The Wheel of Osheim

“You’ve been talking to her!” I knew it for truth as I spoke the words.

“I’ve seen her in my mirror.” Kara shrugged. “She’s not the devil, and I’m no sheep to be led by another’s opinion. I listen. I consider. I make up my own mind.”

“And?” I spread my hands.

“I’m undecided.” She straightened and slid from the wall. Spots of rain began to fall around us.

“But she’s evil! I saw her kill—”

“You say she’s evil because one of the people her cause needed to die was your mother. But the Red Queen’s cause has led to the deaths of thousands, plenty of them mothers. Look around you.” She swung an arm at the ruins.

“I . . . I expect . . .” I tried to find the words to explain why she was wrong. “Most of them probably ran for it.”

“Your people are the invaders. Snorri told me that he saw the onearmed man who tortured you—in a Red March tabard, here in Blujen, walking with soldiers.”

“Cutter John?” I found I was hugging myself and the night seemed colder, more full of terrors. “I thought that bastard would be dead by now.”

“Men who can get information from captives quickly are a valuable resource in war, Jal.”

“It’s a mistake. Red March doesn’t have an inquisition. We’re the good ones . . . I’ll tell the queen. I’ll—”

“Look behind the wall.” Spoken softly to the night.

The rain fell harder now and I didn’t want to look behind the wall.

“Make your own decision, Jalan. But do it with your eyes open.” She brushed past me, bound for the tent.

The rain started to fall in earnest and clouds had stolen the light of moon and stars, but a tongue of flame still licked from a pile of blackened beams ten yards past the wall on which Kara had been sitting. With a curse I hunched my shoulders against the coldness of the raindrops and leaned over the wall where it stood at its lowest.

A girl’s corpse lay curled at the foot of the wall. She lay there as she had lain for our whole conversation, as she had lain when we pitched the tent and while we slept, eyes to the sky filled with cold water. Half her face had been burned black, the skin peeling away in dark squares, but I could tell she had been young, pretty even, her hair long and dark like my mother’s. I almost pulled away without realizing the bundle against her chest was a baby. I wish I had.

We came into Blujen on a grey morning beneath a cold rain. Tears for the dead.

A squad of ten Red March infantry escorted us along the town’s high street. Fire had erased many of the signs of fighting but I didn’t have to look hard to see them. In one place bodies lay in a heap, civilians uniformed in mud, a silent mound. The Dead King would have them hunting me if I stayed long enough for him to register the key. I saw soldiers bringing timbers ready to build a pyre, taking their leisure and complaining beneath their loads. If they had been at Vermillion’s walls a week earlier they would be running to build it!

We spotted the tower before we saw any sign of the Red Queen or her forces. I say we saw the tower but in truth it was only the gleaming reflection of the sky, and as we drew closer, our own reflections warped, along with the surrounding ruins, across the surface of a mirror-wall. The men told me that the tower had been as any other, tall, rock-built, a ring of slit windows beneath a tiled conical roof. As the first soldiers had reached it the mirror-wall sprang up and had held ever since, immune to assault, reflecting back all violence.

The troops occupying the ruins, smeared with ash and mud, some bearing wounds, watched us with hard eyes. They must have known me as the marshal that let Vermillion burn. Some offered up a grim nod as we passed. Perhaps they knew how the Red Queen would deal with such failure and pitied me.

They took us to the royal pavilion, an edifice in scarlet dwarfing the campaign tents of the generals and the pavilions of her lords beyond them. Sir Robero, one of grandmother’s seasoned campaigners from the Scorron conflicts, took the Norse into his custody while a pair of royal guards led me on. I surrendered my sword and dagger at the entrance.

Grandmother’s pavilion had fared better than my tent: a silk outer skin, taut above a more durable waxed felt, seemed to have kept out the worst of the Slovian autumn, though I was gratified to see a collecting bowl to one side being fed by a steady drip-drip-drip from a seam high above.

Guards and officers drew back to clear a path to her wooden throne. The place smelled of wet bodies and old sweat. A dozen lanterns couldn’t quite break the gloom and the rich rugs beneath my feet were thick with muddy tracks. Grandmother sat stiff-backed but older, as if ten years had passed since we last met, iron grey threading the dark red of her hair. “Tell me of my city.”