by Naomi Novik
“No,” Sarkan said. “Marek’s not fighting to win the tower. He’s fighting to win the throne. If he loses to us here, now, we’ll have made him look weak before the Magnati. He’s backed into a corner.”
I understood without wanting to. Marek really would spend everything he had. No price would be too high. All the men and magic he’d used already would only make it worse, like a man throwing good money after bad because he couldn’t stand to lose what he’d already spent. We couldn’t just hold him off. We’d have to fight him to the last man, and he had thousands of them left to pour into the battle.
The cannon roared once more, as if to punctuate the terrible realization, and then they fell suddenly and blessedly silent. Sarkan’s floating sentinel had dropped down upon them and burst against the hot iron. The dozen men working on the cannon had frozen into statues. One man stood before the left cannon with a rod thrust down the barrel; others were bent over gripping ropes, dragging the right cannon back to its place; still others held cannon-balls or sacks in their hands: a monument to a battle that wasn’t over.
Marek at once ordered other men to come and get the statues clear of the cannon. They began dragging and shoving the statues away, toppling them into the dirt. I flinched when I saw one smashing the fingers off the statues to pry out the ropes: I wanted to shout down that the stone-turned men were still alive. But I didn’t think Marek would care.
The statues were heavy and the work was slow, so we had a brief respite from the cannon-fire. I steadied myself and turned to Sarkan. “If we offered to surrender,” I said, “would he listen?”
“Certainly,” Sarkan said. “He’d put us both to death at once, and you might as well cut the children’s throats yourself as hand them over, but he’d be delighted to listen.” He took a turn thwarting the arrow spell: he pointed and spoke an incantation of misdirection, and another flight of silver-led arrows struck against the outer wall. He shook out his hand and wrist, looking down. “In the morning,” he said finally. “Even if Marek is willing to destroy his entire army, men can’t fight endlessly without a rest, and food and drink. If we can hold them until morning, he’ll have to call them off for a little while. Then he might be willing to parley. If we can hold them until morning.”
Morning seemed far away.
The pace of the battle ebbed for a little while. The baron’s men had retreated into the second trench entirely by now, filling the passageway in with corpses so Marek’s men couldn’t keep coming. Marek rode his horse back and forth outside the walls, simmering and angry and impatient, watching while his men struggled to get the cannon firing again. Near him, Solya settled into a steady rhythm of throwing arrow-flights into the second trench.
It was an easier spell for him to throw than for us to deflect. The arrow-heads were Alosha’s work. They wanted to find their way to flesh, and he was only showing them the way to go. Meanwhile we were trying to twist them from their purpose, fighting not just his spell but hers: the strength of her will, the hammer-strokes that had beaten magic and determination into the iron, and even the arrows’ natural flight. Pulling them aside was steady, grinding work, and meanwhile Solya threw his silver guiding lines into the air with wide easy sweeps of his arm, like a man sowing seeds. Sarkan and I had to take turns, each of us catching a flight at a time; each one an effort. We had no time or strength for any other working.
There was a natural rhythm to the work: dragging away a flight of arrows, like hauling on a heavy fishing-net, and then pausing to sip a little water and rest while Sarkan took his turn; then I would go to the window again. But Solya broke the rhythm, again and again. He kept the flights spaced apart exactly the worst amount of time: just close enough that we couldn’t sit down between them without having to spring up, and then every once in a while he let a longer time go by, or threw the arrows at us instead, or sent two flights out in quick succession.
“He can’t have an endless supply of them,” I said, leaning against the wall, drained and aching. There were boys with the archers who were hunting for spent arrows, pulling them out of corpses and from against the walls where they’d struck, and carrying them back to be shot again.
“No,” Sarkan said, a little distant and remote, also turned inward by the steady drain of magic. “But he’s keeping the flights small. He’ll likely have enough to last until morning.”
Sarkan went briefly out of the room after finishing his next turn, and brought back a sealed glass jar from the laboratory, full of cherries in syrup. He kept a big silver samovar on a table in the back corner of the library, which never ran out of tea: it had survived the ruin of the cannon-ball, although the delicate glass cup had fallen over and smashed. He poured tea into two measuring-bowls instead, and pushed the jar of cherries over to me.
They were the deep wine-red sour cherries from the orchards outside Viosna, halfway down the valley, preserved in sugar and spirits. I stirred in two heaping spoonfuls and greedily licked the spoon clean. They tasted of home to me, and the valley’s slow magic resting in them. He dipped only three of them out for himself, chary and measured, and he scraped the spoon on the edge of the jar, as though he was being careful, even now, not to take too much. I looked away and drank my own tea gladly with both hands cupped around the bowl. It was a warm night, but I felt chilled through.
“Lie down and get a little sleep,” Sarkan said. “He’ll likely try a final push just before morning.” The cannon had fired again at last, but without doing much harm: I guessed that all the men who really knew how to work them had been caught in the stone spell. Several of the balls had fallen short, landing among Marek’s own men, or went too far and flew past the tower entirely. The walls were holding. The baron’s men had covered the second trench with pikes and spear-hafts, and laid their blankets and tents on them, helping to hide themselves from the arrow-flights.
I felt thick even after the tea, tired and dulled like a knife that had been used to cut wood. I folded over the rug once to make a pallet, and it felt so very good to lie down on it. But sleep wouldn’t come. The silver arrow-flares lit the top of the window-frame at long, stuttered intervals. The murmur of Sarkan’s voice, turning them aside, seemed far away. His face stood in shadow, the profile sharp-outlined against the wall. The tower floor beneath my cheek and my ear trembled faintly with the fighting, like the distant heavy step of an approaching giant.
I shut my eyes and tried to think of nothing but my breath. Maybe I slept a moment; then I was sitting up with a jerk out of a dream of falling. Sarkan was looking down through the broken window. The arrow-flights had stopped. I pushed myself up and joined him.
Knights and servants were milling around Marek’s pavilion like stirred-up bees. The queen had come out of the tent. She was wearing armor, a mail shirt put over a simple white shift, and in one hand she carried a sword. Marek spurred over to her, bending down, speaking; she looked up towards him with her face clear and hard as steel. “They’ll give the children to the Wood as Vasily did me!” she cried out to him, her voice ringing loud enough to hear. “Let them cut me limb from limb first!”
Marek hesitated, and then he swung down from the horse and called for his shield; he drew his own sword. The rest of his knights were climbing down beside him, and Solya was at his side. I looked at Sarkan, helplessly. I almost felt that Marek deserved to die, after he’d driven so many of his men to death; but if that was what he really believed, if he thought we meant to do something dreadful to the children—“How could he believe that?” I asked.
“How could he convince himself that everything else was coincidence?” Sarkan said, already at his bookshelves. “It’s a lie that matches his desire.” He lifted one volume off the shelf in both his arms, a massive tome nearly three feet tall. I reached out to help him and jerked my hands away, involuntarily: it was bound in a kind of blackened leather that felt dreadful to the touch, sticky in a way that didn’t want to rub off my fingers.
“Yes, I know,” he said, heaving it onto
his reading-chair. “It’s a necromantic text; it’s hideous. But I’d rather spend dead men twice than any more of the living.”
The spell was written out in long old-fashioned script. I tried to help him read it, but I couldn’t; I recoiled from even the first words. The root of that spell was death; it was death from beginning to end. I couldn’t bear to even look at it. Sarkan frowned at my distress in irritation. “Are you being missish?” he demanded. “No, you aren’t. What the devil is the matter? Never mind; go and try to slow them down.”
I sprang away, eager to get far from that book, and hurried to the window. I seized bits of broken stone and rubble from the floor and tried the rain spell on them, the same way I’d used it on the water-jug. Showers of dust and pebbles rained down on Marek’s soldiers. They had to take cover, wrapping their hands over their heads, but the queen didn’t so much as pause. She marched through the breach in the wall; she climbed over the corpses, the hem of her shift soaking up blood.
Marek and his knights surged in front of her, holding their shields over their heads. I threw heavier rocks down at them, bigger chunks that grew into boulders, but even though a few of them staggered down to their knees, most of them stayed safe tucked under their shields. They came to the passageway, and began to seize the corpses and drag them out of the way. The baron’s men stabbed at them with spears. Marek’s knights caught blows on their shields and their armor. And didn’t: half a dozen of them fell, bodies in full gleaming armor heaved back limp and dead. But they pressed on, forced an opening, and the queen stepped inside.
I couldn’t see the fighting inside the tunnel, but it was over quickly. Blood ran out of the passageway, black in the torch-light, and then the queen was stepping through the other side. She hurled down the head of a man she’d been gripping in her free hand, the neck sliced cleanly through. The defenders began backing away from her in fear. Marek and his knights spread out around her, hacking and killing, and his foot-soldiers poured into the trench behind them. Solya lashed magic out in white crackling streams.
The baron’s men began falling back quickly, stumbling over their own feet, away from the queen. I’d imagined Kasia with a sword, this same kind of horror. The queen lifted her sword again and again, stabbed and hacked with brutal practicality, and none of their swords pierced her. Marek was shouting orders. The baron’s men inside the last wall had climbed up onto the top of it and were trying to shoot at the queen from above. But the arrows couldn’t break her skin.
I turned and pulled one of the black-fletched arrows out of the bookcase where it had sunk in, one of the arrows Solya had fired at me, Alosha’s make. I took it to the window and stopped. My hands were shaking. I didn’t see what else to do. None of them could stop her. But—if I killed the queen, Marek would never listen to us, never; I might as well kill him now, too. If I killed her—I felt strange and sick at the thought. She was small and far away on the ground, a doll and not a person, her arm rising and falling.
“A moment,” Sarkan said. I backed away, reprieved and glad of it, although I had to cover my ears while he recited the long shivering words of his spell. A wind breathed out through the window, brushing against my skin like a damp, oily palm, smelling of rot and iron. It kept blowing, steady and awful, and down in the trenches the endless corpses stirred, and slowly began to rise.
They left their swords on the ground. They didn’t need any weapons. They didn’t try to hurt the soldiers, just reached out their empty hands and took hold of them, two and three to a man, grasping. There were already more dead men than living ones in the trenches, and all the dead served the Dragon’s spell. Marek’s soldiers slashed and cut at them in a frenzy, but the dead didn’t bleed. Their faces were sagging and blank, uninterested.
Some of them plodded down the trench to grasp at the knights, at the queen’s arms and legs, taking hold of her. But she flung them off, and the knights in their armor hacked them with their broadswords. The baron’s men were as horrified by the spell as Marek’s; they were scrambling back from the dead as much as from the implacable queen. And she moved forward against them. The dead were holding back the rest of the army, and the baron’s men were hacking down the knights all around her, but she didn’t stop.
There wasn’t any white left in her shift. It was bloody from the ground to the knee; her mail shirt was dyed red. Her arms and hands were red, her face was spattered. I looked down the arrow and touched Alosha’s magic: I felt the arrow’s eagerness to fly again, to seek warm living flesh. There was a nick in the arrow-head; I smoothed it out with my fingers, pressing the steel flat the way I’d seen Alosha work her sword. I pushed a little more magic into it, and felt it grow heavy in my hand, full of death. “In the thigh,” I told it, quailing at murder. Surely it would be enough just to stop the queen. I pointed it at her, and threw.
The arrow dived down, flying straight, whistling joyfully. It struck the queen’s leg high up on the thigh, and tore through the mail shirt. And then it stuck there, hanging half through the mail. There wasn’t any blood. The queen pulled the arrow out, tossed it aside. She looked up towards the window, a brief glance. I stumbled back. She returned to the slaughter.
My face ached as if she’d struck me, with a sharp hollow pressure above the bridge of my nose, familiar. “The Wood,” I said out loud.
“What?” Sarkan said.
“The Wood,” I said. “The Wood is in her.” Every spell we’d cast on the queen, every purging, the holy relics, every trial: none of them mattered. I was suddenly sure. That had been the Wood looking back at me. The Wood had found a way to hide.
I turned to him. “The Summoning,” I said. “Sarkan, we have to show them. Marek and Solya, all their men. If they see that she’s been taken by the Wood—”
“And you think he’ll believe it?” he said. He looked out the window, though, and after a moment said, “All right. We’ve lost the walls in any case. We’ll bring the survivors inside the tower. And hope the doors hold long enough for us to cast the spell.”
Chapter 28
We ran down to the great hall and flung the doors open. The baron’s men came pouring in: so horribly few of them left. A hundred maybe. They crowded into the hall and down the stairs into the cellars, all of them smudged and exhausted, faces wrung with one horror after another. They were glad to come inside, but they flinched from Sarkan and from me. Even the baron himself looked at us askance. “That wasn’t them,” he said, as he came to stand before Sarkan in the hall, his men eddying to either side of us, leaving a circle around us. “The dead men.”
“No, and if you would have preferred to have lost the rest of the living ones, do tell me, and I’ll be sure and keep your tender sensibilities in mind next time.” Sarkan was drawn tight, and I felt just as spent. I wondered how long it was until morning, and didn’t want to ask. “Let them get what rest they can, and share out all the stores you can find.”
Soon Kasia pushed up the stairs, through the crowding soldiers; the baron had sent the wounded and the worst-exhausted men downstairs; only his best remained with him. “They’re breaking into the wine and the beer casks,” she said to me in an undertone. “I don’t think it’s going to be safe for the children. Nieshka, what’s happening?”
Sarkan had climbed the dais: he was laying out the Summoning across the arms of his high seat. He swore under his breath. “That’s the last thing we need now. Go down there and turn it all into cider,” he told me. I ran down with Kasia. The soldiers were drinking out of cupped hands and helmets, or just jabbing holes in the casks and putting their heads underneath, or tipping back bottles; some of them were quarreling already. Shouting over wine must have felt safer than shouting over horrors, over dead men and slaughter.
Kasia pushed them out of my way, and they didn’t fight her when they saw me there; I got up to the biggest barrel and put my hands on it. “Lirintalem,” I said, with a tired shove of magic, and sagged as it ran away from me and shivered through all the bottles and casks. Th
e soldiers kept on pushing and shoving to get a drink; it would be a while before they realized they weren’t getting any drunker.
Kasia touched my shoulder, carefully, and I turned and hugged her tight for one moment, glad of her strength. “I have to go back up,” I said. “Keep the children safe.”
“Should I come stand with you?” she said quietly.
“Keep the children safe,” I said. “If you have to—” I caught her arm and took her back to the far wall of the cellar. Stashek and Marisha were sitting up there, awake and watching the soldiers, wary; Marisha was rubbing her eyes. I put my hands on the wall and found the edges of the passageway. I put Kasia’s hand on the crack, showed her where it was, and then I pulled a thin line woven of magic out of it, as a handle. “Push the door open and take them inside, and close it behind you,” I said. Then I put my hand into the air and said, “Hatol,” pulling, and drew Alosha’s sword out of the air back to me. I held it out to her. “Keep this, too.”
She nodded, and slung the sword over her shoulder. I kissed her one last time and ran back upstairs.
The baron’s men had all come inside. The walls still did us this much good: Marek’s cannon couldn’t be turned on the doors. A few of the baron’s men had climbed up to the arrow-slit window seats to either side of them and were shooting down at the soldiers outside. Heavy thumps landed against the door, and once a bright flare of magic; shouts and noise came. “They’re laying a fire against the doors,” one of the men called from the window as I came back up into the great hall.
“Let them,” Sarkan said, without looking up. I joined him on the dais. He had reshaped the grand throne-like chair into a simple bench of two seats, with a flat desk on the shared arm between them. The heavy volume of the Summoning lay upon it, waiting, familiar and still strange. I let myself down slowly into the seat and spread my fingers over the cover: the golden vining letters, the faint hum beneath like distant honeybees. I was so tired even my fingers felt dull.