The Fire Queen

Chapter 1

PART 1

I remember the day that we left for the north like it was yesterday. My father, a general in the king's army, had been exiled to the Northlands by the queen, who had taken advantage of the king's ailing faculties to usurp the throne. My father was exiled for the crime of treason, for his supposed involvement in a plot to assassinate the king. Nearly all of the high ranking members of the king's court were accused of similar crimes and punished with exile to the Northlands.

The Northlands were known to be cold and barren, and inhabited by savages. Our exile, then, was tantamount to a death sentence, at least that's the way it seemed to those of us that had no firsthand knowledge of the Northlands. During his time in the army my father had participated in several expeditionary missions to the Northlands and he assured us that living there wasn't going to be as hard as we had been led to believe. There were rivers and plenty of animals to hunt, he told us; once we had shelter we would be fine. He also assured us that our exile would not last long. The queen, being illegitimate, was ruling without the blessing of the Overseer, and without the blessing of the Overseer the kingdom was doomed to suffer under her rule, and it would only be a matter of time before she was forced to vacate the throne.

I was afraid of what awaited us in the Northlands but I chose to put my trust in my father. My mother, however, was not assuaged by my father's assurances. From the beginning she had blamed him for our exile, saying that he could have easily sworn fealty to the queen and spared them from all of this but had chosen to put his pride and sense of honor before his family. Her anger at my father and her fear of what awaited us in the Northlands only increased as we got closer to the day of our departure.

We left the capital city of Glendale as part of a caravan that consisted of seven other families that had also been exiled. Each family brought two wagons with them, one for them and one for their provisions. Included amongst the provisions were weapons for us to defend ourselves with in the event of us coming under attack from the bandits that lived in the caves beyond the Rhume salt flats. If such an attack were to occur everyone with combat training would have to take up arms and defend the caravan, and that included me. I was fifteen years old and had been training with my father since I was eight. He had trained me in archery, staff combat and sword combat. My training up to that point had been relatively easy. That, he informed me, was going to change when we got to the Northlands.

It took us a week to reach Galand, a small mining town that was the only town north of the capital city. We spent the night there, replenished our provisions and took on enough water to last us for the duration of the trip across the salt flats. In the morning, when it was time to move out, the members of the caravan were asked if any of them wished to turn back, because there would be no turning back once we hit the salt flats. Two families said that they wanted to go back, their reason being that if the rest of the journey was going to be harder than the journey to Galand then they would rather go back to Glendale and take their chances there. My father expected that this would be the case and he bore no hard feelings toward them, nor did he bear any hard feelings toward my mother when she said that she also wished to go back. We'd thought that once we had left she would accept the reality of our exile, but she was too scared, believing that the only thing that awaited us in the Northlands was death. She asked me to come back with her and I said no. I was resolved to keep going all the way to the Northlands and trusted my father to get us all there safely. I stepped away from my mother at the moment of parting when she tried to hug me. I couldn't forgive her for what she was doing and I wanted her to just leave. I never saw her again, and I never learned what became of her.

We departed from Galand and began the long trek across the Rhume salt flats, a vast expanse of land that had had its natural beauty stripped away by the mining activities that were responsible for Galand's establishment and expansion. Crossing the giant salt flats would take us another week, and would be the greatest strain on our provisions. The good news, my father said, was that while on the salt flats we had no reason to fear attack by bandits. The bandits stayed away from the salt flats because there were no places for them to hide. The bandits would become a threat when we left the salt flats.

The salt flats, my father explained, represented a kind of border. The kingdom had no interest in anything beyond the salt flats, considering the area beyond it to be worthless. The land beyond the salt flats was littered with rock formations, and one could only dig one foot beneath the soil before hitting rock. The land was unsuitable for farming, and geology surveyors had deemed the rock worthless, as such, the kingdom saw no reason to expand into these lands. The bandits lived in the caves that were found in the larger rock formations. They were able to live out there because they had managed to domesticate the teewahs, large flightless birds with strong legs that had a large hump on their back in which they stored water. By riding the teewahs the bandits were able to cross the salt flats in as little as half a day. The bandits would travel south and carry out raids on convoys travelling between Galand and the capital city, then use the teewah's speed to quickly cross the salt flats and put themselves out of reach. The bandits would either take what they had stolen and sell it in the capital city weeks later or they would travel to the Northlands and use it to trade with the Okwari for food and other essentials. It was unclear who exactly the bandits were. My father's suspicion was that they were societal outcasts: ex-convicts, disgraced soldiers, people that owed money, that sort. I asked my father if whether the fact that we were outcasts as well might lead the bandits to spare us, to which my father responded that taking that chance would be far too risky; if we were to come into contact with the bandits we had to be ready to defend ourselves.

On the other side of the salt flats we were confronted by terrain that was uneven and littered with jagged rock formations protruding from the ground. Because of the challenging terrain of the land our only way forward with the wagons was to use the road that had been established by the army's expedition force. Using the established road made us sitting ducks for the bandits, but we had no other options. Only minutes after we had begun travelling on the road, my father spotted something.

"Left side, on the crest of that hill."

Far in the distance, a bandit riding a teewah was watching us.

"Are they going to attack us?" I asked my father.

"Not now, they'll keep following us until nightfall, then make their move when we've stopped for the day."

"What are we going to do?"

"Whatever we can to fight them off, which won't be much."

We kept travelling, and the bandit on the teewah kept following us and watching us. The closer we got to nightfall, the more afraid I became. The danger that we were in suddenly became real to me. I could feel my father's fear, the man I had always thought of as being fearless. There were probably more bandits beyond the hill that the bandit that was tracking us was walking along; our ability to defend ourselves depended on how many. We pushed on until the sun started going down, at which point we had no choice but to stop and set up camp for the night. My father said that he would stay awake for as long as he could to keep watch, but after a long hard day of travelling he wouldn't be able to stay awake for very long. Too anxious to sleep, I stayed awake with my father. We sat looking up at the stars and talked about what awaited us in the Northlands if we were able to make it there. He explained to me that the people that were referred to as savages were a race known as the Okwari that had dark hair, swarthy skin and were very tall. They had one point inhabited the entire kingdom but were pushed further and further north by the expansionist policies of previous rulers until there was nowhere left for them to go but the Northlands, where they were assured they wouldn't be bothered.

It had been two years since the last time my father had ventured to the Northlands. During his expeditions he had developed a relationship with one of the Okwari chiefs, a man named Kendor, who he hoped would help us to get settled. The winters were going to be the hardest part of living in the Northlands. The Okwari weren't an agrarian people, they were hunter-gatherers, as such they didn't stockpile grain to consume during the winter but rather went out in the snow to hunt for whatever animals they could find. We would be doing the same, which was why the most important thing that I could do was to continue to improve my archery skills.