Three nights after the war ends they throw a party, all ball gowns and champagne flutes, where the violins sing and the survivors waltz. The faint smell of paint hangs in the air, and in places you can still see traces of the battle: a line of soot on a window casement, a poorly hidden scar in the ceiling plaster, the Margrave’s throne regilded to hide the Margrave’s blood.
She hates it.
For seventeen months they’d fought—from village to village, street to street—clawing their way to the capital. Seventeen months since the Margrave had seized the throne on a tide of antikunstler sentiment and begun the purges. Seventeen months of vicious struggle, all just to get back to empty speeches, ballroom dances, and side-eyed suspicions from their arbeiter allies. To return to the status quo.
The irony, of course, had been that fewer than half could even use the Arts, and of those, only a fraction could muster the power needed to fight. Her brother had used his Art to fix pocket-watches. Her sister had used hers to light the study at night, to save a few österrmarks on lamp oil.
She had used hers to repay her siblings’ deaths on the pogrom pyres—an entire village “cleansed,” first by bigotry, then by revenge. The reports of her reprisal had spread to command as fast as her blue-white flames had sped down the streets, leaping from beam and post to rooftop and loft, until even the wooden walls were just a charcoal ring around a blackened mound. For days after the act you could see the remains still smoldering beneath snowdrifts of burned brick and ash.
It had been so quiet, just the rushing of wind and the crackle of flame. As though the villagers had spent all their screams on cheering during the day.
They’d given her a commission for that.
She swaps out an empty glass for a full one while someone wearing altogether too many medals makes another long-winded speech from the dais. Their people will once again be united; the Provisional Government will take steps to ensure the rights of all citizens; they will never forget the sacrifices of their brothers- and sisters-in-arms, the needless suffering of their families. The bloody Civil War is over. She downs the glass and grabs another, ignoring the judgement in the eyes of the serving staff.
She’s done the job; she knows the look. The double-edged concern for her well-being and their own, wondering whether she’ll hurt herself or just make extra work for them. For a moment she wishes her past self had had a little more sympathy. Then she wonders when they last slept through the night. She’s almost jealous.
Her distracted reminiscence ends when she sees him: through a sudden gap in the crowd, over at the edge of the room. Standing by a pillar in a blind arcade, nodding with a quiet smile while a diplomat sings a panegyric for some sector of the economy worthy of government investment. He’s a soldier who looks like a bureaucrat. A lawyer, maybe. She’s seen him only twice before.
The second time had been three nights ago. In the final push, their forces had fought their way through the palace, each gilded room and tapestried hall a step closer to victory. The bodies of the Royal Guard had piled up in doorways and behind tables turned to battlements, loyalists falling to weapons that bullets and bayonets couldn’t match. There had been a fear amongst the leadership that the Margrave would escape, but there had also been a man on the inside, an undiscovered Artist keeping close to the throne.
He had been the one to tell them of the existence of the passage. He had been the one who let them into the room. They’d given him a medal for that.
He seems so ordinary in his military whites; just another soldier of a certain age, greying at the temples, sipping his wine. The mild stoop of a man past appearances.
The first time had been different. Two years before, in the village tavern where she’d worked, he’d been incendiary: a table for a soapbox, preaching like a man on fire. To raucous applause he’d extolled the virtues of the arbeiter, the hard-working man. The man who worked with his hands to support the nation, who’d dragged their people out of the long recession through sheer force of will and back-breaking labor, never needing to speak directly of the thing they stood against: the Artists, those elites with their uncanny powers, the lives of ease and privilege they convey. Not like the hard workers. Not like us. It had been an antikunstler litany as open and emboldened as it had been terrifying.
Fists in the air and cheering, the crowd had drunk their fill and spilled out into the night while she cleared and scrubbed the tables, fearing a riot. It wouldn’t come for another eight months, but when it did it would take her family to the fires and march her feet to the doors of the Resistance. How many fuses had he lit like that? How many times had he betrayed his own kind? And why?
He’d waited for the room to clear, then asked her what she’d thought.
“I think you’re disgusting,” she’d said. Her anger had outweighed her fear.
He’d smiled like a shark and given her a generous tip, and she’d thrown it in an alms box on her way home.
In the past three days she had made quiet inquiries of the man and his actions. There were few who recognized his face, but many who remembered a man who’d come to town. Who’d stirred up trouble. Who’d made men angry. Through village and borough he’d travelled, in taverns and inns and town squares. Kicking every hornet’s nest. Waking every sleeping bear.
The Margrave had been a monster, and she bore him no sympathy; but his smiling, genocidal brutality had been made possible by one man, and one man alone.
As the speech ends and the attendees applaud, she slips quietly out of the room.
She stands in the shadows of the palace arches, the gaslight not enough to ward off the night. When the man comes out, he does so alone. She pulls back the pistol’s hammer; the fireworks will be starting soon.
She steps out of the shadows, handgun raised.
He smiles half a smile, but makes no move to run. He looks older than he had inside. Tired.
“It’s you,” he says. “I wondered who it would be, in the end.”
She doesn’t understand—is past trying to understand—and he knows it.
Explosions blossom in the sky above them, and she fires. The man crumples to the marble steps. The fireworks pause as the showmen reload.
“I pay this price by choice,” he says, as distant crowds cheer for more. “I’m glad of it. And I would pay it a thousand times again.” He takes a short, shuddering breath and forces a smile once more. “I have assured our future.”
He chokes on a laugh, blood seeping past his hand, a red flower blooming on a white field. The fireworks resume their staccato rhythm, and she can only read his lips by their light, shaping final words that will haunt her for a lifetime to come.
He says: “Ours weren’t the only dead.”
They never find his body, and the blame never falls her way. Disappearances are common in the early days after the war; stability takes time. But in the following months, as a part of the rebuilding effort, the Provisional Government conducts a demographic census.
Artists are now the majority, by a ratio of five to four.
| Richard Ford Burley (Ash to their friends) is a writer of speculative fiction and poetry as well as Managing Editor of the academic journal Ledger. They live in micropolitan New Hampshire nurturing their AuDHD brain by writing educational and municipal policy. Their two novels, Mouse and Displacement, are available in paperback and hardcover. |  |