The Misrule series Box Set Read online

  The Misrule

  The Prequel and Trilogy

  Andy Graham

  Contents

  A FATHER’S CHOICE

  1. A Coin

  2. Trust Me

  3. Surprise

  4. Aerfen's Debt

  5. Tea

  6. Sun-Fans & Pencils

  7. Return to Tear

  8. Stay Gone

  9. Pig-Headed

  10. Change

  11. The Unsung

  12. Paper Galleries & Perspective

  13. Bucket Towns

  14. Red Lipstick

  15. Rumours & Dreams

  16. No Ifs, Ands or Buts

  17. The Great Trade Conflict

  18. A Trick

  19. Who Watches the Watchers?

  20. Roundabout

  21. Donarth

  22. Rigour Mortis

  23. Revolutions & Martyrs

  24. A Handshake

  25. Three Words

  26. Wedding Burns

  27. The Gunpowder Tower

  28. Rose Franklin's Monster

  29. Epilogue

  The story continues in A Brother’s Secret

  A map (of sorts)

  The cast of A Father’s Choice

  About this edition

  Copyright & Disclaimer

  A BROTHER’S SECRET

  1. Ray Franklin's Monster

  2. Hallowtide

  3. The Ward

  4. An Incentive

  5. Left

  6. The Kickshaw

  7. Playground Economics

  8. Tattoos

  9. X517

  10. White Plague

  11. The Bits in the Middle

  12. Captain Electric

  13. Vulnerable Old People

  14. Cats, Dogs & Buckets

  15. Naive & Bitter

  16. Everyone Should Lift

  17. The Sit-in

  18. Back Doors & Buckles

  19. Head. Heart. Hand.

  20. The Pregnancy Directive

  21. The Angel City

  22. A Fisher Gull & Four Horsemen

  23. The Dawn Rock

  24. The Disease Dog

  25. Enough

  26. The Northbridge

  27. An Annoying Buzz

  28. Greenfields

  29. The Spokesperson

  30. The Angel Nation

  31. An Ambulance

  32. A Farewell

  33. Substation Two

  34. Donarth Taille

  35. Gwenium

  36. A Subterranean Sun

  37. Noise, Noise, Noise

  38. A Coin

  39. Good News for Some

  40. The Watchfires

  41. A Cowboy Hat & a Code

  42. Left or Right

  43. Ancestors

  44. An Old Friend & a Dumb Waiter

  45. Reza

  46. Phoebus Donohue & Coincidence

  47. Stella

  48. An Unexpected Visitor

  49. A Wooden Chair

  50. The Wind at a Window

  51. You Are a Hypocrite

  52. You Know Me?

  53. A Folly Tree & a Field-Marshal

  54. Genes & Diseases

  55. A Question

  56. Finding Rhys

  57. The Dead Could Wait

  58. Epilogue

  The story continues in A Mother’s Unreason

  The cast of A Brother’s Secret

  A note about this edition

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  A MOTHER’S UNREASON

  1. Bait

  2. Just Doing My Job

  3. The Weeping Wood

  4. Plans & Problems

  5. Under the Donian Mountains

  6. Smack Time (One)

  7. Lesau & Melesau

  8. Leadership

  9. The Solution

  10. The Hunt

  11. The Church Above the Ward

  12. More than Ugly

  13. Trucks & Cages

  14. Alcazar

  15. A Little Girl’s Mother

  16. The Morgen Towers

  17. Jann Rainehoff

  18. Maudlin. Definitely Maudlin

  19. Return to Tear

  20. The Map Room & the Husband

  21. A Plastic Tube

  22. The Other Twin

  23. Bricks, Puppies & a Fisher Gull

  24. AWT in EBT

  25. Flinty-eyed Fury

  26. An Opening Gambit

  27. Loaded Dice

  28. The Musical Graveyard

  29. Smack Time (Two)

  30. It’s for You

  31. Frames

  32. It’s All About Stories

  33. Outside the Bridged Quarter

  34. An Old Promise

  35. Inside the Bridged Quarter

  36. A Twist

  37. The Hanging Urn Gardens

  38. The Old Cells

  39. Smack Time (Three)

  40. They Shoot Dogs Here

  41. The First Deceiver

  42. Matricide

  43. Captain Brennan’s Sister

  44. An Old Man’s Eyes

  45. More Than Pregnancy

  46. Purple Eyes

  47. Payback

  48. Nervous & Suspicious

  49. Three Reasons

  50. The Stone Bridge

  The story continues in A Lover’s Redemption

  The cast of A Mother’s Unreason

  About this edition

  Copyright & Disclaimer

  A LOVER’S REDEMPTION

  1. Lesau Rising

  2. Remembering Rose

  3. Remembering The Past

  4. Remembering Lena

  5. Remembering The Way

  6. Remembering The Future

  7. Remember A Lover

  8. Remembering Rick Franklin

  9. War

  10. White Coat. White Noise

  11. A Twin Arrives

  12. Corporal Orr's Obedience

  13. The Sub-Metro

  14. The Antidote

  15. The Musical Labyrinth

  16. Remembering Bethina

  17. The Morgen Towers

  18. Brooke

  19. Fight For The Towers

  20. Regroup. Return. Rebel

  21. A Meeting. A Refusal

  22. VIPER

  23. Cobwebs

  24. Manoeuvring

  25. The Angel City

  26. A Change of Plan

  27. Corporal Orr's Disobedience

  28. Transit

  29. Remembering The Arch Trees

  30. Corporal Orr's Legend

  31. The Best & Worst Of Friends

  32. It Begins

  33. Higher Ground

  34. Tradition

  35. Brothers & Bullies

  36. The Monster Under The Mountain

  37. The Battle For The Angel City

  38. It Ends

  39. Lenka

  40. Epilogue

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  News, offers & updates

  Did you like this box-set?

  Dark Fiction Tales

  Contact

  The cast of A Lover’s Redemption

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright & Disclaimer

  A FATHER’S CHOICE

  The Misrule (The Prequel)

  1

  A Coin

  In the old fairy tale, the traveller carried his fire in his leather rucksack. It was always lit, always warm. Wherever the man stopped for the night, he would pull out the fire, unfold it and lay it on the ground. He would reverse the process the next morning and continue his journey, a crimson glint seeping through the stitching on his bag. Aerfen’s
father had told her the tale and that’s what she saw now.

  The man in front of her picked up the flickers of light one by one. Colours skittered across the walls of the canvas shelter. He kissed each spark and packed the balls of fire into the bag of powder. Under the scars and burns, the fingers he had left moved with the precision of a watchmaker. Aerfen had been brought up by those hands. They’d fed her, taught her to tie her laces, to write. They’d comforted and disciplined her. They’d taught her what soap was for. Her father loved her. She had learnt so much from him. Why didn’t she have any patience for him?

  She had snapped again this morning, impatient with his inability to grasp all the wireless technology sweeping the nation, frustrated because he couldn’t remember his passwords. His response? To kiss her forehead. She had felt ashamed and said, “I’m scared.”

  “So am I,” her father had replied. “That makes what we fight for even more important.”

  “These things you make. What they do to people. It didn’t seem real before.”

  “Neither did life before I met your mother.” He had pulled her close, held her tight enough for her to feel the thud of his heart. “No one will think any worse of you if you change your mind about tonight, Aerfen.”

  The tent walls cracked in a gust of wind. Aerfen’s fear spiked. She hadn’t changed her mind. She had made the journey with her father and the rest of the rebels. Just as she had promised herself she would. Carefully, her father reached for another steel ball. His fingers patted it into the grey powder, like the young saplings he planted in the Weeping Woods.

  Aerfen closed her eyes. Remembered.

  On the morning of her seventh nameday, she had woken to find the hands that seemed so much a part of her childhood had a finger missing. Her leathery-headed father, who had labelled each of the lines on his face after one of her misdemeanours, brushed off the questions. He had sat her on his lap and brushed her hair, humming to her until she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder.

  It happened again when she was a teenager. This time she had been awake when he turned up missing a thumb. She had pestered him until he told her the truth.

  Then the hands that had taught her how to live and survive taught her different things. Things she hadn’t thought one person could do to another. The things she had only heard in whispers were now words in her bathroom, being washed down the plug hole with the swirling red water.

  She blinked, the cold air stinging her eyes. She wasn’t at home. Not a child. She was in a tent in the Weeping Woods. Aerfen reached into her fatigues. The metal disc was still there. She wanted to be sure. The torchlight flickered. Her fingers clamped around the token in her pocket. With glacial stillness, her father picked up a nail. It was long and rusty. He whispered something to it and pushed it into the powder with the pad of his remaining thumb.

  The tent walls flapped around her. Aerfen was vaguely aware of the speech rising and falling between the tree trunks outside, of words that whipped the wind into a frenzy and scared the bright eyes of the forest predators away. For all that they were metres away and joined by the same cause, the other people could have been on a different world.

  Her father had been excused from the gathering. She had slunk away, picking her way through the starlight that frosted the ground. She had heard variations of the speech many times. The first time had been while she had been dressing the stump of her father’s thumb over their chipped sink.

  The words in the night reminded the listeners of the bastards who had taken everything from them: the soldiers that had ransacked homes, blitz mined the valleys and stolen their gods; the men who had demolished temples and built their own on top, reclaiming land like one dog marks its territory over another’s. They had tried to beat the language out of the young. Aerfen was one of those children; the scars on her back still smarted when she thought of it.

  It was a peculiarly inventive way of eradicating language and culture. Any child caught speaking their mother tongue had a hanky tied around their neck. The knotted hanky was passed to the next child heard using the language. The child wearing it at the end of the day got strapped.

  The day after Deian, her father, had given her the speech she could now hear through the canvas, Aerfen had fastened one of her mother’s old hankies around her neck. It had still smelt of her perfume, roses. Aerfen had slept in it and gone to school wearing the hanky the next morning. She had refused to take it off, even when the teacher’s cane snapped on her back. The next day three of her friends had done the same. Within a week, the entire class was wearing them. A month later, the school.

  As terrified as she was, this was her cause now. Her inheritance. Not being considered old enough to be legally classified as a woman hadn’t stopped the enemy from abusing her like one. The men from Ailan had bloodied her, taken what should have been hers to give. Now it was her turn. She was going to take their crusade back to them.

  Six months ago, she had followed her father to her first meeting. There had been a brief flash of anger, then he had hugged her. The tears rolling down his face had been both sad and proud. That evening, the order had come from the faceless leader of the Council to attack the castle on the border. Aerfen had wanted to be part of it.

  She had begged her father while they sat on the edge of the bath. He had finished cleaning his teeth, spat the froth down the plug hole which had taken away so much filth and pain from their family, and taken her face in his hands.

  There had been no tears, no attempt to talk her out of it. He had cleaned her up the day after the soldiers had defiled her. He had buried her mother. He knew why she wanted to go. Her father had just said, “It’s easier to hate someone else than it is to love yourself. Whatever happens in Castle Brecan, don’t forget that. Don’t gloat. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t even enjoy it, just get it done.”

  Now she was here. Waiting. Fear and sweat creeping down her spine.

  Aerfen’s thumb rubbed over the rough metal edge in her pocket. Despite his warning to her, her father was whispering the hate into each piece of metal he packed into the gunpowder.

  The last ball bearing flashed its oily message around the tent. He sat back on his haunches. “Have you got it?”

  Aerfen rooted in her pocket. “Yes. Here.”

  She held out the coin. A Mennai crown, the old type that the villages still used. It was warm in her hand. Slippery. When their leader had sent it through the clandestine channels, Aerfen wanted the honour of looking after it. She had spent weeks guessing at its symbolism. Was it a vindictive tax payment, blood money or something else? In the end she had settled on something much simpler.

  “For luck?” she asked.

  Her father smiled, gun-grey eyes twinkling under milk-white hair. Squeezing her hand as he took the coin from her, he slid it between a cluster of nails. “For luck.”

  2

  Trust Me

  Rick Franklin watched his twin moon shadows coalesce. The rifle slung low over his shoulder blurred, then shifted into focus. He murmured a hurried wish, tapped his forehead, his heart and his right hand with his left. The tradition was supposed to be performed naked but he wasn’t sure Lieutenant Chel would approve.

  High above him, partially hidden by grey clouds, the constellations glittered. The Jester teased the Dancer while the Little Cleaver watched. Dotted amongst them were an increasing number of winking red dots. There was a scuff of boots to his left.