Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (20 page)

It did not matter how sick it made her feel, how watery her knees felt or how much her wings shook. Maeve did not feel glorious, but she had to pretend. It was a lie, but maybe it was better than Xartasia's lie.

Maeve scowled at her twisted reflection. At least Xartasia had Calathan's help, and probably more. Maeve briefly considered asking Panna or Ferris to make the speech for her, but decided that it was hardly fair. It was not the other fairies' fault that Maeve was nervous. She turned away from the sink and smiled a little.

"Three hundred," she said as clearly as she could manage. "It will be a good start. We will hope for more next time."

________

It had been Panna's own idea to join the rest of the crowd for Maeve's speech, but now she began to wonder if it was such a good idea. The other Arcadians were staring at her. Some seemed to think she was human, but it was those who recognized her as one of their own that made Panna bite her lip and bury her hands deep in her pockets.

The three hundred or so pale-haired and white-winged fairies gathered in the sandy red bowl between two dunes. A camp of dusty tents rose on one side like the solidified peaks of choppy water. They were all empty, however. At Duke Ferris' request, the Sunjarrah Arcadians were mixed into the crowd, not unlike Panna.

Logan and Vyron had erected a small stage atop the smaller dune. It was little more than a sheet of metal bolted to four concrete blocks. Hyra and Lorren were still trying to figure out how to sing the strange Stray sand. The only glass they had managed so far was cloudy and brittle, prone to shattering under the slightest pressure.

Across the basin, Panna caught sight of a tall Dailon holding a small black-eyed child up high for a better view. Panna hurried through the maze of feathered wings and extended her hand. "You must be Kessa," she said. "I'm Panna Sul."

The Dailon woman balanced Baliend on her hip and shook Panna's smaller hand. "Maeve told us a lot about you. She says you know more about fairies than she does."

"Queen Maeve said that?" Panna knew she should not grin at the praise, but she couldn't help herself.

Kessa laughed. "Queen Maeve," she repeated. "It's so strange to hear you call her that. She yelled at me once just for thanking her. Maeve was a very unhappy girl."

Panna had a hard time imagining it. Not Maeve being unhappy, but being impolite. She knew it had happened… Duaal had plenty of stories about the queen's misdeeds and Panna knew that Logan Coldhand had tried to capture Maeve for a bounty not so long ago. But now Maeve Cavainna was a queen. Panna could admit to herself that she might not have been as naturally commanding as Xartasia seemed to be, but the younger Cavainna really was trying.

"There she is," Kessa said suddenly, pointing.

Panna looked up. Maeve had landed on the makeshift stage. Duaal and Ferris – who had landed beside the queen and furled his wings against his back – must have chosen her clothes. Maeve Cavainna wore flowing red and gold that streamed out behind her in the dry wind like a flaming banner. Her long black hair danced as though alive.

Logan climbed the dune to stand beside the queen. Panna smiled to herself. He was never very far from Maeve. She knew it drove Ferris crazy. Logan Coldhand was not Arcadian, as the duke so often pointed out. He had no business in their politics. It struck Panna as more than a bit unfair. Duaal Sinnay was not Arcadian, either, but Ferris didn't seem to object to his help.

Kessa cheered Maeve's appearance wildly and Panna joined in. There were other voices raised in the throng, but not as many as Panna hoped. Probably only the Sunjarrah fairies, who were already at least somewhat loyal to the new queen. The far more numerous and suspicious Stray Arcadians remained silent. They had been here before, Panna realized. Here, on this spot in the unwelcoming Gharib desert, listening to Gavriel and his talk of comforting death.

Maeve seemed to be saying something, but Panna couldn't hear her. Ferris spoke into the young queen's ear and she nodded. She stepped up to the edge of the stage and raised her wings. At the corner of the stage, a figure in purple that Panna thought might be Duaal raised one palm toward the crowd.

"I… I thank you for coming today," Maeve said. Her voice shook, but now Panna could hear her quite clearly. "After a hundred years of exile in the core, it is no easy thing to reach for hope. What I tell you now is difficult, but hope and pain are two wings of the same set.

"You have heard, I am sure, of two queens who would lead you. Xartasia, who was Princess Titania and daughter of King Illain before the fall. And me. I am Maeve Cavainna, daughter of Princess Beltain. I have no claim to the throne of the White Kingdom and to your fealty, but I fear that I must ask it still.

"It is Xartasia who should be before you now, who should lead the Arcadians. My cousin says that she can restore Arcadia. She claims that the White Kingdom will be as it once was. But she has cheated and killed in her purpose, and summoned the Devourers themselves! She has taken up the mantle of the Nameless herself, the dark goddess that brought pain and death to our people.

"I am not my cousin. I was never prepared to take the throne. I was trained as a knight. I was taught to protect, not to lead. But I see our people suffering, without Xartasia and with her, though they may not know what they have given up to her. I never wished to rule. I stand here before you not out of ambition, but because I cannot kneel before her."

Maeve gestured broadly to the dunes and then up into the thin blue-green sky of Stray. Panna looked at Kessa and then at the Arcadians all around them. They were watching, staring intensely at the queen in red and gold. Was it working? There was a lot of hard work ahead and the Arcadians were an exhausted and broken people. Could she convince them?

"We are sons and daughters of Aes and Erris, sun and song," Maeve said. "Our gods created us to sing and dance anew when they could not. What has been can never be again. But we can create something new. Here, on Stray.

"We have lived as refugees long enough. We have waited for the Alliance to recognize us, to admit to our loss, but they have problems of their own. So be it! We are Arcadian! We are stronger than they know! We will sing glass towers from the sands of Stray. With you, I will build a new kingdom in this very place. A new home, here and now.

"We cannot bring back the past. But neither will I allow our people to keep suffering. The time has come to rise. The time has come to fly again. The time has come to build a new kingdom and go into the future together."

The fairies did not applaud. They sang. Just a few dozen voices at first. Some of the Arcadians spread their wings and flew back into Gharib, but more remained. They lifted their faces and wings. Twenty voices became a hundred and then two hundred… more… until the air thrummed with the single word.

"A'shae." The night. Your Majesty.

Panna sang, too.

"What is beauty in the dark?"

– Anneth Zhyress (218 PA)

The great black fleet glided silently through space, eclipsing stars but casting no shadows in the endless darkness. Devourer nanites covered every inch of the fleet's hulls, collecting data and transmitting it to the ships' computers and their alien operators. But the seething black was as hungry as its creators, slowly devouring the ships they had themselves restructured and built.

The Starwind convoy never saw them coming. The line of seventeen networked ships dropped out of superluminal flight on the edge of the Giadeen system, six hundred thousand miles from the outermost asteroid projections. The faintly luminous orange bubbles faded from around the cylindrical haulers as null-inertia fields powered down and the Starwind computers gathered new route information.

Dhozo looked at Xartasia. She nodded.

"Now," he ordered. "Tear them apart."

His swirling black cloud of armor transmitted his command across the fleet in nanoseconds. Five thousand Arcadian voices rose in broadcast songs of praise as a wing of sharp-looking black fighters soared into the midst of the convoy. Red lasers and long black hooks tore open four of the Starwind haulers before any of the ships could react.

The lead hauler turned ponderously in the starlight, bringing the tiny, bulbous control deck around to face the threat. It fired a few laser pulses, but the Devourer fighters were too fast. They spiraled tightly around the remaining haulers, each cutting their violent way into one of Starwind's ships.

Two of the blade-winged fighters engaged the better-armed lead vessel. Angry scarlet laserfire seared along one fighter's armored underside. The other Devourer slammed into the hauler's flank, making the whole length of it shudder and buckle. The sharp, backswept black wings curled like clawed fingers into the fibersteel hull. Air hemorrhaged from deep tears in the hauler's side and froze into white plumes in the absolute cold of empty space.

"Return all mineral salvage back to the Sozsarus for reconstruction," Dhozo commanded. "Consume the crew and then report back to the VSS Illisem."

Xartasia was not sure if the Devourer pilot's com channels were closed or if the fairies' song simply drowned out the screams.

"
All
of the metal?" Orix objected. "Commander, we need it to replenish our swarms!"

"My people need ships more than you need your robots," Xartasia told the young Devourer coldly. "Every scrap will go to new vessels."

The black cloud surrounding Orix swirled like a brewing storm. It had lost some of the faint glitter, Xartasia noticed. Were the nanites actually ailing somehow, breaking down? They were machines and machines required power, fuel. Food, like their masters. A steely dark shape jutted suddenly from Commander Dhozo's armor, a shield between Xartasia and Orix.

"There will be plenty to eat on Anzhotek," Dhozo reminded his subordinate. "We're going there soon. Until then, let your appetite keep you sharp, not angry."

Xartasia shrugged to herself and turned to the knights flanking the door. A dozen fairies in shining glass armor stood at attention, wings and spears held upright.

"Commander, you said someone wanted to talk to me?" she prompted.

A knight with red and violet scarves wound under his glass armor nodded. "Yes, my queen. Sharlon Artain. He is new. Sir Varris and Tarno brought him from Arrideen. He has been asking to see you ever since he arrived, a'shae."

"Bring him."

The knight bowed and left. He returned a few minutes later with another Arcadian man limping behind. Xartasia stood at the head of the gleaming silver table. Its polished surface cast her reflection down its length, ending in the diamond points of her glass crown like a circle of daggers leveled at Sharlon.

"What is it?" Xartasia asked.

Sharlon stared at Dhozo and the other Devourers. The huge aliens stood behind Xartasia, but their black armor was never still, swirling and transmitting and gathering data and translating. And eating… The energy demands of their bodies and implanted nanite systems meant that the Devourers, the Glorious, were always eating. Mostly metal, though not always… The dark carbon fiber floor beneath Orix was turning a brittle-looking gray. Sharlon dragged his gaze from the monsters and back to his queen.

"I… thank you for seeing me, Your Majesty," Sharlon stammered. His voice was smoke-roughened, but still far less abrasive than the Devourer's buzzing rasp.

Xartasia raised a slim, perfectly manicured hand in acknowledgment of her subject's thanks. "What is it?" she asked again.

"Before I left Arrideen, they… they said that there was another queen. Is it true?"

Xartasia fixed violet eyes on the cowering fairy. "I have had no word of this. Tell me more."

Sharlon swallowed hard. "Her name is Maeve Cavainna, they say. She is on Stray. There have been no emissaries, my queen, as you send. But word has spread. They say she is even raising towers of glass in the Stray desert."

Xartasia's eyes flickered over the glass armor of the knights at the door. Every atom of carbon for those suits had been collected from ships and shipments, sifted and selected with painstaking care. They were the finest glass the galaxy had ever seen. Xartasia remembered the dull red sands of Stray.

"If this is true," she said. "If my cousin sings glass from Stray's dry sand, what she builds will be as brittle as any coreworlder glass. And the throne she claims for herself is just as fragile."

"They are calling her the Gray Queen, a'shae," Sharlon told Xartasia. "And… and they say that she is accompanied by a great beast, like… like one of your Devourers. But not the same… brown and green where the Devourers are all darkness."

"Yes," Xartasia said. "The Arboran. He is a coward. There is nothing we need fear from him."

"Arboran," Orix sneered.

Sharlon jumped and very nearly fell. One of the knights stood forward and helped to steady the terrified Arcadian man. Dhozo growled something at the younger Devourer in their own language.

Xartasia held her hand out, palm up. "Thank you for this information, Sharlon. It will be dealt with."

"Yes, my queen." Sharlon bowed deeply, still trembling. "Thank you for seeing me."