The Fire Queen

Chapter 6

We saw Uraia at the settlement a lot less often than we used to. Her reason for her long absences was that with things being so bad in the kingdom she and the rest of the bandits were free to enter the kingdom and conduct their business there for as long as they wanted. What had become especially lucrative for the bandits were the underground fights that were being held in the city. These fights took place in different locations throughout the city to maintain secrecy and the bets that were placed on these fights produced a huge pot of which the winning fighter received a large share. The fights were to the death, with fighters being able to choose whatever weapon they wished to use for the fight.

Uraia had competed in three fights so far that she had won easily. Her feeling was that the fighters that she'd fought were just thugs that had been recruited by the syndicates that ran the fights. They were not true warriors, and as such were easy opponents. After seeing one of her fights in which she dispatched with her opponent in no time at all, one of the syndicates made a lucrative offer to Uraia to fight for him, which she turned down. The syndicates were dangerous people, she said, the kind that are best kept away from. According to Uraia, lawlessness had completely taken over the capital city, with syndicates in control of all of the major functions of the city. For my father, who had dedicated over three decades of his life to fighting in service of the king's dream of peace and unity, the news about the state of the kingdom was difficult to take.

Having read all of my father's diaries from his time in the military, I understood how brutal the civil wars had been that the king had fought to subjugate the nobles and unite the kingdom. The kingdom had now once again been broken up into different states, with the noble families returning to their previous positions of power as State Regents. They had used their reacquired power to reverse nearly all of the reforms that the king had instituted following the end of the wars. The most consequential of these reforms that had been rolled back was the king's decision to free the citizens that were indentured to landowners and to turn that land over to the formerly indentured citizens for them to work for themselves. The land reform program had been a success but when the nobles returned to power the first thing they did was to strip the freed citizens of their rights and seize their land. Refusing to return to being indentured, most of the peasant farmers chose to flee either for the nearest border or for the Northlands. This mass emigration precipitated a refugee crisis and a food crisis which compounded the refugee crisis. Everything that we heard from Uraia was nothing that we hadn't heard before from exiles and refugees that had come to the Northlands, it was just that every time we received news about the kingdom it was about things getting worse in ways which were entirely foreseeable and thus preventable if only there was strong and capable leadership that was willing to take the necessary action to halt the kingdom's precipitous descent.

My father's suspicion was that the person behind all of this was not the queen but rather a man named Cornelius Vanbilt, a nobleman who, against all advice to the contrary, the king added to his court to placate the nobles and bring the wars officially to an end. Nobody trusted Vanbilt. He cared nothing for the king or the kingdom, his only interest was in restoring to the other nobles that which they had lost, and everybody could see that all that he was doing was waiting for his chance. My father guessed that with the queen assuming all of the decision making responsibilities, Vanbilt had seen his chance and taken it. With the silver tongue that he possessed it wasn't hard for my father to imagine Vanbilt inveigling out of the queen the return of nobles' rank, property and privileges. With the kingdom grappling with an emigration crisis and a food crisis, my father's prediction was that foreign involvement and interference in the kingdom is what would come next, in which case the kingdom may be too far gone for a new ruler chosen by the Overseer to save it when the king eventually passed.

I could feel my father's frustration at his powerlessness to do anything about what was happening in the kingdom. He started to retreat, pulling away from settlement business and withdrawing into himself. After seeing what all the news of the kingdom's decline was doing to my father, I decided that I needed to see it for myself. The next time I saw Uraia I asked her if it would be okay for me to come with her the next time she traveled to the capital city, to which she responded that if it was okay with my father then I was welcome to come with. My father's trust in Uraia was absolute; as long as I was with her he saw no reason to worry. I left Anbu behind at the settlement and Uraia and I rode out on our teewahs. This was my first time leaving the Northlands since we'd been exiled, and I was fascinated to see how much things had changed since we'd left. Riding our teewahs it took us two days to reach Galand where we rendezvoused with some other bandits who were also heading to the capital city. We left our teewahs in Galand and made the rest of journey on horseback.

Galand now effectively belonged to the bandits. The town had been deserted and the bandits had used their resources to establish themselves there. When Uraia and I arrived in the town it was populated by many more people besides the bandits, people that had been on their way to the Northlands but had decided to remain in Galand rather than take their chances in the wilderness.

"Your father's work at the settlement is what inspired us to make this place livable for all of these people," Uraia said to me.

Uraia warned me that the city we were traveling to was not the same city that I remembered from before we were exiled. When the capital city came into visual range it looked the same as I remembered, but as we got closer to the city the reality of the kingdom's decay became apparent. In the fields and forests on the outskirts of the city people were living in shanties that they had constructed from whatever materials they could get their hands on.