I ride down the street with Negrat and Benett…and I smile…and I wave…and I look. The waving makes me feel faintly ridiculous, but the smiling and looking is real. I meet people’s eyes because I want to see what I’ve done. I was never comfortable touting the liberation of Shraeven as my ultimate goal; I worked toward it because the alternative was wrong, not because I craved it as an end to itself.
I’ll be candid: my feelings about all of this are still in flux. But seeing the happiness on these faces, hearing their cheers...
It’s the children that tumble the last of my resistance. They are too young to know the reason for the celebration; all they know is that the adults are happy, and that’s enough to inspire their uncomplicated joy. By the time I reach the square I’m still glad that I’m going home, but I’m also glad I’m here to witness this moment.
They’ve erected a dais for me and fortunately it’s going to be large enough for my purposes. I step onto it and wait for the throng to pack the square. Was it really about a week ago that I was here, promising to end the Godson’s oppression? It seems an interminable measure more.
But they’ve assembled. It’s time for my final act as provincial governor.
“Citizens of Shraeven,” I say, pitching my voice to carry to the entirety of the enormous crowd. “Not long ago I stood in this very square…though as I recall, I was balancing on top of a barrel. This is a fine stand you’ve put together.”
A rustle of chuckles, one or two cheers.
“I promised you a free Shraeven,” I say more seriously. “And as you’ve heard the Godkindred Kingdom is withdrawing its claim on your country. Within a week, the army of the Closest Kin will be on its way to the border, and we’re not coming back.”
Wild cheering. I wait for it to subside before I continue. “But I said ‘we’ for a reason. I’m not staying.” I hold up my hands in response to their mutters. “I did not free Shraeven to become its foreign queen. I have grown to care for Shraeven and I have known its gods. But I am still an outsider.
“You deserve better.”
Now I had their attention and their absolute silence.
“From the mountains all the way to this city, I have been aided by a native of Shraeven. She has served as linguist, guide, political advisor, esquire…and friend. She has challenged my thinking; she has attempted to educate me in your values. On your country’s behalf, her aid has been tireless. Without her I would never have walked this path. A road without od Ragna, Clan Hegwar, would never have led to a free Shraeven. I may have freed you from the Godson…but she was the one who freed my sword.”
I draw it now and turn it slowly before them, letting them look, watching the sun flicker over steel. Then I thrust it into the sky: a flash of light to summon a mongrel griffin healer already circling overhead…and the passenger clinging to his back.
Even I have never made an entrance like the one Queen Ragna the First made the day she accepted power from the Godkindred Kingdom.
Branden bows to Ragna and leaps back into the sky after depositing her on the dais. She’s dressed in a short vest and a long embroidered panel over pants, all in cream leather with charcoal and ice-blue accents. She looks beautiful, assured…and very alien to me again, reminding me of my first sight of her.
I am curious what kind of orator my pard-of-many-silences will be. I don’t wait long to find out.
“Shraeven’s gods can hold only one tool at a time,” Ragna says. She does not gesture, pace or move, and yet somehow she doesn’t look stiff either. Just…present. Solid. Unmovable. “And until now they have needed a sword. Now they are free to wield something new.”
She turns to me, takes my hand and draws my sword across the side of her wrist, below the bone. The blood is startling, winking liquid as bright as steel. She turns her wrist cut-down and lets the drops fall between the boards of the dais and to the cobblestones.
“I am offering. If I am the right tool,” she lifts her chin to stare into the sky, “choose me.”
I thought the crowd was silent for me. It’s nothing to the absolute hush now, the sound of hundreds of held breaths.
One would think, after all I’ve been through, that I would know enough about gods to be suspicious of the tremor of the floor-boards. But it takes Ragna’s hissed whisper, “Angharad, jump down, now,” for me to start moving and even then I’m almost too late. The dais comes apart, board from board, and the pavers shatter. I see a glint of red, red blood on the last stone to break and then a tree erupts from the ground.
Spiraling, growing, its bark a creamy white with veins of tan and gray, it forks near the ground and shoots upward, gilt-white leaves shivering like flocks of rising doves. Delicate, powder-blue flowers spring open, their scent sweet and spicy and high and wild. That tree grows fifty-years’ worth of growth before it stops, its new branches rustling in the still air and the shattered dais all around it. And the crowd…the crowd is stunned to silence.
Ragna bows to the tree and says in a voice both quiet and somehow clear enough to carry to the edges of the square, “My blood, my sweat, my life, I pledge to Shraeven and its people.”
Then, easy on her feet, she pads to the tree and steps up onto the fork…the one that looks like a natural bowl, almost like a throne. From there, she addresses the square. “When Angharad Godkin accepted me into her train, I did not know her. Nor did she know me. But when I was kidnapped, she saved me, even though it required the commitment of her own. When she discovered the extent of the violence and injustices the mountain pard tribes visited on the valleyfolk, she spent her men’s lives to destroy them. All the way to the capital, this foreigner has been the gods’ willing sword.”
Mostly willing, the Godson murmurs.
Hush.
“I claim Shraeven for the Shraevenaese,” Ragna says, and somehow her quiet contralto holds each and every one of them in a way mine never could. “As long as I live, we will be free or die resisting foreign rule. But Angharad Godkin goes home to rule her kingdom, and in recognition for all she has done for us, I offer Shraeven’s friendship.” She pulls a knife from her belt and with a quick jerk cuts off one of her whiskers…her laughing whiskers, her smiles, all our shared moments of happiness in one strand. She bows and extends it to me.
I spread my wings. My primaries haven’t molted lately and are probably too large anyway. But the secondaries are about to go, and what does a new relationship need but lift? So I pull off one of the secondaries, not allowing myself to wince, and make my offering.
The crowd remains quiet as we trade gifts. It’s when Ragna pulls my head down and rubs her cheek against mine that they start cheering.
The next act of Queen Ragna I is to sit in the bowl of that tree and invite each and every person to speak to her, one by one. I back away as the line forms. It is not for me to stand at her side; I am the representative of a foreign power, and to insert myself into these proceedings is to reduce myself and my country to the role of one of Shraeven’s tools.
But I will never again be Shraeven’s sword. From now on, I am the Godkindred Kingdom. So I watch the first few citizens speak their welcomes to their new ruler and then slip away from the square. Hopefully the wagon has arrived from camp and I can spend the next few hours profitably, setting up my temporary office.
My last glimpse of Ragna that afternoon is of her nodding solemnly to a young father while beside her Negrat beams and Benett looks both pensive and proud. It is a good beginning.