Allesandra ca’Vörl
SHE REMEMBERED PASSE a’Fiume all too well. It was
there, twenty-five years earlier as her vatarh had besieged the
town, that she first learned the hardest lesson of war: that
sometimes the ones you love don’t survive. She’d had a crush then
on a young offizier who’d been killed in the battle. She had
thought at the time that she would never be able to love anyone
again, her heart was so shattered by the experience, but time had
softened the pain. Now, she couldn’t recall the young man’s
face.
The repairs from that
decades-old battle were still visible on the city walls, and they
brought back the memories and the pain.
This time, there was
no siege. The Firenzcian army had passed through the border town
Ville Colhelm without any challenge at all: the Holdings force
stationed there had simply abandoned their post and fled from the
far greater Firenzcian host. At Allesandra’s behest, Jan had sent
riders—including Sergei ca’Rudka—well ahead of the main force to
negotiate with the Comté of Passe a’Fiume. With the garrison of the
Garde Civile largely depleted due to the Westlander invasion, the
comté chose discretion over valor (and a substantial bribe in gold
over his vows of office): in exchange for the vow that the town
would not be sacked, he would permit the army to cross the River
Clario through the city gates to the Avi a’Firenzcia.
Allesandra rode
alongside Jan as they crossed the great stone bridge over the
waters of the Clario, more rapid and dangerous than the wider and
deeper A’Sele, with which the Clario would join before the A’Sele
reached Nessantico. The bridge itself seemed to shudder under the
thudding of booted soldiers and horses’ hooves, the vanguard of the
army already through the gates and the remainder trailing down the
road as far as one could see in the hill-pocked terrain. Jan gazed
around them raptly as they passed through the tall arches set with
the shields of the Kralji, and into the city itself. Crowds lined
the sides of the main avenue through the town, mostly silent, and
the chevarittai of the Garde Hïrzg stiffened in their saddles as
they scanned the throngs for danger.
“You were here with
great-vatarh?” Jan asked again, leaning over toward her, and
Allesandra nodded.
“I was just a child,
and your great-vatarh was in his prime,” she said. “He took Passe
a’Fiume in just three days of siege after the peace negotiations
failed, but Kraljiki Justi—who still had two legs then—had already
made a cowardly escape back to Nessantico. Your great-vatarh was
furious. Sergei ca’Rudka was the commandant for the Nessantican
forces; he was . . . brilliant, even though badly outnumbered. Your
great-vatarh would have admitted that, however
grudgingly.”
Jan glanced back over
his shoulder to where ca’Rudka rode alongside the Archigos. The
Regent’s metal nose gleamed in the sun. Like the Garde Hïrzg,
ca’Rudka seemed edgy and nervous, his lips pressed tightly together
and his eyes scanning the crowd to either side. “I like the man,
but I don’t know that I entirely trust him, Matarh,” Jan said,
returning his attention to her.
She smiled at that.
“You shouldn’t,” she told him. “His allegiance is to Nessantico,
first and foremost. And he is a strange man with strange tastes, if
one believes the rumors. That hasn’t changed. He’ll work with us as
long as he feels that our interests converge. As soon as they don’t
. . .” She shrugged. “Then he will just as happily be our enemy.
Your instincts are right, Jan.”
“He seems to admire
you.”
“I knew him when I
was Archigos Ana’s hostage. He was kind enough to me then. But
right now, he’s more interested in the fact that I’m Kraljica
Marguerite’s second cousin and the fact that this relationship
gives me as much a claim to the Sun Throne as Sigourney
ca’Ludivici. And, for now, we need Sergei and the alliances he may
be able to bring us.”
Jan nodded. He
pressed his lips together as if considering all this as they rode
on into the central square of the city. She wondered what he was
thinking.
Here, the Temple
a’Passe dominated the architectural landscape. Like many of the
structures in the city, it had been heavily damaged in the siege
two and a half decades before. Afterward, the town council had made
the decision to redesign the main square and the temple complex.
Much of the original structure had been demolished. The thin,
skeletal lines of scaffolding caged the as-yet unfinished main
tower and dome of the revamped temple.
The crowds of
townspeople were most dense here as the slow line of the army
marched through their city. By now, Allesandra knew, the vanguard
would already have passed through the western gate and beyond the
city walls. By now, she also knew, messengers would be urging their
horses to a gallop ahead of the force bringing news to the
Kraljica, to the Archigos, and to Nessantico that the Firenzcians
were on the march—for all she knew, that word may have already come
to Nessantico, as the army first crossed the borders. Soon, now,
their advance would be challenged; Kraljica Sigourney couldn’t
afford to look westward for long.
An army—especially
the Firenzcian army; polished, efficient, and renowned—was a large
bargaining chip on any table of negotiation, and Sigourney and the
Council of Ca’ would be all too well aware of that. Allesandra
smiled at that thought.
The crowd pressed
close to them, and the foot soldiers to either side of Allesandra
and Jan pushed them back with the shafts of pikes and spears. She
could see grim, unhappy faces behind the fence of weapons, and from
the depths of the crowd came occasional shouted curses and threats,
but when they looked that way, there was no one they could pick out
of the masses. The populace remembered the Firenzcian siege, too:
many of them had lost family members in the siege, and the sight of
the silver-and-black banners was a mockery waving in their
faces.
They passed into the
shadow of the temple now, the line of the army using the bulwark of
the main tower to shield them from the crowds. The wind-horns on
the temple began to sound Second Call as Allesandra and Jan came
abreast of the tower. Allesandra’s head craned upward toward the
noise, squinting into the glare of the sun. Something—a figure, a
form—seemed to move above, amongst the corset of scaffolding. She
couldn’t see it clearly.
Allesandra was
suddenly struck from behind, as her ears alerted her to the sound
of hooves against cobbles. A heavy weight bore her down hard to the
pavement, though the arms that had gone about her turned her so
that the body underneath took the brunt of the impact. She heard a
loud kr-unk almost in concert with the
impact. A horse screamed—a horrible, awful sound—and people
shouted. “The Hïrzg!” “Move! Move!” “Back! Get back!” “Above! There
he is!” She could hear offiziers shouting orders and more screams.
There seemed to be a mob huddled around her. She fought against the
arms around her, against the folds of her assaulter’s cloak and her
own riding tashta and cloak. There were hands pulling at her,
helping her up.
There was another
scream, a human one this time, and another impact somewhere close
by.
She blinked, trying
to make sense of the scene.
Sergei ca’Rudka was
standing near her, his cloak torn, grimacing as he kneaded his arm.
The silver of his nose was scuffed and the nose itself was
partially pulled back from his face, giving her a glimpse of an
uncomfortable hole underneath. Jan was being helped to his feet, a
stride in back of Sergei. Allesandra’s horse was on its side before
her, a massive statue of a Moitidi demon in pieces on the ground
around it. The animal was thrashing its legs, its eyes wide, and
the sounds it was making . . . Sergei moved to the horse quickly,
kneeling in the wreckage of the stone carving and stroking the
horse’s neck as he made soothing noises. She saw him take his knife
from its scabbard. “No!” she began, but he’d already made the cut,
deep and swift. The horse bucked once, again, and went
still.
Allesandra shook her
head, trying to clear it. Half the crowd in the plaza seemed to
have fled in terror; the Firenzcian soldiers had formed a thick
bulwark around them. Sergei moved away from the horse, striding
toward a body sprawled in a pool of blood not far from the base of
the tower. Soldiers moved to intercept him; he shrugged them away
angrily. Allesandra started to move and realized that her body was
sore and bruised, and she was bleeding from a cut on the head. She
felt Jan come up behind her.
“Matarh?” He was
staring at the horse Sergei had killed. She hugged her son,
desperately, then held him an arm’s length away, examining him—his
clothes were torn, as well, and there was a scrape along one cheek
that was oozing blood, but otherwise he seemed unharmed. “What
happened?” she asked him. “Did you see?”
“The Regent saved
us,” he said. “He took both of us from our horses just in time.” He
glanced up at the scaffolding, then back to the body on the ground.
Sergei was enclosed in a clot of soldiers, crouched alongside the
corpse. “The man . . . he was up there—he would have killed you.
Maybe both of us. But Sergei . . .”
Archigos Semini came
rushing up then, his green robes swirling. “Allesan—” he began,
then shook his head, making the sign of Cénzi hurriedly. “A’Hïrzg!
Hïrzg Jan! Thank Cénzi you’re both safe! I thought—”
But Allesandra was no
longer listening to him. She pushed through the crowd to where
Sergei was examining the body. “Regent?” she said, and Sergei
glanced up at her. He was scowling.
“A’Hïrzg. I
apologize, but there was no time to give you warning. Are you badly
hurt?”
She shook her head.
He nodded and stood up, groaning as he did so as if the movement
pained him. “I’m too damned old for this,” he muttered. He kicked
the corpse in front of him, the boot making a soft, ugly sound as
the broken torso jiggled in response. Allesandra saw a fair face
underneath the blood, a young face, perhaps Jan’s age; what she saw
of his clothing was suspiciously fine. The body was adorned with
the broken shafts of several arrows. “Don’t know who he is,” Sergei
said, “but we’ll find out. Ca’-and-cu’, though, from the way he’s
dressed and the way he looks. I saw him up on the scaffolding just
before he tossed down the carving. That’s when I moved; looks like
your archers took care of the rest.” He seemed to notice his
dangling nose then, and pushed it gingerly back in place, holding
it with two fingers. “My pardon, A’Hirzg—the glue . .
.”
“No matter,” she told
him, waving her hand. “Regent, I owe you my life.”
She thought he would
respond as most would have, with a lowering of his head and
deprecation, a protest of duty and loyalty and obligation. He did
not. Instead, he smiled, still holding his silver nose in
place.
“Indeed you do,
A’Hirzg,” he said.