Champion of the Crown

by Melissa McShane

  “Fine. So it’s not a great plan. It’s all I have.”

  “Not exactly,” said Claudia. “You have me.”

  “How will that help?”

  Claudia dug a furrow in the ground with the toe of her battered boot. “Felix doesn’t need to disappear, he needs to die,” she said. “I can make that happen.”

  “Kill Felix?”

  “No. Make it look like he’s dead long enough to convince the people who matter. It’s fiendishly difficult, and it’s not as if I’ve ever done it before, but I’m sure it’s possible.”

  Willow realized she was holding her breath. “It won’t hurt him?”

  “Dying won’t. But to be convincing, he’ll have to be sick for a while. A real illness. And I can’t spare him the effects of that.”

  “He can’t be told the truth. He’s not good at lying.”

  “Then he’ll have to endure. Will you be able to bear it, watching him suffer?”

  Willow nodded. “Better a little suffering now than a lifetime of it later. I think…it needs to happen after we defeat Terence, to keep our forces unified. I swore I’d see the Crown restored to its rightful ruler, and much as I’d like you to arrange for Felix’s…death…immediately, I don’t want to see the country thrown into more turmoil than it already is.”

  “How long will that be?”

  “Four more days to Aurilien. We’ll meet Terence’s army then. Either we’ll defeat him, or he’ll kill us, and either way…this isn’t going to be a prolonged siege. Six days from now, it will all be over.”

  “Six days is fast. I’ll do what I can.” Claudia put a hand on Willow’s arm. “You’re brave. I don’t know many women who could deliberately cause their child pain for the sake of their future.”

  “It’s not bravery when you don’t have other options. And it’s not the first time I’ve had to do this to him.” Willow laughed, a short, dry sound. “I hope he’ll forgive me someday.”

  They walked, side by side, back to the camp, each lost in her own thoughts. Willow ran over possibilities in her head. They were going to run up against the Valant army, backed up by Ascendants, and they needed to get through the gates of Aurilien so they could reach the palace and confront Terence. Their success hinged on Terence’s death. But how weakened would their army be by the battle at the walls? And the palace was a warren. Fighting through its halls…Willow had never seen inside the palace, but she could imagine all the places Terence might go to ground. They had to find an alternative, but she knew so little of military strategy, she couldn’t begin to imagine what that might be.

  “Ernest! Come back, boy!”

  The dog came bounding toward her, eagerly putting his muddy paws on her trousers and offering his head to be scratched. “Felix, I thought I told you Ernest can’t keep making people muddy.”

  “I know, but he likes you.” Felix whistled, and Ernest bounded away again. “I’m sorry.”

  Willow brushed ineffectually at the mud. Well, her trousers were dirty already. “Make sure all your things are packed so we can get on the road.”

  “Come here a moment, Felix,” Claudia said, brushing his hair away from his face. “You’ve got dirt on your cheek.”

  She ran her thumb across Felix’s perfectly clean cheek, and Willow had to suppress a shudder. She wants to help, this is for his good, she told herself, but the memory of a squirrel falling out of a tree wouldn’t stop filling her mind’s eye.

  ***

  By the time they stopped for the night, Felix was coughing—not much, but enough to be noticeable. His eyes were glassy with fever. Claudia laid her hand on his forehead, and the symptoms vanished. Willow wanted to ask her why she was curing him, if the point was for him to be sick, but Claudia gave her a look that said Willow shouldn’t worry about it. Willow worried all the same.

  In the days that followed, Felix’s symptoms grew worse, and Claudia’s alleviating of them grew less effective. His coughs were hacking and wet, and he whimpered after each one as if his lungs were being torn out of his chest. Willow made a bed for him in the back of the wagon and sat beside him, giving him water when he asked for it and telling him stories, not that she knew many of those. She told him about her mother, what she remembered of her, and a few tales of her life in Lower Town. It was funny how few of those were suitable for an almost-nine-year-old child to hear. She’d never thought of her life as particularly inappropriate before.

  On the third night, after Willow had put Felix to bed, she stood in front of the command tent with Claudia and Kerish and said, for the benefit of listening ears, “Can’t you heal him?”

  “If I did, the treatment would kill him. He’s too small,” Claudia said. “I can help his symptoms, but he’ll have to recover on his own.”

  “But he will recover?”

  “Of course,” Claudia said. She sounded uncertain, enough that Willow forgot for a moment that all of this was a ruse. “I’ll go back and sit with him, see if I can help him sleep.”

  “Thanks.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Kerish said when Claudia had gone, putting his arm around Willow’s shoulders and squeezing. Willow thought he was remarkably calm, given that he’d been less sanguine about the plan than Willow. But it hadn’t taken much argument to convince him that this was the only way to free Felix and implement Willow’s plan.

  “I know,” Willow said, hoping she sounded the right note of worry and fear.

  Kerish held the tent flap for her, and she entered, pretending no one had heard that carefully staged conversation. The tent was full that night; in addition to Soltighan, Richard, and Lord Quinn were Donald Frazier and Philippa Heath, as well as the company captains from Huddersfield and Silverfield and the captains of Soltighan’s and Richard’s spies.

  Lord Quinn said, “Thank you for finally joining us,” in a tone of voice that verged on sarcastic.

  “His Majesty is doing better, thanks for asking,” Willow said. “But right now we have more pressing matters. We are a day’s journey away from Aurilien and we need a plan of attack. What information do we have?”

  “There are seven companies of Ascendants, no more than ten in a company, between us and Aurilien,” Richard said. “They’re accompanied by military forces, not big ones, but enough to make it difficult for us to get close enough to use the wands.”

  “Aurilien’s gate is fortified further,” Soltighan said, “by what my men judge to be the bulk of the Valant forces. They saw both black and red soldiers, and green and brown.”

  “Green and brown is the Tremontanan Army,” Richard said. “They’ll follow whoever the King is, so if we can reach Terence, that might swing the odds in our favor.”

  “Not something we ought to be planning on, in my opinion,” Lord Quinn said. “Anything else?”

  “There are Ascendants at the gate, well-hidden,” Soltighan said. “They will be difficult to target.”

  “So, to sum up: Ascendants between us and our goal, an army at the gates, and hidden Ascendants who can rain down fire upon us,” Willow said. “What’s our plan?”

  The tent was silent. “I’m not a military thinker,” Willow said. “That’s what all of you are for. This can’t be impossible. I’m determined it isn’t. But I need you to figure this out.”

  Robinson cleared his throat. “Our goal is the palace, and the pretender. We only fight the Ascendants and the army because they’re between us and our goal. Better if we could bypass them entirely.”

  “All right. How do we do that?”

  Soltighan stepped forward and picked up the slim baton lying on the table. He shuffled through an untidy stack of papers until he found a sketch map of Aurilien. “There are three gates,” he said, “here, here, and here. The main gate, to the south, is the only one capable of admitting a large invading force. The others, on the east and west, are much smaller. But they are still big enough to allow our army through—or, at any rate, a company of our army. One big enough to attack the palace.”

 
“Those gates will be guarded. We’ll have to fight our way through,” said Richard. “And that will draw attention from the main gate, so they’ll send reinforcements to whichever of the gates we assault.”

  “What if we had help from the inside?” Kerish said.

  That drew everyone’s attention. Kerish rarely spoke during these meetings. “What do you mean?” Richard said.

  “I mean just that. Suppose we had a small force inside the gate who could attack it from behind, then open the gate and let us in. Then we could either harry the main gate defenders, or go straight for the palace—either way, we gain the advantage.”

  “It’s a nice idea, but we don’t have anyone inside the city,” Lord Quinn said.

  “Not right now,” said Kerish, “but I know someone who could arrange it.”

  His eyes were on Willow now, and he was smiling an odd, amused smile. “Kerish,” Willow said, then couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I think your friend Mister Black might be persuaded to help us, and bring his friends to our aid,” Kerish went on. “And I think getting inside the city won’t be a problem for you.”

  “Kerish—”

  “What is he talking about?” Lord Quinn said. “Is there something you haven’t told us, Lady North?”

  “I’ve lived in Aurilien my whole life, Alric,” Willow said. “I have contacts. And the details are, frankly, none of your business.” While Lord Quinn sputtered, Willow said to Kerish, “I thought you wanted me to remember who I am now, not who I used to be.”

  “Specifically, I told you there were things only you can do,” Kerish said. “It’s true, I hate the thought of you going into danger, but this is one of those things. Maybe someone else could get into the city, but no one else can make contact with Mister Black. And I doubt anyone else in the world could convince him to help us.”

  Willow closed her eyes briefly. “All right. Assuming I can get into the city and convince Rufus to help—what then?”

  “We’ll need a signal to coordinate our attacks,” Richard said. “Something all our groups can see. The army at the front gate will need to press hard at the same time your friend, Mister Black’s, comrades attack at the…better make it the west gate. And our smaller force will need to know when to attack the west gate.”

  “Fireworks?” said one of the captains whose name Willow didn’t know. “I don’t think we have any.”

  “Fire,” said Donald Frazier. “A big smoky one, visible by day or by night.”

  “Where are we going to get one of those?” Richard said.

  Lord Quinn laughed. “All you military geniuses, and not one of you knows your history. There’s a signal fire laid ready within the palace grounds for exactly this circumstance. Everyone for miles around will see it.”

  “Where is it?” Willow asked.

  “Top of Old Tower. But you’ll have to get inside the palace to reach it, and that might be a death sentence by itself.”

  “The top of Old Tower,” Willow said.

  “We can find another way,” Soltighan said.

  “Oh, no, it’s perfect.” Willow grinned. “And I think it means heaven is smiling down on us.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The black and red uniform they found for her fit imperfectly, the trousers baggy, the sleeves half an inch too long. More worrisome was the short tear above the left breast and the stiff, dark stain surrounding it. Someone had mended it with black thread, invisible in the low light, but it felt like an omen, as if the fate of its owner might be transmitted to Willow through the skin. She smoothed the sleeves, feeling the edges of her knife and the slim ridge of her wire, and sternly told her imagination to be silent. The last thing she needed was a distraction.

  Across the tent, Felix coughed, long and hard, then let out a pained whimper that tore at Willow’s heart. She knelt beside his bed and put her hand on his forehead. He was burning hot again. “Willow,” Felix whispered. “Can I have some water?”

  “Sure.” She helped him sit up and held the canteen to his cracked, chapped lips, then had to whip it away when he coughed again, spraying his front with water. When he finished, Willow held him close and said, “It’s all right. This will pass, and you’ll be well again.” It wasn’t even a lie.

  “I feel so tired. But then I sleep, and I’m still tired.”

  “I know. Why don’t I have Lady Claudia come to you? Maybe she can help you sleep.”

  “All right.” He wrinkled his nose. “Why do you smell like sweat?”

  “It’s this uniform. It…isn’t the cleanest.” She prayed he wouldn’t notice the bloodstain.

  “That’s a Valant uniform.”

  “It is.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She stroked his hair. “I’m going to sneak inside Aurilien, pretending to be one of Terence’s soldiers. Then I’m going to talk to a man about helping us get the army into the city.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “It is. But I’ve never been caught—” She stopped herself. Gillian Kent had caught her, so she couldn’t say that anymore. “I mean, I’m very sneaky and I’m not going to be caught. So don’t worry.”

  “I’m afraid for you. You have to come back.” His weak voice trembled.

  “I’ll come back. Now, you rest, and work on getting well. I’ll send Lady Claudia to you.” She kissed the top of his head, gave him a light squeeze, then laid him back on the bed and left the tent.

  Claudia sat outside the tents, warming her hands at the fire. “You look like a Valant soldier.”

  “Thanks. Let’s hope the rest of them think so, too. Felix is feverish again.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” She made no move to rise. Willow resisted the urge to prod her into motion. It was hard to remember, looking at Felix’s suffering face, that all this was for a greater purpose. She knows what she’s doing, Willow told herself, and unclenched her fists.

  “Stay with him tonight, please?” she said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  “I will.” Claudia got to her feet. “Good luck.”

  Willow took a moment to prod the fire when the Ascendant had disappeared into Willow’s tent. Her nerves were keyed nearly to the breaking point, a dangerous state for a thief, and she watched the fire until she felt calmer and ready to take on the night’s challenges. She stuffed her knit cap into her waistband, flexed her wrist once more, testing the knife’s bindings, then walked toward the command tent, stepping as lightly as if she were sneaking through camp. Time to be a midnighter once more.

  Soltighan and Kerish were the only ones in the command tent. “The others have gone to their respective camps, preparing for the assault,” Soltighan said. “I have been chosen to lead the company that is to assault the west gate.”

  “Is it bad to say that relieves my mind?” Willow glanced once more at the sketch map of Aurilien. It wasn’t to scale, but the relative positions of the palace, the walls, and the gates were all as accurate as they could be. “Not that I don’t trust the other captains.”

  “I am honored by your faith in me.” Soltighan bowed. “I will leave you now. Good luck, Willow.”

  As soon as he was out the door, Kerish put his arms around Willow and drew her close. “I’m almost sorry I came up with this plan,” he said, his words muffled by her hair. “Some husband I turned out to be, sending my wife into terrible danger.”

  “I’d have thought of it eventually. And it’s the only way.”

  “I know.” He slid his hand along her cheek, caressing her in the way that never ceased to make her shiver with pleasure. “Just—come back.”

  “I promise,” she said, and kissed him. His warm lips on hers filled her with desire, utterly inappropriate for that moment, but she pulled him close to her and kissed him again. He worked his hands beneath her uniform coat and linen shirt and stroked her skin, and she made a little noise deep in her throat and kissed him harder.

  “You have to leave,” he murmured.r />
  “Don’t want to. Oh, Kerish, I love you.”

  “I love you.” He gently pushed her away, tugging her shirt back into place. “Good luck, Willow.”

  He didn’t follow her out of the tent, for which she was grateful; it was hard enough leaving him without feeling his eyes on her as she left. She trotted through the camp, avoiding as many people as she could. She was out of practice, but her sense of curved swords and chain shirts or studded leather coats hadn’t deserted her, and few people saw her leave the camp and strike out toward the road leading to Aurilien.

  She left the lights and the quiet sounds of the camp behind well before she reached the road, and soon the crunch of her feet on the frozen grass was her only companion. The waxing moon rode high in the sky, shedding a dim light over the fields. She moved quickly without running, not wanting to exhaust herself before she reached her destination. Soon she was warm enough that the coat was an encumbrance, though one she wasn’t going to shed. It would be her way in.

  The road was a dark strip of packed earth before her, wide enough for two oxcarts to pass side by side. During the day, it was busy enough that they’d had to steer wide of it as they marched, but now, two hours after sunset with the world in shadow, she had it to herself. Five miles to go. She speeded her pace, not much, but enough that her lungs ached with more than the cold air.

  This was a slender thread to hang a strategy on, this hope that Willow would make it inside the city and then convince Rufus he should help her. If she failed…they might still win the day, but at tremendous cost. Right now teams of wand wielders and soldiers were out hunting Ascendant bands, aided by Claudia’s eye-altering magic. The Ascendants wouldn’t expect to come under attack after dark, and Willow was certain this meant victory. The rest of the army was preparing to move into position at the two gates, waiting for her signal. Willow didn’t understand the tactics behind those decisions, and felt a little guilty at not making more of an effort. But she had her own mission—and those tactics she certainly understood.