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The Armour Hills were brilliant with moonlight. Behind them, the city was burning.
Hiram kept a fast grip on his daughter’s hand, willing her not to look back and think about the two they had left behind, willing himself not to stop. They were almost clear of the madness, the slaughter and the burning. They were at the top of the gulley. He stopped to catch his breath. Lathea’s hand, slick with sweat, slid out of his. Her breathing—as it well might be, in her condition—was strained.
“They’re killing everybody,” she gasped.
“Only those with the Gift,” Hiram insisted. “You and I, we don’t have it. We’ll win free.”
She stared at him, huge tears beading in her amber-brown eyes. “Mother has the Mage-Gift.” Her voice shook. “Karat has the Mage-Gift.” She placed a hand, protectively, on her distended stomach. “And you know as well as I do”—her voice broke—“that there’s an even chance my children will have it.”
“Come here.” Hiram drew his daughter close, held her tightly. “They’ll be all right,” he breathed, trying to reassure himself as much as her. “They have magic; they’re together. They’ll meet us on the other side.”
The face of his wife, Drailin, flashed into his memory, grey hair silvered in the light of the burning fires. The people coming for them, Hiram didn’t know whether they were soldiers or denizens of Armour City itself. Whether perhaps he would know some of the faces that leered out from the formless mob, their own neighbours perhaps, or petitioners he’d once given audience, people who’d kept their hatred and their boundless spite out of sight, below the surface. Until now.
Gunshots echoed in Hiram’s mind; his son-in-law, Karat, raised a hand, and they flew wide. The lead balls were vulnerable to magic.
“They can’t touch us.” His wife stood strong, in his mind’s eye, before the approaching mob, though she was no warrior herself, only an artist, a maker of magical portraits and beautiful things. “Hiram, take our daughter and go! Save her. Save yourself. We’ll stop them here, and meet you outside the city.”
Back in the present moment, in the stillness of the night, the glow of the burning city seeming nothing more than a reflection of the indifferent stars, Lathea gazed at him desperately. “Father—if they’re born with the Gift—”
Hiram couldn’t worry about that right now. If he and Lathea got safely away—if the shock of their flight did not cause stillbirth or worse—if one or both of his grandchildren actually survived and happened to have inherited the Mage-Gift—he would worry about such things when they came to pass. Right now, the only thing that mattered was their lives. His daughter’s life. He had to save Lathea. Hiram’s family had splintered apart, his wife and son-in-law lost somewhere on the streets of Armour City. Lathea was all that was left to him.
“They’ll meet us on the other side,” he repeated. “Your mother, and Karat. They’ll be there.”
“Where?” she asked desperately.
“The Asmyth road.” He and Drailin had discussed this, months beforehand, when the warlord Arran Sylvaissen still seemed only a distant threat to most people within the city. Not to Hiram. He was an Alderman, part of the governing structure that was meant to keep the city, and by extension the whole of the land of Vailana, safe. Arran Sylvaissen and his creed of segregation had frightened Hiram even then. If the hammer blow came, he knew, most people with the Gift would flee to the ancestral home of all those who possessed magic—the Forest of the Morning. But Hiram’s little family had no ties there—both Drailin and Karat were city-born mages, their lives and livelihoods tied to here.
“We’ll go to Svanfeld instead,” he remembered saying. “This Sylvaissen’s armies won’t follow up there, not into the mountains. And I spent some time at a monastery there, once. The monks might help us to start anew.”
Lathea was still breathing harshly. They had to move, Hiram thought. They had paused here for far too long.
“Who goes there?” came the sudden shout, and he froze like a hunted hare. A lantern glared in the darkness, moving somewhere along the riverbank above. Hiram could not make out the face of the one who held it, but he saw, as shadows, the long pointed shapes of the musket guns the group carried. Only soldiers would carry firearms. Arran Sylvaissen’s soldiers.
“Go,” Hiram whispered, pushing his daughter towards the mouth of the gulley.
“Stay where you are, old man!” Hiram froze in the act of following his daughter. “Yes, we see you. Stay where you are, or we’ll shoot!”
“Father?” Lathea whispered. She was already halfway down, clinging to the boulders at Hiram’s feet.
“Save yourself!” he whispered back, his voice low with urgency, praying that they would not hear. The troop of soldiers was making a lot of noise, coming down the dry riverbank towards where Hiram stood.
“No!” Lathea returned, fiercely. She moved, grasping for her father’s hand.
A musket spoke, deafening thunder followed by the crash of a lead ball into the bushes somewhere far too close by. Hiram cringed back, and shoved Lathea away from him.
“Stay where you are!” came the shout, again.
“Go,” he whispered, one last time. “Please.”
