“If you remember your oaths, there’s no danger of their finding out.”
“No danger, unless they hear your squawking. It’s bad enough that I’m trapped with them again. I don’t need you harrying me, too.” Crestman continued to grumble, but he turned his attention to the oxen, unfastening their harnesses.
Shea ignored the boy’s complaints. After all, her Pom had often needed to complain before he settled in to whatever tasks she’d set him. It was fine for boys to grumble, so long as they did not forget their chores.
Sure enough, Crestman began to speak to her again after only the briefest of sulky silences. “So, Shea, what supplies do you think are here?”
“From the looks of it, flour and salt. Maybe some lard. Some wine, to be watered down for the boys. Salt beef. Maybe some early apples.”
“It’s about time.”
“I thought that you boys enjoy living by your own handiwork. I thought the Little Army liked eating what it can kill.”
“Perhaps the Little Army does, but I know better. I’ll eat from the king’s larder, and enjoy the honor.” Shea joined in the boy’s grim laugh. She, too, had been hungry. She, too, could appreciate the wonder of food that arrived, salted and cured, ready for the eating.
If only her orphans could share in the bounty.… If only Tain and Hartley could enjoy the richness in these casks.
Tain.… Even now, the sungirl would be gathering the orphans together, getting them to offer up their daily prayers to the Thousand Gods. Shea hoped that they had been able to lay in some food against the winter, against the creeping cold.
Shea exhaled deeply, her breath fogging in the cool evening air. As she always did when she thought of her children, she wondered if she’d made the right decision. She could admit to herself that she had saved Crestman because he reminded her of Pom. Oh, she could make up stories that she was protecting her orphans from the shame of killing a child, from the sorrow they would feel when they grew and matured and realized the horror of their actions. But in her heart, Shea knew that she had not acted for the children. She had acted for herself. She had acted for Pom.
Even as Shea admitted the truth, she thought of Serena, the little swangirl that she had abandoned in her cottage. The child had been so pale, so slight.… By now, she might have succumbed to a cough or a fever. She might be nothing more than a shade.
Shea stared off in the twilight, and she could see Serena’s wraith before her. The child stood beside the last wagon, holding onto the wooden side with a trembling arm. She was clothed all in white, as if Tain had managed to find a funeral dress for her. Serena looked up when she realized that Shea was watching her, looked up with an expression of horror on her face.
“Serena,” Shea breathed, stumbling forward. Even as she moved, the swangirl fell to her knees, her funeral gown billowing up around her like the finest of linen. Shea cried out and ran to her. “Serena, forgive me!” she sobbed. “Forgive me, child! I never should have left you! May Nome have mercy on my soul!”
“Please! Help me!”
Shea realized her mistake even as she registered the weak cry. The child who lay beside the wagon was larger than Serena; she must be twice the swangirl’s age. Nevertheless, Shea knelt beside her, gathering up the white-clothed, shivering form. “Who are you, child? What are you doing in the king’s wagon?”
“Please, grandmother! Don’t let the soldiers get us!”
“The soldiers won’t get you, child. I’ll keep you safe.” Shea heard the words and wondered at her confident tone. What could one sun possibly do to keep this child safe from the Little Army? How could she keep anyone safe, in the upside-down world that her life had become?
Crestman had sprung to Shea’s side at the first sound from the girl, and he eyed the newcomer cautiously. His knife was out of its sheath, its curved blade tilted to catch the best of the evening light. “Be careful, Shea! This may be a trick!”
“It’s no t – trick.” The girl’s teeth chattered like dice in a cup. Her face was smudged with dirt, as if she had rubbed ashes into the hollows beneath her eyes. Her flesh looked blue beneath her flimsy linen gown. “I p – promise you, I can work no tricks.” She took a few steps toward them, showing her empty hands. She favored her right leg heavily as she moved, and Shea could not help but glance down from the girl’s face. The skirt of her white gown was filthy, covered with dark stains that looked black in the twilight.
“What is it, child? What happened to you?” Shea took a step closer, ignoring Crestman’s hissed intake of breath.
“We needed to hide from – from some bad men. We sought refuge in these wagons. I was injured, though, as w – we escaped. They pushed their swords into the hay, through the cart’s boards, to make sure no one was hiding there. Seven d – days of riding in these wagons has done me little good.”
The girl’s trembling fists closed around the once-white cloth of her skirt and she lifted the fabric enough to show an angry gash along her calf, creeping up her thigh. Shea leaned closer, squinting to view the wound in the fading light, and she saw that the skin had been shaved from the child’s leg, carved like meat from a bone. The wound was bloody; it had reopened with the girl’s few steps.
Bad men had done this.… Shea did not need to be an owl to know that this child told only part of a tale. Bad men, seven days north of here. Bad men in King Sin Hazar’s own city. The royal troops must have chased this child into the wagon. Shea only nodded, not disclosing how much she understood. “We?” she asked.
“Aye,” the girl said, and her affirmative nod was almost lost as she shuddered convulsively from the cold. “My f – friend and I.”
For the first time, Shea looked back at the hay wagon, and she could make out a pair of dark eyes staring over the side. Dark eyes and ragged hair, a pinched face. “Aye,” she called to the other child. “And are you injured too?”
“Not cut, anyway.” The face rose from the sideboard, proving itself attached to a girl’s body, a girl also clothed in simple linen underclothes. “But hungry. And cold.”
“Hungry and cold, we can solve. Climb down from there.”
“Shea –” Crestman started to interrupt.
“Not now, boy.”
“But Shea –”
“I won’t hear your arguments, Crestman. On your oath before my hearth, I won’t listen to you. Help that child down from the cart.”
Crestman grumbled as he stepped forward. “Stupidest words I ever spoke,” Shea thought she heard him mutter. Nevertheless, he reached up to help the girl. She ignored his assistance, though, swinging her leg over the side and clambering down with a maximum of independence, a minimum of grace. This child, too, had ashy smudges across her face, but now Shea could make out the remnant of rays, as if the girl had rubbed off a sun tattoo.
Crestman glared at the girls. “What are you going to do with them, Shea?”
“First we’ll get them to a fire. Then we’ll find some clothes and some food, some bandages to bind up that bleeding leg. We’ll figure out what to tell Davin after the cartmen leave.” It felt good to issue orders, good to solve problems like a sun. Shea turned to the first girl, the one who was injured. “Can you walk?”
“Aye.” She said the single word decisively, but Shea saw a flicker of doubt cross her face. Well, they would see.
“And do you have names, girl?”
“Aye. I’m Rani. That’s Mair.”
“Rani. Mair.” Shea nodded and gestured down the hill. “I’m Shea. Come along, then. Crestman, see what you can find among the boys. Bring us trews and shirts, and the warmest cloaks available.”
“Cloaks! There aren’t any extras!”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m their captain, Shea. You’ve forced me back to that.”
“I’ve forced you? You’re the one who staked a claim, out on the road.” She saw Crestman’s face darken, recognized a longer debate than these shivering girls had time for. “You may be their captain
, boy, but I’m a sun. I have faith that you’ll find cloaks, if you look hard enough. You managed to find new shoes for yourself, didn’t you?”
For just an instant, she thought the boy would continue to fight. He drew a deep breath, but then he shrugged his shoulders. “Fine, Shea. But you’re the one who’ll be explaining to Davin.”
“If Davin asks, I’ll be happy to explain.” She would handle that old goat when she needed to. “Come along, girls.” She began to herd her charges toward her tiny hut. “And Crestman?”
“Yes?”
“Bring more firewood when you bring the clothes.”
Rani squinted in the brightness of the mid-day sun. “Look, Mair! Look how close they’re getting!”
She needed to shout to make herself heard over the battlefield noise, but she managed to limp a few steps closer to the Touched girl. Her leg was healing slowly; every time she placed weight on it, she risked ripping open the delicate scabs that tracked from her thigh to her ankle.
She could almost forget her injury, though, as she watched boys run back and forth on the ramparts of the Swancastle, screaming epithets at their brethren in the Little Army. Rani had watched the boys’ officers exhort them before the mock battle began – the soldiers had been told to fight as if their very lives depended on their ability to defend the glistening white castle. This was apparently a vital test in the boys’ training, a major hurdle before they could advance in the Little Army.
As Rani watched, she thought that this exercise was ridiculously wasteful. Boys’ lives were actually at risk; they were endangering themselves as they both attacked and defended the castle.
Nevertheless, they were learning skills they would need in actual warfare. It was really the same thing, Rani mused, as entrusting an apprentice glasswright with the finest Zarithian cobalt glass. She might shatter the stuff, she might even slice open her palm with a dagger-sharp edge. But she’d certainly learn along the way. And if she couldn’t handle the finest glass, she’d best learn early on. Before the guild had invested a great deal in her. Before her fellow glasswrights came to depend on her.
The children on the ramparts had taken their orders to heart. They had spared no weapons, hurtling down stones on their fellows, along with an occasional burning arrow. Nevertheless, they remained unable to kindle the heated oil that they had poured upon their companions only a few moments before.
Those companions, the rest of the division stationed at the Swancastle, went about their work as if there were no screaming hawks on the walls above them. The largest boys wrestled with the heavy stone shield that protected their fellows from oil and stones. The shield was made of slate, attached to a wooden framework with mortar. Even though the structure was massively heavy, it could be tilted at whatever angle the boys chose. The captain – Crestman – Rani reminded herself, merely bellowed an order, and two boys tugged on a giant wooden screw. The screw was connected to the wooden frame with a complex system of ropes. The boys’ motions tilted the shield up or down, left or right. Oil streamed off its surface, and rocks were deflected. Throughout the exercise, the boys beneath the shield chanted. “We’re the Little Army! We’re the Little Army!”
The chant kept the boys’ true work moving in an orderly fashion. For while the stony shield was fascinating – and a military advantage in its own right – it posed nowhere near the threat made by the machine that worked beneath the shield. The boys had dubbed that engine the Eater.
The massive construction lived up to its name, tearing away at the earth beneath the Swancastle walls with angry metal jaws. Its teeth had been modeled after pitchforks, pitchforks turned into nightmare maws in the smithy behind Davin’s hut. Rani had watched in the pale dawn light as the old man lectured the boys before they began their exercise. Davin had told the children that they were testing the latest of his inventions, the newest of his crafts. He boasted that if they were successful, he would built a bigger Eater, a monster engine that could chew away at the very seawalls of the Liantine cities across the ocean. If the Little Army succeeded, Sin Hazar could conquer his enemies before they even realized that battle had been engaged.
Not that the Eater needed to be much larger. In the course of one morning, the pitchfork-teeth had chewed a deep hole beneath the Swancastle’s wall. The earth that was taken from beneath the structure was ferried away from the excavation by a series of metal pails. These, too, had been fashioned in Davin’s smithy, modeled after wooden buckets. Chains ran between the pails, chains that traveled over and under a complicated system of pulleys. The pulleys were turned by a rack of levers that ratcheted back and forth like the treadles of a loom. Boys pushed at the levers, moving them in time to Crestman’s measured commands, to the measured cadence that the captain had barked, uninterrupted, since dawn. The boys’ backs rose and fell as they hauled on the levers, looking like the crew of a laboring galley on a smooth green sea.
As the boys struggled on, Davin stood by Shea and the girls, raising scroll after scroll of parchment to better catch the daylight. Occasionally, the old man swore vicious oaths, throwing his rolls to the ground and stomping away. He never went more than a few feet, though, before he returned, nodding to himself, checking one calculation or another against some scrawled chart.
Crestman’s voice had grown hoarse during the long morning, and by noon, he’d been barely able to squawk his orders. Once, Shea had ordered Rani to bring the boy a cup of tea, but he had dashed the drink from her hands, breaking his cadence only a moment to berate her. Rani gathered that a sun had no place on a battlefield, at least no place unless a soldier commanded assistance. She had stalked away from the stone shield, wincing as her healing leg almost collapsed beneath her. Once she gained the safety beyond the engines’ creak, she had let Davin, Mair, and Shea know what she thought of such command tactics.
Davin had ignored her, consulting yet another of his mysterious scrolls and holding a notched curve of wood steady with the horizon. Mair had grinned at Rani’s tirade. Shea, though, had crumpled, crinkling her face into a mask of sorrow. Rani watched as the old woman stared at Crestman with mourning eyes, as if she were a beaten dog. Maybe dogs were what these northerners needed, Rani thought cruelly – a new caste or two. Suns, lions, swans, owls.… These Amanthians needed a bit more of a menagerie.
Even as Rani imagined Shea as a dog, she realized that she was being ungrateful. The woman had clothed her, after all, and dressed her wound. She had scrubbed the ashy markings from Rani’s and Mair’s cheeks and silently redrawn their tattoos, this time using ink from Davin’s forbidden cottage. She had fed the girls hearty gruel and hot bread, fresh meat for the first time since they had fled Sin Hazar. Certainly, Shea’s fare was better than the meager rations that Mair had managed to filch from the carters while they were on the road.
It was hardly the old woman’s fault that Rani was left with a throbbing, oozing leg, with a wound that would certainly leave a nasty scar. The long cut itched fiercely as it began to heal, and even now Rani could feel that it had once again reopened beneath the rough fabric of her borrowed trews. There was nothing to be done for that, though. No gentler clothes could be found. Shea was the only woman with this branch of the Little Army, and she had only the homespun dress upon her back.
Nevertheless, Rani’s frustration and fear began to ripen like tangible fruit. She and Mair needed to be back on the road. They needed to move south, away from Sin Hazar’s capital. They needed to travel hard and fast, gain the Morenian border before Sin Hazar’s soldiers could track them down. Feeling the slow seep of blood down her leg, though, Rani knew that she’d be traveling nowhere with Mair, at least not for a week more. Not until her wound had closed for good.
Rani’s attention was drawn away from her itching leg as the boys beneath the wood and stone shield set up a cheer, breaking their own constant chant. Davin stiffened beside her as Rani demanded, “What happened, Mair? What did I miss?”
The Touched girl craned her neck, grimacing as she trie
d to make out the events across the field. “I can’t tell for sure. Look at that mountain of earth, though!”
“How much longer can the walls stand?”
Mair was spared the need to respond by a sudden sharp crack. For one instant, the plain was frozen. The defending boys on the castle wall were poised like a child’s dolls, their hands raised over their heads to throw ineffective stones, to light puny arrows. The boys beneath the stone shield were still as well, rooted beside their metal pails, beside the giant pitchfork teeth of their machine. Then, Crestman bellowed one more time. “Push!”
The boys by the pulleys grasped the wooden handles, grunting as they pushed the levers away from their sweaty bodies. The iron pails crawled away from the wall one more step, each dragging one more mouthful of earth from beneath the Swancastle.
Then there was a tremendous crack, as if the ground itself were being split by thunder. The boys on top of the wall scurried to safety, leaping away from the excavation and disappearing inside the keep. As Rani watched, the wall seemed to lurch toward her, moving of its own volition, like a rock monster from her nightmares. Then, Crestman’s voice rose, sharp and urgent. “Back, men! Back from the wall!”
There was a frantic scramble, as boys scurried from beneath the stone and wood shield. Some ran like rabbits, intent only on placing the greatest distance possible between themselves and the Eater. Others looked over their shoulders as they fled, stumbling over their own feet.
Crestman, though, ignored his own command and stood fast beside the pulleys. When the last of the boys had darted from beneath the tilted shield, Crestman grasped two treadles on the pulley mechanism. “Push!” he bellowed, as if he were ordering some unworthy underling to work. He suited action to his command, grunting at the strain as he tried to do the work of half a dozen boys. The muscles in his arms knotted, and the cords in his throat stood out, shaking, vibrating. His face was pulled into a tortured mask, made more hideous by the tight skin around his eyes, where his warrior’s clout stretched his flesh. “Push,” he gasped, fighting to suit action to words.
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