by David Keck
Abravanal pivoted, looking into the firelit faces of guards and beggars and townsmen as the whisper of what they’d seen shivered over the back of the shadowed mob: thousands trapped in smoke and stone. Beyond the tiny duke, the army of Yrlac unfurled leopard banners to lash in the firestorm, the great Champion moaned, and a howl arose in the Tower of Gunderic. Each letter of Radomor’s offer was smeared in broad strokes of blood.
THEY RETURNED THROUGH dark courtyards and passages populated with staring eyes. But Durand couldn’t face the little sanctuary again. For space and air, he clambered up through the tower, pitching past shield-bearers, pages, and lady’s maids all whispering in the stairwells.
The wailing howl swelled as he climbed. He breathed it. It trembled in the stones under his hands.
A last step took him from stony darkness to blazing battlements. Beyond the castle walls, Acconel was aflame. Torch parties rode the darkness, throwing torches through open windows, and the inferno bloomed in street after street as throngs pressed for the gates. Any townsman who thought to hide himself would soon be sucked from his cellar by the fire.
Durand blinked into the smoke. If Radomor had beaten Lamoric or carried him back to Ferangore, the streets of the old city might have been asleep now. If the king had shut Lamoric up in his Mount of Eagles, or if Lamoric had died before the gates, Radomor would not have bothered with the city.
Durand wondered how much of this disaster could be laid at his feet. He had done his share of rescuing, and he now wondered at the cost. It didn’t bear thinking about.
The howl swelled, drawing Durand’s eye. Crowds poured through the Fey Gates to race the blaze to the harbor. But in the space of a breath, the flame was leaping the harbor road and—before Durand’s horrified gaze—swallowing the gates entire. “Host Below,” Durand gasped as a gust of smoke snatched the scene away.
When the wind gave him another glimpse, he could see only a strange ripple down the mere wall—like laundry flapping over the battlements. As this “laundry” dropped into the water, Durand understood: he was watching men, women, and children. They dropped from the high walls. They lowered each other as far as arms could reach—but the fall was ten fathoms or more, and who knew whether there was water or a stone quay waiting below?
Durand remembered Radomor’s grim offer. How many lives could they save simply throwing Abravanal and his kin over the wall? That was another idea that didn’t bear thinking about.
Durand heard a door slap shut, and, when he turned, he found Deorwen looking out over the billowing sky.
“How is Almora?” asked Durand.
There was a half smile. “She is very concerned about babies and horses just now. And who’s looking after them.”
“I don’t think horses will fare well.”
“I have maneuvered the Patriarch of Acconel into explaining.”
“Oredgar? That old priest could turn a man’s hair white with that stare of his.”
“Almora has latched on to him. I think she believes he has answers.”
“That old man just might.”
Deorwen was walking toward the parapet. “The fires spread so quickly.”
“Don’t look.”
She stopped when the firelight touched her face.
From the shadows, Durand said, “I remember when I first came to Acconel. I’d only seen seven winters—every one in the mountains at my mother’s skirts. I came down with one of my father’s knights. It would have been spring, like this. I was bundled up on the back of this half-stranger’s horse. I remember the Banderol—so wide in that green valley. I remember Wrothsilver like a snowcap on its hill. And finally Acconel on Silvermere. High walls and sails beyond it.” All of it was dark and fire now.
“My mother and father told me I would be serving the duke, and I had skald’s songs in my mind. But my father’s man dropped me in old Gunderic’s Tower among fifty scrapping boys—mostly older and all from shining lowland halls. I think I was very lonely for a while—plenty of black eyes and bruised knuckles.
“But the city! Everything had been standing a thousand winters: the hall, the bridges, the walls, the gates, the high sanctuary. There was someone who could tell you when every well was dug, who dug it, and why some Lost maiden could be seen sometimes on windy evenings.” A gust blew stinging smoke across the rooftop.
Staring out, Deorwen tucked a stray lock under her veil. Firelight glittered in her eyes. “Radomor will turn his might against the castle. When the fires have cooled, he will bring up his engines. There is little food to ration. And, with the city lost around us, the people’s will is fragile.”
This seemed like a very pretty way to describe oceans of dread and terror. “Abravanal’s barons may come soon.”
She kept her eyes on the distant fires. Embers spun into a black Heaven. “It’s easy to turn inward,” she said. And then, after a space of ages: “Hard to see over one’s own small troubles.” Durand could hear the howling from the streets.
“Lamoric has stepped into the heart of the city’s defense,” said Deorwen.
“He has been the great commander.”
“It’s everything he’s struggled for, landed in his lap unlooked-for.”
She kept her wide eyes on the flames, the light glowing on her skin. “When we were fleeing through Eldinor, your skald said there was no one from Mornaway at the Mount of Eagles,” she said. “Just in passing. It is strange how such a brief mention can occupy one’s thoughts. Where was my brother? My father would have sent Moryn, I think. Was there an accident upon the road? Did he simply row up to the island an hour after we did? Did he catch wind of Ragnal’s trap and save himself? Has he died on the road? He is my brother and I don’t know.”
Durand blinked. “Abravanal’s sent riders to Mornaway.”
She nodded without glancing. “Moryn seems so stiff, but when I was a girl, he would appear at my father’s hall—where I was chasing the dogs or playing at needlework. There he would be with his riding gloves and his great blue mantle and I would know that he had come for me. He hardly spoke, but we would ride, the diamond banners of blue and gold flying behind us. Rain or fair weather. He clutched me tight and we tore away from the walls and serving men and ladies waiting. We would fly for the forests without a word, riding until there was no air left in me or the poor horse. Somehow there would always be a stream. And he would have a knob of cheese or sack of apples. He hardly spoke. But he listened. It was magic to me. Alone with my brother.”
In a brief flash of Deorwen’s eyes, the spear-straight Moryn Mornaway was transformed for Durand. “You’ll soon be able to ask the man himself,” he said.
“I’m sure. But it has disturbed my dreams these last weeks. I cannot believe he is safe. But I am so often with Almora, and there are few women at court. I see him in darkness. It has been a job just to keep the poor girl occupied. When can a woman speak of such a thing?”
Weeks, she had said: weeks without a chance to talk over the loss of her own brother. She gave Durand a long look, then lifted her chin. “I came here to get free of the crowd. To breathe. But this is no place for any of that.” She looked up into the clouds. “Many have joined the Lost to night. They are in the air all about us, storming with the smoke and embers. I can feel them pressing in. More and more all the time.”
“Deorwen.” Durand tried to take her by the shoulders, but she twisted away from him, vanishing into the tower. He could hardly chase his lord’s wife through the crowds.
“Hells,” said Durand.
He stood in the fiery dark, listening to his heart thunder, and he punched a good stone wall.
THAT NIGHT THEY knelt in the belly of the deepest Hell, the murmur of prayers thick in the air. Deorwen sat by Almora once more, the little girl more sober than any of them though the old castle moaned like the dead were at the arrow loops. Abravanal stared and panted: somewhere else in his head. Durand eyed the throng in the Painted Hall—hundreds looked back, no doubt weighing life against little girls and loyalty
as dread sank in.
Deorwen reached to set her hand on Lamoric’s, but Lamoric was already rising to his feet. “It’d be just Radomor’s sort of trick to storm the walls tonight when we think we’re safe behind these fires of his,” and he was off to check the sentries. Deorwen watched him slip from the sanctuary. He had only just got back from some similar nervous errand: checking how arrows had been divided among the bowmen.
Someone in the Painted Hall was crying.
The metal Power in Almora’s hands clicked while she sucked her upper lip.
At one window, the Patriarch stood. “Thirty thousand souls chased from their city into the fields. Four thousand dead already.” His long silver beard shivered with the motion of his lips. “In the black water below the walls or brittle in their cellars.” He stopped himself.
His high sanctuary, built in the days of the High Kingdom, now stood beyond the castle walls, the delicate panes of its windows falling in tears of running lead.
Almora spoke. “We will have the city back. Uncle Radomor will be punished.”
The tower whistled like a pot in a kiln.
His expression lost in shadows, the Patriarch said, “Ah, Almora. Radomor has only one soul to balance all he’s taken.”
Almora cocked her head. “They go to Heaven. You told me.”
The room stared up at the holy man. “Yes. So I did. But it is hard to be as wise as you. There was a man: a wise man. Marcellin they called him. He warned that we should trade pity for hatred and forgiveness for vengeance, or we might find ourselves in the same Hell as our enemy. But it is hard.” The old man turned toward the dark glass of the eastern windows and knelt there. Little Almora stepped to his side, and they were nearly eye to eye.
“Marcellin was born in the Dreaming Lands,” he said to her. “I have seen his crabbed writing with my own eyes. Tiny letters he used. An old man showed me when I visited the Library of Vuranna.” Almora blinked into his gleaming face. “They all have black hair in Vuranna—like yours—and even the plowmen drink wine.”
The girl knelt at the old man’s side. Her Power fluttered its damselfly wings.
LAMORIC DID NOT return. Durand watched Deorwen staring over Almora’s shoulder as the little girl dozed and then slept. For one hour and another, she stared. Deorwen waited, but Lamoric never came. Her eyes never closed.
Finally, in the near total gloom, Durand got to his feet. He stepped between sleeping forms, invisible as a spirit, and crossed to the woman. “We’ll talk,” he said. “I think there’s one place left in this old keep.”
And he led her through the blind multitude, past sleeping friends and strangers to an old room he thought no one would have claimed: a storeroom above the keep’s door where a windlass used to be. They sat among old hangings and broken tables; an arrow loop overlooked the fires of the city.
And she leaned against him. He felt her shoulder and her forehead, half-nestled, half-collapsed. He felt her hand touch his thigh, hanging on more than anything. And so he held her.
It was like teetering at the peak of some high hill. He tried to imagine sitting through the whole yawning night, so close and never touching. But, more tired and alone than he could understand, he did not turn from her. His hands slid over her body and they kissed until, together, they hung on with the firelight flashing in Deorwen’s eyes and the smoke of the city in their mouths as they gasped and grappled through the night.
ONLY THE GREATEST exhaustion could have brought sleep to Durand in that storeroom.
He awoke sure that there were knights on the stair or Radomor at the door. He was still with Deorwen—she struggled: fighting, dreaming. It took a moment to find his balance. She was caught in some sort of fit.
“Deorwen,” he said. “Deorwen!”
Now his head was full of his own past premonitions. He lifted her, trying for a look into her face when a great gush of foul, icy water vomited from her mouth.
Durand recoiled. Deorwen’s eyes rolled big and glassy as those of some ancient pike from the bottom of the mere. He would have to carry her downstairs, screaming for help.
“Deorwen!” he whispered, now shaking her. “Come on!”
Then she woke, retching and gasping in the narrow space. He had her shoulders.
“Gods,” she spluttered. “Gods!”
“What’s happened?” Durand asked. How loud could their voices be?
“I’d only closed my eyes. I was somewhere else. Someone else. Cooking. A great stew pot on an open hearth. I could see out the door and the air was cold.”
Durand thought of his own visions.
“I was about to fetch a few bits out with a holed spoon,” Deorwen said. “My feet were bare. We were talking, I think. Then there was some commotion down in the road. Hooves beating—we don’t often hear that on our lane. There were soldiers. Men on big horses.” She hardly sounded like herself. “Then they were coming in, down and ducking through our front door. I tried to get others behind my skirts. Children! I was telling them ‘the window!’ out the back. Then the men caught at my shawl. But I got clear, tumbled out the window. There is a ditch. It’s where we throw what we want rid of—it runs to the river. And I think they won’t follow. But they’re coming round. There’s water in the bottom and I slide. I hear screaming.”
Durand gave her a sharp shake. “That wasn’t you!”
“I remember splashing—falling into water.”
“You’re safe!”
“She’s dead, Durand.”
Durand searched his mind, glancing over the city beyond the arrow loop. “It all sounds like the lower city. Something there.”
“The air is too full of ghosts,” Deorwen breathed, and Durand could nearly see them: mad souls who’d lost too much too quickly, unburied or unknown. There’d been thousands pitched from Creation that day, and few had seen wise women and priests to ease their passing. Many must be Lost now, and one of these had surely found Deorwen between death and sleep.
“I’d hardly closed my eyes,” she faltered.
Durand lifted her—half-sopping with ditchwater. “The sanctuary.” It had stopped Radomor’s sendings. “We’ll get you snug by the altar and see if any of these spirits tries to pass Father Oredgar. I wouldn’t if I came haunting.”
She managed a nod.
He might have stayed by her side until the duke’s men came to prise him loose and throw him over the wall, but now he helped the shaking woman to her feet and led her through the black passages of the keep.
21. A Shell of Stone
The Eye of Heaven returned to a black hall. Soot caked every surface in Gunderic’s Tower. Every face was black, except for the flash of eyes.
Almora was playing. Deorwen threw Durand strange glances—they couldn’t speak. Was she all right? And right beside her was Lamoric. Durand swallowed and clenched his eyes shut, wondering what he was doing.
Meanwhile, the knights in the sanctuary weighed their chances while tearing at bits of breakfast bread. When would the barons ride? How long must the castle hold out? They spun out their arguments until old Coensar spoke into the silence, cold and certain: “It’s from Radomor we’ll learn the truth. If he comes on with a mad charge and throws his ladders at the walls before the embers are cool, he has seen your men and they’re near.”
Even the duke’s wide blue eyes were on Lamoric’s hired captain.
“But,” said Coensar, “if Radomor comes on slow and bides his time, then we know there’s no help nearby.”
Durand joined the others as they climbed the battlements of wall and tower, watching. As the first day wore on, the only sign of Radomor’s army was the collapse of tall and distant buildings in clouds of soot. Sappers and soldiers worked on the wide roads, clearing rubble for the passage of Radomor’s engines. And the advance continued that way for seven days. Soon, each cautious step was another point in an argument long settled. There was no help on the horizon.
Durand suffocated between Lamoric and the man’s wife.
Deorwen fought to keep up with Almora. The little thing circled her, like a little black hawk on its jesses: never far, reporting everything in a bright earnest voice.
Each day, Durand resolved to make an end of it. Once, he came down the stairs to find the Patriarch awake: his bearded face as grim and silver as some king on an old coin. The old man had little Almora sleeping against his knee.
Swallowing unease, Durand whispered, “You are good with her, Your Grace. All she’s been through at her age.”
The old man smiled for an instant. “She is good for me, I think. It is hard for a man to watch his city burn and still cling to the truths he’s rattled off in fat days of peace. ‘Where is the Host of Heaven in all this?’ I will think, and she will answer.”
But Deorwen grew pale, and so, each night, Durand stood, spiriting Deorwen from the silence of their strange prison, and they held each other like the last man and woman alive. The dead were with her when she closed her eyes: men and women dying by sword or fire or flood. He heard story after story, but soon she wouldn’t say a word.
All the while, Radomor tightened the knot around the castle, each night renewing his fatal offer: the Champion in the market square, the fires, the bloody scrawl. The duke’s men were watchful as the last barrels were emptied and filth steamed in the corners.
ON THE SEVENTH day, Radomor’s mighty engines ringed the old castle in a great crescent and commenced to rain stones down on the walls. Castle Acconel was strong, but each blow shook the blackened fortress to its cellars. And there were many hard eyes staring back from the crowd as the duke’s men continued their scheming.
Toward dusk, Almora tottered around the sanctuary asking men questions and getting nervous answers. When the little thing heard children crying in the hall, she took a notion that they might be thirsty. She and Deorwen were soon walking among them doling out water.