The Queen of Crows

by Myke Cole

  The Order thundered toward them. A couple of outriders swept past, swinging their flails in long, looping arcs. Barnard parried one blow, and Guntar the other, twisting his hammer to catch the flail’s chain and pull the rider from the saddle. The other rider moved on up the rise, flanking Samson’s hastily formed line, raising his flail again, heading for Heloise’s father.

  Heloise leapt after the Pilgrim, flying up the hill with long, clanking strides. She easily outpaced the horse, reached the outrider, and struck. Even without a weapon, the war-machine’s metal right fist weighed as much as an anvil. The Pilgrim went flying over his horse’s head, teeth knocked loose as the reins were yanked out of his mouth, his hands going slack, the flail tumbling. The long haft tangled in the charging horse’s legs, and the beast flipped end over end, its screams abruptly cut off as its neck snapped. Its path carried it into the wavering line of villagers, sending them scattering.

  Samson only had time to shoot Heloise a grateful look before he ran after the fleeing villagers, bellowing at them to stand their ground. He caught Myron Tanner by the collar of his shirt and began dragging him back into place as another Pilgrim spurred his horse over his fallen comrade and made for him, flail coming low, the spiked head whirling toward Samson’s gut.

  “Samson!” Sigir shouted, leaping forward. The Maior wore a pot helm and a leather coat under an old iron cuirass. He threw his shoulder into the horse’s breast, madly slashing with his second chance. The animal reared, and the flail’s strike went wide, the haft clanging against Sigir’s helm, knocking it askew. Sigir raked the knife’s edge across the Pilgrim’s face, splitting his nose in two, blood sheeting down to soak his gray hood.

  “Forget the line!” Sigir called to her father. “Look to your life, you fool!”

  With a final furious shake, Samson let the fleeing villager go and charged the Pilgrim, hacking first at the horse’s legs. The creature stumbled, sending the Pilgrim pitching forward over its neck. It only took Samson two strokes to cut the man’s head from his shoulders, tumbling down to be caught in the folds of the blood-soaked gray hood.

  Another three Pilgrims rode in, wheeled away as Heloise lunged to intercept them. They circled at a safe distance, calling to one another, spreading out. A fourth Pilgrim joined them, a fifth. Heloise glanced over her shoulder, saw most of the villagers in panicked flight. Maybe seven stood with her father and Sigir. It wasn’t nearly enough to face scores of Pilgrims, all of them mounted, armored.

  Out on the road, Barnard and his sons stood back-to-back, surrounded by a moving circle of Pilgrims, riding in to lunge with their flails before reining their horses back to avoid the great hammers. Three Pilgrims lay dead at the Tinkers’ feet, blood pooling around their smashed skulls. The remaining Pilgrims were wary, but Heloise could see that even a giant like Barnard couldn’t keep this up for long.

  She glanced back to her father. He was safe for now. Here and there, knots of villagers were standing their ground, but the ambush was a memory. Heloise’s people clung desperately to isolated spots on the road, fending off the Order as best they could. A few Pilgrims looked Heloise’s way, but none rode toward her. Easier to kill the villagers, then come for me.

  She couldn’t let them.

  She turned the war-machine and charged across the road toward Barnard and his sons, banging the machine’s empty metal fist against the shield’s edge. The Pilgrims around the Tinkers scattered, riding around behind her. A flail head scraped against the driver’s cage, caught just short by the metal frame. Heloise jerked aside, threw an elbow back, sending the shield’s metal point crunching into someone behind her.

  The instant the attack let up, Barnard and his sons set their hammers head down in the mud, leaning on the hafts, panting. She turned, lashing out with the metal right hand, ignoring the chips of bone and runnels of blood dripping off the shield.

  The metal fist met empty air.

  The Pilgrims had wheeled about and were charging back across the field back toward her father. Samson had managed to get his few villagers into a kneeling line, supporting their rakes and pitchforks on their knees, bracing them with the sides of their feet. Their faces were white, cheeks trembling.

  “Hold, damn you,” Sigir was bellowing at them. Another three villagers stood in a tight knot around him.

  A line of horsemen charged them, reined in short, striking out with their long flails. None were in danger of striking the villagers, but one flail head tangled in the tines of a pitchfork, dragging it forward. The man holding it was dragged onto his face, pulled out of the line before he finally let go.

  The horsemen wheeled back around, making ready to charge the gap they’d created.

  “Heloise Factor!” a voice boomed, low and haughty.

  Heloise’s stomach turned over at the sound of it. She knew who it belonged to before she saw him, a tall Pilgrim with burning blue eyes. Blood stained the front of his robes, some of it new, most much older. Was that Austre’s blood, where it sprayed across his robes as she lay helpless in the dirt while Hammersdown burned? Was it the blood of some other friend of Heloise’s from one of the other villages in the valley?

  “It’s good to see you, Heloise,” Brother Tone said, trotting his horse toward her. “This was a very brave, very stupid thing to do. How you convinced the Tinkers to put you in the Emperor’s property, I don’t know, but you will all pay for it. I promise to intercede with the Throne if you leave the machine now and give yourself over to our justice. The Emperor is cruel, but there is a certain … fairness in that.”

  Heloise thought of all the people she had lost since Tone had come to the valley. Austre, Alna Shepherd, and all the folk of Hammersdown. Clodio.

  Basina.

  She tried to curse him, to tell him that by the time she was done with him, he would beg her for death, but all that came out was a strangled growl.

  Tone smiled wider. “This is why you don’t parlay with heretics. They only howl like dogs.”

  Heloise had seen Tone fight, knew full well his speed and skill. But he was still a man in a boiled leather shell, while she was in a tinker-made war-machine, driven by the pressure of boiling seethestone.

  Heloise charged, and Brother Tone waited to receive her.

  If he was frightened, he didn’t show it. He moved the reins to his teeth, gently spun the flail head into motion, and dug his knees into his horse’s flanks as the beast began to shy.

  Heloise closed the distance, raised her shield over her head. She could feel the pressure building in her shoulders, the machine tensing to mimic her motions, enough power to cut Tone in half.

  Yet when she reached the spot and brought the shield down, Tone expertly jerked the reins and was gone. The shield’s point parted the dust kicked up by the horse’s sudden movement, sinking into the ground deep enough to make the war-machine shudder. Her stump jerked out of the control strap, slamming against the metal frame. Bright pain blossomed up her arm, spreading across her whole body, so intense that she lost herself for a moment, and came to with a dreadful seeping feeling in her wrist. The bandages were sopping red. The wound had reopened completely, and the dizzying weakness fogging her mind told her she was already losing too much blood. No. She had him. She was in a war-machine and he was a just a man. Surely the Emperor would grant her justice.

  “My speed is the Emperor.” Tone’s voice was surprisingly close, shouted over the galloping of his horse, garbled by the leather in his mouth. “His favor has made me faster than the swallow in flight. More than a match for any tinker-engine.”

  She saw him now, galloping past her, striking out with the flail.

  He placed the blow perfectly, judging the distance from the flail to the driver’s cage as if the weapon were an extension of his body. The chain rapped against the metal frame, expertly finding the gap between breastplate and gorget. The momentum of the swinging head carried it in, rising to crash into the inside of the helmet’s metal visor. It shuddered, springing back off the met
al.

  And right into Heloise’s face.

  She jerked her head to the side, sending the war-machine stumbling in the same direction, but it was not fast enough. She felt the iron spikes rake across her cheek, claw their way up the side of her head.

  She knew she had lost the eye before she even felt the pain. She felt the pop, the liquid dribbling down the side of her nose. The world went half-dark, and she suddenly couldn’t tell what was close and what was far. The pain came next, not as bad as she would have thought, but accompanied by a deep, wrenching sickness in her belly and weakness in her limbs. She wanted to double over and vomit. She wanted to give in. No. She couldn’t lose now. Not after all Tone had done.

  She swallowed bile, felt the machine sway as her body went slack from the agony. A moment. I just need a moment.

  But Tone would not give her a moment. He was circling back, trying to shake the offal off his flail head. “This will need cleaning,” he grumbled.

  Shouts from up the hill. The impromptu line of villagers had broken and now Sigir and Samson were back-to-back, fending off circling Pilgrims with their short blades. They wouldn’t be able to hold out for long.

  Tone slowed his horse to a canter, lined up for another pass. Heloise’s stomach boiled, and now she did vomit, letting it run down her chin, the whipsawing of her neck igniting a fresh spasm of agony. She wasn’t sure she could move now, hoped he would charge her. She thought she might be able to reckon the distance in spite of her lost eye if he was doing the moving instead of her, but the Pilgrim only stopped, laid his flail across his saddle. He gestured at the hole where her eye had been. “Well, there won’t be any portals opening there, at least.”

  What little hope she’d had died. He would make her charge him. She braced herself, unsure if she could move at all, or fight when she finally reached him.

  But her father shouted again, in pain this time. Samson was down, his thigh laid open. Sigir stood over him, driving back his assailant, a hound-faced Pilgrim with hanging jowls. Her father’s blood still dripped from hound-face’s flail head. Heloise looked back at Tone. The Pilgrim had raised his flail and transferred the reins to his teeth again. “Don’t turn your back on me. Face your end.”

  She would be mad to turn her back on Tone, but her father’s screams might as well have been ropes about her shoulders, twisting her around. The pain, the sickness, all faded behind the sound of her father’s cries, the sight of his wounded leg. She heard Tone gasp as she ran from him, bounding up the hill in three agonizing strides and knocking the hound-faced Pilgrim flying. He didn’t scream, only gave a strangled cough as he slammed into a tree trunk, his spine snapping with a muffled crack. Sigir helped Samson to his feet as Heloise spun, the motion nearly making her vomit a second time. “To me!” Sigir shouted to the remaining villagers. “To me!”

  Tone had been chasing her, and he yanked the reins as she turned, flicking out his flail toward her face again. She got the shield up this time, squinting against sparks as the iron head struck. The act made her wounded eye sing.

  Across the battlefield, what few villagers remained were racing toward Sigir, throwing down their old shields, their pruning hooks and rakes. A shout of “Cleanse! Cleanse!” rose up from the Pilgrims, and they dug in their spurs, riding them down. Tone ignored them all, cantering in a tight circle, coming around to face Heloise again.

  “Heloise!” Samson panted behind her. “Are you all right?”

  It broke her heart. Even wounded, leaning on Sigir for support, his first thoughts were of her. She was grateful she had turned to Tone now. She couldn’t bear to have her father see her ruined eye.

  Behind Tone, she could see the villagers racing off the battlefield, the Pilgrims riding hard in pursuit. None stood against them now. She could feel the sticky wetness on her cheek, tears of blood weeping from the hole where her eye had been. No! The rage and frustration threatened to swamp her, but that wouldn’t help them. She had been a fool to think they could win this, a fool to think she could have led them to victory.

  “Sigir,” Heloise called over her shoulder, forcing the words out, “we … we lost.”

  “To the fens, your eminence,” Sigir said.

  Heloise nodded inside the war-machine, forgetting that the Maior couldn’t see.

  She heard Sigir dragging her father back, cursing him when he tried to stay by his daughter’s side. “Father!” she called without turning. “Go! I’m right behind you!”

  “She has the hand of the Emperor upon her, you fool!” Sigir added. “And she’ll be a sight safer without having to look after an old man with a wounded leg.”

  Heloise kept her eye on Tone as the limping scrape of her father’s steps told her he was finally letting Sigir take him away. Villagers streamed past her, bolting for the woods. Some were wounded, most had cast their weapons aside. Their eyes were fixed on the ground, to stumble now was to die. A few kissed their fingertips and touched them to the war-machine’s frame as they passed. The three Fletcher boys hid behind the war-machine’s leg, and Heloise absently swatted at them with the shield’s edge. “Go!” They did.

  The Order forgot Barnard and his sons, raced to ride down the fleeing villagers. The Tinkers jogged behind the rush of Pilgrims, moving as fast as their exhausted bodies would allow, giant hammers propped up on their shoulders. Barnard waved a tired hand at Heloise, mouthing, Go.

  “No,” she whispered to herself, Tone always in her peripheral vision, “not without you.”

  Three Pilgrims galloped toward her. They jerked the reins as they came close, and their horses reared, lashing out with sharp hooves. The sickness from her lost eye made her weak and slow, but Heloise got her shield up, the hooves striking sparks off the painted surface. She lowered the shield as the horses came back down on all fours, then jerked the shield up again, smashing the horses back and bowling the riders from their saddles. The Pilgrims tumbled backward and into the path of their comrades charging behind them, who veered aside to avoid trampling their own.

  Tone alone did not join the pursuit, letting the Pilgrims stream around him. He kept his eyes locked on Heloise. “You won’t escape,” he called to her.

  “We grew up in these woods,” Heloise replied, “we slept under the trees and gleaned in the meadows for leagues around here. You ate off silver plate in a city. We’ll escape.” She wished she believed the words.

  Tone laughed. “We eat from wooden trenchers, and I haven’t slept in the same place twice in the last five winters. I’ve spent more time under the stars than any of you. We are called Pilgrims for a reason.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way, Heloise.” Tone’s face grew serious. “Even now, the Emperor is merciful. Climb out of your machine and surrender to me and I will call my brothers back. We will go to Lyse, and you will stand trial before the Inquisition. We will learn the truth of these rumors that you are a devil-slayer. If your testimony is pure, the Emperor will redeem you. No one else need fall.”

  Heloise caught her breath. Has word spread so fast?

  “Yes.” Tone pointed his flail at the scratched sigil on the war-machine’s metal chest. “The story has spread beyond the valley already. They say you are a Palantine.” He glanced at his flail, the remains of her eye still spattered across one bent spike. “But if that’s true, I must be the mightiest saint to ever mount a horse to be able to harm you. Which means it is not true. Come, Heloise. You are a girl playing at war. If you would save your village, climb down from there and be a girl begging the Emperor’s forgiveness.”

  “I killed a devil.” The surge of anger made her words into an angry hiss, a sudden and welcome relief from the sickness and pain. “You will beg me. I swear it in the shadow of the Throne.”

  Tone laughed, shook his head. “You seem confused,” he said, “as to the difference between the Emperor’s favor and a bit of dumb luck.”

  He twitched the reins and dug in his spurs, and Heloise tensed for his charge. She didn’t have to worry about
how hard her missing eye made it to judge distance. He would come straight for her, and all she needed to do was be ready to meet him.

  Except Tone didn’t come for her.

  His reined his horse sideways instead, plunging straight for the Tinkers.

  Heloise leapt for him, but it was much too late. Gunnar was turning, raising his hammer to parry a vicious overhead swing from Tone’s flail. The boy was strong, but he must have been so tired, and Heloise could see how his heavy armor dragged at his shoulders. The horizon bounced as Heloise stretched her legs, pushing the machine to go faster. But she could still see Gunnar’s hammer-haft catch the flail’s chain, the head slipping over to clout him hard enough to ring his helmet like a bell. Gunnar staggered, dropped to his knees.

  And then Heloise reached them, striking down with the machine’s empty right hand. She screamed in frustration as Tone jerked aside, and her blow landed on his horse’s neck, breaking it with a loud crack, sending the animal tumbling. Tone kicked easily free of the falling beast, striking out with the flail haft, slipping the butt inside the driver’s cage and sinking it into Heloise’s gut hard enough to send all the air out of her. He took a few careless steps as his horse shuddered on its side, then raised a hand to his mouth and called to the Pilgrims. A few reined in and began riding back toward him.

  Heloise sank to her knees and vomited again. She glanced up at Gunnar. Barnard was hoisting the boy onto his shoulder. There was a single red hole punched in the base of Gunnar’s helmet, but Heloise couldn’t see how bad the wound was. Barnard dropped his hammer and began to run for the trees where the rest of the villagers had fled. “Heloise! Get up!”

  “Just … just a…” She couldn’t breathe. The sickness and the pain of her lost eye was all.

  “There’s no time! Come on, your eminence!”

  She lurched to her feet, the horizon swaying and her vision going gray. Guntar staggered after his father, and Heloise went with them, a slow walk for the giant machine, as close to a run as the exhausted Tinkers could manage. Gunnar flopped on his father’s shoulder, blood trickling from the hole in his helm.