The Orphan and the Queen, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by D.J. Molles Books LLC
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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
Book Cover by Tara Molles
Maps by D.J. Molles, Tara Molles, Kathryn English
ISBN Print Paperback: 9798334859692
ASIN B0DCDJZ8SN
First edition 2024
Contents
Full Map of Eormun
Full Map of Leftland
1. Previously, in Ashes of Eormun:
2. Chapter 1
3. Chapter 2
4. Chapter 3
5. Chapter 4
6. Chapter 5
7. Chapter 6
8. Chapter 7
9. Chapter 8
10. Chapter 9
11. Chapter 10
12. Chapter 11
13. Chapter 12
14. Chapter 13
15. Chapter 14
16. Chapter 15
17. Chapter 16
18. Chapter 17
19. Chapter 18
20. Chapter 19
21. Chapter 20
22. Chapter 21
23. Chapter 22
24. Chapter 23
25. Chapter 24
26. Chapter 25
27. Chapter 26
28. Chapter 27
29. Chapter 28
30. Chapter 29
31. Chapter 30
32. Chapter 31
33. Chapter 32
34. Chapter 33
35. Chapter 34
36. Chapter 35
37. Chapter 36
38. Chapter 37
39. Chapter 38
40. Chapter 39
41. Chapter 40
42. Chapter 41
A Note From D.J. Molles
About The Author
Also By D.J. Molles
Previously, in Ashes of Eormun:
Many generations ago, it began with two very unlikely allies. One was the Chief of a region known as Brymsland. His name was Curn. The other was a pagan priest. His name was Beficien. Curn saw the pagans as troublesome to his rule, and was intent on eradicating their priests, and therein, their entire religion. But Beficien was spared. In Beficien, Curn saw not a threat to his rule, but an opportunity. Because Beficien had found a way to harness the magical powers of the draeids–mysterious peoples born with the ability to move things with their minds. Beficien had discovered that the ashes of draeids could be alchemized, and their powers bottled up to be used in all manner of ways.
Allying himself with the priest, Curn appointed Beficien the religious leader of something that would come to be known as the Church of Alchemy. Beficien built for Curn weapons of war, powered by the ashes of draeids. With those weapons, Curn’s army became unstoppable, and he conquered all the other regions on the continent of Eormun. Fenland, Rightsbrim, Auldland, Drugoth, and Haeda–one by one, they all fell to Curn the Conqueror, and from the rubble, he built something new: The Brannic Empire.
A shadowy organization called the Seekers rose up to assist the Church of Alchemy in hunting draeid children. Once captured, they would be delivered to the House of Draeids, imprisoned until they came of age and were harvested for their ashes.
New ways to use alchemy were discovered. It could heat homes, and pump water, and light streets. And so, a primitive and warlike society found themselves suddenly thrust into a technological revolution. Drunk on all of this unprecedented progress, all the people wanted was more, more, more. Even if it meant giving up their own children to get it.
But only one in ten children were born a draeid, and that was not enough to feed their ever-growing appetite. This created a crisis for the Church of Alchemy. As the sole possessors of the secrets of alchemy, they’d grown powerful, ruling hand-in-hand with the Brannen. But that rule was threatened by dwindling supplies of ash, and increasing demand.
Then, explorers discovered a new continent. A place they called “Leftland.” A place where every single inhabitant seemed to possess draeidic powers. In Leftland, the Church had found all the magical ash they could ever ask for.
Crusades were mounted for the sole purpose of ravaging that foreign populace and harvesting as many of its native peoples as they could kill and burn. For any that might balk at the cruelty of it all, the Church made two things into unimpeachable doctrine: First, that it was their duty to their god, Feor, to hunt all draeids and put them to the flame. And second, that the Leftlanders were not really people, but rather mindless animals. They were simply clockwork golems, the rumor went. And so the Leftlanders became known as “Tickers.”
Into this world of feverish excitement for more and more alchemic technology, a new Brannen rose to power. At only twenty, Annistis Fyrngelt was not only the youngest Brannen ever to rule the empire, but also the first woman to sit the throne. In order to gain the support of a dubious populace, Annistis gave them what they wanted: More progress, bought with the ashes of the innocent.
But after two very profitable crusades to Leftland, the Church had begun to wonder: How big was this continent of Leftland? And how many Tickers were there? Were they at risk of hunting the Tickers into extinction?
Because of this, the Church decried Annistis’s Third Crusade. But Annistis had already made promises to her people, and she didn’t dare break them. Against the Church’s wishes, she sailed to Leftland, only to discover that the Tickers, having been massacred twice before, had done what no one thought they were capable of doing: They’d fought back.
The resistance was unexpected, and its consequences were disastrous for the Third Crusade. Sailing back to her empire in disgrace, Annistis landed to find that the Church had been working hard in her absence, convincing the populace that she’d gone mad–that the horrors of war and the shame of her defeat at the hands of the Tickers had broken her frail, lady’s mind. With this as their justification, they deposed Annistis and locked her away. Then they established her cousin, Morric, as the new Brannen. Morric was generally regarded as little more than a puppet for the Church. But that was what the Church wanted–complete and total control over the Brannic Empire.
Then came the Fourth Crusade to Leftland. A more measured approach, the Church intended to harvest only a few large cities, and to take several months to map the continent and determine its population.
Fleeing a broken family and a life of regrets, Sergeant Lochled Thatcher signed up for the Fourth Crusade, only to find himself saddled with a young woman named Rony–a swineherd with no experience at war. After successfully keeping her alive through the invasion, Lochled’s squad and two others were assigned to the mapping detail. While the rest of the army established a foothold on the coast, they would plunge deep into the heart of Leftland with a priest named Ord Griman, who would map the continent and tally its population.
But then Annistis Fyrngelt, known as the Mad Queen, escaped her confinement. Fearing that Annistis would attempt to sail to Leftland and recruit the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade to fight for her, the Church decided to limit the Fourth Crusade to a single month.
Now on a heavily-truncated timeline, the mapping detail was directed to work its way quickly across the mysterious continent. But fractious leadership and bad blood began to take its toll. Lochled found himself increasingly possessed by the conviction that the Tickers were not as mindless as the Church claimed, while innocent little Rony discovered that she might have a knack for killing after all.
Then came the mutiny. Two squads, dissatisfied with being assigned to the mapping detail, attempted to murder Seeker Kayna Redstone and the detachment’s commanding officer, Captain Hotsteel. They quickly found that, while old and filled with doubts, Lochled was still every bit the man that had earned the dreaded name “Redskin.” As though possessed by daemons, Lochled slaughtered them mercilessly. But after his blood cooled, he found himself confronted by the impending murder of two innocent Ticker children.
Unable to turn his back on them, Lochled saved the Ticker children. But in order to do so, he was forced to kill Hotsteel, who’d been intent on executing them. Knowing he would be charged with treason if caught by the army, Lochled fled into Leftland with the two children, not realizing that Kayna Redstone was tracking him.
Which left only two survivors in the place where the mutiny had occurred: the priest, Ord Griman, and the inexperienced young woman, Rony Hirdman. After rejoining the army, Ord was filled with his own doubts about Church doctrine, and decided to sail back to the Empire. But Rony was given a choice: She could go with him, and return to her failing swine farm. Or she could remain in this hell called war, accept a sergeant’s commission, and see where this knack for killing might take her.
Meanwhile, back in Eormun, the pillars of the Brannic Empire have begun to shift and crack. The base of lies and cruelties on which the whole thing was built are just now showing the first signs of impending collapse…
Chapter 1
The priestess demanded that Vera get up from the stone bench, but Vera ignored her. The old hag would find out soo
Instead, she stared through the metal bars that surrounded the courtyard of the House of Draeids. On the other side of the cobbled street, a man stood, staring right back at her.
It was very strange. Vera’s mind filled with images that she supposed her own imagination had conjured. In those images, it was almost as though she were looking at herself through the man’s eyes.
Her mind did that sometimes. But Vera just assumed that’s how it was for everyone.
From Vera’s perspective, she saw a man that was not old, but certainly not young anymore. He looked like a fighting man, with his steels in his belt, and the hair on the sides of his head and cheeks closely shaved, while his beard remained long, and the hair on the top of his head was braided. He wore a soldier’s tunic—gray, with some black stripes across it to denote the man’s rank, though Vera didn’t know what they meant.
He was headed to the Bransport docks, no doubt, where the armada assembled for the Fourth Crusade to Leftland was being filled with men just like him.
And he looked terrified.
From his perspective, she saw herself through those iron bars—even saw the priestess, all robed in vermillion, hovering over Vera and looking furious. Odd. It seemed the man saw her as far younger than her actual age of fifteen. Saw her almost as a girl, instead of a newly-budded woman. Pale skin without a wrinkle on it. White blonde hair in a mane that caught the sun and made it seem to shine. And her cold, blue eyes.
The two of them couldn’t have been more different, and yet they shared something in that moment. Something that was hard to pin down at first. Until Vera realized the man wasn’t terrified to be going off to war.
He was, in fact, terrified for her.
More images cascaded through her mind.
Images of herself. Fire all around her. Blackening the white gown that all the girls in the House of Draeids wore. Singeing her hair until her whole scalp was just a charred dome of peeling flesh.
She saw herself screaming as she was rendered down to ash.
Her stomach twisted, and she began to tremble.
“Vera!” Theyna Gernid Potter clapped her hands in front of Vera’s face, trying to snap her out of it. “Get up this instant, impudent girl!”
A new image came to Vera—this one from Gernid’s perspective: The priestess snatching her up by the arm and hauling her off the stone bench.
If she did that, Vera knew the little pad of cloth she had stuffed between her thighs to hide her bleeding would fall out, oh-so-clearly stained with red.
Vera felt her nostrils flare and her breathing quicken. The man’s fear became her fear. Or perhaps it had been hers all along. A fear that had gripped her since the moment she’d awoken the previous night to feel the trickle of something between her legs.
She’d known putting the scrap of rag there wouldn’t hide it forever. She’d known she was simply delaying the inevitable. It was just that, after being an orphan in the House of Draeids for so long, she’d become obsessed with doing anything she could to make Theyna Potter’s life harder.
Mystified by her disobedience, Gernid followed Vera’s gaze. The priestess and the soldier locked eyes for a moment. Gernid gave him a respectful nod.
Then the man spun, as though he’d caught fire himself, and started stalking away with a sort of rushed, unsteady gait, as though he were drunk. Or perhaps in a panic. Or perhaps both.
Gernid’s eyes snapped back to Vera, narrowing to angry little slits. She’d had enough of Vera’s stalling. The woman’s arm darted out and snatched Vera up, just like Vera had imagined she would.
She was always shocked at how strong the thin woman was when she got to manhandling Vera. The priestess lifted her clear off the bench with just that one, wiry arm, then stood Vera on her feet.
Vera clenched her thighs together in one last desperate effort.
But it didn’t matter.
Gernid’s eyes went to Vera’s backside, and then widened.
“I see,” the priestess said.
She must’ve bled through. That was why they made the girls wear the white gowns after all—so they couldn’t hide it when their first blood came.
Panic rose in Vera, like the flames that would meet her that very night. She thought about running, and she thought about fighting, and she thought about clawing the priestess’s eyes out…
But then, all at once, it burned out. She sagged in Gernid’s grip, and began to sob.
Through her tear-blurred vision, she saw that Gernid’s face was no longer flushed with anger. She beamed at Vera like a proud mother.
“Oh, dry your eyes now, cully,” Gernid said, soft and soothing. “It is a wonderful and beautiful thing to sacrifice your life in service to the Empire.”
Chapter 2
Vera sat on a chair in Gernid’s chambers, staring across the small wooden table that separated her from the discerning eyes of the priestess.
Why wasn’t Vera angry? Why wasn’t she ferocious in her will to survive? Why wasn’t she fighting—or at the very least, running?
Because she was numb. That’s what the House of Draeids did to you. It wasn’t really an orphanage. It was a storeroom. A place to put things and forget about them until their hour of use.
Eventually, every child in this place came to the realization that they weren’t really people. They had no power over their own lives. They were just potential power for others. Locked away until that potential could be harvested.
Over time, that stripped their will to fight. Even their will to live. Complacency became mindless cooperation. Every day, boys and girls walked on their own two feet into the Burners, when they should have been kicking and screaming and fighting to get away.
That’s what they’d done to Vera. They’d taken a savage, pagan Fen, and turned her into another mindless puppet for the Church of Alchemy.
It made her think of that poor bastard she’d been staring at earlier. On his way to be another sort of mindless puppet. The killing kind. Though he might die just as surely as Vera would.
When he was spluttering out his last bloody breaths on some foreign battlefield, would they tell him it was a wonderful and beautiful thing to sacrifice his life in service to the Empire?
Gernid leaned back in her chair, causing the wood to creak.
It must’ve been a poorly-made chair, as Gernid couldn’t have weighed much at all.
“Who gave you the rag?” Gernid asked. Her tone had changed. The proud mother was gone now. This was the mistress of the house. All business. Getting to the bottom of things.
Vera considered lying, but it didn’t really matter. Hayla had given her the rag, but Hayla was already dead. Burned to ashes only a few months earlier.
Why not lie anyways? Why not make Gernid’s life more difficult one last time?
But Vera had the erroneous hope that she might still get out of this, if she played nice, and acted very reasonable and cooperative.
“Hayla,” Vera finally answered. “It was Hayla that gave me the rag.”
The priestess frowned at her.
Vera realized she’d forgotten to use Gernid’s title, and swore inwardly. “Sorry. Theyna.”
Gernid relaxed a bit, though her expression remained suspicious. “Hayla made her sacrifice three months ago, cully. How long have you been hiding your first blood?”
The possibility that Vera had been hiding it for months on end clearly concerned the priestess a great deal. It would be a mark against her if she’d allowed one of her draeid wards to trick her for so long.
“Only since last night, theyna,” Vera said.
“Ah.” Gernid sighed. “And why would you hide such a thing? You know that it is your destiny to sacrifice yourself. That is not something to shy away from. It is something to face, head-on, with pride. Like that soldier you were looking at earlier—proud, and eager to be off to serve the Empire with honor.”
Vera didn’t think the man had been eager or proud. Frankly, he’d looked tired, and ill-at-ease.
“Theyna,” Vera began, choosing her words carefully. “I apologize for hiding it from you. It’s only that…I know I’m not a real draeid, and I simply wouldn’t want my ashes to spoil the Church’s alchemy. On account of me not having the magic.”
