As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  So Walthere ordered the drummers up on those walls every night, to play, and play, and play—largely, it was the same song over and over again as well. Deny a man his sleep long enough and you denied him his own worth.

  Charlotte checked on Sara as often as she could, though no change came to her in these long days, and Dartrek was a good keeper. The visage of him in the window of that tower, a broad man with bow in hand, fletching arrows, was about as reassuring a thing as one could come by.

  Yet other matters detained her attention as well. At midday on the fourth, a messenger rode under the white banner. A parley was arranged (the first since the army’s arrival), and after a blissful hour of silent heat, Charlotte accompanied their diplomats into the field.

  “Mauritz is of an older breed,” Saelec had said with certainty. “He’ll not sully himself striking a woman at the table.”

  In all, six of them rode to the meeting. They went on white horses, with green sewn saddles, to make a point. Mauritz’s party was hellishly drab, by comparison. We might as well be going to picnic, Charlotte thought of her fellows. They were as children before their enemy’s malevolent gaze.

  This was the first time Charlotte had ever actually beheld the Master of Arms and Lord Justiciar of the Empire. He was of impressive height for so old a man, and mounted on a powerful warhorse. A wolf skin was draped over his shoulders, seemed to weigh him down but—no, she reasoned, that was a hunch time had sewn into him. A thick noseguard concealed most of his face, but the eyes stood out like the beacons of a lighthouse. He rode well, for a seventy-some-year-old man in full armor.

  Both sides observed the full auspices of jurti, with its specific steps and coded bows, the particular paces to which each was set to hold. Then her father called, “Perhaps you have not heard, Lord Mauritz, but the capital is in turmoil. Would it not be best for each of us to serve our people there?” It was a jab, and one which bit through the tight confines of their formality. Mauritz shuffled on his snorting horse, pointed a gauntleted finger toward the man.

  “And you were formally stripped of your title, Walthere,” he snapped, observing none of the show of niceties, and no title, of course. “Would you not best serve yours by absolving yourself of this charade?”

  “The Empress Dowager and young Emperor have observed all our titles. They have not even ordered yours stripped, rebel that you are, for they do not discard family as easily as some.”

  All those gathered grew still, only the horses shuffled in the dirt, the chomp of their teeth on grass. Mauritz stared at the other man. Then his creased lips split into a smile and a hand slipped down to tap the hilt of his sword. It might have echoed, that little thing, if they had been in a proper place for it. Walthere met that smile with eagerness—any sensible man was pleased when a barb bit home.

  Mauritz said, “My brother was a traitor to the Empire, as are you. He took a coward’s way out, yet still, I think, approached his end with more manhood than you have ever known, cowering as you do behind your poets and paltry walls. Why do we waste words? Fight me now, in single combat, and let the old Ordeal settle where Assal’s truth lies.”

  Walthere was no longer smiling. His eyes grew cold and distant as a winter moon. “These are not the old days, Lord Mauritz. We are not savages. Two old men could not settle the grievances of a hundred thousand souls. If you wish to fight, you can fight my brother when he returns. Otherwise, if you insist on this fools’ gambit, I will return to our walls and watch you break against them. You asked for a meeting. Give me something or get you back to your camp.”

  A leader had to be harsh. They had to know the balance between talk and action.

  “Cowardice. As expected.”

  Somewhere, a bird called. Fitz snarled and started forward, one hand flying to his own blade. “Let me act as your champion, lord!” the bastard said. “I’ll not have him name you so.”

  The austere appearance of the Lord Justiciar shattered with the shaking belt of a laugh. Still quivering, he said, “Oh, pup, I would kill you.” Blunt, absolute—purposely so.

  Walthere flicked a glance back at Charlotte, and she spurred forward as he said, “Do not speak out of turn, young lord,” and she put her horse before Fitz’s own, and laid a hand against his. He scowled at Mauritz, but retreated, step by step, into line. Later, she forced her eyes to promise. She could not be certain he was placated.

  “Hear the words of the Emperor, by which I am charged—be he now deceased or no—Walthere Cullick. You, a member of the court, have committed treason against your emperor, conspiring with elements of the Emperor’s own family to deprive the rightful heirs of their throne, and place your own family where it does not belong. You and your daughter,” and for this, he looked directly at Charlotte, not at Walthere, “have forfeited your lives. Take them yourself or surrender them to us. It matters little. Your brother shall be similarly treated, when caught. Likewise the Empress Dowager, for her part in this treachery—but we shall be merciful.

  “To your own son, we shall grant life, and a barony far from this place. The Princess Sara and Prince Lothen shall be released into our custody, where you might no longer poison them—”

  “You speak of your emperor, and his sister,” said Charlotte. She had seen her father about to speak—could not allow him to speak for a girl he had nearly ruined.

  “And you of my wife!”

  One of Mauritz’s accompaniments showed life then. He did not spur himself forward, but his voice, petulant and affronted, took the measure of the field. Though none of his fellows seemed to pay him particular deference, the rangy, mustachioed man was nothing like his comrades, even if he wore their colors. He was a swarthy, dark-skinned creature, had been otherwise silent before this moment. Now he was red-faced, clearly outraged.

  “So you are Count Hernando,” she said softly, though she had never seen the man before. Sara had spoken much of him, this husband, now general—and doubtless sycophant-prisoner to Mauritz—and few of them turned to praise.

  “Mark it, witch!” Hernando said in flawless Idasian. A count he might have been, but he had never once seen the homeland from whence the title came. “You will return my wife, or so help me there will be no place any of you might hide.”

  She could feel both Fitz and Saelec bridle behind her, hear their conspiratorial words: “This one, this one is mine…I do not care for the way he speaks…”

  Calmly, she said to her challenger, “If you feel so strongly, my lord, why did you not come when she wrote you? I sat beside her as she penned countless of those letters. We have not even heard a word of you before this moment. Did you think you needed an army to see your own wife? Or did you just need an audience?”

  Dead silence. Hernando gaped, and fumed, but Mauritz didn’t even have to look at him to hold him off. There was no reply. Instead, the Lord Justiciar resumed with a voice loud enough to carry to the walls, “All others under you, here or abroad, will be offered pardon. That is all. Let us quit this place before these youths do something regretful.” He tipped his head up and shifted in the saddle.

  Arrogance breeds us thus, Charlotte thought. Time could not defeat him because he is too arrogant to die. In this, she imagined he had good company with her father.

  Walthere seemed to look past the man, into the middle distance, at the army or birds circling the updraft. “Why would I do that?” Walthere said. He sounded genuinely perplexed.

  Behind it all there was fear as well, she could hear it, but she knew no one else could see it. Walthere was a practiced man, and so was she, and while all of those around them were as well, this was a master with whom she had grown—she knew more of him than any other soul alive. She would like to tell someone else, to ask them if they would stand with her father no matter what passed on this field, but of course she couldn’t. She had taken the form of a diplomat today, and a loyal daughter beside, and both demanded that no one hear her speak out of turn, that there could be no disunity bred which might tear the band
age off an already wounded pride.

  “Generations ago, your family betrayed your kinsmen,” Mauritz said. “Were I alive then, I should have counseled my own kin to the foolishness of letting your house survive that dishonor. Betrayal runs in the blood. It is a stain which never wholly leaves, if not excised.”

  Walthere appeared undisturbed. “If I were merely a traitor, I should have my men shoot you from the walls. This is a matter of legacy.”

  “Is that it?”

  “It is always different for those that have, Lord Mauritz. Complacency breeds in familiarity. We begin to think of ourselves as entitled. In truth, none of us are, nor ever has been, nor ever should be. You and yours—you are past your time.”

  At this, Mauritz shifted to point at Charlotte. “Understand, Cullick, that I have marked your daughter. Whether you live or you die today, I will come for her, to her very deep regret.”

  Walthere tipped his head, and the groups drew apart. The problem with backing men into corners, however, was that they had nowhere else to turn, and nothing to lose. Her father could talk all he wished of those that had and those that had not, but in that situation, it was the haves that had so much more to lose—and less to keep by rules.

  Saelec was the one to cry out, to spur his horse forward quick enough to smack the rear of Charlotte’s own. Her palfrey whinnied and leapt, and as the other leapt too, she wrenched back, trying to see what had startled him, and was met with the boom of thunder as first one, then a second and third cannons opened up on them. From the walls men were shouting, were suddenly drowned out by the sheer force of dust and searing metal in the air.

  The gates were open. She saw Fitz ahead of her, a little nearer the gates, wandering dazed toward them. His horse was a black lump behind him, a discoloration in the midst of an upchurned field. “Bastard!” she cried, because she could think of no word quicker to take his attention. He twisted, and though her horse ran, she managed to ease it enough that he could catch a stirrup and wrench himself upward. A clump of hair, a grip that shifted to her leg—it was unseemly, but he had her, just barely had her, was slumping against her as the horses tore through the gates to safety.

  The armies stirred. Men jeered as the gates clapped shut. Orders had been given, and the world erupted with the fire of a man’s broken pride.

  That night, men would slip from the walls and scatter to the winds, carrying message of what had transpired. For the people outside, it would be one more slight against a seemingly honorless man. For others, it was a desperate call: Help us, it cried. Behold the rage that gathers before our walls.

  Things turned from bad to worse. Raiders hit the invaders’ camp in the early hours of the fifth day. Charlotte heard the screams, the sudden clamor of iron as men—no more than flickers of torch flames from that distance—suddenly bobbed into furious activity. Yet the attack was repulsed, the raiders trapped and butchered, and come light, Mauritz had the heads of the ringleaders fired into the city.

  Ser Edwin mustered a cluster of the city guard to gather them up, lest they eat too deeply at morale—or spread disease. He returned ashen, and he needed say nothing for Charlotte to know that he had known some of those faces. She could picture a great many knights they may have been, or lords beside, yet she dared not fit a name to any of them.

  She had run out of prayers as she had bent over Fitz, waiting for men to staunch the bleeding. At least that one small salvation had been allowed her.

  On the sixth day, spotters on the walls pointed out another army approaching. Hesitantly, some dared hope it was Maynard’s long overdue return. Instead, as the men trickled in, trepidation turned to desolation: quartered flags bearing a demure Imperial gryphon and the mountain bear meant that the long overdue Duke Urtz of Dexet had finally arrived, with a force nearly half the size of that already encamped.

  Given the pomp and to-do with which the man arrived, trumpets and drums beside, one might have thought he expected their walls to fall by music alone. If she squinted hard enough, she imagined she could see her former fiancé. She could picture his finely curled black hair, his high forehead, and the formidable presence he brought to bear in all things. He was an intense fellow, with determination—no one could deny him that—if not particularly likeable. She would shoot him with a crossbow herself, for how quick he had dismissed her after the Matair incident.

  Hopes and dreams, drifting like smoke from a pipe. That’s all it was.

  They would come in force now. An army so large could not hope to long sit a siege. Either they would run out of food or their men would grow restless. Not one of them knew how many more partisans might be lurking out there, or if Maynard had truly been stopped.

  In this, she was not disappointed.

  “Charlotte.” She roused at the desperation in the voice, but the pangs of sleep were slow in dissolving. A man stood over her. Sara’s cold form still lay beside her. Darkness. Thunder. She rolled her head up, saw the leaning face was Dartrek’s, and he already had a hand on her shoulder. Presumptuous. “We must go. They are in.”

  “Who? What?”

  She had been startled from a dream, wherein Usuri was trying to tell her…what? She could not remember. There was the assassin, and her, and the walls beyond which…

  “Time to rise, little bird.”

  Her attention went beyond Dartrek, to the witch in the corner with a smile carving out her face. How… she wanted to ask, but even in her addled state, she knew better. The witch had her ways. Then her mind snapped into focus. They. Them. In. And her mind registered horror.

  “Men with crowbars slipped under the south wall. Pried loose mortar there, most like, ‘fore anyone noticed.” Dartrek put his hands out in a helpless gesture. “Just a matter of cracking the masonry, really.”

  Charlotte knew little of construction, but she could parse out the details. A hole weakened the whole. “That done, at the first shot…”

  The wall crumbled. It wasn’t said. Nothing woke a person so swift as terror. She swept from the bed and turned back to Sara.

  “Dartrek, help me. We need to take her…”

  “No time,” Usuri snipped. She and her bare feet had crossed the room without a sound. “And it’s not so bad as that.”

  Half-truth, in that. They would not have woken her if it were not serious.

  “How so?”

  It was a stupid question. She knew it even as the words left her lips. The city was fallen. The citadel remained. They were in no danger…yet. But then…

  Usuri, as though reading the line of her thoughts, said, “It’s just a matter of time, little bird. Time you considered flight.”

  “The city—”

  “Dead,” Dartrek grunted.

  “Is still fighting for the moment,” Usuri corrected. “Come.”

  There was a certain compulsion to that last demand, but that in itself gave Charlotte pause. She did not like to feel manipulated, and Usuri must have realized her err, for her features softened, the force was lost, and she held bare hands toward her.

  “I touched your well water. The ground beyond the walls…it’s become a slog of mud. And your assassin…” Usuri hesitated. That one still frightened her, then. “He walks.”

  They led her from the tower and into the courtyard. Chaos reigned there, embodied in the figures both armed and innocent who scattered across the battlements and the outbuildings. Most of the latter were fleeing for the keep. No one seemed to have eyes for anyone else within the boundaries of the walls, however, save for the men Charlotte had left on the doors.

  “My lady, it’s not safe out here of the moment,” one of them said.

  “This is why I take my shield with me, ser. Make sure no one enters the tower; we go to survey what else might be done.”

  Usuri, Charlotte noted, had donned the demure garb of a servant, along with a travelling cloak she had bundled over herself to hide her markings. It was enough to make Charlotte draw her own cloak a little tighter, even as the heat of the evening
threatened to overswell. Dartrek did not seem to notice. He led them quickly through the yard, to a certain point on the walls where others gathered. They did not exactly blend, but they did not particularly stand out either. There were more than a few unarmed gawkers amongst the sullen soldiers.

  What struck her most about the scene below was not the carnage at the opened gap, but rather the flood of townspeople fleeing the disaster. Some had been atop their roofs, watching, but most had been asleep in their beds. In some places she could see the telltale signs of folk barring their windows and their doors, but most were forming mobs laden with their precious possessions, a teeming mass of gasping men and squalling children whose pandemonium was set to the tune of church and watch bells ringing in the city. For the city guard, it was a demand to muster, a sort of internal smoke signal. For everyone else, it was a desperate warning.

  Suddenly Charlotte was afraid again. She did not see how anyone could make sense of the rush, and she knew there was no way so many could fit in the relative safety of the city’s cathedral. Some would try the gates; they would only complicate the defense, send guardsmen into a panic.

  Politics was brutal and it was bloody, but it was efficient. This was something else entire.

  From up here, Charlotte could see everything, but she understood little. At the southern breach, a thick knot of men held the hole, using the rubble of the caved wall as higher ground. Their antagonists had a way in, but it was unsteady and still involved a climb. Pikes complicated that climb, and so too the archers and long gunners hammering them from the battlements.

  Dartrek motioned them back along the wall, away from the chaos. Below, she could hear shouts as men organized a sally to support their kin in the city, not that horses would do them much good in those tight spaces. She did not want to focus on what this other piece entailed.