For the first time, Will had a strong feeling that Conlan was right. This was so different from the way war was waged in Mydren that they would take the tower from under the Lords’ noses before they even understood they were under attack.
The North Tower
“There should be more men on watch,” Arran said, his breath clouding in the frigid air.
“They are not expecting an attack and it is ridiculously cold. I am sure any Protector with a brain would have found some reason not to be on guard today,” Conlan replied.
“You make it sound like they have a choice,” Arran murmured.
“Of course, you realise that if they know we are coming they would want to present an easy target so they could better spring their trap,” Eleanor said, wriggling in the snow they were all lying in, trying to get more comfortable. Will doubted that she would be successful. They lay on their stomachs on the crest of a hill, looking down across the plain towards the sturdy spires of the North Tower, sitting in a square of thick, high, impenetrable walls. It was a dark monstrosity, standing stark against the clean, snowy landscape that sparkled in the sharp, bright morning sun. There was only one enormous wooden gate in the wall, and it was firmly closed.
Raising a hand to shade his eyes, Will was able to see a group of men practicing their sword-fighting in the large courtyard inside the battlements between the gate and the tower itself. Other men were shovelling last night’s snow into piles up against the inner battlement wall so that more of the courtyard was clear. Winter had well and truly arrived in the three months it had taken them to cross the mountains with their carts. The thick layer of snow beneath them pushed wet icy fingers up through their bodies, chilling them from below, and a strong, freezing wind blew south, tugging at their clothes and forcing icy needles through the material from above. This was their fourth reconnaissance mission to the Tower, as the cold kept driving them back before they had finished. It was, however, the first time Will and Arran had been asked to come along. Will disliked being this cold, and had a sneaking suspicion that Eleanor had only insisted they come in the hopes that more people would agree with her theory about the North Tower already knowing they were there.
“They do not know we are coming, Eleanor,” Conlan replied testily.
“Yes, they do,” Eleanor snapped back.
“They know we want to rescue Gregor—they know we are coming in that sense—but they do not know that we are here, now, arguing about it,” Conlan replied.
“Arran just said there were too few Protectors—”
“And there could be any number of reasons for that,” Conlan interrupted.
“Reasons like… we have a traitor, or there are spies following us?” Eleanor said. “I have heard you and Will talking about the feeling of being watched at night. There is a fine line between not creating panic and ignoring a big problem by sticking your head up your—” Conlan turned to glare at her, and Eleanor gulped. “… in the sand,” she amended, a tremor in her voice.
Conlan’s glare turned to blistering fury when Arran spoke.
“You have felt the woman’s presence, too? I thought it was just me.”
Giving Eleanor a snarl of disgust, Conlan turned back to Arran, who lay on the other side of him. “We have felt the presence. It does not seem to be a threat, so I saw no point in mentioning it,” Conlan said.
“She is a threat,” Arran said softly. “She comes quietly at first, but I can feel her madness, driven by raging grief.”
“And you never thought to mention it?” Conlan asked, an undercurrent of anger in his voice.
“I have recurring dreams about being attacked by bees, and experience ‘bad feelings’ in places where unpleasant deaths occurred,” Arran said. “I did not tell you about that either. The woman was just part of living my life, another strangeness that I thought was unique to me. Why would I reveal it and push myself further away from those I wish to fit in with?”
Arran’s words were followed by a thoughtful silence. Suddenly Will gave a start; something Arran had said woke him from a stupor caused by the intense cold, fatigue and the large dose of lepdrac he had taken before coming out.
“Arran, what did you say about the woman?” Will asked.
“She is a threat?”
“No,” Will said. “The next bit.”
“She comes quietly at first…” Arran repeated.
“Yes, that. I have heard that exact phrase before,” Will said. “Moylan used it to describe the onset of his seizures.”
“He said ‘she’?” Conlan asked.
“He changed his mind afterwards and said ‘it’, but I think the first time his subconscious gave the right word,” Will said. The ramifications of this connection exploded through his head.
“This woman is using Moylan to spy on us,” Eleanor said in horror, before Will’s sluggish brain had been fully able to formulate the concept. “But why give him seizures?”
“It might just be a side effect,” Will said, as another unpleasant thought occurred to him. “Or it might be done purposely: the memory loss and disorientation of the seizure may be a means of ensuring that Moylan does not remember the woman using him.”
“This is just conjecture,” Conlan said. “Even if this ‘madwoman’ is spying on us through Moylan, she cannot be getting the whole picture, as we have not been ambushed since Merckley.”
“Ambushing us in snow-covered mountains would be difficult. Why bother if they knew where we are and where we are going?” Eleanor asked, her eyes blazing anger when Conlan refused to respond, staring back at her with his flat blank expression.
“Now I think on it, every time I have felt the woman’s presence, it has been at night, shortly before Moylan has had a fit,” Arran said with slow reflection. “I just never connected the two events.”
“Maybe the bees put you off,” Conlan suggested with a straight face.
Will thought it over. The little pixie could well be right. Conlan needs to give this more consideration.
“While it is not proof, Moylan has only had seizures at night, and we have only felt the presence at night,” Will agreed. “And the others have said that Moylan often mutters that he ‘will not tell’ before a fit. Perhaps Moylan is fighting it, trying not to give too many details, so they cannot pinpoint our position—and the seizure prevents him from remembering.”
“We felt the presence the night we fled Prenderick, and Moylan did not have a fit then,” Conlan pointed out.
“That’s true,” Will said, remembering that first disconcerting feeling of being watched. “Perhaps she was tracking us already, but the damage Moylan suffered to his brain later made it easier for her to enter his head—and she has been using him ever since.”
“How is that even possible?” Conlan asked.
“As you know, those with a strong affinity for Water can access people’s minds,” Arran answered. “I have even heard of occasions when they have done it without the need to remove the shield around the victim’s mind. However, I have never heard of it being done by someone over a distance. Whoever this woman is, she is immensely powerful.”
“So it is possible… And there is enough doubt to put our entire plan at risk,” Eleanor said. “Moylan has been heavily involved in the balloon building from the start. He was the one who suggested boiled linseed oil to seal the balloon when we had to use muslin instead of silk. He was fascinated from the beginning with the maths we used to work out how much material was required.”
“To be safe, you must devise another plan,” Arran said.
Conlan was speechless, shocked. He could not deny the logic of what they were saying, but Will knew how much time and effort it had taken them to come up with their existing plan. If they wanted to attack in deepest winter when the balloons would be the most useful and reinforcements would not be able to reach the tower quickly, they had a month left at most.
“Does Moylan know about the gunpowder?” Conlan asked Eleanor, switching to English.
Will could hear the desperation in his voice.
Eleanor shook her head, replying in English. “No—only Will and I have been working on it. We kept silent about it as you requested. Freddie and Amelia have said nothing either.”
“Is it going to work?” Conlan asked.
“We had some trouble purifying the nitre, but Will figured it out and used wood ash to crash the calcium and magnesium out of the nitre solution—” Eleanor started.
“Eleanor,” Conlan interrupted, his tight voice a side effect of the effort he was exerting to control his irritation. “I’m not even going to pretend I understood what you just said. Just tell me: is it going to work?”
“Yes,” Will said, taking no pleasure in saying it. “It’s going to work.”
Conlan gave him a curt nod. “We are going back to camp,” he said, switching back to Dwarfish. “We need to do some more planning. Nobody says anything, to anybody, before I have had the chance to think about this. Understood?”
The four of them arrived back to a silent camp. They spotted Freddie standing guard, and Will knew Davlin was also somewhere watching the edges of their camp, but everyone else was in one of the two carts, sheltering from the cold. They were too close to the tower for fires to be a possibility, but Freddie had come up with a rather clever alternative: he had filled the stoves in their carts with large, smooth river stones and heated them up. The result had no smoke, yet provided enough heat to keep the carts warm for hours. And they could use them to cook.
Will had been going over and over their problem on the jog back, to distract himself from the aching exhaustion of his body. He was certain that if this ‘madwoman’ had told the Lords exactly where Conlan was, they would not have waited for him to attack, regardless of the mountain hazards. So he was confident they did not know everything, which explained why the frequency of Moylan’s fits had increased recently: they were trying to find out. They knew Conlan must be close to the North Tower, and they might even know about the balloons, but would they understand the true advantage they represented?
“Eleanor, please can you send Moylan out to see me,” Conlan said.
“Are you going to tell him what’s happening?” Will asked.
“Yes. He deserves to hear it from me,” Conlan answered, hiding his feelings behind his usual expressionless mask.
“He does deserve to hear it from you, but not yet.”
“He’s a security risk, Will. We need to keep him away from anything important, and he needs to know why we’re doing that.”
“If our suspicions are true, and the woman doesn’t know we’ve figured it out yet, we can use that against her,” Will said.
“You mean use Moylan against her? Expose him to further seizures, risk further brain damage or death, just so we can feed our enemy false intelligence?”
“There’s no guarantee that she will stop the attacks once she finds out that we know about her—and you make it sound like the result won’t be worth the risk,” Will said, giving Conlan the harsh reality in a calm, assured voice. “If you were able to ask Moylan, I’m certain he would volunteer his services. He’ll be horrified when you do tell him; think how much better it will be to also be able to tell him that he unknowingly saved the day.”
Eleanor stepped forward and took Conlan’s hand. “Will’s right. If we can use this situation to our advantage, we should. And Moylan would be the first to agree.”
“It seems wrong,” Conlan said, the soft pain obvious in his voice. “I saved his life when he was a child… so that I can risk it now he’s a man. Fate is cruel.”
“And unpredictable and spiteful,” Eleanor said quietly. “But that doesn’t change the facts. We need to come up with a plan we can give to our enemy, as well as a new one we’re actually going to carry out.”
Having told Arran to hold his tongue about their ‘spy’, Conlan, Eleanor and a mystified Freddie had walked off together to spend hours out in the cold, in private conversation, making new plans. Before they left, Will had offered them the cart, but Eleanor had explained, in a conspiratorial whisper, that they would come to an agreement on how to proceed far more quickly if they knew warmth awaited them when they did.
When they had first started talking about attacking the North Tower, Conlan had invited Will, Amelia and Davlin to join his ‘war council’, along with Freddie and Eleanor. Amelia had given him a flat ‘no’: she was happy to fight for him and would do as he ordered, but she did not want the responsibility of planning their battles. Davlin, while flattered, had also turned Conlan down—explaining that he would be better used gathering intelligence and scouting out their battles, rather than sitting in stuffy meetings making plans—and Conlan had chosen not to argue the point. Will had considered his own involvement carefully, and eventually came to the conclusion that he did not want Conlan relying on him as an advisor. He would be his captain, leading his men on the battlefield. He did not need to know the big picture; in fact, knowing it would be nothing more than a distraction. So, with a heavy heart, Will had given his reasons and turned the offer down, trying not to see the hurt in Conlan’s eyes when he did. He told himself over and over again that it was for the best. Yet knowing and believing were two different things, and Will could not stop the sharp spasm of jealousy through his chest as he watched the three of them walk off between the trees.
They were gone for hours; for so long that everybody noticed, and muttered conversations about what was going on started to travel through the camp. Dinner had come and gone, the temperature of the pitch-black night had dropped well into minus figures, and the bitter wind made it even colder. Will and Davlin had wanted to go looking for them, but Amelia had insisted that they were overreacting. Their brands had not started hurting, which meant Eleanor and Freddie were still in contactable range and could call if they needed help.
Not finding this calm logic very reassuring, Will had headed out into the dark to sit guard with Davlin. He was unsure how this would help, but at least he would be doing something useful with his nervous tension.
It was nearly dawn and the sky was just beginning to lighten when Davlin nudged Will out of a light doze and pointed. In the distance, three figures were coming towards the camp. Finally. Unravelling himself from the cloak that he was wrapped in, Will climbed out of the tree and dropped to land in a crouch in front of Conlan, Freddie and Eleanor, all three of whom took a step back, hands reaching for their swords in their surprise.
“Are you okay?” Will asked in English. “You were gone for ages. What did you decide?”
“We’re fine,” Eleanor told him. “It just took a while to reach a consensus. You’ll find out about it when everyone else does.”
Eleanor had not spoken with any particular malice or condescension she was just stating a fact. But tired, cold and upset at being marginalised, Will bristled at her words.
“You don’t think I deserve to know now?” he asked.
A silence followed, one which Will felt he could have swum through. He expected Conlan to say something, to reprimand Eleanor perhaps, but it was Eleanor who finally spoke.
“Will, we’re cold, tired and hungry. We’re going to have to explain some of our plans to everyone in a few hours anyway, and I, for one, have no intention of spending what precious little rest time I have telling you all about it first.”
With that, she walked past him. Freddie followed, eyes on his feet. Conlan remained, the rising sun revealing how tired he was. The wind snapped round them and Conlan brushed his hair out of his eyes. He had been growing it longer to hide the crown’s band of silver, making it less obvious that it was bonded to his head. It gave him a softer, more approachable look, which Will thought rather suited him. Clenching his jaw to fight a yawn, Conlan held Will’s gaze. Will raised a questioning eyebrow and Conlan shook his head.
“Eleanor’s right: you can wait to hear it with the others,” Conlan said with blunt honesty. “You chose to not be involved in my war council; you can’t then decide tha
t you want to be included when the mood suits you.”
“Is it too late to change my mind?” Will asked quietly, stunned at being dismissed that way.
Conlan’s body stiffened. “I… Will…” he started. Then pulling himself up, suddenly looking every inch the powerful, confident king, Conlan shook his head. “As much as I believe we would benefit from your experience and thoughtful input, I would no longer take you onto my war council.”
The words spread ice through Will’s insides, far colder than the stinging wind that swirled around them.
“But… I’m the captain of your men,” he said, bewildered and hurt by Conlan’s response.
“And if I had more men, that would be a problem too.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Will, there’s something wrong with you. You’ve carried on this ‘experiment’ with your energy far longer than necessary. It makes you tired, irritable and slow. I’m fairly certain you’re addicted to lepdrac, which is scattering your concentration all over the place, and I know that Eleanor knows more than I do. She’s not half as worried about you as Freddie, Amelia and I. I’ve felt the assistance she gives you during our balancing sessions and the work we’ve been doing practicing our long-distance communications.” Taking a step forward, Conlan grasped Will’s upper arms. “I’ve given you every opportunity to explain to me what the problem is, and yet you have chosen to keep silent, bringing only Eleanor into the secret. I can’t force you to explain, and I’ve always trusted you—so I trust you to keep your secrets if you believe I shouldn’t know. But you’ve got to understand that I can only judge your abilities based on the information you give me. And from what I can observe… you’re a liability.”
Shocked to his core, Will stared at Conlan, into the glowing green eyes of the boy he loved. They stared back with such concern that the urge to tell the truth almost engulfed him. No—I’ll ruin all his plans. I can’t. I can’t risk it. Giving Conlan a small, sad smile, Will nodded and dropped his head.
Will (Book 2) Page 40