Isobel

by Chloe Garner

  Weeks later, Allie sat in the bushes outside of the clearing of yet another hillfort. The chieftains had begun to blur together for her. The Romans were on full retreat, surrendering stronghold after stronghold as Drest and his warband pushed south. The news to the east and west was similar, and the warbands were growing larger as they approached the wall.

  This one, though, was different.

  The Romans had stopped running counter-attacks, stopped attempting to meet the Caledd in the field, stopped even hunting to feed themselves. They sat inside the wooden stockade around the stone stronghold, keeping the Caledd women and children in with them and forcing the men to go out to hunt and tend the small fields that sat against the stockade. From the underbrush at the edge of the hillfort clearing, Allie could have hit any one of the men, but they were all Caledd. They had captured more than one of them as they were out hunting, desperately trying to capture enough meat to feed both the Romans and the Caledd families, because if anyone was going to go hungry, it wasn’t the Romans. They said that if a man failed to return at dusk, the Romans hung three or four women and children, depending on the mood of the commander.

  It made Allie angry, but it made Drest furious. He and his advisors had spent days talking about what to do, and they hadn’t come up with anything that any of them thought was good.

  So the men were going to storm the fort.

  They had taken some of the Roman armor off of soldiers they had killed, anything metal that looked useful to stop a spear or arrow, and the thirty men in Drest’s warband were set up to try to burn the stockade.

  This was old warfare, where the goal wasn’t so much about taking the land as it was destroying the people. Before the time of the kings, the Caledd had not been a single people, and the clans had warred endlessly, attempting to kill the warriors and steal the livestock. The chieftains had no interest in rulership - they considered the land necessary to sustain their own people to be their realm, and anything more than a half-day’s ride away was too far to defend. But neighboring clans were always a threat, and each chieftain spent much of his life planning the ways to weaken his neighbors and strengthen himself. The hillforts were a relic of those times. Drest and his ancestors were kings largely because he had the most impregnable fortress, with a stronghold of stone, rather than wood, and a defensive position that made attacking nearly futile.

  This hillfort had a generous ring of tree trunks, set at an angle in the ground, and the men who lived there said that they had been cared for well, over the generations. As they went to rot, the clansmen had replaced them as a sign of honor to the men who had died defending them, and the wood was treated spring and fall with pastes designed to keep them from weakening or being susceptible to fire.

  Not that wood burned, readily. The steady rain through the summer meant that the stockade would be perpetually damp, even with the best treatment to keep the timber sealed. They had had to prepare pitch that would burn long and hot to have any hope of damaging the stockade. In the end, that had been all Drest had been willing to do. Burning them out from the inside would incur too steep of losses among the Caledd, especially considering the Roman troops would likely take refuge in the stone stronghold where the chieftain and his family would have lived, before they’d been deposed.

  Allie steamed, internally, as she watched the men prepare. She didn’t care about the land and the politics. She just wanted to purge the Romans from the land, and throwing themselves against wooden walls had only the slimmest of chances of actually killing Romans.

  Aedan was excited. The impromptu siegeworks, the elaborate plans and coordination, even - she was certain - the opportunity to wear the gleaming metal armor in full sun energized him, as it did most of the rest of the men. Brietta was anxious, and Heather kept her opinions to herself. Allie could hear them, quiet as deer, just behind her, watching with the same intensity as herself.

  The battle cry went up around them, loud and powerful, and for a moment Allie understood the pride of being with such a group, then the Caledd men charged up the gentle hill toward the stockade.

  Allie pulled her bow over her shoulder and drew an arrow, but otherwise didn’t move. It was possible the Romans would come out to meet them, as the Caledd men didn’t have a strong history up against the soldiers in even combat on open ground, but Allie didn’t see why they would. The hillfort provided near-perfect cover, especially given that Drest didn’t want to risk massacring the Caledd trapped there, and if they had any archers or spear-throwers at all, they could pick off Drest’s warband at leisure.

  And as they watched the men running, it appeared that that was exactly what was going to happen.

  The distance and the time stretched. A target that Allie could hit with a bow seemed miles away as the warriors ran, completely exposed. Two men trundled up the hill with a huge skin of pitch. It was awful to watch.

  And then the arrows came.

  There weren’t a lot of them; Allie guessed there were only a handful of archers in the hillfort, but there was no protection from them, nor any good way to meet the attack. She itched to take a shot, but Drest had told her that they would be shooting through tiny slits between the timbers, and that it would be impossible to hit them.

  The men would just have to get to them.

  The outward slant of the timbers would give them some protection from the arrows, but they would be within reach of spear- or sword-thrust as they tried to set fire to the stockade.

  And already they were falling.

  The armor provided some protection, but not enough. Allie sat, wooden, and watched as the men fell on the hillside, one by one.

  It was possible - likely - that they had the Romans outnumbered, but it gave them no advantage.

  “This is pointless,” she growled.

  She heard Brietta’s breathing accelerate.

  And then stop.

  Allie had been watching Aedan, but now she stood, scanning for Lyall.

  Brietta’s husband, the man who had saved her from a life she’d never wanted, was lying on the field.

  It didn’t take any thought. Allie snatched Brietta’s wrist and pulled, dragging the girl behind her as she darted forward.

  “Allie,” Brietta gasped. “We don’t have armor.”

  “We’re quicker, we’re smaller, and we’re not attacking,” Allie said. “Stay low, move fast.”

  She got no more arguments.

  The roar from the Caledd was diminishing as the women got to Lyall, who was pale but awake as Allie skidded up to him on her knees.

  “Go,” he groaned. “Go back.”

  Brietta was frantic.

  “Allie,” she said. “Allie, what do we do?”

  “Breathe,” Allie answered, looking for the wound. The arrowhead had stopped before it came through the back plate of his armor, but it had neatly punctured the front. It had broken when he fell on it, so it was possible it hadn’t moved too much. Allie sliced through the leather bindings on the armor, leaving it like a split turtle on the hillside next to him, and looked quickly at the wound itself.

  “You have to run,” she said, pulling him onto his knees by his good arm. His skin was cool and sweaty.

  “Go,” he said again, his head dropping to the side.

  “Look at your wife,” Allie said, glancing up the hill to check on Aedan. She couldn’t find him, and her heart jolted. She steeled herself and, clenching her jaw, looked back down the hill, beginning to drag Lyall.

  “Look at your wife and tell her that you are giving up, right here, right now, and leaving her on her own.”

  “Lyall, please,” Brietta sobbed. “Please.”

  He staggered one foot underneath him, but couldn’t take weight on it. There was nothing wrong with his feet, but his body was shutting down. She continued to drag him, grateful for any help he could give her. Brietta tried to take his other arm, but Allie waved her off.

  “You’ll make it worse,” she said.

  “Then let me,” t
he girl answered, coming to take his arm from Allie. Enough tired to let her, Allie shrugged his weight across the Brietta’s shoulders, then turned, searching for Aedan again. She still couldn’t find him.

  Painfully slowly, they made it back to the treeline, and Brietta, great big workhorse of a girl, laid her husband on a small patch of open, mossy ground.

  Allie was having difficulty focusing. She was walking backwards, searching the battlefield for her husband.

  “There,” a voice said. Heather pointed. He was at the wall, slashing at swords that came through the timbers and trying to protect the men with the pitch. The rest of the men were converging on the spot, and the cry that had begun to die off picked up volume. Allie gave Heather a significant glance, and the girl nodded, crouching in the brush with a tense alertness, and Allie had to close that line of thought off, following Brietta into the small, shaded clearing.

  Lyall’s breathing was shallow and his skin was visibly damp.

  “Did they take it?” he asked.

  “They’re making a valiant attempt,” Allie said, fingers probing the wound in his shoulder. She put her head on his chest.

  “Breathe,” she said. His effort was pitiful, but it told her what she needed to know. She looked up at Brietta’s anxious face.

  “He isn’t going to die here,” she said. Brietta gave her a quick, shaky nod. Allie touched Brietta’s hand.

  “Be strong,” she said. “I need old man’s beard.”

  She took out the small amount of the moss she had in her pouch and pressed it hard against Lyall’s shoulder, rolling him against her hand to look at his back again. He was beginning to shake, like someone just after a surgery.

  “They couldn’t get the fire to take,” Heather said, the small girl appearing at Allie’s elbow from nowhere. “They’re retreating.”

  Allie stood, drawn toward the hillfort, then looked down at Lyall again. She knelt, drawing Heather’s hands down.

  “Hold here, and here,” she said. Heather nodded.

  “Go.”

  Allie dashed to the edge of the woods, holding herself back on a sapling as she stood and watched the men run back down the hillside. Most of the archers’ fire was gone now as they lost visibility in the thick smoke rolling up from the pitch at the foot of the timbers, but a few arrows continued to rain down blind on the Caledd. One of them found a mark and Allie stood, frozen, with her heart in her throat as Aedan turned and ran back up the hillside to help one of the men limp back down to the safety of the forest.

  She waited for another moment, hand on the bow she had re-strapped across her shoulders, to be sure the Romans didn’t give chase any further, then she quickly returned to Lyall.

  Heather asked the question with her eyes, and Allie nodded.

  “They’re away,” she said. “We need to get him ready to go.”

  “Where is he going?” Heather asked. Allie looked at her curiously.

  “To Isobel.”

  Lyall left, sitting uncomfortably on the back of an old draft horse, with an old man and a young boy leading. It was surreal, watching from this side of the trip.

  Brietta stayed.

  “I didn’t come for him,” she said to Allie as they watched Lyall’s mount trudge away. Allie hadn’t asked, but the question had been unavoidable. Brietta’s breathing suggested she was only just keeping herself under control, and Allie didn’t look at her, wanting to spare her. Brietta continued anyway. “I came for me.”

  They’d talked most of the night, discussing tactics and strategies, ideas on how to cope with the way the Romans had holed up in the hillfort, everything. When the sun rose the next morning, Aedan dragged her in front of Drest as the king was sitting at breakfast around a tiny cooking fire with his advisors. The big man looked up.

  “What is it?” he asked. Two men had died the night before, and Lyall was one of six who were in need of medicine. Aedan cast a look at Allie, but he was on his own, here.

  “They’re starving in there,” he said, starting the argument where they had ended it. Drest looked annoyed.

  “I know that, boyo.”

  “You know every man here would lend his bow to feed those people, if it weren’t that the first of it would go to the Romans.”

  “I have very little patience this morning, Aedan.”

  “Leave them as an island,” Allie said. One of the older warriors grunted without looking up.

  “I’m listening,” Drest said, ignoring his advisor.

  “Let us move forward,” Aedan said. “We can keep pushing them while you hold them here, keep our people fed. We can push them to the wall by winter.”

  “I don’t like splitting my forces,” Drest said.

  “I know,” Aedan said. “But we can’t stop here, and we can’t just leave them.”

  “We can’t leave a pocket of soldiers that big behind us,” one of the other men said.

  Drest looked from one man to the next for a moment.

  “You think you can keep after them, lad?”

  “Send me by myself, and I’ll have the wall by frost,” Allie said. Aedan nudged her.

  “I have pledged myself to your son,” he said. “Either you believe me or you don’t.”

  Drest sighed.

  “Go,” he said. “We will discuss it.”

  Allie tried to read from Aedan whether or not that had gone well, but he didn’t seem to be any surer than she was. He shrugged.

  “We did what we could.”

  The news spread as they worked south.

  Warbands to the east and the west were routing the soldiers, and Allie, Brietta, and Heather formed a spearpoint that cut soldiers off from larger companies. Nothing stood in their way. The land was fixed, and the Romans still clung to bits of it, but the Caledd, orchestrated by Aedan and lead by Allie, were uncatchable, phantoms. As they cut off the roads and the means of communication, more than one company simply got up in the middle of the night and left.

  Allie wore woad and leather and came out of the trees like a wind.

  The weather made a liar of her, turning cold three days before they reached the wide expanse of cleared land that ran along the wall. Allie had never seen construction the like of it before; it stretched as far as she could see in either direction, and was tall enough that she couldn’t climb high enough in a tree to see over it. They picked a stretch where the local boys played as there were no fort outposts in short walking range, wanting to see this border that was so infamous to them. For all its size, Allie was disappointed. The ditch in front of it was easily scalable and the wall itself was simply an exercise in displaying dominance. She could walk up the side of it with a bit of effort.

  They spent the rest of the fighting season pushing the last pockets of movable troops back behind their wall. They retreated carefully, not wanting to wait too long and get stranded without supplies this far south, but not wanting to give the Romans a window to retake any of the southern settlements. They met up with Drest and his troops, who had set up a small settlement of sorts a few hours away from the hillfort the Romans stubbornly continued to occupy. He would leave men there for the winter to try to keep the Caledd fed. After the ill-fated attempt to take it, they had not had any violent encounters with the Romans at all.

  And then they were back at Drest’s hillfort. It felt strange to be home, stranger to be among so many people. A lot of the refugees had managed to get home as the warbands had driven the Romans out, but there were a certain number of widows and orphans whose lives had been completely upended. Most of them would take some time to resettle with relatives, and a few would end up living at the hillfort permanently. Making the long walk up the front hill was surreal. Allie was stained with woad and wore the light, functional leather that she had grown comfortable in, and the arrival of the king and his warband attracted attention from the entire hillfort.

  She braced herself for impact from Kenna, but surprisingly, it never came.

  “Where will Lyall be?” Brietta ask
ed, at Allie’s elbow.

  “If he recovered, he will have gone home,” Allie said, “but he would have come through here. We’ll ask.”

  Brietta hadn’t looked this anxious in weeks, but now her hands fluttered and her mouth stretched as she chewed on various bits of it.

  Drude met them at the gates, his pace much improved, but still showing the lifelong limp he would have. There were the unavoidable formalities, then the warriors broke off to see family and friends.

  “Where is Kenna?” Aedan asked Drude after the men exchanged rowdy hugs. Drude gave him a strange expression, then his eyes widened.

  “Oh, you weren’t here. Oh.”

  “Drude,” Aedan said. Allie’s stomach clenched.

  “No,” Drude said, shaking his head, then grinning. “It’s such a Kenna thing. She’s been fighting Gede over it all summer. I tell you, I was grateful she distracted him.”

  “Drude,” Aedan said. Drude grinned wider, motioning to Allie.

  “She took up where Allie left off.”

  Allie frowned.

  “What does that mean?”

  “She’s training the girls who turned up at Rafa’s and Isobel’s.”

  “She’s what?”

  Drude laughed.

  “Fifteen of them, if you trust Gede’s count.”

  “She’s going to be unlivable,” Aedan said dryly. Drude laughed again. Brietta made a soft noise, and Allie felt guilty.

  “I should have started with it,” Allie said. “What of Lyall?”

  Drude looked at a loss for a moment, then turned to Brietta with sincerity.

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry. Alive or dead, he would have come through here, but… There’s been so much going on. I should know, Brietta. I’m sorry.”

  Allie felt Brietta collapse a little, and she took the girl’s arm in her own.

  “We’ll leave now,” she said. “Aedan will come with us. We’ll know before dark.”