The three of us were walking toward Simon’s tent. I was almost running, to keep pace with Piper and Zoe’s long strides. “Kept me safe for what?” I said. “If we lose tonight, there isn’t anything else to be done. It’ll all be over. We need to throw everything we have into this attack. I should be there. If I have a vision, it could help.”
“There’ll be enough screaming and weeping without you having your visions,” Zoe said.
“I could see something that would help in the battle.”
I didn’t want to fight—I wasn’t stupid. I’d seen the battle on the island, and I would never forget the smell of blood, and the sound of broken teeth spraying on flagstones. I’d learned, on the island, that the body’s wholeness is an illusion that a sword quickly shattered. I had seen the Council soldiers fight, and I knew that my knife and my lessons from Zoe would count for little, in the brute chaos of a battle.
But it was the battle on the island that made me sure I had to join. I couldn’t hide, once again, while other people did the fighting. The dead who I carried were already too many—I could tolerate no more. It was selfishness, not martyrdom. I was afraid of fighting—but I was more afraid of hiding, and of seeing the dead mount up in my absence. Of being left behind with the burden of the ghosts.
I didn’t try to explain that to Piper and Zoe.
“If the Council soldiers know I’m there, in the thick of the fighting, it might force them to hold back,” I said. “They’ll have orders from Zach not to harm me. He’ll protect himself, as always. It made a difference on the island, and I wasn’t even fighting there.”
“They won’t hold back,” Zoe said. “Not if New Hobart’s as important to them as we think. You heard what the Ringmaster said: the General’s the real power now, not Zach. If she has to put him at risk to protect her plans, she won’t hesitate.”
A dark-haired woman interrupted, stepping in front of us and blocking the path. After days of footfalls from hundreds of soldiers, the path had become a furrow of half-frozen mud.
“If you can see the future,” she said, “then you can tell us how it’s going to go tonight.”
“That’s not how it works,” I said.
She made no move to step aside.
I couldn’t tell her what I’d seen. Her death would come soon enough—I couldn’t bear to be the one to hand it to her, there, on the muddy path. I stepped around her, Piper and Zoe flanking me.
“Tell me,” she called after me, as I hurried away. It wasn’t just the ice-slickened mud that made me stumble. It was what I’d seen, slipping in between my eyes and the world. All the blood, unforgiving on the snow.
In the end, it was that woman who persuaded them to let me fight. Her and the others who gathered around me, each time I ventured out of our tent. Most of them kept their distance, looking at me with the mixture of unease and disgust that I’d become used to. But they all had the same question: Tell us what happens. Tell us how it will be.
“You need me to fight,” I said, as soon as we’d regained the cover of Simon’s tent.
“We’ve talked about this,” said Zoe. “It’s not worth the risk.”
“It’s not about me,” I said. “It’s about them.” I gestured at the tent door. “They know that I can see what’s coming. And they need to believe that there’s at least a chance of victory. And they won’t, if they see me staying back.”
“They might believe in your visions, but that doesn’t mean they’ll rally behind you,” Piper said. “They don’t trust you. You know what people are like with seers. You heard what Violet said just the other day.”
Sally was looking at me. “She’s right,” she said. “It’s because they don’t trust her that they’ll follow her. They’d never believe that she’d go into a battle that she didn’t know we were going to win.”
“I have to be there,” I said. “Right at the front, where they can see me.”
So it was decided. I’m glad, I told myself, and it was true. But my lungs strained at each breath, a pair of creaking bellows, and sweat itched where my woolen sweater touched the back of my neck. It wasn’t just the fear of battle, though there was plenty of that. It was the knowledge, hard and certain in my stomach, that my presence at the battle was to be a lure. A false assurance to our troops that victory was possible.
Ω
At sunset on the night of the battle, Sally and Xander sat alone amid what was left of the dismantled camp. We were leaving them there, along with the handful of troops who were unable to fight.
“Where will you go, if we don’t free the town?” I said.
“Will it make any difference where we go?” she said. “I’ll do my best to keep Xander safe. Maybe we’ll make it as far as the Sunken Shore. But you and I both know there’s not much chance for any of us if we don’t win. You heard what Piper said to me, when we were in my house: the soldiers will come for me there, eventually.”
I knelt next to Xander, but he wouldn’t look at me. He sat with his knees drawn up before him. One of his hands tapped out a silent message on his shoe.
“We’re going to try to find the papers,” I said to him. “The papers that you told us about, from the maze of bones.”
He nodded, and then the nod spread to his whole body, until he was rocking backward and forward. “Find the papers. Find the papers,” he said. There was no way of knowing whether it was an order, or an echo. When I walked away he was still rocking.
In the last few weeks, time had seemed to run away from us. Not enough time to gather troops, or to drill them; not enough time to warn the people of New Hobart; and always the fear that we might be too late, and that the tanks would consume them before we could free them. That the Ark papers would be found before we could enter the town. Now, as we waited in the darkness, time was a landslide on a scree slope, gathering speed, and taking us all with it.
I knew I would fight and not turn back. But as I stood next to Piper and Zoe, the troops gathered behind us, my body was undergoing its own quiet revolt. A shaking had begun in my damp feet, and now spread through me, my whole body resonating like a struck bell.
The armorers had given me a short sword and a wooden shield. I clutched the sword now in my sweaty hand. I would have been more comfortable with my knife, its leather-wrapped handle that had molded to my own grip, but Piper had insisted. “By the time anyone gets close enough for you to use that, you’ll be dead,” he said. “You need range and heft.”
“I don’t know how to fight with this,” I said.
“It’s not as if you’re an expert with the knife,” Zoe said. “Anyway, you’re not going to be trying to fight. All you need to do is be seen, and not get killed. Keep your shield above you in the charge—that’s when they’ll use their archers. And stay close.”
I kept my old knife with me as well. In the hours of walking from the camp to the edge of the forest, the silent troops massed behind us, I’d been comforted to feel its familiar weight at my belt.
Zoe and Piper had been given swords, too. I picked up Zoe’s to test its weight—it was so heavy that I needed both hands to hold it.
“This isn’t a game,” she said, snatching it back from me and turning away.
She stood at my left, now, her eyes fixed on the blade as she passed the sword from hand to hand. Piper was at my right. He, too, carried a long sword, but he also wore his usual row of throwing knives in the back of his belt. Behind us, the soldiers were gathered—more than five hundred, at the final tally. Leaving the camp had, alone, taken hours; the swampland didn’t permit an orderly march, and instead the troops had to straggle their way, single file, along the few strips of land that emerged from the icy pits. The horses were led, one by one, along the narrow, tussocked paths; they kept their heads low and their nostrils wide, sniffing at the edges of the trail. Only once we reached the forest could the troops mass properly. Now they waited,
row upon row. A few wore the blue uniforms of the island’s guards, but more were wrapped in their own winter clothes, ragged and patched. Their faces were muffled against the snow. Nobody spoke. I looked away from them to the frozen trees around us. The icicles, stiff as the fingers of corpses. Everything seemed sharpened, as if I were seeing it for the first time.
I thought of the Ark papers that were hidden somewhere within the walls. And I thought again of those small hands clinging to the boards of the nailed-shut wagon. We were already too late to keep the children from the tanks. I thought, too, of Elsa and Nina, waiting within the walls. What we were about to do might make no difference to their fate—my dreams had shown me too much blood for me to have any faith that tonight’s attack could free the town. Perhaps that was the only difference we could make: that if the people in New Hobart went to the tanks, they would at least go knowing that we had fought for them.
I’d felt the troops staring at me as I walked to my place with Piper and Zoe. My whole body was a trap, to lure these people into a battle that could not be won.
I turned to Piper.
“I’m lying to them,” I whispered haltingly, my breath uneven.
He shook his head, keeping his voice low. “You’re giving them hope.”
“It’s the same thing,” I said. It was the first time I’d spoken so bluntly about what I’d seen. “There isn’t any hope. There’re too many Council soldiers. In my visions, there’s too much blood.”
“No,” he said. He bent slightly, so that his face was close to mine. In the night air, the steam of his breath hung white. “You’re fighting, even though you’ve seen us lose. You’ve known all along, and you’re still standing here, ready to fight. That’s hope, right there.”
There was no time to say anything else. The troops were gathered in the expectant dark. They were watching Simon, waiting for him to step forward and address them. But Simon turned to Piper.
“You were always better at this than me,” he said.
“You’re their leader now,” Piper said quietly.
The older man shook his head. “I’m in charge of them. That’s not the same thing. They’ll do what I tell them to, sure enough. But I haven’t led them. Not since I brought you out to the island, all those years ago. You lead them, Piper.”
He put a hand on Piper’s arm. They exchanged a long look. Then Simon raised his arm to his head, in a small salute. The troops whispered, and shifted to see more clearly, as Simon stepped back.
When Piper moved forward to address them, the whispers stopped.
“Our Omega brothers and sisters are waiting for us, in New Hobart,” he said, his voice cutting through the dark air. “I can’t promise you that we will free them. But the alternative is to wait, while the Council steals from us more and more lives. They’ll see us all tanked, if we don’t stand against them. After centuries of Alpha oppression, there is no place, anymore, for Omegas in this world, except the one we begin to build here, tonight. It may be that we build it with our own blood—but the tanks are worse than death.”
He turned his head, unhurried, to survey the entire mass of troops before him. “The Council underestimated us,” he announced, his voice loud and clear, “just as they always have done. They thought we would be crushed—that year after year of tithes and beatings and hunger would leave us broken, and ready to submit to new horrors. To go meekly to the tanks. They were wrong.
“Because they don’t allow us to marry, they think we don’t weep when our wives or husbands are beaten, or killed. Because we can’t bear children, they think we don’t mourn when they take the children we have raised. Because they see no value in our lives, they don’t believe that we will fight for those lives, and for one another. Tonight we show them that our lives are our own, and that we are more human than they can ever know. Tonight we say enough. Tonight we say no more.”
I felt the ground shake, as hundreds of staffs and axes beat the earth in time with Piper’s final words. No more.
chapter 19
We carried no torches—the darkness was our ally. Piper gave the signal, his sword raised high and then sweeping down. He stood so close to me that I could hear the blade slice the air. The advance began, as quietly as five hundred armed troops could manage, to the northernmost edge of the charred forest. At another signal from Piper, the advance troops slipped from the woods. Surprise was our only advantage, so we held off on the main charge as long as possible. For now, it was just six pairs of assassins, hand-selected by Simon and Piper, loping up the plain toward the town with knives destined for the throats of the patrols circling the city.
The night quickly swallowed the assassins as they moved over the plain in a crouching run. We’d watched the town for long enough to know that there would be three patrols orbiting the walls at any time, but we also knew that the patrols were complacent. The sentries in the four gate towers looked mainly inward, at the captive town itself. If they were expecting any trouble, it wasn’t from outside.
One of the patrols was within our sight, a torch tracing their journey around the town’s southern edge. There would be at least three riders, their leader carrying the torch. When a shout came from further west, the torch swung around—but the noise cut off, stopping so swiftly that I wondered if it had, after all, been just a crow’s hacking call. There was a moment’s stillness, before the torch resumed its route around the wall. Then came another sound, a shorter yell this time, and two clashes of steel. The torch dropped, bounced once, and was extinguished in the snow. I could hear, away to the east, the distant noise of a horse bolting. Silence returned—but this wasn’t ordinary silence. Knowing what was happening on the plain, the silence felt stifling, a blanket thrown over the night.
The next signal came from the assassins: a flash of light at the base of the wall, halfway between the northern and western gates. They had carried oil and matches, to get the fire started quickly. Ideally it would weaken the wall; at least it would be a diversion while we charged from the south.
Once more, Piper’s sword was raised, and then lowered. We began to run. There was the noise of five hundred people’s footsteps, stumbling on the uneven ground. Panting breaths, in lungs tightened by waiting in the cold, and by fear. Scabbards knocking against legs; knives jangling.
The Council’s soldiers hadn’t been forewarned. My journey to meet the Ringmaster hadn’t won his help, but at least he hadn’t betrayed us. There was no ambush, no phalanx of soldiers pouring from the gates to meet us. The first cries of warning came when we were halfway across the open plain between the forest and the town. Shouts and cries spread from gate to gate, and there was a scrambling of lights within the walls as the warning was sounded.
The arrows came first, when we were a few hundred yards from the walls. One landed just to my left, plowing a ditch two feet long in the ground. I kept my shield over my head, but there weren’t enough shields for everyone, and not all our troops had two arms to carry them. Beside me Piper carried only his sword, and so did Zoe, to keep her left arm free for her throwing knives. In the near total darkness, there was no kidding ourselves that we might dodge the arrows—they sprang from the dark above us, as if the night sky itself were suddenly sharpened. The archers made it clear, right away, that the Council soldiers weren’t holding back as they had on the island. If they knew Zach’s twin was part of the attack, it wasn’t stopping them. I wondered if the General ordered that no concessions to Zach’s safety should be made, and if this was a sign of his waning power. But all speculation was ended by the scream that went up behind me, the sound of an arrow finding its mark. I turned, but the fallen man had been overtaken by our oncoming troops, his scream already half drowned in blood, a gurgle of sodden lungs.
The southern gates opened, spilling light as well as the Council soldiers in their red tunics. The mounted soldiers came first, four abreast. They carried torches, as well as weapons, so that the
flames flashed off the blades, and off the eyes of the horses.
Back in Simon’s tent at the encampment, when we’d planned the attack, it had seemed straightforward: arrows and crosses marked on a map. The best vantage point for our archers to plant themselves, to provide cover for the runners with grappling irons and ladders for the wall. The routes where our two mounted squadrons would flank the town and lay siege to the northern wall where the assassins had begun the fire. Four squadrons to charge at the eastern gate, where the sentry tower was flimsiest. On Simon’s map, everything had been neat and contained. As soon as the battle began, that neatness was lost in blows and blood. On the island, I had watched most of the battle from the window of a locked room in the fort; I thought I’d witnessed what fighting was. I realized, now, how wrong I had been, and what difference a few hundred yards could make. In the midst of the battle, now, I had no sense of strategy, or of the overall shape of the battle. I could see only what was happening immediately in front of me. My instructions were to stay close to Zoe and Piper as they led the attack on the eastern gate, but I quickly lost any sense of our destination. Everything was too fast, the whole world accelerating. The horses’ hoofs set the ground beneath us trembling. A mounted soldier thrust a blade downwards at Zoe, and she dived to the side. I ducked to avoid a sword that swung by my head as Piper exchanged blows with another soldier to my right. Zoe had regained her feet when I next looked, and when the rider blocked her strike, she slipped under his sword and severed the girth. Her blade nicked the horse’s belly too, and blood dropped to the snow as the saddle slid down the far side, taking the soldier with it, so that he fell almost on top of me. He scrambled up, but had dropped his sword in the fall. When he bent to retrieve it, I stamped my foot on the hilt, pressing it into the snow.
The fallen soldier looked up from where he crouched. Now I should kill him. I knew that, and my hands tightened on my sword hilt. But before I could raise my blade, Zoe had dodged around the flailing horse and sunk her blade into the man’s stomach. She had to shove the sword again to dislodge him. His blood left her blade blackened as he slid backward off it to the ground.
The Refuge Song Page 18