The Fires of Vengeance (The Burning, #2)

by Evan Winter

“The only way to get as far as you have, considering what they think of us, is to become undeniable.”

“It’s because the powerless, having no understanding or experience with how much real power can save or destroy, think too simply. They see things as either right or wrong, but the world and the purposes of those in it are distorted, misjudged when reduced to so basic a binary.” Tau shook his head, and testing his balance, he took a step toward Nyah. “Wrong is wrong,”

“The doors to unwanted truths are rarely locked, since so few wish to face what’s behind them.”

“And why shouldn’t you see how far we’re all capable of going to keep those we love safe?”

“That’s not how I go,” the scarred swordsman said, as if his words were power.

“Because the limits to which we’ve been yoked were never ours, and the stories we’ve been told about our nature, our insignificance, and our lack, they were never true.”

“The lie isn’t that we can’t be their equals. The lie is that they were ever anything but our equals.”

But Tau knew who decided what needed to be measured, and they’d chosen things in which they already had an advantage. They said, “This matters more than that,” making it seem as if their edicts sprang from natural law when they were little more than self-serving choices. They wrote the rules in their favor, succeeded more often than others, and pointed to that as proof of their superiority. It was all a lie.

“Tell us what you saw,” the queen said. “Rage.” Tsiora blinked at him. “And what can one do with rage?” “Everything.” “Is it like love, then?”

“Rage is love . . . twisted in on itself,” he said, using some of the words she’d spoken to him on the night Zuri died. “Rage reaches into the world when we can no longer contain the hurt of being treated as if our life and loves do not matter. Rage, and its consequences, are what we get when the world refuses to change for anything less.”

“We will wait to hear about your sword brother, Champion Solarin, because rage won’t help him tonight, but a little love just might.”

Too much had been lost, and that hurt most of all.

“My head is filled with . . . violence. Its patterns, its flow, the essence of it, and when I’m fighting”—Tau could feel his blood race as he spoke of it—“I can sense the way things will or should be. It’s like I can remember the words yet to be sung in a familiar song.”

“There must be consequences,” he said. “Evil must be punished or it will continue undeterred until it consumes all that is good.” The queen wasn’t convinced. “You do this as a holy mission to fight evil?” Tau let his eyes roam the room, wondering what to say and how much of his truth to give her. “Abasi Odili murdered my father just to make a point,” he said. “He did it with ease, because the life he was ending was not, to him, equally human. The Nobles think that we’re born feeling less, loving less, worth less, but they’re wrong, and I’m going to show them that.”

“You’ll expose evil by doing evil?” “No,” Tau said. “I’ll reclaim my humanity by destroying a man who would otherwise deny it. You can’t talk people into giving up their hold over you. You have to make them do it.” “Tau”—it was unsettling to hear his name, unadorned, from her mouth—“aren’t you simply justifying the right to do harm? And who but those who have succumbed to evil can believe they have that right?”

You say the Nobles want to make you smaller than you are, but in thinking only of revenge, you’re also doing it to yourself.

“If your ideas hold merit, they’ll win out in spite of your person.” “Yes, that’s the lie everyone unaffected by hidden hardships believes.”

I think the world is too complex for most things to be purely right or wrong. Given that, the way words, actions, or even intent is viewed depends on who is doing the viewing and on who is being viewed.”

“Is this why you think you can’t achieve all you want? You think that just because you’re a Lesser and they’re Noble, they’d kneel on glowing coals for no better reason than to prove you wrong if you said the fire was still hot? Come, now.” “You’re right, they wouldn’t do that,” Hadith said. “They’d have me walk across the coals with them as equals, me in my bare feet and them in leather boots.”

“That’s it? Nothing more to say?” “Not to those who can’t hear,”

“don’t give in to the lie that you honor the dead or Gifted Zuri Uba by closing your heart forever. Grief, anger, they’ll hold you for a time. They must. But if you let them root and fester, they’ll become a hate that will consume you.”

“Nyah told me that life, like love, is meant to be shared and that we are least linked to our own selves when we have no one with whom to share what we are. None of us are meant to go through this life alone.”

His first thought, though it shamed him, was that he could trade the animal for enough rations to feed himself, his mother, his sister, and his mother’s husband for the rest of their lives and the lives of all their children. But he was no longer Tau Tafari, the boy who needed to worry if he’d have enough to eat. For good or ill, that boy was gone.

“I’m already strong,” she said, chin out. “I’m still alive and most Nobles would be dead if they were me.” Tau blinked slowly, both acknowledging her words and wanting better for her than what was.

It was always easy to find Nobles beautiful. They were properly fed, they dressed in marvels, and they could move through the world with confidence, heads held high, treating the world as if it were fair and decent, because for them it was. Nobles had the better of everything and they wrapped themselves in that betterment, appearing to everyone else as beautiful, right, and good, just like sunlight.

It seemed strange that the animals had a better roof over their heads than anything he’d had growing up, but a lot happened around Nobles that was strange, and Duma wasn’t one to waste thoughts on foolishness he couldn’t control.

“Maybe I’m right,” she said, “or maybe coming out of bad times has always meant pushing for a place that seems too far.”

“Lady Gifted, as far as I know, the only path to becoming what others cannot is to suffer what others will not.”

“They attacked the Ndola first. The Ndola, a peaceful people with gifts ill-suited to death and its dealings, were conquered, and the Cull became their masters. “We don’t know everything that happened next. What we can tell you is that the races of man did not retaliate against the Cull. Instead, they decided that their ancient enemy must have needed the Ndola’s more fertile land for food and resources. They decided that the Ndola had none to blame but themselves for being weak enough to have been bested. “The Cull, they told themselves, were after easy prey and would stop once the weak and the indolent had been dominated. But our ancient enemies did not stop, and by the time the other races of man had accepted that the Cull never would, they were too few to stop them.

“Where we fought, the world burned, and still it was not enough.

“What does any such group, priding itself on being more than others, want?” she asked. “They wanted their claims and their beliefs about themselves to be true. They wanted to be more powerful and better than everyone else.

though the war saw humanity embrace its worst instincts, it could not overwhelm the greatest gifts the Goddess had given to the races of man—love and life.

He thrived not because his pain was gone, but because he had found a way to use it against the forces that were trying to break him.

The powerful, in Tau’s experience, kept seeing the loss of their desires as being world ending without ever once stopping to realize that for people like him, every day held that potential already.

The problem with feeling safe in a tent is that though it may hide the dangers outside, its canvas is no protection from them.

“Jabari Onai of the Nobles, what will you and yours have left, when it’s no longer possible to pretend that you’re better than people like me?”

“The things worth fighting for die in darkness if we’ll only defend them in the sun.”

“but my life has been spent learning that those who argue for the moral necessity of a fight are far better at spending lives than they are at saving them.

“I don’t believe that I’m the difference that matters, but I am the only difference I get to control. So I’ll fight, because it’s the only principled choice I can make, and doing anything less is the same as an acceptance of defeat and the admission that it’s deserved.”

“You call me a monster because I won’t let you treat me like my life is worthless, a thing to be used and thrown away?”

They could be kind and a comfort to their friends and families. But there was another truth about them as well. Nobles granted themselves a humanity that they did not extend to people like him, and because of that, they thought little of ruining or even ending a Lesser’s life.

It isn’t good enough and nothing will be for a while, because that’s part of what loss is, an absence of goodness and happiness that can’t be reasoned with or diminished.” “When does it end?” “In time.” She shook her head. “Not good enough.” “No,” he said, “it’s not.”

he tried to understand how it was possible to feel as if everything was both beginning and ending all at the same time.

“I can’t survive losing you, and there’s not much left in the world that scares me like the thought of that does.”