Ash and Deserters

The first town she came to was called Cinder Crossing, which was not a metaphor but a geographic description: the road crossed a dry riverbed that ran black from decades of runoff from the Cinder Hills mines. She arrived in clothes that had been court-appropriate eleven days ago and were now the clothes of someone who had slept in four different kinds of weather and bartered her ring for a pair of used boots in a market town that hadn't asked questions.

She had traded the ring and her name in the same transaction. She was Sera now. Just Sera. A woman heading east for family reasons, which was the explanation that invited the fewest follow-up questions.

Cinder Crossing had four hundred people and a permanent smell of sulfur and the specific resentment of a town that had been promised infrastructure for twenty years and had learned to build around the absence of it. The tavern had no sign — it was simply the largest building that sold ale, which was how she found it. She sat at the bar and drank watered ale and listened.

The Aldric news had arrived ahead of her.

"—Queen's dead," said a man to her left. He was maybe forty, with the calloused hands of mine work and the deliberate tone of someone who'd formed an opinion and was distributing it. "Jumped from the palace window rather than be taken. That's what they're saying in the capital."

"They're saying she was thrown," said the woman behind the bar. "There's a difference."

"Either way she's gone. The brother's king now. King Aldric the First."

Del the barkeep—the woman behind the bar, who'd introduced herself as Del to everyone who asked and to no one who didn't—had the quality of someone who had survived by keeping her assessments private until they were useful. She looked at Sera when she said there's a difference with the particular look of a person who was watching to see if the distinction landed.

Sera drank her ale.

"He's sending the grain provisions through apparently," said the man. "The ones the Queen had been sitting on."

Sera kept her face still with some effort. She had not been sitting on grain provisions. She had been rerouting the distribution channels because the guild middlemen had been taking thirty percent off the top, which was why the provisions had arrived late to the outlying provinces — they had been moving slowly through a system that profited from their slowness. She had been six months into fixing the distribution when Aldric had moved.

Aldric was now presenting her six months of logistical work as his own generosity.

She thought, coldly, about that.

"I heard there's deserters up in the hills," said another man, from the far end of the bar. He said it quietly, the way people say things they're not sure they're allowed to say. "From the northern garrison. Three, four dozen came through last week. Harwick's men."

Del the barkeep said nothing. She wiped the bar.

"What happened to Harwick?" Sera asked. She kept her voice at the level of someone asking about weather.

"Arrested," said the first man. "Aldric's taking no chances. Harwick's loyal to the crown, everyone knows it. New king moved fast."

Harwick. Loyal, strategic, forty years in service. Arrested. She added this to the account she was building: every asset she'd cultivated over six years, methodically removed.

She finished her ale and paid and found a room above a cooperage and lay on her back on the narrow bed and thought.

The deserters in the hills. Harwick's men, which meant trained soldiers, men who'd followed a loyal general and now found themselves without a command, without orders, without the protection of a legitimate chain of authority. Deserters had two options: disappear completely or find a new purpose. The ones who hadn't disappeared were, by definition, the ones who hadn't given up.

She was going to find them.

It took three days. She hiked into the Cinder Hills on the pretense of looking for a mining claim she'd heard was hiring, which was a plausible lie in this territory, and she followed the signs she knew how to read: cold campsites, game trails that had been traveled by boots rather than animals, the specific silence of a hillside that had people in it.

She found them on the fourth day, in a hollow that had been selected by someone who understood tactical positioning: concealed from below, visible from above, two exits, the kind of location a military mind would choose.

There were thirty-one of them. Mostly men, three women, ages ranging from a teenager who'd probably lied about his age to get into the garrison to a grizzled sergeant named Breck who looked at Sera from under heavy brows with the expression of a man who had seen enough nonsense to have developed a sensitivity to it.

She told them who she was on the second day.

The first day she watched. She ate their food and did her share of the work — she could haul water and cut wood and she did both without comment, which established something in their assessment of her before she opened her mouth. By the second day she had a tentative reading on each of them: who was angry, who was frightened, who was pragmatic, who was the one the others watched when they weren't sure what to think.

The one they watched was Breck.

She told Breck first.

She found him alone at dawn, cleaning his blade by a small fire that he kept carefully small because a careful man kept fires small in occupied territory. She sat down across from him and she said: "I'm the queen. I'm alive. And I need you to help me decide whether the thirty people at your back are worth anything."

He looked at her.

He looked at the scar on her throat.

He said: "I heard you jumped."

"I fell," she said. "I caught the second-floor ledge and fell the last twelve feet. My shoulder still hurts when it rains." She paused. "How long have you been in the hills?"

"Eight days."

"You have enough food for another five."

His eyes sharpened. He hadn't shown his food inventory to a stranger.

"I walked your camp," she said. "I know what you're rationing and how. You're going to need resupply or a decision within the week." She looked at him steadily. "I'm the decision."

Breck cleaned his blade. He took his time. She waited, because waiting was a form of pressure that she applied more precisely than most people understood — the silence that said I'm not afraid of your consideration.

"You're going to take back the throne," he said finally. Not a question.

"Yes."

"With thirty-one deserters and a court ring you already sold."

"I sold it for boots." She looked at her boots, which were excellent boots, which had been worth every bit of that ring. "I'm going to build something worth following. But I need soldiers who can survive long enough to be the core of it. I need a sergeant who can train people who aren't soldiers yet into something that functions." She met his eyes. "I'm not asking you to believe in my cause. I'm asking if you can see the architecture of a workable plan."

He was quiet for a long time.

"The ash provinces," he said. "You were the one who fixed the distribution."

"Started to fix it."

"People here remember."

"Yes."

"If you can get the mining towns to shelter you — enough towns, enough supply lines — you could build something the capital would have to take seriously before spring."

"That's the plan."

He looked at the blade in his hands. He made a decision she could see forming on his face — not enthusiasm, not devotion, but the assessment of a practical man who had looked at the available options and selected the one that had the most structural integrity.

"I'll tell them," he said. "They'll want to see you."

"I know." She stood up. "Tell them I'm not promising a righteous crusade. Tell them I'm promising a plan that might work, and that I'm going to be honest about what it costs."

He looked up at her.

"That's not how queens usually talk," he said.

"No," she said. "It's how I talk." She turned toward the camp. "Come find me when you're ready."

She walked back and sat by the main fire and felt thirty pairs of eyes adjust to the new information.

The queen was alive. The queen was in the hills.

The queen was going to need a bigger fire.