Page 5 of The Kingdom of Flames

Several noblemen objected loudly. Then her father slammed his rod of office onto the ground. His eyes tear-filled, his voice held the darkness of a battlefield under a falling sun. “If Celestine does not sate their wants, I will see the Seasons starve. Too long have our people suffered for the whims of these demigods.”

“So be it,” Astris of the Black Banner agreed. “If their guards come next year, my mages will rip their souls from their bodies.”

“It will be our end,” a nobleman said.

“Tomorrow is my end,” her father spoke. “And a year and a day from now, these Seasons will taste the famine they have heaped upon us. Any who attempts to enter my lands after tomorrow to pay the Tithing should prepare for war. For if they do not slay me and my men, I will burn their very banner from this earth.”

Celestine held back her own tears. To watch her father’s heart, cleave itself in two before her eyes was too much.

All lords rose around the table and went to her, each taking the turn to kneel and kiss her hand. Even Whitehall, who smirked and murmured something crude that she didn’t deign to hear it.

“Thank you, my lady,” Scalehall said.

“We wish you good fortune.”

And so on.

As all men do who create a mess, they left it in the hands of a woman. Some left in shame, some left in indifference, some swore to honor her and defend her father’s decree. She embraced her father for a long time, and he wept into her shoulder, harder than even when her mother had died.

“You are my world,” he croaked. “The light of my life. Please come back to me someday. If you don’t, I’ll find a way to Calendar.”

“You have been a wonderful father” she murmured into his shoulder.

“Were that true, I would’ve found a way to make the world for you.”

Celestine dried her eyes and smiled at her father. He would be alone now, truly. “I must go, father. I know it. I just know it. Do not fall into sorrow or grief for me, for I love you greatly. Find a wife, find my friend, and look after her. In a year, I swear, you can break the keys of all women locked away. Men will toil in the fields and forest and streams and seas once again.”

Her father hugged her.

That night, Celestine walked in a daze. She had grown up in Mirrortower. But now, she felt so little time left. Word traveled fast. Everywhere she went, her people gave her boons of food and wine, of blankets to keep her warm, but she refused them all. They needed it. But their generosity steeled her.

Where she was going, she would either have everything, or need nothing in the grave.

In the dark hours, Celestine tended to the Silent. Maybe it was a way to prove they weren’t forgotten, as Whitehall had deemed them. She knew deeply she had to see them. The women who sat silently and stared at nothing, whether in melancholy or madness or the darkest sanity of knowing what had happened to them.

The people of the Painted Realm would sometimes say she asked them what happened. That they finally spoke to her. That they warned her. Some would say they had not been selected by the Seasons, and that profound rejection was what stole their voice.

But Celestine did no such thing.

She sat and tended to them, dressing and bathing and feeding them with gentle hands. The lone bride for the final Tithing spent her final night with the women who had come back from Calendar, and even if they would have spoken their secrets to her, she did not ask.

For she believed women could own anything.

Especially their own secrets.

Chapter 3

Travel to Calendar, Kneel Upon the Painted Court

The next morning, a grand procession of carriages arrived from Calendar. Each one bore the banner of the Lords of Calendar.

Riders and guards in finery stepped forth with long pikes. Their armor was polished, their skin and faces covered in soft black cloth. No one heard them arrive. No one saw where they came from. In the bleakness of their own world, these visitors from a realm of magic and gods were almost too bright to look upon. Too real, and unreal.

No one would have ever dared attack the Tithing except in these days. Celestine wondered what the price would be if the desperate men of the Painted Realm attacked the caravan.

The many guards of Calendar in their mirrored masks did not look worried. Calendar was a place only they could guide one to. Many grieving parents and siblings often looked for it, hoping to find their missing sisters and daughters after the Tithing and bride hunt. None could ever lay eyes upon that place where the Lords of Season met once each year.

Four carriages arrived for each season. The colors of each Lord of Season painted on the carriage. Celestine gazed at the vehicles. In all her life, the people of the Painted Realm called the demigods who met at Calendar Seasons, or referred to them as Lords of Summer or Spring. No one knew their names. But now, staring at the carriages, she saw their grouping and remarked on the twelve. Could she convince twelve ethereal princes of another realm to cease their conflict to spare her people?

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