“You don’t know that the Auldek will come. For all you know they still scorn you.”
“You know nothing.” Crannag rose, and his shoulder swiped at the air as he turned away, almost like a blow.
“I know this!” Corinn said. “You are a coward!”
Crannag trudged away. He waved one arm, dismissing her accusation as if it were an insect.
“The Numrek hiding in that fortress are quivering,” Corinn continued. She stood and began to follow him. Her guards jumped to keep pace with her. “Your men are dogs, no braver than your children. Your women are whipped bitches. I will tell the world this is so. News of it will fly on every bird to every province. The Known World will scorn you, and if the Auldek ever arrive, they will learn of your cowardice. I would not wish to be you.” She spat toward him. “Not after I tell the world that I came here and offered you battle on these terms: an equal number of my force to fight yours. Equal numbers, Crannag! One Acacian for every Numrek. No more.”
The warrior paused but did not turn back to face her.
“How will you explain that?” She stood in the full sun now. The shade tent flapped behind her with a sudden gust of air. She waited a moment longer, then added more lightly, knowing that Crannag would turn to make sure he heard her correctly, “I will be one of them. I will take to the field myself.”
A few days earlier, on the evening before she was to leave for Teh, Corinn had been occupied with affairs of state all day. She did not join Aliver until after her late meetings. She found him, to her surprise, standing inside the door that would have led him out into the upper courtyard, into the view of the guards and general palace staff.
“What are you doing?”
He blinked rapidly for a moment. “I want to see my quarters. My own rooms, with my things … I should see them. I should stay in them.”
“You will.” Corinn gently turned him and led him away from the door, back into her own chambers. “Don’t rush, though. You have everything you need here. Stay here until I return from my trip.”
“Your trip. Why are you going? What trip is it?”
Having gotten Aliver seated in a side parlor, Corinn lowered herself to the plush chair opposite. She relaxed into it, truly fatigued, knowing that she should rest in preparation for the morrow. A small fire burned in the hearth, and she commented on the warmth of the room and the early chill in the air tonight. Aliver watched the fire, but not with the curiosity he had shown during the first few days. He was changing already. The world did not amaze him as it had before. He was more at ease in his body, quicker with words. In the new clothes Rhrenna had brought for him he looked very much a prince. At times his eyes still glazed over, but just as often he snapped out of it with a shake of his head.
“There are things I don’t understand,” Aliver said.
Corinn bent her head forward as she unwrapped the lace shawl from around her neck. “You have to relearn the world. It can’t happen overnight.”
“I’m already forgetting death.”
“Good, Aliver, good. Life is what matters. Even in death, spirits told you of the living. That’s what you said to me the first night we talked.”
“I thought that, but it doesn’t seem the way it was anymore. When I was dead, I was not a self. I was not a single mind. I was spread thinly across the world. I was part of everything. Like a very fine dust that gets into everything.” Aliver no longer had difficulty controlling his facial expressions. He frowned, and Corinn did not question whether he meant to or not. “When I was like that, the lives of humans did not register as of much import. I cared about the tree of Akaran about as much as a stone on the path in the gardens outside does.”
“But you said you knew things that had happened after your death.”
“I learned those things in the moments you were pulling me together. I did know things. I do, but they didn’t have meaning until I was becoming Aliver again.”
A piper announced the midnight hour then. Both siblings cocked their heads to listen as the tune passed from the palace down toward the lower town, a delicate cascade of sound.
It reminded Corinn of her fatigue. “I wish that we could stay locked away for days upon days. I would tell you everything. Absolutely everything. I’d have you understand me completely, so that you saw the world with my eyes.”
The rapidity with which his gaze snapped back to her caused her to pause. “I prefer my own eyes,” Aliver said.
“I mean only that I will help you, until you can see fully on your own. The world has changed, Aliver, as I’ve been explaining.”
He shook his head. “No, you haven’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“You told me you needed me. That I am here to help you.”
“You are,” Corinn said.
“But you’re not telling the things that matter! You’re going away tomorrow, but you haven’t told me why.”
For a moment Corinn was speechless. She stood up and moved behind her chair, running her hands over the backrest and then gripping it. “Of course I did.”
Aliver’s mouth puckered into a sour expression Corinn remembered from years ago. He said, “No, you didn’t. You brought me back from the dead, but you haven’t even explained how. You haven’t spoken of Mena or Dariel. From your lips—nothing about them.”
“That’s not true.” She must have! They spoke for hours. What else was more important?
“You talk and talk, but you tell me nothing. You haven’t even told me of your son.”
To that she had no response. It was an impossible statement. She thought of Aaden always; she visited him several times each day; she whispered to him all about Aliver’s return; she had come back to Aliver and …
I told him nothing of my son, she thought. Why? It took all her concentration to nod and say, “Aliver, I have a son. His name is Aaden. He is your nephew. He is to be heir. He will be the greatest Akaran monarch yet.” There! That’s what I meant to tell him.
“I would like to meet him.”
“You will. He is not well right now, though. When I return from Teh. Just rest here until then. When I return, you’ll meet Aaden and see the rest of the palace. You’ll see others and talk to them. We’ll send a bird to Mena and we’ll talk about Dariel, too.”
Aliver eyed her. “You are going to confront the Numrek in Teh?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What I must,” she said. “What they brought upon themselves.”
“You can’t kill them all.”
“What do you know of it?” Corinn retorted. “You know so little of what’s happened. Let me explain it to you, but give me time.”
“As you have made such good use of the time we’ve had so far?”
Corinn rubbed the plush arms of her chair. She watched the way the passage of her hand changed the look of the velvet, from light to dark, dark to light. “I don’t like this side of you.”
“Which side is that? The one that thinks?”
“The one that blunders through the world with noble ideals based on nothing. Look at the fact that you died and I did not. That you failed and I did not.”
“If that’s what you believe, you should have left me with the dust. You’ve made a mistake.”
Was that a note of threat? Corinn wondered. It was, wasn’t it? Back among the living so briefly, and already we are at odds. If they fought here, now, what battles lay ahead? He would be a thorn in her side instead of an ally. She knew then that she had made a mistake. A small error. One that could be corrected.
The notes of the song swirled in her mind before she had even called for them. She would have him as that ally, a symbol and miracle to a world that needed symbols and miracles. She would also have his obedience. The song would make it so.
She spoke through the spell playing out in her mind. “When I return, Aliver, we will start to make plans for your coronation. Brother and sister, king and queen. No marriage, but a union unlike anything the world has ever known. Why not? Are we not unlike any that have come before? The old laws don’t apply to us. We will be stronger, and wiser together. Our strengths will bring the empire closer together than ever before. Can you see that?”
Aliver looked away from her, unwilling to answer. The song whispered through Corinn’s lips, quietly binding him. Binding him, so that when he did answer he gave her exactly the affirmation she wished for.
Corinn walked at the head of a contingent of one thousand, three hundred, and seventeen soldiers. With her included, their numbers matched the remaining Numrek adults, men and women both, all those of fighting age and some beyond it but still proud. The Numrek children lined the walls of the Thumb, watching from high above.
The two forces met on the field to the west of the fortress. The land was arid and flat, perfect for battle. The sky a light, cloudless blue. Beneath it, the Numrek gathered. They were tall, seven feet the norm among the men, the women shorter perhaps but just as stoutly built. Their hair hung as it always had, thick and black, oily. Most wore light armor, but many went bare armed; and some left their chests exposed. They were warriors. Their curved swords and battle-axes and the jagged slivers of knives at their belts attested to it.
Corinn heard her officers conferring. She turned and drew General Andeson’s eyes. “It remains as I told you last night,” she said. “No weapons are to be drawn. Understood? I will do this myself.”
She turned back to face the enemy. There was a sudden buzz of arguing behind her. She knew what they were saying. They thought her some fool version of Aliver, trying to re-create his mistake in fighting Maeander Mein on a field much like this one. If they had their way, she would be shunted to the rear of the army and encased within a wall of Marah, long-legged soldiers who would stand ready to lift her and sprint at the least sign of danger. That’s what they had said last night, at least—that her safety was paramount.
In truth they feared fighting the Numrek without a much superior force. Why offer the terms she had? They argued it was madness. They might have balked at her order, but they feared shame even more—just like the Numrek. They feared her, though they likely half wished she would perish. Die and yet somehow leave them alive afterward to fight among themselves for power. All this was true. No matter. Let them watch and learn yet more of who she truly was. What had she told Aliver she was going to do? She had said …
For a moment she could not remember. And then it came to her. She had said,
Destroy them. I’ll destroy them
.
With that thought behind her, she opened her mind to the song. At first she kept it within the curve of her skull, letting it build, searching for the rhythms within the dissonance. And what a cacophony it was! Had she not known better, she would have thought the noises in her head were the tumultuous ravings of a world exploding. Raw emotion and anger and beauty and longing and hunger screamed in a thousand ways at once, with the timbre of myriad voices and notes played on all manner of instruments at war with one another.
She could also hear order within the confusion. She could pinch with her mind’s fingers the song fragments she wished, each of them a living, moving line of codes and runes and words all held in fluid motion along ribbons slithering through the tumult. She could hold much more of it now than when she had first begun her study. She found meaning more easily than even a few weeks ago, before Aaden nearly died and before she worked her spells upon Barad’s eyes and Elya’s children and before gathering back the spirit that had been Aliver. Yes, she had much more mastery now.
She walked forward. She parted her lips and let the first notes of the song escape her mouth, barely louder than exhaled breaths. The Numrek, accepting her commencement of the battle, strode to meet her. As the distance between them closed, the song grew stronger and began to shift the substance of the air, creating currents around her that seethed and squirmed. She felt the heart of the spell gather in her chest, a stone of greater and greater density. Her mind seethed with hatred. That was what she would give them. She would hurl at them a roiling animus that could take no single shape but instead erupted in ever-changing forms. What she saw happen on the field before her reflected this. Had she not owned it so completely she would have been just as shocked by the horror of it as the soldiers behind her were.
Suddenly the stone inside her surged up out of her chest, scorched through her throat, and rushed from her mouth in a great torrent. The Numrek paused in their tracks. Some backstepped. Many fell as if shoved savagely. Corinn centered her gaze on Crannag. She knew as it happened that his face was going to blister with a heat from within, that his hair was going to burst into flame, and that a moment after his skull would burst.
The man beside him tried to flee, but his legs and arms moved stiffly. They folded and snapped. In seconds he was on the ground, writhing but incapable of action, his bones fracturing with each effort. Another Numrek stepped over him, coming forward, and Corinn knew the moment his skin would erupt with maggots that consumed his living flesh. His armor and weapons and even the sudden wig that was his hair fell to the earth along with the squirming mass that had been his body.
And so it was throughout the entire Numrek force. No two among them died the same way, but each one did die. A woman became a sack of flesh with nothing solid inside. A man thrust his hand into his breast and pulled out his own heart. Some panted and contorted with unknowable tortures. Some blistered with poxlike scars or went yellow or gangrenous. Things grew inside a few, protrusions and antlers that burst their skin as they screamed. Some danced as if they were being hacked by unseen weapons. One youth ran raging, his mouth red with blood. An old soldier lowered himself to the ground and—a single still point among the chaos—folded into himself, and turned to ash.
Through it all Corinn let her body be the song’s instrument. It gave her what she wished and went further, making it more terrible than she could have imagined. At some point the stream of sound slowed, slackened. And then ceased altogether.
The silence was gorgeous, even if it was not a complete silence. She heard her soldiers retching. At least one of the officers behind her spilled his breakfast in a splatter on the ground. A few mumbled prayers or expressed disbelief. And yet in the wake of the song such sounds were dwarfed by the magic that had come before. Homage, really, to the language of creation. And destruction. The reverence did not just come from the Numrek dead. Not just from her trembling soldiers. This silence was sung to her by the entire world. All creation had been awed speechless.