‘Qwethnethog!’ shouted Small Hands.
Nita Qwan never heard an order given but in heartbeats, the clearing was empty, save only his fire, his pie, and the six eldest warriors standing around Ota Qwan.
The Qwethnethog emerged from the underbrush moving as fast as a racehorse, and she took several long strides to slow. She looked back and forth at the line of men, and at the fire.
‘Skadai,’ she said in her shrill voice.
‘Dead,’ said one of the aged warriors.
‘Ahh,’ she keened. Made an alien gesture with her taloned paws, and turned. ‘Who leads the Sossag people?’
Ota Qwan stood forth. ‘I lead them in war,’ he said.
The Qwethnethog looked at him, turning her head from side to side. Nita Qwan noted that her helmet crest was a deep scarlet, and the colour came well down her forehead. But the crest was smaller than on a male. It amused him – even through the terror she broadcast – that he’d become so well-versed in the ways of the Wild as to know male from female, clan from clan. She was of their own clan – the western Qwethnethog, who lived in the steep hills above the Sossag lakes.
‘My brother speaks for all the Qwethnethog of the Mountains,’ she said in her shrill voice. ‘We are leaving the field, and will fight no more for Thorn.’
Ota Qwan looked at the men to the right and left. ‘We thank you,’ he said. ‘Go in peace.’
The great monster turned and sniffed. ‘Smells delicious,’ she said, to no one in particular.
‘Stay and have a piece,’ Nita Qwan found himself saying.
She coughed – he assumed that was her simulation of laughter. ‘You are bold, little man,’ she said. ‘Come and cook for me another time.’ And with a flick of her talons, faster than a deer, she was gone into the woods again.
No sooner was she gone then a dozen women came out of the woods – matrons, every one. They spoke so rapidly in Sossag that Nita Qwan couldn’t understand even single words.
So instead, he went and opened his temporary oven.
It was burned all down one side, but the rest had steamed well and the crust was a nice colour – a rich golden brown, shot with darker brown. Perhaps the oven had cracked – he had no idea why part of the outer rim was so singed.
Nor did he care, for the people came forward like an avenging army and seized the pie as fast as he could cut slices off it. He had made enough, and it wasn’t the way of the people to complain.
Ota Qwan took a piece – a burned piece. ‘Well done. Now we are fed, and well-fed. We will run all night.’
He ate his piece in four bites and drank a cup of water. Nita Qwan emulated him, and noted that his wife had packed his baskets. He took one on his back. She smiled shyly at him.
He smiled back.
He shouldered his quiver and his sword, and then – with no further discussion – they were off into the trees.
Albinkirk – Desiderata
The row galley landed against the Bridge Fort’s dock; the garrison was alert and manned the walls. The captain was waiting on the dock.
The row galley was full of women, each one more beautiful than the last. It wasn’t what he’d expected.
One woman – short, blonde, and harried – stood on the foredeck. ‘I need a healer,’ she said. ‘A good one.’
The captain turned to Michael. ‘Get me a Knight of the Order,’ he said. Then he turned back. ‘They are superb healers.’ he said. Unfortunately, they had gone on a sortie to clear the trench at dawn, and they hadn’t returned.
‘I know,’ she spat. ‘How long?’
‘A few minutes,’ he said, hopefully.
‘She doesn’t have a few minutes,’ the woman said, her face cracking. She seemed to clamp down on a sob. ‘She’s lost a great deal of blood.’
‘Who has?’ he asked as he tried to get a leg over the gunwale. A dozen oarsmen reached to pull him into the boat.
‘The Queen,’ she said. ‘I’m Lady Almspend. Her secretary. This is Lady Mary, chief among her ladies.
The Queen.
The Red Knight ignored the people gathered around the figure on the deck. The woman lying on the deck was losing blood at a tremendous rate. He could feel it.
And he had very little strength, at least in terms of power. What he had he’d squandered, fighting boglins. And to heal her here, now, would give himself away – at least as a Hermeticist.
So much blood.
She was young – imbued with power, herself.
In that moment, he realised that if she died, he could take her. As he had taken the boglin chief. She was defenceless – wide open, trying to use her power to strengthen herself. She drank in the sun’s rays – the pure power of Helios. She was very potent.
He put a hand on her back.
‘Well?’ Lady Almspend asked, impatient. ‘Can you help?’
Vade Retro, Satanus, the captain thought. He took his arming cap off his head, and pushed it into the wound. Put one finger on the cap as it turned from dirty white to brilliant scarlet.
He almost grinned. He was linked to a legion of healers. It was easy to forget that.
The palace seemed empty without Prudentia. He knew the basic phantasms of healing now – he wondered if he could release the power of Mag’s bindings to power them. And keep the power – and funnel it through workings he knew mostly from long ago lessons.
‘Amicia?’ he asked.
She was there. ‘Hello!’ she said. She took his hand, smiled – and let his hand drop.
‘I need to heal someone.’ He wished-
‘Show me,’ Amicia said briskly.
He took a moment to kneel by the fallen statue, and brush a hand across Prudentia’s marble back. ‘I miss you, ‘he said. ‘Help me, if you can.’
Then he took Amicia’s hand and laid it on the Queen.
She pointed to workings he now knew – through her – in a mind-wrenching moment, he was on her bridge using her memory palace even as he stood on Prudentia’s pedestal and collected what was left of his power.
It wasn’t enough.
Amicia shook her head. ‘I have nothing to give,’ she said. He looked up at her, and even in the aethereal her exhaustion was obvious. ‘So many wounded,’ she said.
Sighing for the loss, he tested the binding of power on Mag’s cap. He cast, as Harmodius had taught him, guided by Amicia’s sure hand on his – three workings, each contingent on the other, like nested equations on the chalkboard. The loosing, the binding for power, the healing. He used what was left of the life force he had taken from the boglin chief.
‘Saint Barbara, Taurus, Thales. Demetrios, Pisces, Herakleitus. Ionnes the Baptist, Leo, Socrates!’ he invoked, pointed, pivoted, and the room moved – the gears of his imagined rooms turning at the speed of a man’s muscles, so that the room spun like a top.
It was the most complex conjuring he had ever attempted – and the power that flared from it astounded him, a backlash of released power that rose in the room around him.
The arming cap immolated itself in a paroxysm of power – a brief flare, and all that power vanished into her.
A red mist crossed her back from her spine to the top of one tanned leg and around to her hip, right across the kidney. A flake of grey-white ash fell away from it.
The captain fell back away from her.
The Queen gave a squeak, and then sighed, as if stroked by her lover. And then gave a low moan.
Lady Almspend clasped her hands together. ‘Oh, by the power of God, ser! That was brilliant!’
The captain shook his head. ‘That wasn’t me,’ he admitted. ‘Or not just me.’ His voice was a croak.
The wound began to bleed again. They bandaged it tightly, being careful of the wound which still seemed to be open.
The captain shook his head. ‘But I felt the power flow,’ he said in frustration.
‘I feel the pain less,’ the Queen said bravely. ‘It was well done, Ser Knight.’
A red-haired giant threw hi
s cloak over the Queen. ‘We need to get her ashore.’
The captain shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t. That castle is the lynch pin of the battle, and I’ve been holding it all night. I wouldn’t risk the Queen of Alba in it.’
But other boats were pulling up against the pilings of the bridge, anchoring or tying up, their crossbowmen engaging the boglins on the north bank. The bolder boatmen were pulling under the bridge, through the narrows, to further outflank the enemy in the meadows north of the river.
‘I have twenty brave men to add to your garrison,’ Red Beard said.
‘I’d rather have all those nice crossbowmen,’ the captain said. He smiled to take any apparent sting from his remark. ‘Very well. Land the Queen. Don’t mind the boglin guts – we haven’t had time to tidy up.’
He rose from the deck, almost unable to walk. He clambered back over the side to the dock, and managed to give the required orders.
He collapsed onto a bollard. He was aware that Red Beard was standing with him, talking, but he hadn’t slept, hadn’t recovered any power, and he’d just cast – he was phantasm sick, something about which Prudentia had warned him, over and over.
He reached out into the wan sunlight. Pulled the gauntlets off his hands and raised them to the sun.
What would mother think of this? He wondered. Because as soon as the sun licked his hands, he felt a trickle of power through his arms. The headache receded. The depression-
Amicia?
Captain? she asked tartly.
The sun. Reach out and take power from the sun.
I cannot. It is not given to me.
Crap, my lady. To paraphrase Harmodius, power is just power. Take it.
Did I hear my name?
Show her what you showed me. Show her the way to the sun.
With pleasure, as soon as I have a moment in which I am not fighting for my life. Harmodius’s image in the Aethereal was looking tattered.
Use the well, then, countered the captain.
Without intending, he was on her bridge over her stream. The stream was a trickle, the rocks dry, the foliage wilted.
He took her hand and she sighed.
‘We’re going to win,’ he said. ‘It is close, but we are going to win.’ He wasn’t sure just how the well would manifest in her place of power. He conjured a well cover, and a hand pump, just at the end of her wooden bridge. ‘Hold out your hands,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘The sun is not for me, but I can use the well.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s just there. Power is power. Take what you need.’ He pumped the handle and a surge of power shot from the nozzle like water under pressure and soaked her through her green kirtle.
She laughed. Power sprayed around them – into the pool under the bridge, into the trees.
The light became richer, the stream began to sing.
‘Oh!’ she said, and reached out to the well-
The well-cover and the pump-handle vanished, and the stream beneath their feet roared to life.
‘Oh!’ she said. Her eyes were tightly closed. ‘Oh, my God!’
He sighed. It was not the denouement he had hoped for.
But outside the palaces of the Aethereal, men were calling his name.
He leaned over and kissed her, all the sweeter for being there.
‘I must go,’ he said.
‘Those are Royal Guardsmen,’ Red Beard shouted, pointing to the south across the river, and back east of the bridge. ‘I know them.’
‘Horses,’ the captain said to Michael. ‘War horse for you, another for me, a mount for the red giant. Ser Milus, you are in command until I return. Send to the fortress for a healer. Tell them that the Queen of Alba is dying.’ He was hard put to leave her. It wasn’t his way to turn his back on a project. He had a new reserve of power – but she needed a fine, trained hand. And he needed to have something left for the fight.
They carried her past him.
‘Fuck it,’ he muttered to himself. He reached out and put a hand on her naked shoulder. He gave her all the power he had – everything that he had taken through Amicia at the well, and all he had taken from the sun.
He sagged away from her. Spat the taste of bile into the water, and fell to his knees.
She made a sound and her eyes rolled up.
Michael caught his shoulder, and put a canteen in his fist. He drank. There was wine in the canteen, mixed with the water, and he spat it out, then drank more.
‘Get me up,’ he said.
Red Beard got under his other shoulder. ‘You’re a warlock?’ he asked brusquely.
The captain had to laugh. ‘I’ll forgive you your imprecise terminology.’
The wine was good.
Michael handed him a chunk of honey cake. ‘Eat.’
He ate.
He let the sun fall on his face and hands, and he ate.
Fifteen feet away, Ser Milus was trying to find the bottom of a leather jack of water. He nodded, sputtered. ‘Is the fight over?’
The captain shrugged. ‘It ought to be,’ he muttered. He could hear them fetching horses – could hear the heavy clop-clop of the hooves on the cobblestones of the Bridge Castle’s yard, and the rattle-slap of the tack going on.
‘Jacques has him,’ Michael said.
‘I hate that horse,’ the captain said. He finished his honey cake, swallowed more wine and water, and made himself run up the ladders to the top of the Bridge Castle’s north tower.
Sixty feet above the flood plain many mysteries were explained.
He couldn’t see beyond the ridges south of the river, but the brilliant sparkle of armour told him that the men-at-arms pouring over the last ridge had to be the Royal Army.
To the west the trees were full of boglins, and north, almost a mile away, a trio of creatures – each larger than war horses – emerged from the woods with a long line of infantry on either hand.
The new trebuchet mounted in the ruins of the north tower of the fortress loosed – thump-crack - and the hail of stones fell short of the Wild creatures, but they shied away anyway.
But as far as he could see, along the woods’ edge, the undergrowth boiled with motion.
‘Why are you still here? Even if you win you won’t take the fortress. You’ve lost, you fool,’ the captain muttered. ‘Let it go. Live to fight another day.’ He shook his head.
For a mad moment, he thought of reaching out to Thorn. Because if Thorn stayed to fight, some of his men were going to die, and he’d come to love them. Even Sym.
I’m tired and maudlin.
He scrambled down the ladder and found Jacques holding his new charger. Michael was at the postern gate. Jack Kaves waved.
The captain got a leg over his saddle and groaned. The big stallion shied and tossed his head.
‘I hate this horse.’ He looked down at Jacques. ‘Go straight for Jehannes, now.’
‘Ser Jehannes is wounded,’ he said.
‘Tom, then.’
‘Tom’s the man, aye,’ Jacques said.
‘Get every man-at-arms of the company mounted, and by the foot of the ridge,’ he said. ‘All the farmers and all the guildsmen along the trench and to the fort, here.’
Jacques nodded. ‘Just for the sake of conversation,’ he said, ‘we could keep the fortress.’ His smile was transparently empty of guile, like a boy who has just thrown a rock at a hornets nest and remains unrepentant.
The captain nodded. ‘We could. Hold it for ransom. Sell it to the highest bidder.’ He sounded wistful. ‘We could be the baddest. The Knights of Ill-Repute. Rich. Feared.’ He shrugged. ‘Sometime in the last month we became paladins, Jacques.’
Jacques nodded. ‘’Bout time, my prince.’
‘Stow that, Jacques,’ the captain said. He turned his horse’s head, backed his charger a few steps, and saluted Smoke, the archer commanding the gate. ‘Open it,’ he called. ‘And the Bridge Gate.’ He turned back to Jacques. ‘Don’t forget to bring healers,’ he said.
&n
bsp; Red Beard joined them, mounted on an old roncey that had seen better days.
‘Sorry about the horse,’ the captain said. ‘I’m the captain.’
‘That’s your name?’ asked the red giant. ‘I’m Ranald. Ranald Lachlan.’
‘You know the Royal Guard?’ the captain asked. The he paused. ‘Lachlan? Tom Lachlan’s brother?’
‘Cousin,’ the other man said. ‘You know Bad Tom?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’ the captain said. ‘Let’s go find the king.’ His voice was a little shaky.
‘Amen,’ the hillman answered. ‘Do you know him? The king?’
‘What a very interesting question,’ the captain answered. ‘No. Not exactly.’
Michael followed them, and their horses’ hooves rang as they crossed the bridge. At the middle the captain reached into the purse on his sword belt and produced a key – intricate, beautiful and apparently solid gold. He leaned out – groaning at the pressure on the muscles of his back and neck – how long ago did I fight the God-damned wyvern in the woods? He fitted the key into the great gate, turned it, and the gate vanished.
‘Nice trick,’ muttered Ranald.
Near Lissen Carak – The King
The king was collecting his guardsmen and the knights of his vanguard – the vanguard had lost fifty men-at-arms and as many squires, the men were exhausted already, and the morning was young. Two of his leading noblemen were dead – both the Bishop of Lorica and the constable had both gone down in the first fighting. The Captal de Ruth had taken a mortal wound defending the king, and was dying.
But the valets were coming up with the horses and the machines of war were grinding along – surgeons were searching among the wounded for those who could be saved, and his huntsmen, who had swept east to guard the flank of the onslaught of the vanguard, were trickling in. They, too, had lost men fighting monsters in the woods by the river – nor had they been victorious, by all accounts. The Wild creatures had burst through them and run off east. They had lost sixty men. Good men. Trained men.
It was hardly the great victory he sought. He had been ambushed and his column had survived. That was all.
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