“The Queen’s advisors told her to call her last loyal army to
the city. The capital’s walls are tall and strong; Psuedo-Komfo’s mob had
arrived, but they could only lay siege and wait. If the Southern Army marched
north immediately, they could reach capital before they worst of the starvation
set in. With the bugs mysteriously vanished, there was no reason to leave our
best chance at survival in the badlands.
“But then one final spy returned. He snuck past the army
surrounding the city, and he barely made it in with his life, but the word he
brought changed everything. The bugs hadn’t vanished; they’d gone underground. He’d
found them hibernating in caves, stuck to the walls, cased in amber and piled
on top of each other like bubbles on soap. He used an axe to break through the
amber and killed a dozen of them without even waking them. The bugs could be
destroyed—they could all be destroyed, wiped utterly from the earth. But only
if we reached them before they woke.
“Since they’d disappeared about the time of the first hard
freeze, we thought they must be hibernating for the winter—and winter was
already half over. If the queen sent the Southern Army across the badlands into
the southeastern lands and the hill country, they might barely have enough time
to destroy all the nests before spring broke. But in the time that took, the
capital would starve.
“I accompanied my queen to the Court of Widows and Orphans. It
was crowded with refugees from the infested lands, living in tents and
surviving off the charity of the Temple. As she walked among them, blessing
children, settling arguments, I urged her to call the army back. These people
around her, the displaced and destitute, would be the first to die in this
siege. And because of the demands they’d already made on the royal storehouses,
there was no surplus to feed even the palace and its retainers through a
month-long siege, which Pseudo-Komfo’s horde could easily wage before they
began to starve themselves. She was risking her own life if she did not call
the army back, and she had no right to do that. Our nation needed her leadership
now more than ever. No devastation the Scarabs could wreak would be worse than
losing her.
“I remember she knelt down to give an apple to a little
girl, orphaned by the Scarabs—and told me she’d already ordered the army into
the south. Their orders were not to return until every bug in every corner of
the land was destroyed.
“She was brave. Her enemies never gave her enough credit for
that. She was soft, but she had steel in her.
“I realized she’d come to the refugee camp to face the
people her decision had condemned to death—but that wasn’t it either. She’d
come to brace herself for her own death.
“Pseudo-Komfo was at the gate, with all his mob. Refugees
from the infested lands had been streaming into the capital since the crisis began,
and most of the survivors from the south were living there now. Between the mob
and the refugees and the capital’s own population, at least half the population
of Freya was here, ready to starve or be starved. The bugs would be destroyed,
our queen had seen to that. But to what avail, if there weren’t enough people
left to live in it after? For whom would she have saved the country, if we all
destroyed each other in the meantime?
“So she resolved to save us even from ourselves. I begged—I begged her not to go. But she was … She
was a queen. She gave all her guard permission not to follow her to His camp;
she pleaded with us, as much as a queen ever pleads, to stay behind. But she
didn’t order us. She understood the heart of a warrior better than that. And
we, who knew her so well, who saw her every day, in all her moods and in her
every temper—not one of us would consent to leave her side. As always, her fate
would be ours.
“We flew the flag of parlay, and he flew his. She opened the
gates and we marched out. He received us in the goat hide tent he called a
headquarters, and she explained everything to him: where the bugs were, how
they would be gone soon. How she had chosen to use her army to fight our mutual
enemy instead of slaying him and his acolytes. He thanked her for all of it.
Then he cut her down in front of my eyes.
“I struck down eighteen of them before one of them ran me
through, from behind. I fell near my queen. She was still alive. My name was
the last thing she ever said.
“I found out what happened next later, after the priests
revived me. HE took the city as soon as she was dead. He burned the temple and everyone
in it to the ground, starting with her beloved Court of Orphans—but the city,
the rest of the city, survived. With that madman as king.
“But the madman underestimated her. He always underestimated
her. He took the capital with an army of pagan Gajafaris. Which left Gajafar,
and the river delta it guarded, barely protected. When Pseudo-Komfo had first
announced himself, Queen Danafreya had sent an envoy, not south to the false
prophet, but north, all the way across the Great World Sea to the Emperor of
Suzer. The envoy conveyed an invitation, and a scroll—with a list of the fire
signals Freya’s navy used to pass the fort of Gajafar in the night.
“There was a messenger waiting at the gate that day we went
to meet Pseudo-Komfo. He had a simple order: if the false prophet surrendered
and dispersed his mob, he would ride north and deliver an order to change the signal
codes. But if that liar slew the queen, or took her captive—he would simply burn
the order. And so he did.
“A month after Pseudo-Komfo took the throne, the Suzeri navy
sailed right up to the capital and started bombarding the walls. They took the
capital inside a week. Freya became a vassal state to the great Suzeri empire.
“They left just enough warships and legions to make sure the
emperor would get his share, and took the ruler of Freya, Psuedo-Komfo, back to
Suzer as an honored and indefinite guest. In the meantime, per their usual
policy, the Suzeri appointed locals to administer the country. After all the
lies he told, and all the people he slaughtered to put himself on the throne, he
ruled less than two months. Less than two months, and then they took him away.
“That’s why I’m here, on these godforsaken mountains. For
Him. After the priests revived me, and made me the Ultor—the Avenger—they sent
me to find him. The Suzeri navy will have to sail around these mountains, but I—I
crossed over them. Before he can reach the Suzeri capital, before he becomes a
pampered hostage the rest of his life, I will find him. I will find him and I
will kill him. And her name … her
name will be the last word he ever says.”
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