Of Smoke and Wind Read online

  I weigh my options carefully. My thoughts are still tangled with the vision. With each passing moment the memory and the prophecy blur a little more, their edges melting into each other. What if it was nothing but a memory? Could I tell the King that I was wrong, that I thought I had seen the future, but had instead been trapped in the darkest moment of my life?

  But I have never made that sort of mistake before. I have never failed to speak for the Gods—presumably. Would my confession open the King’s mind to doubt…and my life to the whims of his justice?

  “I beg Your Majesty’s indulgence,” I murmur, keeping my head bowed in deference. “I cannot recall what I said.”

  He stops pacing. “You cannot?” he asks, dubious. “Or you refuse to?”

  Bolstering my courage, I lift my chin and say, “When the Gods speak through me, it is their voice, not mine, that you hear.”

  “Then let me remind you,” he says, “and perhaps I can persuade you to interpret the message of the Gods for me.”

  There is steel in his voice, so I swallow my dread and nod mutely.

  “You said that a storm is coming.”

  He pauses, as if waiting for a response, so I simply nod again.

  “You said that the Sun is blotted out in smoke, that you see war, and people dying, villages burned…knights with white plumes stained red and black.”

  He falls silent again. I turn my face away from his scrutiny, leaning forward to catch the heat of the fire on my cheeks. Maybe the warmth will bring color to my complexion, because I know how bloodless I feel.

  “What does it mean?”

  I say nothing. I am the Voice of the Gods, but I cannot find my own.

  “What does it mean?” the King cries suddenly, slamming his hands on the arms of my chair.

  I shrink back instinctively. In seven years, I have never been this close to him before. My heart chatters with fear, and a nervousness I cannot understand. The King is barely older than I am—I remember the year of his coronation. I was thirteen, then, and the priests had muttered that a sixteen-year-old prince was far too young to bear the weight of the crown. We were all still reeling from the report that his father had been killed in the war—the war that I later prophesied his son would win.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, because his hair smells of smoke, and the scent brings the horror of my vision crashing over me again. He takes my chin in his hand. It is scarred from battle, too roughened for his youth, but his touch is not cruel.

  “Look at me.”

  I cannot force myself to obey.

  “What is wrong with you?” he asks. “You’re shaking all over. What do you have to fear?” He releases me, his hand falling back to the arm of the chair, then he sighs and stands away from me. In that moment he seems suddenly weary, and the realization surprises me more than I wish to admit. “Unless you have lied to me? Did you invent this prediction simply to wound me?”

  “N-no, my liege,” I stammer. I have no need to feign confusion. “I had no control over my words, I swear it. Please…spare my life.”

  “You think I would have you killed if I disliked your message?” he asks, now openly astonished.

  “Wouldn’t you?” I gather my courage like strands of silk and say, “Aren’t I nothing but a nameless tool, to be disposed of if I don’t serve your needs?”

  “You speak boldly,” he says. “I have no patience for impertinent slaves. But…you are not my slave.”

  “I am your prisoner, however,” I say, and immediately regret the rash words.

  He takes one step back. “How can you say that? Have I not kept you in comfort all these years, and showered you with honor? Have I not seen to all of your wants and needs as if they were my own? Have I not given you the most beautiful garments of any woman in my kingdom, and a chamber befitting a princess? And yet you persist in slighting me and ignoring me at every occasion.”

  “When have I ever ignored you, my liege?” I gasp.

  He doesn’t answer. Maybe he thinks the question is so obvious, no answer is needed.

  “If you think yourself a prisoner,” he says, “then do you hope this prediction will come true?”

  His voice is quiet now, but more dangerous than ever.

  “I don’t know what it means,” I whisper.

  “How can you not know what it means?” he cries. “Everyone knows what it means!”

  “But I don’t.”

  He grabs my arm, and I cry out in pain before I can stop myself. Immediately he releases me, but only to brush back the silk drape of my sleeve. I want to pull away, to hide myself from his eyes, but it is too late.

  “This bruise,” he says, his fingers brushing the injured skin.

  One secret of many.

  I shudder and wonder how many women in the kingdom would envy me in this moment, as he leans close to me, his hand circling my arm like an embrace. Yet I feel nothing but fear.

  “Has someone mistreated you?” he asks. “How did this happen?”

  “I don’t recall,” I say, honestly. “But it is no one’s fault.”

  I keep my head bent, praying he will let me go, praying for this nightmare to end. Finally, he sighs and takes my elbow—carefully—and marches me across the room with his guards trailing close behind us. I still feel weak and dizzy, but I have no chance to ask him to slow down. He stops when we reach a window, and I take a deep breath of the fresh air, hoping it will clear my mind. But nothing clears my mind with the King standing so close beside me.

  “Look,” he says.

  I grip the window casement, finding surety in the coarse stone, and close my eyes. I don’t want to know what he wishes me to see.

  “Look!” He almost shouts the command. “How can you look at that and tell me you don’t understand the prediction you made? How can you stand there so indifferently, as if you can’t even see their fear? Do you not care at all?”

  I bend my head, shoulders hunched, praying with every bit of faith I can summon that I won’t break down and weep.

  One secret of many.

  Suddenly I lift my face, as the faded murals of my memory creep back into my thoughts.

  My village in ruin, the soldiers with swords gleaming red with blood, the white-plumed knights framed by the flames of burning thatch. The banner of a rising sun.

  “It was just a memory,” I say, breathless. “I got confused. Something must have reminded me of it, and I was reliving the terror. It sounded like a prophecy, but it wasn’t. It was something that happened when I was a child. A foreign army came and decimated my village. They were brutal, my liege. They slaughtered everyone…almost everyone. I watched them murder my mother. They…they threw fire at me. I don’t know who they were, I was no more than five or six. But…I remember the banner of a rising sun.”

  One of the guards behind me draws a sharp breath. Beside me, the King stands very, very still. I wait for him to say something—to laugh at my stupidity, or berate me for my foolishness, recounting a memory instead of the fate ordained by the Gods. But he says nothing.

  “What?” I ask at last, desperate. “Why do you say nothing?”

  When he still doesn’t speak, I hesitate. I feel there is something I’m missing…something I just can’t see.

  And all at once the coldness in my soul creeps out into every nerve and vein, and I lean all my weight against the window casement to keep from falling.

  The Festival of Lady Sun…

  “It was you? Varhada? That banner, the knights…” The words stumble over my lips. “My village was destroyed! My mother…” I reach up and touch my cheek. The scars from the burns have almost smoothed away, but the pain never has. “Then…”

  The King gives me no answer, but says in a voice honed with fury, “You stared straight at my knights in their white-plumed helmets, standing under my banner of the rising sun, and
predicted their defeat, as if you did not even care. How? Have you no soul at all?”

  “It was burned out of me,” I mutter, listless.

  It is over. Unwittingly, I have predicted the downfall of his kingdom, and even if he survives the coming war, how could I ever be allowed to live?

  “I don’t believe you,” he says. “After all I have done… Tell me, did you plot with my enemy? Did you teach them our weaknesses? Is that why you have never dared look me in the eye?”

  “No, I swear it. You must believe me.”

  “I do not.”

  “Do any of us truly know the future?” I say, desperate. “Are my words carved in stone? Perhaps I foretold your ruin, or perhaps I gave you a warning of the danger that lies ahead, so that you can save your men. Or, perhaps it was not your doom I foretold, but your enemy’s. Can you honestly say it isn’t possible? The words I said could mean anything. Or…or nothing.”

  He is silent a long while, then he sighs and says, “Tell me, Voice, are you speaking the truth now, or seeking only to save your own skin?”

  “Every moment of the last seventeen years I have been trying to save my own skin, my liege,” I admit. “But the truth is, there is nothing left to save.”

  “No, you are hiding something. Look at me, and tell me the truth.” When I refuse to move, he grabs my shoulders and spins me toward him. “Look at me!”

  I lift my face. I must be crying, because the wind feels cold on my cheeks.

  “Forgive me, my liege,” I whisper, “but I cannot see you. When your father’s soldiers burned my face, I lost my sight. The banner of the rising sun was the last thing I ever saw.”

  His hands falter on my shoulders, then drop away. I wish I could see what he is feeling, because I can get no sense of him. He stands too still, his breathing too steady. He is an enigma.

  Then his fingers brush my cheek—the burned one. I wonder if the scars are visible, still.

  “I am so sorry,” he murmurs. “I never knew. How did you hide this from me all these years?” When I don’t answer he says, “But you are wrong—it was not my father’s soldiers who burned your village. They came to your defense. He lost many men that day, trying to save your people, but word of the siege came too late. And it wasn’t your father who gave you to the Temple, Vitra, it was mine. A promise made to a dying man.” He brushes the tears from my cheeks. “And on this day, seven years ago, I kept my own.”

  I try three times to speak before I finally conjure my voice. “What did you call me?”

  “Vitra,” he says, without hesitation.

  “Is that…my name?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t remember it. I was too young.”

  “It is the name your father told to mine, and the name my father told to me. He said…” The King laughs softly. “He said you would be the salvation of the Kingdom. What would he say if he had been there today, I wonder?”

  “Take it as a warning, then, my liege, or a promise of another victory.” My mind is muddled; I don’t know what I’m saying, but I am desperate for him to believe me. “Tell your men. Tell the city. Tell them I interpreted the words of the Gods for you, and this is what they say.”

  He is quiet a moment, then he asks, “Would it be the truth?” When I keep silent, he says, “Tell me, Vitra, have you ever once honestly predicted the future?”

  I hesitate, just a fraction, but it feels like an eternity. “No,” I say. “Not once.”

  “Not once?”

  I can’t answer. If I do, I am deathly afraid of what it will mean. Before this day, I would have feared my own fate in the wake of such a dire prophecy, but now I only fear his.

  His hand on mine startles me, but there is no pain, no punishment in his touch. Just a steady contact, calm and reassuring. “It was different today, wasn’t it?”

  I wonder how he can see through me so easily. It is a skill I envy.

  “I have felt this storm coming for months,” I say. “Is it the murmurings of the Gods I have heard, now, after all these years? I don’t know. I have never felt so blind as when I stood on the balcony and saw that desolation. I can’t make sense of it. It was just chaos—nothing but smoke and wind.”

  He surprises me with a quiet laugh. “Is that not the nature of the future? Can we ever truly know what awaits us?”

  “You knew,” I say, baffled. “You knew that I was bluffing all these years, that it was never anything but a ruse.”

  “I guessed,” he says. “It never mattered to me. My people crave these prophecies; I was happy to oblige them. My father once told me that a wise man takes heed when a prophet foretells the future, but the brave man forges his own.”

  I press a hand against the false buttons of my gown. For the first time in my life, my spirit feels weightless. “It’s true, my liege. I am no more capable of predicting the future than anyone—I believe I’m less wise than most,” I say. “You don’t need me to prophesy that dark days are coming. But you will rise above them.”

  “Isn’t that a prophecy?”

  “It’s not a prophecy,” I say. “It’s faith.”

  “In the Gods?”

  I turn toward the warmth of the breeze and the fall of sunlight on my face, and say, “No, my liege. In you.”

  Like what you read? Look for these other books

  by J. Leigh Bralick!

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  Subverter (Book II in The Lost Road Chronicles)

  Prism (Book III in The Lost Road Chronicles)

  Down a Lost Road: Special Extended Edition

  The Madness Project (Book I in The Madness Method)

  A Dark So Deep (Book II in The Madness Method)

  A Sea Like Glass (Book III in The Madness Method)