* * *
Gwendolyn Torrance
Waldegrave, also known as Lady Aiden, mother of the Queen of Delain, wife
of the Earl of Riverwood, who was believed to be the secret true love
of Prince Peter of Delain, and was
the former wife of the notorious Harold Ethelbald, entered her room
and closed the door.
She crossed calmly
to the mirror and regarded her reflection. Her fair skin was smeared with
soot,
and her hair was in complete disarray though she had spent an hour
arranging it before the feast. Her
lovely gown of scarlet silk was charred, the hem burnt away to expose
her fancy stockings and gold
dancing slippers.
She smelled of smoke.
She had smelled smoke on the day that her family died at the hands of
horrible dogsbody demons. Ever since, she had associated that scent
with anger, loss, and despair. She
had smelled smoke the time she had set fire to the lawn at Greenvale
and boiled exotic fish in their
fountain pool. She had smelled smoke when they had rescued Peter from
the Needle and she'd caused
half of Delain City to go up in flames. The time she remembered most
vividly was the night from hell
when she'd been caught in the midst of a battle between the Overlord's
forces and Alan IV's avenging
army. She'd thought death would come for her that night, for her, Toby,
and for baby Belynda, whose
future as Delain's Queen was as yet unforseen by everyone except possibly
Rannian.
Thinking of the placid,
dark-eyed Seer made her mad all over again. Why hadn't Rannian warned
her that assassins would be coming after Belynda? She had spent the
last twelve years in a state of
paranoid fear that someone would try and take her precious little girl
away from her. She had spent
thousands in Pandathaway's magic shops purchasing items to protect
her daughter.
She forced herself
to take a few deep breaths. She could not be mad at Rannian. If Belden
were to be
believed, the Seer was Lunari himself. She had spent half of her life
hating the gods to no avail. Rannian
must have known about the assassin, and seen that she would handle
it herself without any harm coming
to Belynda.
She brushed out her
long black hair and braided it into a single plait. There was little thought
to her
actions as she slipped out of her gown and into a worn outfit of dark-colored
leathers. Her drake, red
Phoenix, watched her anxiously and chirped once or twice, but she ignored
even that. Her thoughts were
on Fourcity.
She'd spent a large
part of her young life in the city in the center of the Four Duchies. Her
parents
had held lands away to the west, near the borders of the Duchy of Rhaff,
but following their hideous
deaths, she had been forced to live with the inhuman creatures that
claimed to be her uncle and cousins.
She'd been a virtual slave,
bound by terror, unable to escape until one day when the torment had become
too much to bear. Fourcity had been a prison, a place where she had
spent cold winters locked in a
windswept attic, huddled in misery and constant fear. Like the smell
of smoke, it was something she
linked with the bad feelings. She rarely went back, and every time
she did, the urge to destroy grew
stronger.
The time had come
to stop denying those urges. Fourcity had gone too far. In her mind, the
assassin
was just a single part of a huge, horrible monster. The actions of
that one man could be laid at every
door in the city. Every single person was to blame.
Aron knew what she
was planning. He knew her too well, even better than she knew herself.
She
was glad that he knew her well enough to stay out of her way, because
she did not want to argue with the
man she loved. She did love Aron, though for a long time she had despaired
of ever loving again. He
made her feel safe, precious, treasured. It was entirely unlike the
thrilling, tingling feelings she'd had for
Harry, or the sweepingly romantic emotions she'd felt for Peter. Harry
had turned out to be an uncaring,
unloveable cad. Only Rebecca, the gods alone knew why, could see anything
in him to love despite his
callous treatment of her. And Peter, dear Peter, had literally been
the handsome prince of her dreams.
Fate and circumstance had kept them from seeking any sort of lasting
passion.
She would never forget
the things his brother Thomas had said on the day that Belynda became
Queen. Could it be true that Peter had been in love with her all that
time? That he had never married in
hopes that she would someday come to him? She remembered the way his
dark blue eyes had lit up when
she appeared in his throne room the day he'd been reviewing ladies
under pressure from his advisors to
choose a bride, the genuinely warm and delighted smile with which he'd
greeted her, and the quickly-
hidden look of disappointment that had come over him when she'd explained
that she wasn't there for
that purpose.
She thought about
him sometimes as she walked the halls of the palace, the same halls where
he had
played as a boy, before the awful incident that resulted in his false
imprisonment. What did he think, she
wondered, if he looked down from the Realm Beyond to see what had happened
in Delain? Did he
approve of Belynda, who could have been his own true daughter? Did
he remember what had really
happened that night in the Needle, or was his memory, like hers, clouded
by wine and confusion? She
wished she could remember, wished she could tell Belynda who her true
father was. She supposed she
could consult the Seers, but fear held her back. Fear that Belynda
might actually be Harry's daughter.
There were three men that Belynda could call Father, but Harry was
the only living one who had any sort
of likely claim. Aron, who loved Belynda best of all, had the least
claim.
Her sword was hanging
way in the back of the closet. She got it out, ignoring Phoenix's worried
protests, and held it up. Deciding that she would not need the blade
for the night's work, she tossed it on
the bed. She stamped her feet into her old adventuring boots, which
she hadn't worn in years, and threw
her cloak over her shoulders. Glancing again in the mirror, she gasped.
It was like looking back through
time. She touched her face, almost expecting to feel the ugly scrawled
scar that one of her cousins had
left as a reminder of his cruelty. The skin remained smooth and unblemished.
Otherwise, it was like
seeing herself as she'd been all those years ago. She could almost
expect to go to Funess and see Toby as
a child, instead of the good-looking young man he'd grown into. She
could go to the Grey Pony and see
Sara, still years before the terrible events that would lead her to
murder Peter and die herself on Delain's
chopping block. She could visit Coppers' shop and find just a crazy
old man, instead of a crazy old man
who now had a peculiar Damonite wife and a son named after a jackalope.
Yes, the years
had brought a lot of changes, and while some of them were bad, many
had been good. The girl she'd
been back then had been ugly, ashamed of her scar, distrustful. She
was still distrustful, particularly of
Fourcity and anything that Harry had to say, but she was no longer
ugly or ashamed. Even the possibility
of her infidelity did not trouble her, because the people of Delain
blessed her for it. They loved their
Queen, and under Belynda's rule, Delain prospered as it never had.
Thinking of her daughter
reminded her of her purpose. Fourcity had tried to hurt her baby, and
Fourcity was going to pay. She pulled up her hood and went into the
nursery that adjoined her chambers.
The guards, on edge, reacted in alarm to the sight of a hooded figure
entering the room and nearly shot
her down before one of them recognized her. She hastily pushed back
her hood and apologized, keenly
aware of how close she had come to being killed by the very people
whose presence she'd demanded.
The guards returned
to their posts, and she approached the oversized crib. Her twin sons, Alan
and
Peter, were snuggled beneath a fluffy blanket. Her familiar, a fox
named Sasha, was lying awake and
watchful at the end of the crib.
Peter's hair was dark,
like her own, and Alan's head was covered by a reddish fuzz. Even in sleep,
he bore a strong resemblance to his father. The palace staff had given
them the nicknames of Smoke and
Fire. The twins were inseperable, and the joke, "wherever there's Smoke,
there's Fire", had already
grown old.
She touched their
tiny faces. Following Belynda's difficult birth, she'd been terrified of
having
another child. But Aron had wanted a child of his own so badly, and
it was the only thing he had ever
asked of her. Thankfully, the twins had come quickly and easily, though
their timing was awkward. They
had been born right in the middle of the dramatic revelation of Belynda's
heritage, sharing their birthday
with her coronation day.
Leaning over, she
kissed them each on the forehead. Peter wrinkled his nose, perhaps smelling
the
smoke that still clung to her, and rubbed his eyes.
"I love you, babies,"
she whispered. Beckoning to Phoenix, she tucked the drake under the blanket.
"Take care of them."
"Don't worry," Sasha
said, causing the guards to look around uneasily. The people of Delain
had
laregly gotten used to her menagerie, which consisted not only of Sasha
and Phoenix but a young
hippogryph, a tame bear, and half a dozen other creatures. The fact
that Sasha could talk was still the
cause of some superstitious concern. Delain was slowly coming to accept
magic, but the road was long
and rough.
"Nobody's going to
hurt these cubs," Sahsa continued. Phoenix warbled in agreement.
"Not with you on guard,"
she said, stroking the russet pelt. "I'll see you later."
She nodded to the
guards, and went back to her own room. Standing in the center, head down,
she
closed her eyes and concentrated on Fourcity. Dismal, dingy, hated
Fourcity. When her destination was
firmly fixed in her mind, she opened her eyes and looked once more
around the room. It could be that
she would never see it again.
Forcing the negative
thought away, she decided she was ready to go.
Gwendolyn Torrance
Waldegrave, also known as Lady Aiden, had entered the room. But it was
a
woman called Wildfire that teleported out.
* * *
She arrived in Fourcity
mere heartbeats later, and the dirty, narrow streets were worse than she'd
remembered. She imagined she could see the dogsbodies lurking beneath
the faces of everyone she
passed. Some of them looked her over with the eyes of a predator, scanning
for jewelry or pouches of
coin. She carried no money, not anticipating needing any on this trip,
and the only article of jewelry she
wore was the one that she intended to use.
The rage that had
gone undiminished, since she first saw the man in black raged up inside
of her.
This time, there was no gentle Aron to soothe her, no innocent people
that might be harmed. There was
only Fourcity, the place of her tortured childhood. Like the phoenix
that she revered, she had come home
to burn. By destroying Fourcity, she would not only be avenging herself
on those who would try to hurt
her daughter. She would also be destroying her past, freeing herself
to rise reborn from the ashes of what
had been.
"You should have left
me alone," she said.
A passing mad glanced
at her curiously, then decided she was just a harmless loony. He never
had
time to rethink that opinion, because seconds later, the flames began.
* * *
Chaos reigned in Fourcity
that night. One one side of town, a strange vigilante showered the poor
with plundered goods from a looted Tristan temple, and the priests
of the god of theives had been routed
and killed. Elsewhere, the fires spread hungrily from one building
to the next, consuming everything in
their path. New blazes sprang up in a random, wandering trail of destruction.
The people of Fourcity,
human and dogsbody alike, did what they could to battle or escape the
raging fires, and many of them
feared that the gates of hell had opened wide.
By daylight, less
than half of the buildings were still standing, and most of those were
severely
damaged. Blackened bodies littered the streets. Many were human, but
the few survivors found some that
were obviously inhuman, hideous demonic shapes. Those discoveries strengthened
the rumor that a gate
had been opened.
The dukes, visiting
the city later in the day, were inclined to agree. Such overwhelming destruction
could not have been caused by anything less than the forces of the
Abyss itself, they said.
Meanwhile, one woman returned to Delain. She was blistered from
the ferocity of her own flame,
exhausted, emotionally drained, and finally satisfied. Fourcity had
pain, paid in the only coin that she
would accept. In fire and blood.
* * *