“Let’s wait for Coddin,” I said. Even Coddin needed his faith restored.
“Sire.” Hobbs bowed his head. He took his bow in hand and waited, his breath heavy in his chest. A good man, or if not good, solid. Father picked him from the royal guard for the Forest Watch, not as punishment but to reward the Watch.
I looked away from the seething mass of men to the peaks, snow-clad, serene. The snowline waited for us not far above the choke point. The wind carried fresh snow, icy crystals in a thin swirl. None of us felt the cold. Ten thousand mountain steps burned in my legs, leaving them to tremble, and warming my blood close to boiling point.
To the west I could see God’s Finger. The tiredness in me was nothing compared to what I felt the day I hauled myself onto the tip of that finger and lay as dead beneath the bluest sky. I lay there for hours and in the end I stood, leaning into the teeth of the wind, and drew my sword.
When you climb take nothing that is not essential. I took a sword, strapped across my back. There’s a song behind the swinging of a sword. On God’s Finger it can be heard more clearly. I had climbed chasing the memory of my mother’s music, but the Spire had sung me a different song. Perhaps it’s that heaven is closer, perhaps the wind brings it. Either way I heard the sword-song that day and I made my blade kata, slicing the gale, spinning, turning, striking high then low. I danced to the sword-song in that high place for an hour maybe more, wild play with an endless drop on every side. And then, before the sun fell too low, I left the blade on the rocks, an offering to the elements, and started down.
Standing on God’s Finger I had first understood why men might fight for a place, for rocks and streams, no matter who calls themselves king there. The power of place. I felt it again at the head of the valley with the hordes of Arrow swarming toward me.
“What ho, Coddin,” I said as my chancellor staggered to us. “You look half-dead.”
He hadn’t the breath for a reply.
“Do you have what I gave you?” I asked. At the time I hadn’t known why I gave it to him, only that I should.
Still gasping, Coddin shrugged off his pack and dug into it. “Be glad I didn’t drop it just to keep ahead of the enemy,” he said.
I took the whistle from him, a Highland whistle such as the goatherds use, a foot long with a leather-washered piston.
“I always trust you to deliver, Coddin,” I said, though I had Makin carry a second and had a third with Keppen. Trust is a fine thing but try not to build plans upon it.
“We’re none of us local men,” I said to my captains, voice raised for the Watch men starting to gather round. “Well, you are.” I pointed to a fellow in the second rank. “But most of us were born and raised in Ancrath.”
The last of the Watch were drawing in now, the men of Arrow a couple of hundred yards farther back, toiling over broken rock.
“You’re here with me, men of Ancrath, because you’re my best warriors, because you learned to fight in lands that are hard to defend and that others want to take. These Highlands of ours, however, are easier to protect, and hold bugger all save stones and goats.” That got a laugh or two. Some of the Watch still had go in them.
“Today,” I said. “We all become Highlanders.”
I took the whistle, held it high, and drove the piston home, not too hard because that spoils the tone. It’s a steady pressure gives the best results.
A goat-whistle will carry for miles across the mountains. It’s pitched to let the wind take it and to bounce from rock to rock. One long blast would reach almost back to the Haunt. Certainly far enough to reach each and every Highlander I had hidden on the high slopes overlooking our path up the mountain. And not just any Highlanders these, but the men who had held these particular slopes from generation to generation. The men who like their fathers and grandfathers would take a rock for a walk. They kept their secrets well, the men of Renar, but from the tip of God’s Finger, that day years before, it had all been revealed to me.
It took the blasts of seven trumpets to bring down the walls of Jericho, but they weren’t stacked to fall. One blast of a herder’s whistle set the mountainsides moving in the Renar Highlands. On both sides of the valley, along the full length, a dozen individual rockslides. The Highlanders know their slopes with an intimacy that puts lovers’ knowing of each other’s curves to shame. Big stones poised to fall, boulders on edge with levers set and ready, toppled with a shove and a grunt, rolling, colliding, cascading one into several into many into too many. We felt the ground tremble beneath our feet. The noise, like a millstone grinding, rattled teeth in loose sockets. In moments the whole valley had been set in motion and Arrow’s thousands vanished as the dust rose and stone churned flesh into bloody paste.
“Well, thank you, Coddin. Much appreciated.” I handed him back the whistle. “Hobbs,” I said. “When the dust clears enough for a good shot, if you could have the men knock down anyone still standing.”
“Christ Bleeding,” Makin said, staring into the valley below us. “How…”
“Topology,” I said. “It’s a kind of magic.”
“And what now, King Jorg?” Coddin asked, faith restored but still focused on the numbers, knowing our chances against seventeen or sixteen thousand were scarcely better than our chances against twenty thousand.
“Back down, of course!” I said. “We can’t attack from up here now, can we?”
23
Wedding day
The journey back to the Haunt took us over fresh territory, a new and broken surface, littered with dead men turned into ground meat, and here and there along the way the cries of live ones trapped beneath us. We moved on, the grey of the Watch’s tatter-robes renewed with rock dust, the men pale with powdered stone and with horror.
The Prince’s army encircled the Haunt now, archers on the heights, siege machinery being hauled into place. All my troops at the castle crowded within the walls, space or not. There was no standing against the foe on open ground.
I could see units of bowmen descending in long files, presumably ordered east to meet our advance in light of the recent massacre. The Prince looked to be a fast learner. He anticipated my renewed attack. It didn’t seem likely that he would consider my three hundred men a mere nuisance this time.
“He shouldn’t be in a hurry,” Makin said beside me.
“He’ll reduce the walls and thin the ranks first,” said Coddin.
“He doesn’t need to get inside until the snows come, the big snows,” said Hobbs. “Inside by the big snows. Winter by the fire. Over the passes when the spring clears them.”
“He wants in today,” I told them. “Tomorrow by the latest. He’ll go through the front gate.”
“Why?” Coddin asked. He didn’t argue, but he wanted to understand.
“Why waste a good castle?” I said. “A big push. A surrender. A dose of mercy and he has a new stronghold, a new garrison, and a small repair to make on the entrance. He doesn’t do half measures any more than I do. Go in hard, fast, get the job done.”
“A dose of mercy?” Makin asked. “You think that famous Arrow mercy has survived recent events?”
“Maybe not,” I said, my smile grim, “but I don’t intend to offer any either. Mark me, old friend, nobody gets out alive, not this time.”
“Red Jorg.” Makin clapped his hand to his chest as he had at Remagen Fort years before.
“A red day,” I said. I dipped two fingers into something that lived and laughed just hours ago and drew a crimson line down my left cheek then the right.
As we made our way back down the valley I fiddled with the copper box in its leather sack on my hip. All day I had felt Sageous trespassing through the edge of my imaginations, the half-dreams and daydreams to which he could find paths. My own sources, a spy network far less sophisticated than most of the Hundred maintained, told me the Prince of Arrow had a second army, far smaller than the one at my gates, headed for Ancrath and the Tall Castle, presumably to ensure my father kept his tro
ops indoors. There seemed no reason for Sageous to be haunting my dreams unless he had joined Arrow when the balance of power became clear and now served as the Prince’s advisor, seeking of course to own his mind rather than merely guide it.
Then again, the dream-witch might be keeping himself at the Tall Castle. It might be that Sageous sought to know my plans in order to sell them to Arrow and buy Ancrath’s independence for my father. Either way, I wasn’t going to show them to him.
I snagged the thread of memory that I’d been fishing for and pulled at it. The pre-laid plans that I stored in the box always emerged as sudden inspiration, moments of epiphany where disparate facts connected. I drew on the thread of my schemes but this time something went wrong. This time, despite my care, the box cracked open, a hair’s breadth, and I saw in my mind’s eye a dark light bleeding from beneath the lid. I hammered it down in an instant and it closed with a schnick.
For the longest moment I thought that nothing had escaped.
Then the memory lifted me.
“Hello, Jorg,” she says, and my clever words desert me.
“Hello, Katherine.”
And we stand among the graves with the stone girl and the stone dog between us, and blossom swirls like pink snow as the wind picks up, and I think of a snow-globe broken long ago and wonder how all this will settle.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” I say. “I’m told there are bandits in these woods.”
“You broke my vase,” she says, and I’m pleased that her tongue has turned traitor too.
Her fingers return to the spot where I hit her, where the vase shattered and she fell.
I have put her loved ones in the ground, but she talks about a vase. Sometimes a hurt is too big and we skirt around the edge of it, looking for our way in.
“To be fair, you were about to kill me,” I say.
She frowns at that.
“I buried my dog here,” I tell her. She has me saying foolish things already, telling her secrets she has no right to know. She’s like that knock on the head I took from Orrin of Arrow. She steals the sense from me.
“Hanna is buried there.” She points. Her hand is very white and steady.
“Hanna?” I ask.
Thunder on her brow, green eyes flash.
“The old woman who tried to throttle me?” I ask. An image of a purple face floats before me, framed with grey wisps, my hands locked beneath her chin.
“She. Did. Not!” Katherine says, but each word is more quiet than the one before and the conviction runs from her. “She wouldn’t.”
But she knows she did.
“You killed Galen,” she says, still glaring.
“It’s true,” I say. “But he was a heartbeat away from stabbing his sword through my back.”
She can’t deny it. “Damn you,” she says.
“You’ve missed me then?” I say and I grin because I’m just pleased to see her, to breathe the same air.
“No.” But her lips twitch and I know she has thought of me. I know it and I’m ridiculously glad.
She tosses her head and turns, stepping slowly as if hunting her thoughts. I watch the line of her neck. She wears a riding dress of leather and suede, browns and muted greens. The sun finds a hundred reds in her coiled hair. “I hate you,” she says.
Better than indifference. I step after her, moving close.
“Lord but you stink,” she says.
“You said that the first time we met,” I say. “At least it’s an honest stink from the road. Horse and sweat. It smells better than court intrigue. At least to me.”
She smells of spring. I’m close now and she has stopped walking from me. I’m close and there’s a force between us, tingling on my skin, under my cheekbones, trembling in my fingers. It’s hard to breathe. I want her.
“You don’t want me, Jorg,” she says as if I had spoken it. “And I don’t want you. You’re just a boy and a vicious one at that.” The line of her mouth is firm, her lips pressed to a line but still full.
I can see the angles of her body and I want her more than I have wanted anything. And I am built of wants. I can’t speak. I find my hands moving toward her and force them still.
“Why would you be interested in the sister of a ‘Scorron whore’ in any case?” she asks, her frown returning.
That makes me smile and I can speak again. “What? I have to be reasonable now? Is that the price for growing up? It’s too high. If I can’t take against the woman who replaced my own mother…can’t make childish insults…it’s too high a price, I tell you.”
Again the twitch of her lips, the quick hint of a smile. “Is my sister a whore?”
“In truth, I have no evidence either way,” I say.
She smiles a tight smile and wipes her hands on her skirts, glancing at the trees as if looking for friends or for foes.
“You wouldn’t want me reasonable,” I say.
“I don’t want you at all,” she says.
“The world isn’t shaped by reasonable men,” I say. “The world is a thief, a cheat, a murderer. Set a thief to catch a thief they say.”
“I should hate you for Hanna,” she says.
“She was trying to kill me.” I walk to the grave Katherine pointed out. “Should I apologize to her? I can speak to the dead, you know.”
I stoop to pick a bluebell, a flower for Hanna’s grave, but the stem wilts in my hand, the blue darkening toward black.
“You should be dead,” she says. “I saw the wound.”
I pull up my shirt and show her. The dark line where Father’s knife drove in, the black roots spreading from it, threading my flesh, diving in toward the heart.
She crosses her own chest, a protection quickly sketched. “There’s evil in you, Jorg,” she says.
“Perhaps,” I say. “There’s evil in a lot of men. Women too. Maybe I just wear it more plainly.”
I wonder though. First Corion, then the necromancer’s heart. I could blame them for my excesses, but something tells me that my failings are my own.
She bites her lip, steps away, then straightens. “In any case, I have my heart set on a good man.”
For all my cleverness I hadn’t thought of this. I hadn’t thought of Katherine’s eyes on other men.
“Who?” is all I can find to say.
“Prince Orrin,” she says. “The Prince of Arrow.”
And I’m falling.
I hit the rocks with a curse and skinned a palm, saving my face. Makin pulled me to my feet sharp enough. “Kings fall in battle,” he said, “not tripping up on the way.”
It took me a moment to shake the memory off. Still, there’s little better than a hard reunion with the ground and blood on your hands to haul a man back into the here and now. The mountains, impending snow, and an enemy many thousands strong. Real problems, not rogue memories best forgotten.
“I’m fine.” I patted the sack on my hip. The box was still there. “Let’s break this Arrow.”
24
Wedding day
From the heights even Arrow’s many thousands looked small, arrayed across the slopes before the Haunt and along the ridges to the east. The sight might have given me heart had not my castle looked smaller still, swamped on three sides by men and more men, the winter sun picking glimmers from spear and helm.
Whether the Prince of Arrow’s plans were in line with my prediction of an overwhelming assault or with Makin and Coddin’s siege wasn’t yet clear. What was clear was that our second attack would cost us. On our line of approach the Prince’s troops spread out before the main body of his army in a scattered buffer zone, foot-soldiers under the best cover the slopes could offer, with additional defences hastily cobbled from overturned carts and heaped supplies. They kept under cover whilst the Watch picked whatever targets they could. Our arrows were killing or wounding men in their scores but all the time the archer columns ordered down from the eastern ridges drew closer. Perhaps a thousand of the Prince’s four thousand archers would b
e returning fire within five minutes.
“They’re not happy,” Makin said. He didn’t look too happy himself.
“No,” I said. The roar from the Prince’s army waxed and waned as the wind rose and fell. No true warrior holds any love for archers or archery. Death wings in unseen from a distance and there is little that skill or training can do to save you. I remembered four years back, Maical sliding from the grey as if he’d just forgotten how to ride. I didn’t relish the arrival of the Prince’s archers myself. My little tale of wickedness and gambles could be cut short easily enough by the sudden arrival of the right arrow in the wrong place.
“We should leave now,” Coddin said.
“They won’t follow us until the archers join them,” I said.
“And why do we want them to follow us? The rockslides, well that was impressive, I won’t deny that, but it can’t happen again,” Coddin said.
“Can it?” Hobbs at my right, hopeful.
“No,” I said. “But we need to draw as many men from the fight as we can. The castle can work for us, but not with these odds. And remember, gentlemen, the beautiful Queen…Mi-something?”
“Miana,” Coddin said.
“Yes, her. Queen Miana. Remind the men who we’re fighting for, Hobbs.”
And that was Coddin for you. He watched and he remembered. The man had a mixture of decency and reserve in him that struck a chord with me, qualities I would never own but could appreciate none the less. He’d been the first man of Ancrath I met on my return four years back. I’d thought him tall back then, though now I overtopped him. I’d thought him old, though now he had grey amid the black and I thought him in his prime. I’d elevated him from a guard captain to Watch-master of the Forest Watch because something in him told me he wouldn’t let me down. That same quality put the chamberlain’s robe around his shoulders a year later.
Across the slope old Keppen had his archers lofting their flights high into the air, passing over the scattered foot-soldiers to rain down unaimed in the midst of the Prince’s forces.
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