Page 11 of Heart of Defiance

He thinks I’m right? He’s arguing in my favor—in front of all that’s left of our town?

Did he take a blow to the head in the middle of the destruction last night?

Then the comments being tossed around penetrate my consciousness.

Norbert the old cobbler is waving his hand toward me dismissively. “We can’t trust anything that comes out of that girl’s mouth. Even her own godlen didn’t trust her enough to give her a gift.”

The crouched figures nearby sway uneasily. A woman farther back is sniffling. “The Darium empire always wins.”

One of the devouts who escaped the All-Giver’s temple dips his head. “We took one of their lives, and they took our whole town. You can’t conquer every foe.”

I feel my aunt’s piercing gaze on me before I pick out her face in the crowd. “Signy never could make anything of herself. She’s the last person any of us should be following.”

Jostein’s bright blue eyes have fixed on me again. His mouth slants at a discomforted angle. “Your dedication sacrifice was rejected?”

A heaviness presses down on my chest. I force a tight smile, wiggling my remaining toes within my boots, not that he can see them. “I asked Inganne for more creative talent. Apparently she didn’t think I’d make a good artist.”

And what that has to do with my opinions on the Darium empire, I can’t really see. But more disheartened mutters are still passing through the crowd, any rebellious energy that was left dwindling by the second.

Landric shakes his head, though his stance has already started to deflate as if he can tell this is a losing battle. “If Signy knows about anything, it’s how to survive without much support. She pulled together an entire household with the scraps everyone else threw away.”

“Because she couldn’t manage better,” someone calls out, and another burst of disparaging murmurs follows.

I suppress a wince and lower my head. The insults sting, but they’re nothing new.

What prickles deeper is the frustration that’s gripped me since the first moment I saw the Darium soldiers swing at Mom’s fountain. The frustration that’s maybe been simmering in me for longer than I knew.

How can they just give up? How can they shrug off the latest horror the Darium empire has inflicted on us on top of so many others?

The dukeling liked to call me the waif of refuse, but it’sall the rest of them who’ve been sitting down and eating a pile of shit without complaint, day after day. And now we’re absolutely mired in it.

Unless we find a way to dig ourselves out. To throw the shit right back at the pricks who buried us in it.

What do any of us have left to lose? I’ve certainly got nothing.

I square my shoulders and lift my gaze again, pitching my voice to carry. “Just listen!”

I’m still a little surprised when the barrage of voices falls silent. Not knowing how long their grace will last, I hurtle onward. “We have a chance. Even the empire knows we do. The Darium soldiers must see our rebellion as a legitimate threat or they wouldn’t have come down on us so harshly over one brief scuffle.”

“Or maybe they’re just bastards,” someone grumbles.

“No,” I say. “They’re not used to anyone fighting back. It terrifies them. They’ve gotten complacent—because we’ve gotten complacent, just taking whatever they inflict on us. They aren’t prepared for a real uprising. None of them have needed to face one before.”

The soldier next to Jostein, the one with blond hair tucked behind his ears and a roguish grin, arches a skeptical eyebrow at me. “And you think you’re in a position to face them? The entire Darium army?”

I stare steadily back at him. “Yes, I do.”

My gaze travels over the townspeople hunched all through the woods around me. “If we strike out at them again, fast and effectively, while they’re thinking they’ve cowed us, we could do some real damage. And the more we push back and tear them down, the more people from other towns will realize it’s possible and join us.”

The image unfurls in my mind’s eye, the way I can sometimes look at a cracked bucket or a tattered net and seehow it could be mended into something functional again. Veldunians standing up against Darium soldiers all across the country. Not just hundreds but tens of thousands of us, fueled by centuries of bottled anger.

My voice falters with the enormity of what I’m saying, but I push the words out. “We could… We could take our whole country back. If we’re just willing to try.”

Someone snorts, and someone else makes a scoffing sound. “That’s dreaming too big.”

But the image has taken hold of me too forcefully for me to back down. I can almost taste it, the freedom from fear and tyrannical demands. The knowledge that our home was really ours, with the rules and justice we decided on.

Where no child ever lost someone they loved because an asshole in a skeleton-painted uniform took offense.

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