Anezka had run up the hills well ahead of me.
“They never even had time to close the gate,” she said.
“Then we’ve won!” I hadn’t even bloodied my axe, and it was over. We had torn the Paikans down. “We’ve done it.”
From up here, as I looked around, I could see smoke beginning to billow up from the city. And the field was empty of living soldiers. Only the dead and injured, lying in the mud made by our feet, lay out there like small dolls or figures in a painting regarded from a distance.
When I looked back at Anezka I did not see the same happiness. “There’s something you should see,” she said.
She took me into that turret I’d been in the day before, and my mouth dried even before the door opened and I looked inside.
An ashen-faced Ixilon looked back up at me, then quickly down at the table he sat at, his wrists bound with rope. Behind him, Jal slumped, a long spear run through the whole of his chest stuck out of both sides of the man.
“You killed him anyway?” I asked.
Ixilon licked his lips, and did not look up at me. “A guard, not me.”
A badly beaten guard in the corner of the room croaked, “Payback, for the whore who dared take the city.”
The fury that lived inside me exploded. I grabbed my axe and crossed to where Ixilon lay with his head in his hands, and swung the axe deep, easily, and precisely toward the back of his neck.
I swerved at the last second, and buried it into the wood of the table just short of his ear.
“You failed,” I told Ixilon. “You failed as a man to keep just a simple promise to me, and you failed in your attempt to foist your Way upon this land: there will be no more cullings now. And the land will be better for it.”
I had done my duty for all the other mothers in these lands. But now it was time to do something I’d yearned to do since I’d met Ixilon. I ran from the room and into Anezka. “Get me a horse. Now!”
“Please, listen to me first. Jiva’s dead, you need to talk to the commanders,” she said. “They need to hear from you…”
“A damned horse! Now!” I shoved past her and ran down the cobblestones with a tired limp until I saw a horseman. “Give me your horse,” I demanded.
“Who are you to…” he started to say, but then he saw the axe, and my face, and realized who I was, and slid off.
“Tana!” Anezka called.
“You are as much one of this army’s leaders as I am,” I shouted at her. “You take care of it. In my name if you must. But you take care of it.”
I galloped off as fast as the horse could manage down the hill, around the curves, and then out the gates. I pushed the horse as hard as I dared, until foam flecked its mouth and it ignored my demands.
Getting down from the horse I stumbled along the empty roads of the small town that had sprung up to serve the Paikan harbor.
Eyes looked at me from behind shuttered windows.
I staggered out to the end of one of the piers and looked out at the gray sea, and in the far distance, watched a single sail slowly disappear over the edge of the ocean, headed South.
It was doubtful my sons were on that last boat. But standing there, it felt like it.
They had left me and moved on.
I crumpled to the wooden planks. I could not find tears, but my body shook as if I were trying to remember how to cry.
Anezka found me still on the edge of the pier hours later.
She said nothing, but waited at the start of the stones of the waterfront until I decided myself to turn my back to the ocean.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her.
“It was truly as much your army as it was Jiva’s,” she said. “We’ve won. And now we need to plan what comes next.”
I let myself get recaptured by her, and returned to the city.
I think of philosophers as drug-addled dreamers who see only the reflections cast on their blackboards. The shadows of the world as it really exists around them. They say there is no such thing as good and evil. They talk about choice and flux, intersections and perspectives and situations.
They may well be correct. Who am I, an old peasant mother, to question those who spend their lives poring over these questions? And since I decree it, any philosopher or religion that forsakes weapons at my city’s gate can come to Paika. My city. And they do so flock, like hungry sheep, to my markets.
I did this for my sons, against counsel, so that they would have a city on the coast to return to if they choose. They follow the Way, now, and I cannot bring myself to chase those who follow the same beliefs as my sons from these coasts.
I will be here, when they get back from the Southern Isles. I will be here for them, even if we might hardly recognize each other.
The thinkers say it is the way of the world for things to change. That includes people, I gather.
So even though we grow unrecognizable to each other I am still their mother, and this is still their land.
I hold back the bramble as best I know how. At first,
I did not care to hunt people in the city. But those who did not follow the Way, my own people, began using magic, and bramble began to choke our streets.
I fought the Paikans to get my children back. To stop the culling. I had no wish to return to forcing the Way on people. And so I am forced to find the magic users, as I must, and hang them from the city’s walls. On my worst days, I think
I have become no better than the Jolly Mayor. And to my chagrin, the Way’s priests point to the people I execute as proof that only the Way can save these lands.
I do all these things because even though I am a mother, I am also now a new person. I am the queen of Paika, the lady of the lands in its shadow.
I am the Executioness.
And I am waiting for my children to come home.
