The Hero of Glasire

by Becca Dwight

in Issue 160, May 2025

The latest rebel venture in the city had been a snatch-and-grab, and the General made my team, but mostly just me, stay behind. So our first glimpse of Tema Blystone, Baron of Moorac, Hero of Glasire, the fabled Hero Foretold, was through the slit into the veritable prison cell we fancied up just for him. As I watched, he rolled off his cot, threw up, and passed out in his own vomit. 

“Empress addicted him to sage to control him,” Kemmy said. Sage being what we called the drug people liked to smoke because it made them both happy and better at whatever they desired before taking the drug. At least, happy and better until the drug wore off or the person took it too often. Both the General and Glass said Tema Blystone had been very good at swords. The man in the room, he didn’t have the muscles to lift a sword even if we tied it to his hand. The proof that this man was in fact the great Hero of Glasire, the one who ended the Emperor’s Reign of Terror, lay entirely in the General’s say-so. 

“Mebbe she got it wrong?” Commander threw out the question like fisherman, waiting to see if someone bit.

“Could be,” Sally nodded. “Been fifteen years since the General seen the Hero?”

“Eleven,” I told them. “Eleven years since any of the First Rebels saw him. But the General wouldn’t get this wrong.”

The Grunts moved on to wondering why the General took the risk of traveling all the way to the Glasire capital city just to capture him. After all, he may be the one who killed the evil sorcerer Emperor, but he was also the one who allowed the evil sorcerous Empress to take over. Some say he helped her. They ganged up on me to do the asking. I won’t. The General already told me, about three or four years ago, and won’t allow me to tell anyone else. She said Tema believed the Empress was trapped, a victim, in the same way the Emperor trapped most of Glasire’s aristocrats, and so Tema made a deal with her where she helped him sneak into a specific place in the palace that let him kill the Emperor without falling foul of the magic traps.

Scirho told me a different version. The Hero of Glasire fell under the Empress’s beautiful maiden spell and left his wife in order to save the maiden. But a married woman wouldn’t be a maiden. Even I know that. 

The General thinks our spies have found that place, the one that will let the Hero Foretold destroy the Empress. I can’t tell the Grunts that either. I’m full up with things I can’t tell my friends. It’s in the Palace, and if the Hero of Glasire wants to live up to his name, he’ll help us get in.

The Grunts, and that included me, took turns cleaning Tema up. Being the General’s son gave me some privileges, such as a lighter sentence than many of my team when I did something stupid. If I acted way out of line, though, I’d be sent to my mother’s people as permanent manual labor. While I wanted to meet my grandparents and uncles some day, I did not want to spend the rest of my days as a farmer, so I kept my pranks to what anyone else could get away with, and otherwise used my privileges to keep a few friends out of bigger trouble. 

Like Merit, when he forgot to lock Tema’s cell. Twice. Good thing Tema remained oblivious.

Tema lost his voice the first week, screaming Kate, Kate, Kate like a man in the lowest levels of hell waiting for rescue. The General almost pitied him then, peeking through the food slot as he curled into a ball and sobbed the woman’s name.

“His wife was named Kate,” the General told the Grunts. 

“What happened to her?” Merit asked, tentatively. The General rarely volunteered information.

But it was Glass who answered, gruff and unforgiving. “Tema left his wife and son hidden in the city slums when he invaded the Palace. They died of smallpox.” His hands and expression remained gentle as he touched the General’s shoulder before he left.

No one knows what happened, exactly. Rather, everyone who came to stop the Emperor knows a piece, but we can’t gather together long enough for us to piece everything together. All those decisions that led up to worse, not better. 

What the General and Glass know, and have shared, is that the Emperor killed the rightful king and the king’s family and locked the entire country of Glasire under a sorcerous dome. He kept two gates open for trade and everyone who survived on trading outside of Glasire had to pay. Most people needed things from outside Glasire. We’re a small country. Also, he styled himself Emperor and somehow we’re still calling him that even after he’s dead.

The rebel army gathered under Tema’s banner, as Baron of Moorac, and infiltrated the city, planning to take over the Palace, kill the Emperor, and undo the sorcery locking our country away from the rest of the world. It took weeks to get everyone into place, Glass said. But then then Tema and his closest guard disappeared. We think they snuck into the castle, with the Empress’ help. Two days later, while our leadership waited for nightfall to execute a rescue plan, the Empress appeared, Tema right by her side, declaring the Emperor and his sorcerers dead. She publicly announced the end to her husband’s reign of terror, introduced Tema as the savior, and invited the entire city to the palace for a celebration party. And then used those who came as sacrifices to build her own sorcerous power base. 

That last part is also conjecture, but I grew up hearing it spoken as if it happened. The following year the Empress threw another party to celebrate how Tema led an army into the city to free everyone and rescue them all from her husband. She declared him the Hero of Glasire, gave him new heraldry and established a day where all of Glasire celebrated his actions.

We rebels spend that day doing drills and skirmishes until our arms fall off and our hands spasm because even after eleven years the holiday drives Glass into such a fury he needs us to wear him out. I asked the General why, on one of our dinner nights when she could just be Mother. She said it was for us, she and I. Because of us. It took me a long time to understand that, but maybe I do now.

The other grunts often asked me why Glass didn’t marry my mother. The entire army knew the General and Glass were a devoted couple. Ironic, really. I remembered when Glass and Mother barely tolerated each other. And of course, I know why they never acknowledged their love except in private, or in small gestures. Her husband, my father, still lived, and currently lay in a cell sobbing my mother’s name. Eventually the army lodged here would discover her marriage. It’s more shocking no one let that particular tidbit out yet, with those who’d been in the first rebellion in and out of the castle so often. Some days I was even glad Glass and the General couldn’t be seen as a couple, caught up in ideas of my parents reigniting the passion she says made me. Then we brought Tema in.

Tema screamed for days. Then he croaked out his nightmares. Then his nightmares just stopped. He also stopped vomiting, spiking fevers, or scratching gouges into his chest. And eating, talking, or moving except to piss once or twice a day. We grunts failed the General. We treated him gently, reverently. We didn’t force him up, not even to change the soiled bedding. The General marched in one day as Nert and I took turns shaking Tema’s shoulders and yanking on the linen trapped beneath him. She glared at us until we stepped back then snapped at Tema, “Get up!” 

Tema twitched, blinked, then closed his eyes again.

“This one thinks he’s the Hero Foretold,” the General sneered. “He’s a worm like all the others that succumbed to the Empress’…charms.”

That got him. He staggered to his feet, eyes blazing. Nert and I darted around him and quickly exchanged the bedding while he croaked out “I was her prisoner, just like I’m yours.”

“Yet we captured you in town, staggering out of a smokehouse all by your lonesome.” Noting we were done, the General gestured us to leave. Nert refused until the General moved first, knowing better than the rest of us how unpredictable people could be when recovering from a sage addiction. 

“Is it because he thinks you’re a prison warden?” I asked Mother at family dinner night. While everywhere else I needed to call her General, on these nights, I called her Mother and she called me love or sweetheart or Micah.  Glass created these nights for us, back when he thought my mother ought to be his woman, mother of the boy he raised as his son, and only that. I don’t know how or when Mother smashed those ideas; I just know she’s the indisputable leader of the rebellion, then and now, but now Glass filled the role of her right-hand and her most adamant supporter. I’m not sure what will happen to that if we succeed.  We’ve talked about it, but Mother says to make plans as if they will change.

“That’s probably for the best,” she said, about Tema considering her his warden.

“Then why are you so sad?”

Typically, she denied it. 

“Scirho asked me about it.” 

Mother paled a little, knowing what that meant: if that batty old guard noticed the General was sad then everyone knew. The army gossiped worse than country women. 

“Glass decided he should lead the Naroot expedition. He leaves tomorrow.”

That explained why he wasn’t at dinner. I waited. Glass never left Mother alone unless he had no other choice.

“Tema will recognize him,” she admitted.

“That’s a problem?”

“I don’t think so. Glass does and won’t risk the plan.”

We ate in silence. Even as General, Mother ate what the troops ate, and food was scare in winter. The meal was tasteless, tough, and gone quickly.

“Maybe I should say something to the troops,” she said, pushing the last piece of salted beef around her plate before forcing herself to eat it.

“Glass is probably ordering everyone around, getting ready. They’ll have figured it out by now,” I told her. Her squad leaders would, at any rate, and they’d tell their squads, and tomorrow everyone would stand straighter when they saw her, would make sure their uniforms buttons gleamed, their weapons clean, and attend any other details they could do to show their respect. Just like they did last year when Glass and a measly five guards snuck across the Galise-Sharneen border to convince the Trinity Council of Sharneen to support the rebellion. 

Mother created a very disciplined army with the sole focus of taking down the Empress. She didn’t care what people called her, but somewhere along the way the title General stuck. It’s an honorific, like the rest of us have, except that it marks what she is.  Except Glass, sometimes, when they think no one else can hear, calls her Kate. And Tema dubbed her The Warden., because she led the raid when we stole him from the Empresses clutches and then kept him in a locked room to sweat out the sage. She didn’t care.

She did care what we called him though. It had to be Tema. Just Tema. She demoted the first person who called him the Hero Foretold and put the next two on tower night duty for the rest of winter.

The Grunts ganged up on me again, demanding I tell them why he couldn’t be called the Hero of Glasire or the Hero Foretold, but had been dragged to our very stealthy, very secret castle in the wild. Why else, if not because he was these things?  I lied and said the General wouldn’t tell me. 

Tema eventually showed signs of life without needed to get kicked or barked at first. He flailed against the cell door and demanded to be allowed to see the sun. The General arranged it, and Tema used it to try to escape. It took fourteen-year-old Nert less than three minutes to take down Tema, and two others to drag him back to his cell. When the General answered his demand for a face-to-face talk, he called her a pox-marked whore who earned her job on her back and demanded to see the real warden.  

People lost respect for him. Not just the oldtimers who rallied to his original banner but also the grunts who grew up on stories about the Hero of Glasire, the one who took on a sorcerer and won. Nert and I kept our hopes up. Nert because his brother made it through the addiction and changed for the better, so he knew it could happen. Me because I couldn’t quite hate my father even if he did inadvertently save the person who turned our nation into a haven of evil. Even if he did leave us behind where we all but died.  

Tema took to pacing his cell and calling out the number of steps. When he grew bored of that, he returned to pounding on the cell door demanding we be patriots and let him go. He ranted one hour alone about how he benefited Glasire by staying in the Palace, about how he kept the Empress in line. 

“Last week he said he was her prisoner,” Kemmy pointed out.

“And this morning he called Yohan, Brat, and Sally by his dead son’s name,” Rooster said.

We placed bets on how many days the General would put up with Tema’s temper tantrum. I lost.

Three days after Tema tried to escape, the General entered his cell again. She stared him down when he tried to insult her and intimidate her. He shifted uncomfortably under her glare, cleared his throat, and mumbled something about wanting to see the actual warden.

“I’m in charge,” the General said. “Follow me.”

We scattered away from the door; an undisciplined mob transformed into an elite guard by the time the Hero of Glasire stepped from the room. And that’s how Tema presented himself, despite the unsteadiness in his steps and slight tremor in his hands. He stood straight, made eye contact with each of us, gave an approving nod, and walked right behind the General as if one of her counselors.

The General stopped in the courtyard where ten-year-old Leon and his eight-year-old sister, Marianbelle, practiced archery. Both still wore haunted expressions, as if unsure when the next disaster would come. 

“They are the grandchildren of Duke Wirwhith,” the General told Tema. “I heard you extolling the Empress’s leadership. She has improved trade with other nations. However, we discovered these children in the Palace dungeons not six months ago. We think they were in line to be sacrificed for the… How does she put it? ‘Greater good of the nation’. Is a better price for linen worth their lives?” 

“The Duke is a trusted confidant of the Empress,” Tema said, firm, head high, trying to convince himself. 

“Ah, well. Perhaps our intelligence, about what happened to their parents, was wrong. You know how unreliable intelligence networks in a rebellion can be.” 

Glass often told me that everyone can make a mistake, but if you put in people you trust then you need to have faith in their work. That’s why the first rebellion worked, because of the strength of the spies and how careful the commanders were in what they acted on. The rebellion, after all, succeeded. Until it didn’t. Glass won’t say so but it’s clear he thinks the failure was entirely Tema’s for ignoring the reports the spies brought about the sorcerers in the palace. Plural. 

Five months ago, our spies said the Duke Wirwhith’s nephew was desperate for someone to break into the Palace. Curious, the General and Glass reached out to him, and he outright begged us to find the children. I read the letter one day when I snuck into Glass’ office on a dare. When the rebel team rescued them, he begged us to keep them until he could find a way to smuggle the three of them to Sharneen. 

The General didn’t tell Tema any of this. Instead, she led Tema around the bailey and to the stables, the one with the old nags we kept close by because they couldn’t make the steep walk around the rock. The actual stables, the ones he wouldn’t see, lay on the other side of the sharp cliff that made the northern wall of the castle, accessed by a near invisible track or by a tunnel cut through the rock. The General kept strict discipline everywhere, but more so in the stables where we all took turns both guarding and training the horses. To anyone wandering in the area, we needed to look like peasants eking out a living and using the only available shelter: a castle that would crumble in the next storm. 

Tema followed the General around, trying to gauge exits and guards and any other thing that would help him escape. He thought he was being sly, but the General knew. He saw what she allowed him to see, which he figured that out two days later when he picked the lock on his cell door for his next escape attempt. As arranged, we followed him. It was a training exercise for us Grunts, where we took turns on a person, leaving as soon as we’d been spotted. I followed Tema when he left his cell and snuck down the hallway and out into the bailey. I left him as he claimed a nag and picked him up again at the bottom of the hill. He caught Nert watching early on and thought he got away from her.  Me, he never noticed. 

“That’s why Lord Sebby dubbed you the Rat,” the General told me with a loving smile while we waited for Kemmy to bring Tema back the next morning. She raised her voice so the group around us could hear, “Now that he’s seen the wasteland, he’ll stop trying to escape for a month or two. By then, maybe his addiction will have ended. Maybe we’ll have countered that Empress’ influence. Certainly, we will be able to strike once the snow melts.” 

Not that it snowed much here. The rock-filled ground and narrow mountain pass kept most people from the area, people who didn’t know about the much easier tunnel through the mountain.

Tema entered his cell looking chastised and also contemplative, as if he’d learned something important, and not just about the idiocy of running away in the middle of a winter’s night. We left his cell unlocked after that, on the General’s orders. He spent the next week wandering around the castle, but he’d only talk to the General.

I don’t know what they talked about, but he spat at her once. Sally witnessed it and called him out. That’s a thing the General insisted on that Glass eventually agreed had been a good idea. Anyone below the level of Commander could call out anyone else for disrespecting another person, and they had to fight. Sally tossed Tema a sword and proceeded to thrash him, hitting him with the flat of the blade over and over until he tried to run Sally down like a bull and knocked himself out against the wall when he dodged. We all knew he’d lose after his first swing, even though Sally’s only a mid-level fighter. The embarrassing way he lost ruined the last of his reputation with the rebels. The Hero of Glasire was supposed to be the best swordsman in the country, after all. Most of the grunts already thought the General brought the wrong man back. Now everyone did.

“This was a mistake,” Mother admitted at family dinner. “I should have waited and ‘freed’ the Hero when we took the Palace.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wanted him to be the man he once was. Best way to give him that chance was to bring him here.”

We grunts, of course, took turns following Tema around as his guard, making sure he didn’t interfere with any of the training, or discover anything. The castle design ensured he never saw the advance training or the General’s quarter, just the extra practice bouts new recruits organized, but we took recruit training seriously at all levels. Tema began talking to us at last, probably out of boredom. It began when he saw Nadine grip a sword wrong and he barked at her about breaking her fingers. We made all new recruits crop their hair the same and wear the same clothing, which wasn’t a uniform so much as a type of clothing that was easy to run and climb in, but Nadine was new enough, and at sixteen also old enough, that being called boy five times by the wastrel who thought he was the Hero of Glasire burned as bad as the fire that took her parents. That’s what she told us later. By then everyone had heard about his run-in with Sally. At least three times. Sally’s bout was all control; Nadine, she exploded. 

I think that’s what finally got through to him, that a sixteen-year-old girl, so new to our army she hadn’t even earned a nickname, nearly took him down. He started training. I traded tasks ruthlessly so I spent nearly an entire week in the training room with Tema. After that, everyone refused to trade. General’s orders. But I at least got that week. 

“What’s your name?” He demanded the first day I followed him into the new-recruit armory. We kept the battered weapons here, the ones useless for actual fighting but still in decent enough shape to learn how to swing, or shoot.

“Rat.” I didn’t let him see how disappointed he made me.  Again.  He knew my names.

Tema sighed, disgusted. “Rat, Brat, Sally. Commander, for a boy who’s clearly a grunt. General. And I keep hearing the name Glass. No one’s named Glass.”

“New life, new names,” I told him, watching him swing and nearly drop a two-handed sword.

“You name yourself Rat?”

“Course not. I earned it.” 

He frowned, rolled his shoulders and walked into the new recruit practice room, then spun around in a defensive pose. “How do you earn a name that means vermin?”

“Rats are smart. Loyal to those who earn it.”

“They eat their young.”

“Baron Shureth first called me a rat when we were living with him and I found all the ways he used to spy on his guests.”

Tema leaned backwards, like he knew what happened to the Baron, and the lean was an unconscious way to put distance between himself and that night. 

“The Baron’s soldiers took up the nickname, and by the time we had moved on, that’s what everyone called me. Rats are survivors. They are not vermin.”

Tema nodded, and didn’t say much else to me that day, or any other days I was able to watch him. He focused on stabbing the dummy then chopping at it. He switched hands and did it all again. He grew breathless after just three swings on that first day and took more time resting than swinging, but didn’t let himself stop long until my replacement came. The grunts tasked with watching him after my week gossiped freely about his determination. He slowly gained stamina, and we began a betting pool on when he’d reach each new gain.

“I think you were right,” I said at family dinner a few weeks later. We hadn’t heard from Glass in two months; Mother needed hope of any sort. “We should recruit Tema. Take him with us in the Spring.” 

“Is that the soldier in you saying this, or the son?” Mother scowled. 

“The soldier,” I said, offended. But really it was the son part of me, the little boy who wanted his father back. 

Mother told me, when I was twelve and convinced the Hero would fix everything if only he knew we were alive, that the failure of the first rebellion happened when Tema believed that he and he alone was the Hero Foretold. That he forgot about his army, the intelligence network in it, the strategists in it, the fighters, the cooks, the suppliers. 

“He believed what people said about him,” Mother told me, “and forgot about what’s really important.” 

“What’s really important?”

“Family. Integrity. Faith in those around you.” She listed more things, but those are the parts that stuck.

Glass filled in the pieces for me back then, what he knew of them. He joined the rebels somewhere in the third year, when they were still focused on acting like an actual army rather than distinct, separate units, and he never told anyone much about himself until the General recovered from smallpox. According to Glass, it took the many people to get Tema to the Palace. People in the country readily funded the rebels, with both food and what few coins they could spare. Nobles snuck the gems and gold housewares into the carts that made it through the Emperor’s gates and sold to the highest bidder then snuck the money to the rebels. People in the city had a network of rooms for rebels to hide in. Which is how Glass stayed hidden for so long. And, of course, the prophecy, which had spread the year in which the Emperor killed the King of Glasire and took over. That gave everyone hope. The prophecy basically stated a hero would kill the sorcerer, and Tema fit the people’s expectation: handsome, brave, and very skilled. Being the banished son of a northern Duke fit the hidden son line of the prophecy, and then his older brother’s death made him heir to the dukedom, the unforeseen heir. 

People believed it, and therefore so did he. Even Glass said he believed Tema was the Hero Foretold. 

I missed Glass when he went on missions. I missed him while listening to stories about Tema because Glass would be able to tell me what pieces held value.

Tema asked about the General’s scars a lot. He still called her the Warden, though. Smallpox scars dotted her face and arms, and a scar from a dagger stretched lengthwise across her throat. I hated that one. It gave me nightmares, even though she came closer to dying from smallpox. Tema really wanted to know about the smallpox scars, how she got them, if it was in the city during the epidemic. Which of course it was. Smallpox ran through the Glasire Capital the year the rebels invaded the city, and disease hits harder in the slums. Everyone knows that. Yet that’s where he left us, because no one would expect a noble to stay in the slums. We were lucky that Glass found us. In the original plan, Glass was part of the castle invasion. When Tema disappeared, Glass wanted to regroup, and tracked down the person behind the entire rebel strategy: my mother. She and I already burned with fevers and blisters when he found us, he said, and it had only been three days. 

Of course I didn’t tell Tema any of this when he asked. I shrugged like I didn’t know. I pointed out how many of us in the rebellion bore pox scars. Ours didn’t interest him. Just the General’s.  None of us grunts told him anything about her, though, because we didn’t like how he treated her, or us.

He grew on us, eventually. He started earning some grudging respect back. Tema gave each of his guards tips that helped us win against older, bigger fighters. He told us stories at night, most of us off-duty but gathered in the main hall to hear about the first rebellion. Tema started it all, according to the official story. Knowing my mother, it was her idea but she talked Tema into being the rebel leader because he had the face and the bloodlines to get people listening. Except, when he told his war stories to the grunts, he never mentioned Kate or Micah, not once. Even though I noticed him staring at the General some days with a half-hopeful expression, as though he thought maybe, just maybe, his wife hadn’t died after all.

“How did you become the Warden here?” he asked her as she paused to watch Nadine’s bout against Sally. Sally won, of course, but Nadine ranked up in our betting. 

“It’s not a prison,” the General answered blandly. 

He snorted as Nadine dropped her sword. “Clearly it’s another attempt at a rebellion.”

“Clearly.” The General knew how to use a dry tone like an edged blade.

Provoked, Tema pointed at the bout. “Those two aren’t soldiers.”

“Are they not?”

He dug into his position. Nert elbowed me in the ribs as she noticed his tell, the way he shifted his shoulders in irritation. “You need numbers for an army, and real men, not a bunch of ragtag kids running around with ranks used as nicknames. You know this!”

“I do?” the General said. 

“He doesn’t even know he’s bleeding from all the cuts,” Nert whispered to me. Then offered me a two-bit bet that he’d storm out in five minutes. Commander took her up on it. The General pretended not to see us. She was good that way. 

“You know this, Kate.” Tema whirled so he was face to face with her. I waited for my turn, when he’d demand to know me. I think the General did too, but it didn’t come. “You know this isn’t an army. This,” he swept his arm to indicate Sally and Nadine talking, Nert and Commander and I haggling, and the castle with its worn down walls and carefully curated rubble. “This isn’t how a rebellion wins.”

“I’m not Kate. Your wife is dead.” 

“Then what’s your name!” 

“The General.”

“Not another nickname,” he growled and stormed out. 

We bet on how long until he came back to swing swords at dummies. I pretended to care I won it. 

Spring came. We weren’t quite ready to take our army to the city. Instead, we poured out of the castle to get the fields ready. Tema had the physical shape of the Hero of Glasire now that he’d filled out, but retained the attitude of a life-long prisoner. He attempted to wheedle his way out of plowing and, when that didn’t work, whined about how unfair it was to make him work, even though he saw the General bandage Nadine’s blister, take the farm tool from the younger woman and begin hoeing. 

I made excuses for him. As a noble, he never expected to do a day’s labor, I told Nert. Commander Reine, working the row beside us, corrected me. “He lived with the General’s family for two years after his father banished him. Tema knows how to prepare the fields. He’s just spoiled.” 

Glass’s letters, all three months worth, arrived at once. Naroot was won, the villages safe still and preparing their own fields with our people filling in for the young men conscripted by the Empress. Other letters and notes trickled in. Our spies in the Palace said the Empress sank her energy into the upcoming war with Sharneen. The war she provoked. The General gathered us in the great hall and read the missive outlining what the Empress was doing. It was the first time Tema had been in this part of the castle, and I watched him realize that we were a much bigger and disciplined force than he’d known.  

“You know what this means,” the General told her troops. We did. The rest of her speech was for Tema, who had no choice about joining us now. “She has stolen an entire generation for a war even her gods’ forsaken husband knew better than to start. She has murdered innocents to enhance the magic she stole from that husband, and lock us away from the rest of the world.  She has given the lands of old bloodlines into the hands of sycophants who rule with a greedy hand and no respect for the traditions of our country. The Emperor twisted this proud country’s traditions but she, she made us evil to the world. Now she has turned her sights to expanding, drained her power, and sent the mass of her troops, our stolen children, south to die on foreign lands.  

“When the last rebellion seeped away under false hope, I found a prophet.” Those who’d been with us years ago knew this story. We’d filled the castle to bursting since then. I could feel people leaning in to better hear the General, Tema not least of all. “I asked about the prophecy. He said it had come to pass but not been fulfilled. Then he said the most important part. ‘Don’t miss when the next chance comes.’

“Now is our chance. The pieces are in place. Let us move them decisively. We march the dawn after next.”

Tema rode a bay gelding, straight backed and resplendent in some of Glass’s last finery. The Hero of Glasire leading the charge. The Hero Foretold at last. He’d lead us in, and ensure we won. Or so the grunts told each other as we marched, step after jarring step, armor and weapons weighing us down. It kept me going, too, even though I knew the plan. 

We snuck into the city in groups of three to five, where the General reunited with Glass at last, and in secret. Then it was into the Palace through every route Tema told us about or our spies ever found. 

An hour before we sent Tema to walk through the main gates, with the General disguised as one of the Hero’s infamous pity rescues, in rags, dragging a bundle that was actually her sword, I led the team that snuck Glass into the Palace. The Rat Patrol, named after me, walked through the castle sewer then made a human chain up to the second-floor privy. We wanted the first floor, which meant not only less climbing in stench and sick, but also one floor less to sneak—or fight—our way down to get the the cavern where the Empress pooled her magic. But Vomit, our spy inside the Palace, could only convince the Palace staff to let him put new water piping on the second floor, so that was the only floor where he could break open the privy wide enough for us to climb out. We took turns hauling each other up then changing into palace guard uniforms we brought in sealed packs. 

The entire plan focused on killing the Empress before she used her stored spells on us, but we needed the right people in place before we could do that. At least, that’s what history and the prophecy both indicated. The General set a lot of store in the prophecy. As the Rat Patrol was free of the sewers and safely in clean clothes, I changed my orders and went with Wobble to scout out where the Empress had taken Tema and my mother.

“This is not what the General ordered,” Glass said, trying to hold me back. 

The plan was that I stay as part of the team to protect Glass while the rest scouted. Then, once we knew where the General and the Empress were, we went there all together. It kept Glass safe, which was one of the most important things now. It kept me safe. It was a good plan. Just not mine.

“I’m the best at sneaking around. That’s why I am Rat,” I argued. It was true.

“You’ll keep yourself hidden,” he ordered. “And wait for me to arrive before you go in.”

“Yessir,” I said. 

We reached the first-floor unseen, Wobble and I. The rest of our rebels started attacking the Palace then, right on schedule. 

“You’re a distraction,” the General told them last night. “I expect you to be alive at the end of this to celebrate.” 

We took our rebellion seriously, though. Even knowing the assault wasn’t the real battle, I could hear the fighting. The outside force really wanted to get in. The Empress’ guards ran into place, smart and disciplined even as the Empress herself shrieked conflicting orders and strode toward the stairs we thought led to her sorcery chamber. She dragged Tema behind her, one hand twisted in his jacket. Behind him, the General followed and tried to look small and scared. I sent Wobble off to tell Glass where to go and waited for the corridor to clear so I could slip from the hidey hole.

Soon the fight came to the front door and most of the guards left the corridor to join it. 

A few guards kept an eye on the stairwell, but quickly got caught up trying to figure out what was going on by the front doors. I scurried down in one of their gaps. I could hear the Empress demand Tema explain where he had been for the past four months. I heard his answer about the people who found him and nursed him back to health. 

I peeked around the corner and saw the Empress completely absorbed in wheedling information out of Tema. The General slid the rags off her disguised sword. If I stayed low and very quiet, I could watch while hidden behind a chest. I just had to hope that she didn’t need anything in it. Before I made my move, I heard a clatter, a shriek, a whomp-like sound, and then the Empress berating Tema for faithlessness and betrayal.

“Betrayal?” Tema yelled. “She’s my wife! The one you claimed died!”

I used the argument to mask my sounds as I raced into the room.

The General stood statue-like in a position no one could hold for long. I silently begged Tema to be the Hero of Glasire, to save my mother. Tema talked about how much he loved her, although I couldn’t tell who he meant, the Empress or my mother, while the Empress snarled something about the army outside and started pouring energy into a glove. 

Rumor said the Emperor didn’t need physical theatrics, he just lifted his hand and whomp, you were dead. The Empress though, she never really learned how to use magic subtly. Something Tema said made her look at Mother again. She set aside the globe and started using her hands to sweep energy into a raw glowing ball. “You should have heard what he says about you. You’d have stayed dead. Let me show you what he really thinks about you.”

And then Mother lost all her grey hairs, her smallpox scars, and the scar across her neck where the Duchess of Sciors tried to kill her, and kept transforming until she looked like a twenty-year-old pinup girl, one ready to gut Tema where he stood. Tema’s concerned expression turned proud. I didn’t realize I rolled my eyes until they fell on the General’s sword, just a few feet behind the Empress. Glass would be here at any time. He could sneak around behind the Empress, and it would all be over. 

The Empress shrieked again.

“What you say as you throw the magic is what the spell becomes, Vanika,” the General told her. 

“Oh, Kate,” Tema glowed.

“Enough,” Mother told him. Even her voice was different, softer, almost feminine. “Just stop.”

“But Kate, what have I done?”

He believed she held more value as a pretty girl instead of the General of the Rebel Army. If anyone else saw her now, they’d ignore her. That was why she set Tema as the rebel leader the first time. Even I knew that.

“You’ve lied to me, that’s what you’ve done,” the Empress hissed. “All this time I thought you loathed your wife. You called her a harridan!”

I saw movement at the entrance. The arguing covered the sounds of The Rat Patrol’s approach. All they needed to do was get Glass inside. Empress had her back to me, I popped up from my hiding place so the General could see me, then quickly moved to the next spot, a little closer to the Empress but better for hiding. That’s when I saw the Empress’s deadly expression. 

The General raised her voice, “Don’t waste our chance on second guesses!” 

I was already running. The Empress focused only on the Mother and her glowy, princessy face, her hands working rapidly to build a spell. I knew by the Empress’s expression this one would kill my mother.

I bolted in the open the last ten feet, scooping up the General’s sword without slowing, and used my momentum to swing the sword in an arc as I turned. As the Empress faced me the blade pierced her skin but resisted against the bones of her chest. I grabbed her shoulder and pushed with the arm on the hilt while I pulled with the hand on her shoulders, and suddenly her body dropped, magic fizzing into harmless heat around me. I stared at the sword where it stuck from her chest. I stared as her body fell backwards and hit the stone. I’d never killed anyone before.

A hand wrapped warmth around my arm. Sound returned. The hand on my arm moved to the back of my head, and I realized I was sobbing. “Micah,” Glass said, “It’s alright now.”

Tema’s head snapped our way when he heard the name. Later I knew I would care, and be angry, and tell Nert all about it while laughing. Laughing while raging. Right now, all that mattered was Glass pulling me into a hug. “Son,” he said. “You did good. You did exactly right.” 

In the hours after, the Rat Patrol worked as messengers checking in on the progress in the castle, with Glass and the General staying in the Empress’s cave.  The General because she wouldn’t be recognized.  Glass because he wouldn’t leave her, and wouldn’t let me leave.  He and the General kept an eye on me, even an arm around me, as they listened to the reports. The Rat Patrol occasionally patted my shoulder or bumped me with a joking “Not calling you Hero now.” 

Then the scars began reappearing on the General’s face. Tema stared in mute incomprehension when Glass embraced her and kissed each one as they reappeared. Mother started giggling, forgetting for a moment that she was the General.

“Micah? They’re…together?” Tema asked me.

Nert gave Tema a look that called him an idiot. Tema didn’t know it, but the grunts picked a name for him: Motley. Unless the General or Glass ordered otherwise, that’s what he’d have to answer to. At least until we won and earned our own names again. 

“Bets on how long after the coronation until they get married?” Nert asked.  

“What coronation?” Tema asked, but we ignored him as Rooster came in then with more reports.

“But the prophecy,” Tema cornered me later. It was my own fault, since I trotted after him in the months he spent training with us, that he expected worship rather than the confused anger I gave him in the days after I killed the Empress. We were in the library, which the General turned into the War Room until we retook the duchies the Empress gave away to evil people. Glass, the General, and three of their lieutenants used a large table for all the maps.

An entire question happened in those three words. But the prophecy. I wanted to be kind, but I was impatient with my failed hero and furious with my father so I belted out the prophecy. “Hope gathers in the hidden son and the unforeseen heir,” I pointed to myself while I said son and then to Glass when I said heir. “Through hope the hero foretold prevails. Without hope the venture fails.”

Tema shook his head. “The prophecy is about me.”

“It’s about the General. She’s hope. Both times. Last time you were the son and the heir pieces, but you left hope behind. This time, you were the distraction.” 

“The distraction,” Tema said.  

“Hey, Glass,” Vomit interrupted. “We can crown you now. Is it just you or you and the General? I mean, do we need to find another crown?” Nert and I both held our breath so we could recite his answer word for word to the rest. We grunts laid our bets on this a year ago. 

“One crown,” Glass said, and I lost another bet. 

Tema started at him. A peculiar expression took over his face. “Glass. Glasire. Henry Glasire, the late king’s cousin.”

“Told you,” Glass said to the General. 

“Took him two days. Two full days,” she said. 

“Micah,” Glass said, commanding again. “You’ll stand on my left. Your mother will stand on my right. Once I’m crowned, Wobble and Kemmy will bring up the two extra thrones for you.” 

“You’re trusting Wobble to climb those steps holding a chair?” I asked to cover my relief. He might not crown her, but he wanted her, wanted us, right by his side.

“I don’t have to be the Hero of Glasire anymore,” Tema said, and then smiled as if the world had been lifted from his shoulders.  

 © May 2025, Becca Dwight

Becca Dwight lives in the gorgeous southwest United States.  No cats, alas. Unless you count the knee-high dog who likes to wend between your legs. This is her first appearance in Swords & Sorcery Magazine, or anywhere.