Tales of the Three Kingdoms: Silver Falcon Falls

If it struck me as odd that Brass Bell would have to sneak into her own town, I didn't give the notion much consideration. Failed assassins snuck everywhere. Losers in the game of Imperial power kept their heads low and their tails between their legs. This was my new life now. I wouldn't be surprised if I was a rankless bandit by the morning.

As Brass Bell led me through the muddy streets and stall-cramped avenues of what could have been any provincial village – if not for the many stone buildings that came with a bit more Imperial patronage – it seemed for the moment that we were safe here. Windstopper and I followed the town's skulking chief to a row of stonewalled houses, through a garden gate that looked slightly more solid than the others, and up toward the main house's entrance.

We must have been outrunning the Dreadwolf's messages, and with any luck the Demon was just now kicking down the door of a palace apartment that I had long since escaped. The confusion would only be multiplied by the smoke and chaos that was my next most likely destination.

All looked quiet in Moon's Reflection in the early hours of morning, and now inside the chief's solid home, there was only a small glow beneath the dangling cookpot. I was looking forward to a breakfast and perhaps a few hours of rest before-

Movement caught my eye at the edge of the cooking area. Another shape and then another had me turning this way and that as I pulled my sword and leveled it at the man clad in gray furs who strode toward me.

I didn't recognize him, but he smiled and didn't bother drawing his weapon. Wolves now crowded every doorway. They crunched on apples, picked their fingernails with knives, spit fruit seeds. They looked for all the world like they were making themselves at home, as they often did wherever they went. But one thing was clear from their demeanor: they were not the least bit worried about me and my sword.

One step from Windstopper however made them all jump for their weapons.

"No!" I shouted to the simple, loyal man. "Leave your weapon, Windstopper. It's no use."

He looked to me, hurt and confused, as if I had somehow robbed him of his highest calling, stopping a painter just as he was picking up his brush to paint his masterpiece. He allowed his dagger-ax-anvil to fall to the floor, leaving a dent in the wood, as I threw my own weapon angrily at the feet of the wolf in front of me.

I turned to Brass Bell, as a pair of them placed fetters on me.

"You!"

The small-town chief had the gall to feign shock at my accusation. Brass Bell was still pretending to be surprised by the wolves in her home. Or was her reaction genuine?

"No," came a voice from the shadows, I knew all too well. "Me."

Out of the shadows stepped River. My River.

The wolves leered at her, but she seemed to drink in their lascivious gazes, rather than shrink from them. She even wore one of their pelts around he shoulders, staving off the morning chill of the nearby river.

I was no sparrow in a trap and she was a she-wolf, more dangerous in silks and porcelain skin than any of them were with their teeth and their claws and their armor. No, she was the dark river that swallowed us all, bird and beast alike.

Hopes and dreams, beasts and demons, they would all succumb to her fatal allure if she chose it. She could be a better kingkiller than any of us, and she knew it.

"Sorry little Sparrow," she said with a hand running down my robe to my sweaty, soot-stained chest. "I'd rather drown the world than drown in it."

"There's plenty of time for both," I snarled.

She planted a kiss on my cheek bent demurely to rekindle the coals in the hearth and place the kettle over it, as if this were just a continuation of that strange domestic dance we had done for months now.

"You bitch!" shouted Brass Bell. "How?"

There was something strange about Brass Bell's anger. Did it ring false to my ears or… No, it was that the wolves hadn't bothered to bind her. It was the fact that she was a seer and her Mandate should have seen this coming.

"You can drop the act, my dear," said River. "We have them well in hand, now."

I looked back to Brass Bell who looked down at her feet in such shame that I almost believed it for one last second. But when the chief looked up she was smiling triumphantly, as if she and River were just two old friends meeting for tea.

Accordingly, River handed Bell a steaming cup.

"Ugh," said the village chief, rolling her shoulders, as if sloughing off an actor's costume. "What a night."

Of course she had seen this coming! But there was no danger to her, no alarms going off in her head because this was all according to plan.

Her plan or River's plan? It didn't matter much, in the long run. But if I was going to be torn apart by the Demon or Dreawolf I at least wanted to know who I should curse with my last agonizing breath.

I was so powerless, so impotent, so accursedly stupid! I opened my mouth again to give voice to my general rage, but a first slammed against my open jaw. I was on my knees without remembering how I got there.

There were the vague sounds of a struggle, and through clotted, murky vision I saw Windstopper free from his bonds, a half dozen wolves draped across him and still flinging fists this way and that. The other half dozen drew their swords.

"Stop," I said, too quietly. No one heard me and the wolves began to close in on my bodyguard, teeth and blades glimmering.

"St-" I shouted. The effort made the darkness close in at the edges of my vision and I wasn't sure if I had been able to finish the command. But Windstopper was still fighting and the Black Wolves raised their swords higher ready to come stabbing down on his back.

"STOP!" I bellowed. Windstopper froze, a pair of wolves around his ankles and another two dangling from one arm and his neck. The wolves surrounding him looked from Windstopper, to me, and back to Windstopper. I could see the fear and bloodlust in their eyes and knew that they teetered on the edge of skewering the big man anyway.

"I'll go," I said to the pack leader. "Leave him be."

The pack leader leaned in and slid a knife up under my eyelid. "Oh, you'll go alright."

"No one's going anywhere until I've had my tea," River said, sipping as casually as if this were typical morning conversation. She was seated primly on a cushion by the growing fire and Brass Bell added another log before folding up next to her.

"You haven't eaten have you?" the mayor asked.

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"I could eat," said River.

"There's a coop out back," Brass Bell went on. "How about some eggs?"

"That sounds lovely."

"Could you…" Brass Bell looked up and seemed to remember we were there, still frozen in mid-fight. "Oh yes. Take them below. And then fetch us some eggs, would you. I'll get the rice going."

She said this last to River as if the rest of it were a foregone conclusion.

"Lovely set-up you have here," said River, continuing to prattle on like a schoolgirl with an old classmate as Dreadwolf's men began to drag me and Windstoper away.

"The house comes with the post of course, but there are certain… disadvantages to living in what essentially serves as a town hall. There's a rather morbid prison in the cellar." She handed a ring of keys to the pack leader.

"That must get terribly cold," continued River.

"Oh yes. But at least…"

The rest of the conversation faded as the wolves forced me out back and toward a hole on one side of the house, just past the chicken coops.

"Go where they lead you, Windstopper!" I shouted behind me to Windstopper, worried that the wolves might still decide that one bodyguard's life wasn't worth the trouble of towing him around, especially with his prodigious strength. "He'll cooperate so long as I tell him to!"

The wolves snickered. How much desperation was in my voice at this point? How weak did I sound? I was past caring. They'd beaten me. River had beaten me. I didn't care if they knew it, so long as there was still some way out of this for Windstopper.

This is indeed a morbid prison, some part in the back of my mind thought. There was only a single iron cell set into a leaking stone wall. It smelled like the refuse at the bottom of a river, which made sense because this close to the water, that's probably what was oozing through the mortar. No one would last long down here, not that it mattered for me.

Iron bars slammed home, a lock fell into place, and just like that our fate was all but sealed.

The guards left us alone at this point and I wondered idly at just how strong Windstopper actually was. He had been dragging two men in full armor when I first met him, and a moment ago he had still been fighting with five men draped around his shoulders. Could he bend iron bars? Pull the house from its foundations? Hurl the cornerstones through a pack of soldiers?

I was still wondering at exactly how an escape attempt with Windstopper at its core might go, or at least I thought I was, when footsteps on the dank cobbles pulled me from my stupor. I shook myself. I was freezing and stiff now. Had it only been moments, or had I lost track of time. Had I lost consciousness without realizing it? Looking at Windstopper and realizing that he had moved without me noticing, I figured that fist across my jaw must have done a lot more damage than I had thought.

The figure that entered the small provincial prison was not carrying a lantern, and she whispered, "We don't have long. They're eating now then they'll take you back to their master."

It was Brass Bell again. My head was spinning and not just from the convoluted game this woman was playing. "What are you-"

"Shh. At this point I'm considering letting them take you," she hissed. "So no questions from you. I only want one answer. What are you going to do now?"

"Die horribly," I said, "in all likelihood."

"No, idiot," said Brass Bell. "If I decide that instead of a nice fat promotion and a guarantee that the wolves never come to my town again, and I'm not sure why I wouldn't leap at that deal, if I decide that I'd rather let you go free what are you going to do next?"

I didn't respond immediately. Was she giving me a chance to pitch her on the value of my life?

"You're running out of time," said Brass Bell, voice low.

I mustered all of my remaining strength. The next few words out of my mouth were going to be more important than any battle I had ever been in, and the room still refused to stop spinning.

I sat forward, trying to catch a sliver of light from the cellar door and look Brass Bell in the eyes, bruised, bloody, and muck-covered though I was.

"I'm going back to the Plains of the Falcon. I'm going to raise an army. And a year from now, maybe two, I'm going to ride into the City of Lanterns at the head of a hundred thousand soldiers, sitting atop my horse next to Noble Lion, White Stallion, and whoever else wants this bastard's head. After that…"

I shrugged and let it hang, sitting back into the shadows of the cell.

I had said it all like a statement of fact, a foregone conclusion, and there was a lot more confidence in my voice than I actually felt at the moment. This could have been an elaborate interrogation technique on Brass Bell's part, a way to glean my exact level of treason before handing me over to the Prime Minister, but I was past caring.

Noble Lion had escaped without me, River had turned against me, and any other friends I thought I had in the capital weren't coming to save me.

Yet, there must have been something I said that Brass Bell needed to hear, because she pulled that old, tarnished chain back out from around her neck. She flipped a catch in her pendant and out popped a cleverly disguised key, a miniature, no doubt, to one of the many on the keyring she had handed to the wolves.

"You don't think I'd have a spare key to my own dungeon?" said Bell, opening the cell. "It's the first place they'd put me if the rebels ever took the village. Now move. The stables are right around the corner."

The horses were already saddled and who was waiting there on one of the horses but River, still in her Gray Wolf shawl holding Windshear by the reins.

"You!" was all I could think to say.

"Yes, of course me," she said. "Now shut up and get on before they hear you."

I hadn't wanted to believe it… I can't believe I ever did believe that River would sell me out to Dreadwolf, but my head was spinning so fast now I would probably accept anything. River had saved me, then pretended to sell me out just to save me all over again. Brass Bell truly had been as surprised as I had been, she had just figured out the game sooner. I tried to organize the chain of events that had led to such a convoluted plan, but…

Forget it. My head was pounding and there were Gray Wolf soldiers eating breakfast in the house and we just needed to get out of here as fast as possible.

But first…

"Hold on," I whispered, as Brass Bell brought a horse up for Windstopper. The village chief and my bodyguard looked up at me.

"Windstopper?" I said.

"Hmph."

"Can you bring me that stone?"

Everyone looked at me like I had hit my head. I had. But I knew what I was saying, now.

Windstopper's only question was, "Which Stone."

"That one there. The cornerstone." It weighed perhaps as much as a horse, and had most of the house's weight on top of it besides.

Windstopper snorted an affirmative and set his brow. Heaven bless him, Windstopper never balked at anything. I just ordered him to lift a house and he just took it as a challenge.

River and Bell looked at me. I held up a hand and said, "Just be ready to move."

Windstopper rubbed his hands together, settled into a deep squat, and then wrapped his brawny arms around the corner of the house.

Brass Bell mounted up and pulled alongside me and River, a fourth horse – a very nervous stallion – saddled and ready for the big man.

"You're coming with us?" I asked Brass Bell.

"I'm not staying to explain your disappearance to the wolves."

I nodded at that. "Good. Because you're about to be homeless."

Windstopper, meanwhile, was grunting at the cornerstone. Nothing. He growled his effort. Nothing. I was just about to tell him to stop before the wolves inside heard, when there was a grating as if from the turning of a millstone. Mortar hissed around Windstopper and a heartbeat later there was a prodigious rumbling. Dust fell out of every crack between the heaving bodyguard and the roof.

As Windstopper lifted the hewn boulder out of its place in the wall, and began to turn with the incredible bulk, the building sagged to the tune of a dozen startled voices from within. Then it cracked and crumbled inward in a shower of dust and sand.

When the wave of debris subsided and I could see again, Windstopper was standing before me with the cornerstone, a huge smile on his face.

"I Brought You The Stone."

"Thank you Windstopper. I just wanted to see it. You can throw it back."

"Oh. Kay."

He did. It rolled to where the house was in shambles, timbers and stone still settling in atop the wolves who hadn't had a chance to make it out. Some were screaming in surprise, fear, and possibly – hopefully – pain.

Windstopper tried a few times to mount his horse, but an inexperienced rider, he didn't get it until I wrenched him upward from my own mount and held him steady while his overburdened mount picked up speed. By then, the whole town of Moon's Reflection had run out into the dust-strewn street to witness the apparent catastrophe of the chief's house collapsing.

By then, we were long gone.