Crown of Vengeance

“Am I to wait for you to serve me? You have served me well enough in these past moonturns, I think.” The tea had finished steeping so she poured for both of them. Steam curled from the delicate cups. “So you say, I must win. And how will I know when I’ve won?”

Gunedwaen cocked his head, studying her. “People might stop trying to kill you,” he offered. “Or not. But the simple answer to your question is one you already know: have all the War Princes proclaim you High King.”

“A more difficult task than it sounds. I had hoped,” she said, offering up the word with unaccustomed diffidence for she well knew Gunedwaen believed that if one must hope, one had lost, “to gain the Uradabhur before facing the Alliance.”

“Whereupon they would concede and anoint you High King,” Gunedwaen said. “But that is not your road to victory. It never has been.”

Vieliessar gazed at him in puzzlement and after a pause Gunedwaen continued. “I have been a Swordmaster since before your father’s birth. Wondertales are my stock-in-trade. Truth matters little. It is what people believe that ends battles or begins them.

“At least half the people out there follow you because you’re the Child of the Prophecy, Amrethion Aradruiniel’s chosen successor.” He waved his hand in the direction of the rest of the camp. “They expect your life and your war to be a wondertale. They want you to be as amazing and unknowable as Great Queen Pelashia Celenthodiel. If you give them what they want of you, they will love you and they will follow you. As will your foes— if you can convince them.”

“I am not a—” Vieliessar began hotly.

“Spirit? Great Power? Ancient hero reborn?” Gunedwaen asked. “Do you really think it matters? They want a good story. Give them that, and even the Twelve will bow their necks.”

Vieliessar bit back the angry words she longed to say. From the moment she’d begun to realize the sheer scope of the power surrounding her—and influencing her—she’d been uneasy with it. Even if she wasn’t manipulating people’s minds deliberately, she knew it was happening. The fact that Gunedwaen dismissed it so lightly made it worse. When did what she did to save her people become more terrible than what she was trying to save them from?

She shook her head stubbornly. There were no clear-cut choices.

“You mean to destroy the life we’ve all led for thousands of years, cast down the War Princes, change everything anyone has ever known, bring ‘justice’ to the commons, and turn every soul of the Fortunate Lands into a great army to fight an enemy so terrible Amrethion Aradruiniel refused to name it. You cannot do that as a mere War Prince, or even as High King. You must become more than that.”

Gunedwaen gazed into the distance. “Serenthon tried. His enemies feared him, and that fear was the greatest weapon in his arsenal. You don’t want to be feared, and you’re right. Fear is a good weapon on a battlefield, a bad one in a Great Hall. But you must become a legend. A dream all can dream together. A dream they can share and follow. If you do not, your army will lose all hope and be destroyed with its first great defeat. Now it’s late, and I’ve said far too much. With your permission, my lord, I will withdraw.”

“Of course,” she answered.

Gunedwaen got to his feet and walked to the door of the pavilion. His expression was thoughtful, but she would not gaze into his thoughts. “Rest you well, Vieliessar High King,” he said, turning back to regard her.

“And you,” Vieliessar said. As if I could, after that.

Amrethion High King, what hradan have you set upon me?

Her untouched tea had gone cold by the time she rose from the table and sought her bed.

* * *

Long before dawn, the army began to move. First to depart were the scouts and foragers, not just the commonfolk on shaggy ponies whose sole task was to warn of the presence of enemy forces in the Mystrals, who had been on patrol since the army had arrived in Ceoprentrei, but komen ready to fight.

Once the scouts were away, the army followed. It was odd to see so many in the same colors. The infantry and former mercenaries wore tabards, the komen wore surcoats, and all were green with a rearing silver Unicorn upon them. Her device. Her colors. The mark of the armies of the High King.

Once all had been set in motion, Vieliessar took her personal guard and rode up to the top of the pass. It was chill and dark, still a full candlemark before dawn. The Dragon’s Gate had been worked and shaped long ago by Lightborn: the pass was broad and open, and she could see down into the hills on the western side below, where the army of the Alliance gathered.

The earth was a mirror of the sky, dotted with thousands of points of light. The large ones were cookfires and watchfires. The small ones were the torches set at the boundaries of the Alliance’s camp and in front of many of the tents. Here and there she could see balls of Silverlight glowing with a moon-blue radiance. She wondered if Prince Runacarendalur was down there somewhere.

Of course he would be. He was Caerthalien’s most able General.

Realizing where her mind had strayed, she shoved the thought aside irritably. She wouldn’t think about him at all save for the Magery that had made him a knife at her throat. If we were not Soulbonded, I would slay him with a light heart. He is all that is corrupt and shameful in the Hundred Houses.

“There are a lot of them,” Komen Mathoriel said quietly.

“Yes,” Vieliessar answered. Her personal guard had suffered heavy losses in Mangiralas, and because of that Komen Orannet—a hedge knight of Oronviel—had become its head, but protocol demanded Vieliessar have a komen of higher rank to head her guard, and she valued Komen Mathoriel’s steadiness. She’d taken care to fill the rest of the places with komen of other Houses than Oronviel, for she was no longer War Prince of Oronviel, but High King.

“We will prevail,” Mathoriel said firmly.

Vieliessar wasn’t certain whether it was tact or optimism that prompted Mathoriel’s remark, but it made good hearing.

* * *

“What do I need to do to become High King?” Her words returned to haunt her through the long days of descent through the Mystrals. She stood upon the threshold of a battle she might well lose. Yet it was a battle that must be fought whether she wished to or not, for she had begun her quest to become High King not for power or ambition, but in fear and dread. The Song of Amrethion prophesied a terrible Darkness that would ride across the land during the years of her life, and if the Hundred Houses were not united against it, the alfaljodthi would be erased from the world. All she had done, all she would do, was meant to prepare her folk and her kin against that day. It was that battle to come she must think of, and not the battles she must fight to reach it. Lose them, and she lost all. But win them …

Every war began, so Arilcarion War-Maker had written in Of the Sword Road, with its own hero tale, as if it were a great lord who had lived a long life and now had a storysong crafted to be sung over its funeral pyre. And any prince who clung to that storysong after a campaign began would drink to drowning of the cup of defeat and loss, for no mortal prince could force the world to follow their whim as if they wore the cloak of the Starry Huntsman.

She would not have the Hundred Houses’ strength to call on if she obliterated it. To imagine a victory that did not begin with the destruction of all the War Princes and their meisnes was madness, but madness or not, it was the only road to victory—true victory.

Gunedwaen says I must become a legend, a dream. I do not think I can. We are no longer a people of dreams or trust. Bolecthindial, Girelain, Manderecheriel will never accept my bare word. Oh, if only I could show the War Princes of the Alliance what I have seen in my visions! Surely then they would understand.…

Could she?

Not her vision of the city, but the city itself?

Find Celephriandullias-Tidorangelor. Take Celephriandullias-Tildorangelor. Fill its lands with the thousands upon thousands who had followed her out of the West …

And the War Princes would rail in vain against a victory already accomplished, for she would