The Will of the Empress

Three lightning strips flew at the mimander, the caravan leaders, even Daja herself, nipping at the rumps of their horses. Thunder boomed in the canyon, startling the herds into a run. Animals, Traders, and non-Traders alike decided they’d had enough. They, Sandry, and Briar fled across the river with Tris behind them, just in back of the last wagons.

“Keep going!” Tris screamed, her voice hoarse. Now she used her lightning to goad the caravan’s rear and its front, scaring the horses and the oxen who pulled the wagons until they rushed up the inclining road. The end of the caravan was a scant twenty feet above the canyon floor when a rumbling sound made the cooler-headed riders stop.

Rocks pattered down the cliffs that overlooked the road. Bits of the ledge that overlooked the canyon floor crumbled away from its edge. In the distance they could hear a dull roar.

This time, Tris, clinging to her horse’s mane, didn’t need to speak. Everyone scrambled to move higher on the steep road. They were sixty feet above the riverbed when a wall of tree- and stone-studded water snarled down the canyon to swamp the river flats. It ripped boulders from the ford, ground the road away, and plowed on down into the canyon again. Had they been just a little slower, the savage torrent would have swept them up and carried the remains far downstream.

“But there was no rain, no snowfall, higher in the mountains.” That lone voice belonged to the mimander. Daja did not look at his veiled eyes, out of consideration for his shame. Trader mimanders studied one aspect of magic all their lives. They chose their specialty when they were young, and risked their lives to learn all they could about winds, or the fall of water from the skies, or avalanches, or storms at sea.

How humiliating, she thought. It must look like he missed this coming, even after years of study. He knows this caravan puts its life in his hands.

And how humiliating, to yell at your sister because she doesn’t have time to save over two hundred people and explain herself, too.

Briar looked at the swirling mess below. He blinked. For a moment the trees were bodies: gaudily dressed men, women and children who were missing limbs or heads, their wounds streaking the brown water red. They were joined by the bloated corpses of yaks, goats, even birds, and by the corpses of soldiers. The stench of the rotting dead swamped him.

Not here, he thought, closing his eyes and clenching his teeth. Gansar, not Gyongxe. Peacetime, not war. Not here.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the remains of trees and the bulk of stones. Only the stench of death continued to haunt his nose.

He forced himself to study this flood, the one that was real right now. Already it was clawing at the earthen walls on the far side of the river flats. “You ask me, I think the dam broke upriver, master mimander,” he commented. “It was too old, maybe, or it needed fixing, or something, but some of those rocks look like dressed stone. It wasn’t your fault if that’s so. A dam break isn’t weather.”

Tris, limp along her mare’s neck, nodded briefly.

Daja was looking very sheepish, he saw. She rode over to Tris. “I’m sorry,” Briar heard her mutter. “I should have—”

“Trusted me?” Tris’s reply was muffled, but it clearly stung Daja. “Remembered it’s my favorite thing in all the world to act like a crazy person before strangers, and it would have been nice if my sisters and brother had said, ‘Oh, she’s peculiar, but she’s usually peculiar for a reason’? Go away, Daja. I don’t feel like blushing and accepting your kind apology just now, thanks all the same.”

Daja drew herself up. “All that traveling and all those conferences, and they never taught you how to be gracious.”

“You want Sandry for that. She’s up ahead. Leave me be.”

Briar rode over and touched Daja on the arm. He jerked his head, a sign for her to come aside with him. When she did, he whispered, “Remember? She gets all worked up, and she snaps at the first nice voice she hears. She was probably scared witless. I’ll put on the heavy gloves and gentle her some.” He winked and rode back to Tris, getting her attention by poking her in the arm. “Hey, Coppercurls, nice fireworks,” he said, keeping his voice light. She looked like one of the warrior dedicates right after battle: exhausted, but still not quite sure it was safe to stop fighting. Briar had learned to handle them carefully when they were in that state. “Maybe you ought to do like Chime and eat something so the lighting will come out of you in colors.”

Tris replied with a suggestion that Briar knew would be physically impossible. He grinned. Offering Tris his canteen, he said, “Have some water, and don’t spit it back in my face.”

As Tris obeyed, Briar looked at Daja and shrugged.

Daja smiled reluctantly. That’s right, Daja thought. Tris gets really frightened, and then she bites the heads off of people. I had forgotten.

I wonder what else I’ve forgotten—about Tris. About Sandry, and Briar.

I hope I remember really, really fast.

Sandry was livid. Had she been less aware of what she owed to the people around her, she would have shaken Tris until her teeth rattled. Furious as she was, she still remembered one of her uncle’s most often-repeated lessons: “Never express anger with a friend or a subordinate in public,” Vedris always said. “They might forgive a private expression of anger or a deserved scolding, but they never forget a public humiliation. It is the surest way to destroy a friendship and to create enemies.”

The caravan found a wide cove off the road where they could halt to collect themselves and calm the children and the animals. Sandry then went to give Tris a piece of her mind. The mimander beat her there. He had backed Tris up against a tall stone by the road, his yellow-robed body shielding her from onlookers. Sandry moved to the side of the stone to eavesdrop.