“I never did this for you. I never did this for history. There’s no great sweep to any of this. Major saw a man with a weapon and acted on instinct. The grenade might have gone off and he’d have died just the same. It could have happened to anyone. I just wanted to help people. To try to make the world a little better. I like to think that if I weren’t doing this I’d be working in a soup kitchen somewhere. In fact maybe I’d have done more good if I’d worked in a soup kitchen.”
“You can’t do any good alone, Clare.”
“I think you’re the one who can’t do any good alone,” she said. She looked at him. “I have saved four hundred and thirty-two people who would have died because they did not have clean water. Because of me, forty-three people walked a different way home and didn’t get mugged or pressed into the army. Thirty-eight kitchen fires didn’t reach the cooking oil. Thirty-one fishermen did not drown when they fell overboard. I have helped two dozen people fall in love.”
His chuckle was bitter. “You were never very ambitious.”
“Ambitious enough,” she said.
“I won’t come for you again. I won’t try to save you again.”
“Thank you,” she said.
She did not watch Gerald walk away and vanish in the swoop of his cloak.
Later, looking over the village, she reached for her tin box and drew out a sugar cube that had been soaked in brandy. Crumbling it and licking her fingers, she lifted a bit of earth, which made a small girl trip harmlessly four steps before she would have stumbled and fallen into a cook fire. Years later, after the girl had grown up to be the kind of revolutionary leader who saves the world, she would say she had a guardian angel.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I awoke from a vivid dream that involved a barren, rocky shore bursting forth in a profusion of roses. The image haunted me, and I incorporated it into a short story titled “The Martyr of the Roses.” Although the story failed to find a home at the time, it sketched out the rough beginnings of a complex theology and a map of the world that I went on to explore in detail in Kushiel’s Legacy, the series of alternate historical fantasy novels that launched my career.
At some point, I fully intended to capitalize on the success of Kushiel’s Legacy and put the story back on the market, but as I continued writing the series, I made creative decisions that rendered the story noncanonical. It became a literary curiosity, the spark of inspiration that no longer fit within the framework of the narrative it engendered. And while I wanted to share it with my readers, I didn’t know what the right venue for it might be.
When Shawn Speakman contacted me regarding this anthology, I knew I’d found it. Over the years, Shawn has done so much to connect fellow fantasy writers and fans. Donating this literary curiosity is the perfect way to give thanks to Shawn for the wonderful service he provides with The Signed Page, and to give my own readers a never-before-seen glimpse into the origin of Terre d’Ange.
Just don’t ask me how House L’Envers ended up on the throne, because I honestly don’t know.
— Jacqueline Carey
THE MARTYR OF THE ROSES
Jacqueline Carey
Chrétien L’Envers sat on a window ledge in an empty tower room in the ancestral home of the House of Drozhny. From this lofty perch in the estate of the longtime governors of the city of St. Sithonia, the Dauphin of Terre d’Ange contemplated the quality of the light, which was unlike any other he had ever seen. Such things made travel worthwhile. In the south of Caerdicca Unitas, where he and Rikard Drozhny had spent two years together at the University in Tiberium, the sun sometimes beat like a hammer upon the hard-baked earth. This light was as intense, yet vaster, far vaster; no hammer, this, but an anvil. It flattened the harsh terrain and rendered the whole of St. Sithonia, with all her crags and crevasses, oddly two-dimensional.
They said in Vralia for three months a year the sun never set.
“Angelicus?”
Chrétien turned his head, smiling at his friend’s usage of the old nickname. “Yes?”
With two glasses of wine forgotten in his hands, Rikard Drozhny stood in the doorway and blinked, struck dumb for the thousandth time at the sight of his D’Angeline comrade, whose pale hair in Vralian summerlight shone the precise hue of gold reflected on a drift of winter’s snow. “I brought wine. But we should leave soon, unless you want to ride.”
“I’m sorry. Is it customary to walk?”
“It is, actually.” Trust a D’Angeline to be sensitive to nuance even in the midst of a reverie. “The Prince-Protectorate himself walks when he comes to make his pilgrimage. With,” he added, “a very large, well-armed escort.”
“Ah.”
“Yes, well. Rumour has it that this year’s will be the largest ever.”
Chrétien raised his elegant brows and swung one booted foot. “What will your father do?”
Rikard shrugged, thrusting a wineglass toward Chrétien. “What can he do? He’s the Governor of St. Sithonia, he’s sworn to uphold the Prince-Protectorate.” Their eyes met in silence as Chrétien accepted the glass. “Think what you will,” Rikard said softly, “But my father will stand or fall with Janos Vraalkan because he can do more for Vralia as the Governor of this city than he can as a dead man.”