The Fire Queen

Chapter 9

I spent the next four years with the bandits. It was made clear to me at the beginning that I would be responsible for myself and that I would have to prove myself as a member. Neither proved to be a challenge.

Most of what the bandits did consisted of them working for the syndicates, who were engaged in a perennial struggle for increased power, wealth and influence. As a bandit I stole, killed and sabotaged, travelling all over the kingdom with other bandits to strike at critical functions of the operations of other syndicates. The syndicates were all in league with the nobles, and whenever a syndicate suffered damage the noble that was backing them also suffered damage. The stage was being set for another civil war, this time with the nobles going into conflict amongst themselves rather than with the kingdom.

The inevitability of this civil war was such that demand for armor and weapons spiked and in the countryside peasants were being made to participate in combat drills. In the capital city, overtures were being made to skilled fighters who were being offered considerable sums of gold in exchange for aligning themselves with a particular noble. All of the bandits received this offer, and we all declined it. This civil war was the final stage of the Volstaff kingdom's plan to bring the kingdom completely to its knees so that it could be easily taken over, and none of us had any interest in being a part of that, nor did we have any interest in getting drawn into the war involuntarily. The decision was made to disband; we would all take what we had earned and go our separate ways.

During my time with the bandits there was one other person besides Uraia whom I had developed a close bond with, a young woman named Clara. Like me she had red hair and she was also the daughter of an exiled member of the king's court. After being exiled, she and her family had gone north and settled in Galand. She and Uraia started making plans for us to return north on the assumption that I would be going with them. My intention wasn't to return to the north, my intention was to escape the civil war by going elsewhere, specifically east, to the Erst kingdom. Of the three kingdoms that bordered ours it was known to be the most stable and prosperous. Because of this it attracted the most refugees and had put in place the most stringent border controls of the three border kingdoms, but there were rumors that for the right amount of money you could get in. I set off for the east prepared to use all of the gold that I had accrued as a bandit to buy my way in, and once I was in I could set about building a life for myself.

The journey east took me a month. If it had just been me and Lucy we could've gotten there much sooner, but we had to keep pace with Anbu. Arriving in the border town of Allendale, I was met by the same scene as when I had first traveled to the capital city. Outside of the town, refugees that had decided against returning home were living in camps composed of makeshift shelters. To keep the refugees out, the town had constructed a perimeter wall and anybody wanting to enter the town had to pay a toll. Once inside I found an inn where I could stable Lucy and took Anbu with me to visit the local administration building to learn what the protocol was for gaining entry to the kingdom.

"We are no longer processing refugee applications," the clerk told me.

"I had heard that for a certain fee..."

"For a certain fee you could bribe an official to grant you the necessary paperwork, but there's since been a crackdown on corruption."

"I have gold."

"I'm sorry, but we are not granting entry in exchange for payment. There is only one way to gain entrance to the kingdom as a refugee."

"And what is that?"

"To the south of here is a mountain where terrilium is mined. The mountain is actually a dormant volcano, and because of the high temperatures inside the mountain a phoenix has nested there. If you can get rid of the phoenix, allowing the miners to return to work, you'll be allowed entry and granted full citizenship."

After leaving the Administration building I returned to the inn for Lucy and rode south with her Anbu to get a look at the mountain that the phoenix had made its home. When the mountain was in view I got off of Lucy and took a seat in the shade under a tree, hoping to get a sight of the phoenix in the event it flew somewhere. I sat there waiting for a long time, time which I spent thinking about whether I was on the right path and whether I should do the sensible thing and return to the north. I hadn't been back to the north since the massacre and had planned to never go back. In the years since I had joined the bandits I had learned that the massacre had occurred because the success of the settlement was causing some agitation among the citizens of the capital city who were angry about the fact that people that were exiled were doing a better job with the settlement they'd built than was being done in the rest of the kingdom. The settlement had been massacred to quell that agitation and to silence the stories that were circulating about the settlement's prosperity being due to the presence in the settlement of a red haired girl who was the incarnation of the mythical fire queen who, according to an ancient legend, descended from the heavens draped in golden flames and saved the kingdom from invaders by engulfing the invading army in a sea of flames. My resolve to never return to the north was to ensure that nothing like what happened to the settlement happened to Galand or the Okwari villages, and for that reason I had to keep moving forward on the path that I'd chosen.