Crown Of Embers

The soldiers came to Ashveil village on a morning when the mist was still thick on the valley floor, when the oak trees dripped silver and the world smelled of wet stone and old wood smoke.

I was already awake.

I had been awake since before dawn, as I always was, tending the fire that kept the forge hot — my uncle’s forge, the one I had been working since I was nine years old when my mother left and didn’t come back. Fire was the one thing I understood completely. The way it breathed. The way it wanted. The way it answered when you asked it correctly.

I heard the horses before I saw them. The stamp and chink of soldiers at a distance, the sound a company made when it moved with purpose rather than haste. I set down my hammer and went to the forge door.

There were six of them. Crown soldiers, in the grey and silver of the Vorn regiment — not the village patrol, not the regional levy. Crown regulars, which meant this was not a tax collection or a census.

The conscription notice was nailed to the well post before I had taken ten steps.

By order of His Royal Highness Crown Prince Caelan Vorn, all able-bodied persons between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five are hereby conscripted for service in the Northern Campaign. Report to the valley staging ground by midday.

I read it twice. Then I looked at my hands — scarred and calloused and smelling permanently of smoke — and thought: of course.

The border war with Valdrath had been going for three years. The prince had been fighting it personally, which was either impressive or reckless depending on who you asked. Our village was small enough that it had escaped the first two conscription rounds. It was apparently not small enough to escape the third.

My uncle found me by the notice board.

“Lyra,” he said. His face was the face of a man delivering grief with both hands.

“I know,” I said.

“You could run.”

“And go where?” I folded the notice. “North is the front. South is the river. East and west are open country with nowhere to shelter.”

“You’re only twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two is exactly what they want.” I tucked the notice into my belt because I had no better place for it. “I’ll come back.”

He looked at me with the specific helpless love of someone who had been raising a fire-touched girl for thirteen years and had never managed to make her less dangerous or less stubborn.

“Your mother’s blood,” he said. It was what he always said when he didn’t have other words.

I kissed his cheek and went to pack.

There was not much to pack. A change of clothes. The knife I had made myself from a piece of scrap iron at fourteen, which had a better edge than anything the armory would issue. A small piece of iron ore that I carried always, for reasons I had never satisfactorily explained to myself.

At the bottom of my chest was a folded letter, sealed with wax I had never broken. It had arrived when I was fifteen, addressed in a script I did not recognize, and my uncle had gone grey when he saw it and had not spoken for the rest of the day. I had never opened it. Some things were safer unknown.

I left it where it was.

The staging ground at midday held forty-three conscripts from the valley and its surrounding villages. Most of them were afraid. Some of them were making the faces of people pretending they weren’t afraid, which was also fear, just performed differently.

I stood at the edge of the group and watched the soldiers assign numbers, and when the sergeant called my name — Lyra Ashveil, smith’s apprentice, fire designation — and she looked up at my hands, something moved briefly through her expression.

“Fire-touched?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She wrote something additional in her ledger and told me to stand in the second column.

I stood in the second column, with the others who had been flagged for something, and watched the mountains to the north where the border was, and thought: something is beginning. I could feel it the way I felt fire — in my chest, below language, the warmth that came before the burning.

We marched north for three days.

On the third day we came through a mountain pass and the valley below opened into something I had no frame for: the base camp of the Northern Campaign, spread across three miles of highland plateau. Hundreds of tents. Rows of supply wagons. A training ground already occupied by soldiers who moved with the efficiency of people who had been doing this for years.

And at the center of it, surrounded by officers, a man in black armor.

He was not looking at us. He was looking at a map. But even at distance, even surrounded by advisors and officers and the general apparatus of command, he occupied the center of the tableau the way a fire occupied a room — not aggressively, not performatively, but as a simple fact of physics.

Crown Prince Caelan Vorn.

He looked exactly like the rumors: tall, dark-haired, the kind of cold precision to his face that suggested he had never made a decision carelessly in his life. He was twenty-eight years old and had been commanding the northern border for two years and had won six engagements no one had expected him to win.

He did not look at the new conscripts. We were processed by his officers and assigned our posts and given our equipment and sent to our tents.

I was assigned to fire support. Which meant I was on the end of a line of archers with burning arrows.

I thought: this is not what I am. But I picked up the bow and I went to stand in line, because the fire was mine and the war was real and sometimes you did the available thing while you waited for the necessary one.