the adults came together in aggregates when they were not otherwise busy, and cared for the disabled and infirm of the town. The disease liked social formations like that. Anyone who was connected to anyone else, and anyone who moved among the public, would succumb.
When your husband arrived, they had only just begun to learn that this strange sickness was not like any they had seen before. The patriarch saw, with clarity, what had to be done. He declared that none were to leave or visit—that this would be Acse’s trial to best alone.
He separated those of us who had not taken ill into the meeting hall, to save us while the rest of the village fell.
Caric died of this disease soon after his parents. I only knew he was here because his arrival had brought terror.
One by one, our village dwindled. Every day, a new corpse was reported, but only by way of fire signals between windows. The patriarch was dead within a week, as was his successor. After three weeks, there were only nine left in the hall. All was silence beyond.
When we heard a knock on our door at last, we were almost afraid to answer it. “Let me in,” called the voice of the visitor. It was one we knew: the Queendom’s interpreter, Hiscera.
Thin and, pale, her face was an omen. Behind her stood a large, red cart, pulled by three horses. “Come with me,” she said, pointing at her vehicle. “Leave this wretched place, before we set fire to its streets.”
That day, I knew, meeting those steely cold eyes, that she was the plague itself. As we rode away, choking with the sorrow and relief of daylight, a column of smoke rose behind.
It was a signal to all who saw it from afar: There is no place that you can save from our reaping.
“And now, there lies a road through the ruins of Acse,” concludes the young woman, trembling. She is too young. She watched her village die when she was a child.
“We learned too late. Too late. The godless Queendom would do what it will to have what it wants, even bring plague,” answers an aged Corcaro, sagging in his chair. “Pray tell, do they treat you well at least?”
Talurn stares as she attempts to corral the disarray of her thoughts. This is the Queendom, the one whose tongue she learned. This is the place that has sustained her while she nursed her grief.
The Queendom saved her. The Queendom raised her brother to the upper echelons, gave her an escape from the village and its sorrow. But the Queendom tore up their fields, burned their villages, scattered their histories and rewrote their futures, as easily as tossing ashes into the wind.
The Queendom killed him. It killed him. She killed him.
They call this place—these plains and deserts and volcanoes—the Cracked Land. And they would keep breaking it, just to find the water within.
She sees the clouds, the urana fields, the sun, the lava, the straw huts all flash by, and her husband is in all of them, and her husband is dying in all of them, and his daughter stands in his place, looking so much like he did in a younger day, before all this sadness came to be.
“They treat me like a person,” Talurn finally says. “But that is only because of Eirucan.”
“That is a conqueror’s tactic,” Marcia murmurs, eyes narrowed in thought.
“We did not know it then, but all that the Queendom touched could become a weapon in their hands. Land and water…fields…plagues…families…”
She nods. “It cannot be easy for you. Becoming a warrior in the Queendom that tore your world to pieces…”
“There is more to it than that—there is a reason, although I cannot speak of it. But it is easier for me than it is for my sister.” He looks away. “Sometimes, I feel she was made to bear the grief of every village they destroyed.”