15,600, Age of Magic, Late Spring
"Honor is what those who cannot face their error Make up to live with the face they see in the mirror."
-From Towers To Touch the Stars, the first book of the Glory Cycle.
"You're our hostage?"
Kerenje Darklinden dropped his eyes. "I understand that I am not what you were expecting," he murmured. "But I am what the Queen decided to send."
He could feel the soldier who had come to collect the hostage fuming. Kerenje kept his eyes on the ground, though of course his peripheral vision caught the vivid bloom of dustflowers and burnbush. He could understand the soldier's confusion all too well. He didn't look like a hostage. He wasn't broken, or shivering, or terrified. He didn't look like someone who would serve as a guarantee of his own side's good behavior.
That was because he wasn't.
But the soldier couldn't be expected to know that.
"All right," said the soldier at last. "Come with me. Lady Ilena will be expecting you, anyway. Not my fault if you're not what she expected."
Kerenje followed silently, his eyes continuing to watch the flowers on either side of them although most of the time he looked straight at the soldier's back. The rebels had a secret hideout here, and the people who had hired him, including Queen Darenia, couldn't find out how they were hiding. It was Kerenje's responsibility to find that out.
It wasn't something every astrimon would do. But Kerenje had offered, and Queen Darenia had gratefully accepted, even though it made the price of hiring Kerenje go up.
The soldier ahead of him made a slight move with one hand towards a particular burnbush. The red flowers rippled and pivoted as if with natural wind. Kerenje recognized the magic that began to uncoil around the bush, but was impressed all the same. He hadn't thought the rebels would have such sophisticated magic, and hearing the reports of Queen Darenia's scouts, it wouldn't have occurred to him to look for something like this.
But then, since the Queen ruled wolf Elwens for the most part, they lived by their noses. They wouldn't have seen something like this. They would be repelled by the intense smell of the burnbush's flowers.
The world rippled too, and then the trail ahead of them altered. It would have appeared a sudden transition, as if they had passed through a gate to another world, to another Elwen. But Kerenje knew magic, and he especially knew the wild magic. He knew that the rebels weren't really hiding in another world, any more than the ancient falcon Elwens had really lived in another world. This was a piece of Arcadia, but twisted at right angles to time in the rest of Arcadia, and at a two-hundred-seventy-degree angle to the rest of Arcadia's space. The glittering trails of wild magic racing everywhere told Kerenje that. Wherever he glanced, he saw angles in the precise numbers.
"You don't seem startled," said the soldier.
Kerenje returned his gaze to the man's face. Perhaps it would have helped to pretend startlement, he thought, but he rarely worked with outright deception unless he really needed it. It was simpler to tell the truth. "I am Changed," he said. "I could sense it."
The man frowned at him. "Changed? You don't look it."
Kerenje shrugged a little. The soldier himself resembled an Elwen, such as Kerenje looked, for the most part, but he had large wolf's ears, a third eye in the middle of his forehead, and a long bullwhip tail. By the standards of the Change, he had gotten off lightly. But there would always be some who considered him Cursed, and for that reason he was prepared to resent someone like Kerenje, who had no more than four limbs, two of them legs and two of them arms, and the normal number of features, and even pale, unmarked skin and relatively handsome hair and eyes, the former clear blue and the latter calm gray.
"I am many things that I don't look."
The man snorted, seeming to recover his confidence. "Such as a hostage?"
"Such as that," said Kerenje, and gestured for the man to lead him on.
The soldier gave him a glare, and did just that.
Kerenje glanced around as they passed through the streets of an orderly village. Children played, and parents watched them, and here and there the flicker of magic showed just how well the rebels had adapted to the Change. It was something that Queen Darenia's people were still struggling with. Kerenje shook his head. He might even have fought for the rebels, if they had approached him. But they hadn't.
Still, given how well they lived with the magic of the Change, it was almost a shame that all of them had to die.
*****
"Here he is, my Lady."
Kerenje bowed and looked up into Lady Ilena's face. She sat on a throne raised up above the rest of her people, hands gripping the smooth white arms; the throne was carved of a single block of marble. She looked almost the same, with hair and flesh bleached of color. Only her dark eyes glittered and made her look alive. She probably had snow Elwen blood in her somewhere, as the magic of the Change wasn't strong about her.
"You are the hostage?" she asked, in a voice that said she didn't personally believe it.
Kerenje nodded.
Ilena snorted and stood. "And why would that foul bitch Darenia send us anything but a traitor?" she asked, loud enough that all her people could hear her. "Do you know our grievances?"
"The Queen explained them to me," said Kerenje in a low voice.
Ilena shook her head. "So you have only heard them from her side, and doubtless they are prejudiced."
"Perhaps, my lady."
His quietness only seemed to infuriate her more. She paced back and forth along the dais, and then said, "Did she tell you that she hadn't made us a fair offer for the land?"
"No, my lady."
Encouraged, Ilena continued. "She didn't. She told us that we would be compensated, but she didn't pay us nearly enough. We have lived in this land for thousands of years, and she couldn't be bothered to pay us a fair price!" She turned, glaring. "And she is only a Queen, and she has courtiers around her who don't represent the people! Is that fair?"
Her people roared back a negative. Kerenje only looked at her, but the Lady was on what was obviously her favorite topic and didn't seem inclined to stop.
"Those who hold power must listen to the people, or they are not true rulers," she said, still pacing. "They don't know what to do with the power once they have it, save buy luxuries for themselves and spoil their favorites. They don't understand the suffering that takes place among those starving for simple meat, or among those who don't know enough about the world to survive beyond their villages. Queen Darenia could have done so much good, but she didn't even care to try. She is weak, and incompetent, and the people who follow her should be strong and care about the needs of the people."
"You are thinking of yourself, of course," said Kerenje.
The cheering crowd didn't seem to hear him, or care, but Ilena gave him a sharp glance.
"Of course," she said. "I care about the needs of the people. I can hear their voices." She looked at the crowd as if it would prove her point.
"So what?"
"I would be a better ruler."
Kerenje shrugged. "You are relying on unproven assumptions," he said, and in spite of herself Ilena leaned forward to hear him. "You think that hearing the voices of the people is a good thing, but you have not explained to me why that is."
"All true power comes from the people."
"What about the magic within you?" asked Kerenje. "The magic that built this place? Or the strength of being trustworthy and keeping your word? Those things do not rely on other people, and I think you would be a fool to suggest that they do."
"Political power does."
"Only if you decide it should," said Kerenje. "If you have a true choice about the way you rule, then you can choose a way, as Darenia has done, that does not rely on listening to everyone else and wringing your hands when you can't please them all."
Ilena looked away from him. "I didn't come here to discuss politics with a hostage," she said loudly. "We are here to discuss the best way to keep the bitch Queen from destroying our people. Yatrin, take the hostage and put him in a cell until we have need of him."
Kerenje shrugged and acceded to being dragged away, since Yatrin seemed to want to do it so badly. This was the last night the rebels had to live. It seemed best to allow them their little whims.
*****
The cells were dark, carved out of stone. Kerenje watched Yatrin lock the door of his cell, sneer at him, and spit on the floor, then walk away.
"Are you from Queen Darenia, too?"
Kerenje turned his head, his interest quickened. The Queen had assumed that all of her scouts and hostages sent before this had vanished permanently, dying at the hands of the rebels. But now a dirty man in the cell beside him placed his face against the bars that separated them and nodded encouragingly, as if to say that Kerenje could trust him with any confidences he might have.
"I am," said Kerenje. "A hostage."
"You don't look like a hostage."
"Neither do you."
The man grinned. "I was a scout." He paused. "And they've kept me here for a long time, long enough to talk to me, and I think I'm starting to understand."
"Understand what?" asked Kerenje, but he thought he knew the answer, and his interest was already waning. Really, if they couldn't come up with anything more original than this, he wouldn't regret killing them.
"Their cause." <
Kerenje sighed and rolled over.
"Have you ever looked at the faces of the people who walk the countryside?" asked the scout, and didn't seem inclined to notice that Kerenje was silent. "The ones who live closest to the land? They are honest, and fair, and just, and free. They don't deserve to be ruled by a Queen like Darenia. They deserve someone like Ilena, who is as honest and fair and just and free as they are."
Kerenje closed his eyes and let his mind fall away from the endless spiel, into the part of him that made him such a good astrimon.
It only took a moment. The fire that beat at the heart of his will came to life, and he expanded it throughout his body. For a moment, he smoldered, and then he burst into flame. He felt the brief shock of death, and then his spirit hovered above what had been the body, watching as the flames expanded.
The man who had talked to him vanished in seconds, vaporized by the sheer heat, and then the flames spread outside the cells and around the village, burning the wooden houses and vaporizing children and women and men. Ilena was taken in the middle of a speech, and she burned to death. Screams rose in a few places, but for the most part they died too swiftly to matter.
Kerenje hovered above the destruction, sighing as he watched their dreams die. It was the same in so many parts of Arcadia. They rebelled, and talked about ideals they thought could make a difference. Some of them claimed honor, for example, and some of them claimed courage, and still others talked about freedom and justice; that seemed to be the favorite plea of the rebel groups. But it made no difference, in the end. They were the same, all of them, with a remarkable sameness that cut across the lines of normal and Changed, Elwen and non-Elwen, animal and non-animal. They would lose and smolder until they burst into flame again, or they would win and then become the very tyrants they had supposedly fought against.
It was a cycle that went on, and on, and Kerenje stood outside it all and watched, shaking his head. For all he knew, Queen Darenia could fall tomorrow, and then he would watch as her successor did just the same things in a few years, and another rebellion formed.
All so useless.
That was why he preferred the wild magic. At least it was creative and new. When it tired of something old, it destroyed the old and created the new, instead of recreating again and again, the same old way. The gods and stars of the Old World before the Change had been so limited and inadequate. Kerenje wondered if they had even satisfied themselves.
He saw that the last of the rebels had died and called the fire back to himself, collapsing and condensing it, and then formed a new body out of his will. He shook his head and ran his hands through his blue hair, then walked over the scorched earth, past the dais where Ilena had stood, and to the burnbush the guard had brought him through. He made the little gesture, and stepped back into normal Arcadia.
Time to tell Darenia that the job was done, and collect his payment of captive bubbles holding magewinds. He loved to watch the colors.
Kerenje sprang upwards, wings unfolding from his shoulders because he felt like it, and flew over the meadows and hills towards Darenia's palace, watching the world from above and enjoying the gleaming, devious patterns of magic.
