The King is Dead, Long Live the King by Alexandra Rowland

Author:Alexandra Rowland [Alexandra Rowland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alexandra Rowland
Published: 2022-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

I was walking home one night, and the only spell I had prepared was a touch of witchfire to light my way home, anchored into a birch twig because I knew that by the end of the night I’d be too drunk and upset to cast it fresh. I’d spent a lot of my time drunk and upset since the hanging of the students. Since the moment we knew we’d been betrayed.

There were barricades up all over the place, had been for a couple weeks after our children were killed. Neighborhoods blocked themselves off and patrolled their borders to protect themselves from the unmerciful and unpredictable hand of the law, but this did nothing for them but bring them further under suspicion. I had to scramble over or around a couple of the barricades to get home, singing out the whole time who I was and what I was doing. Most of the time I wasn’t bothered too much—strangers just kept a real close eye on me, and when I got back to my own place, where they knew me, the people there would give me hand up over the pile of junk and scrap furniture and pull me inside.

That night, though, I stumbled straight into a bit of a fracas. Swarms of soldiers came up, tearing the barricades with their hands while their warmages snapped their twigs, or untied their knots, or took off the rings on their fingers and blew through them to cast the spells anchored therein.

People screamed. Ran or fought all around me, and died either way.

And the only spell I had prepared was a touch of witchfire to light my way home.

It’s a strange memory—it’s like it all happened underwater, like my pounding heart and my weak knees and shaking hands were all someone else’s.

I made a mistake, but the only other choice I saw was death.

I took the birch twig from my pocket, and held it in front of me. I snapped it and I shoved at the spell, blew it from a spark into a conflagration, and I pushed the mass of turquoise-black flames into the crowd of guards, into the warmages.

I wish that I’d spelled real fire into that twig, though it isn’t as stable and I would have had to bring a lantern with me all the same. It would have been better. It would have done more. But I suppose the witchfire did plenty. Killed people—some of the soldiers, some of the warmages, some innocent people just trying to protect themselves and the things they held dear.

And, because witchfire doesn’t burn as hot and produces no smoke, they took a long, long time to die.

When things calmed down, they came for me and found me sitting against a wall and shivering with panic or adrenaline or something. They lifted me to my feet and I felt like things were rattling around in my brain like the the stuff you find at the very bottom of your pockets—old coins and pins and stale bread crumbs and bits of string and lint.

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