Lord of the Inferno - Chapter Thirteen

This week’s episode features a chapter from Lord of the Inferno, Volume Two of War of the Fathers. War of the Fathers is available as a free ebook if you sign up for the Dan Decker Newsletter. Here is an excerpt from the show: 

The breeze blew against Soret’s face, but she didn’t notice as she stared into the fire beneath the pot while taking deep, steady breaths.

She had tried to sit at first but had been too antsy to rest and had paced for a while after that. It was a matter of time until Adar came back. It might be safe to look for her father when Adar returned. She wouldn’t take Jorad with her, of course. The two would need to be kept as far away from each other as possible. Maybe after Barc had a chance to calm down, he would be more open to reason, and she would be able to prevail upon him to join them on the trip to Rarbon.

The others in her group spoke of Rarbon as if it was a great city that would be able to withstand the Hunwei. She hoped they were right but was trying to not let herself count on it. If Rarbon turned out to be the haven it was purported to be, then the smart thing for her and her father to do would be to go there. It would grate on Barc, but she might even be able to convince him to apologize to Jorad. It wouldn’t be a real expression, to be sure, but given how everybody in the group either feared or respected Adar, it would be best to have both Adar and Jorad as allies.

Barc’s face came to mind, the fear and the betrayal ripping through her as though it was a knife. She sighed as her heart raced and she returned to pacing. Even after reminding herself that Barc had already survived one Hunwei invasion, it was a struggle to stop worrying about him. To calm down her nerves, she focused instead on what she could have done differently.

A hundred different scenarios danced around her head, but it all came back to an inescapable conclusion. She had let others have too much influence over her. Originally, she’d felt like the men in her life were controlling her but she had decided that was the wrong way to look at it.

Shouldn’t she be able to make her own decisions regardless of what others were doing? Nobody had held a dagger to her throat and made her do something that she hadn’t wanted to do. The situation had made the outcomes inevitable.

No, she thought, that’s wrong too. There isn’t anything that can’t be changed, if something seemed like it had to happen, that didn’t mean that it should happen. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t have stopped it. I was going along because I was afraid and lacked the skills to survive. I turned off my brain and trusted somebody else to use theirs. Well, she was done with that and wouldn’t let that happen again.  

“That water boiling yet?” Karn poked his head out of the arch. His calm demeanor had returned, but had his eyes narrowed slightly when he looked at her?