On Wings of Bone and Glass

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  Leaning back, he put a small hand on my cheek and said, “Never again will I let you go out without a proper farewell.”

  “I didn’t die,” I offered.

  “A near thing. When the Vessel told us that you’d been separated—”

  “Rose is alive?” I straightened. “Where is she?”

  “Not far,” he said. “Directing the battle with e Sadar. The others… did they live?”

  “They’re fine,” I said. The drake’s head appeared beside us both, and startled, I laughed and said, weary. “All of us, as you can see.”

  “He has grown since I saw him last...!”

  “He is not quite as tall as that.” I looked over the edge; the drake had its forepaws on the wall, balancing itself with partially spread wings. I reached, stroked its nose, but did not part from my brother. “Tell me we’re winning, Amhric.”

  “We are not losing.”

  Which was not the endorsement I’d been hoping for. At my expression, he sighed. “Come.”

  The edge of the wall-walk terminated at the gate, and from this vantage I observed the press of battle. The sun had risen behind the clouds where it could not help us, and I could barely discern the fight save as a heaving carpet. Here and there I caught the glint of rain-slicked armor, or raised weapons, but there was no piecing out the melee. It seemed eternally trapped just beyond the wall, and moved neither forth nor backward.

  The royal gifts, however, spoke eloquently. We were few already and many had died. But those few were holding the redoubt, as Rose had promised, and the dead were being destroyed.

  “But so slowly,” I said. “We will tire, and they won’t, and then they will kill us all.”

  “So long as I live,” Amhric said. “They will not tire.”

  “But how long can you give them what they need?” I looked over my shoulder at him, wiped the hair from my eyes, realized anew how exhausted I was. “How long before the magic runs out?”

  “So long as the land lives, there will be magic,” he said. “And I can give it to them. Particularly now—oh, the magic came back, and in such waves. Its exuberance… it wants to rush through every channel.” His nostrils flared. He closed his eyes, composed himself. I watched, marveled at him, at how such a small figure could be so large, solely because of his goodness. And then I started, because the streaks on his face were not rainfall, but tears. “They will not tire. And yet, they die. Not all the magic I can give them can keep them alive indefinitely. And I cannot join them.”

  The idea was ghastly; what the dead could do with a person of Amhric’s power beggared the imagination. If they fed on life, how many of them would erupt anew, fully-formed, did they feed on a king? “No,” I said. “Here you must stay, and safe, or there will be no one left.”

  He asked for my hands with his outstretched ones, and I covered them, pulled him closer, and this—and the inquisitive drake—were the only reasons we survived the wall shattering.

  13

  The dead were mindless. They could not climb. Presented with a target they desired—the lives of all the people in Vigil—they pressed toward the closest ingress in an attempt to reach it. But the gate was too small an opening, and hundreds of them had been relegated to a crush at the newly erected walls. They could not scale those heights, but they were unnaturally strong. So they pushed. And pushed. And the mud beneath the stones that made up the walls, and their hasty construction without mortar, and the constant rain, were more effective than any siege engine.

  I had one warm impression of the weight of my brother’s head against my shoulder, and then I fell, and tons of stone block fell with me. Had we been on the northern parapets we would have died—even we—for the bridge leading into Vigil became a sheer drop not far past the gate. But the southern hills swelled up toward the road and girdled the city, and it was onto that hill that we were tumbled, scattered.

  The few humans who were there with us perished almost instantly. If they survived the stones, the dead tore them to shreds before they realized they’d fallen amid them. I very nearly went with them, for I landed under a splintered block and would have been hours healing the result, and in that state been found and torn asunder by our enemies… but that Amhric grabbed me and pulled me free and poured me full; I lost only a few heartbeats to excruciating pain and then I was on my feet, tearing our attackers from him and struggling to haul him back up the hill. We were armed solely with my staff, my desperation, and his power, and we were surrounded, not just by those straining to kill us, but to flow past us into the courtyard, where we heard the screams and yells of our own. The opening had allowed the enemy to pour in behind our numbers, and they were now wreaking havoc there, and we were too beset with our own troubles to reach for them. All of Amhric’s attention had riveted to me alone, to keeping me on my feet so that I could keep him on his.

  I remember very little. Desperation tightening my chest, stealing my breath. The grip of the staff digging into my palm, cutting it again and again, until it became slippery with blood and sweat and my flesh sealed over and into the grooves, and ripped again the next time I thrust with it. The stench, everywhere, worse than anything I’d ever experienced, and I had been a man who’d vomited twice a day for weeks. The gray of the sky becoming the gray of dead skin becoming the gray of slimed bone becoming the gray of mud... and in it, shining with a smolder like an unquenched flame, my brother’s aura, trailing him like gossamer. His coin-gold eyes, like treasure. His breathing, too quick. And all around us, the misery, the dying, the failing.

  We would not have broken through the enemy lines alone. I knew it then, and simply could not permit myself to lie down and die. I had fought against everything in my life so hard: my disease, my oppressors, my fate. To give in at the end was not in me. And this was the only reason why we were still alive when the drake finally clawed its way back up the hill and plucked us from a knot of revenants. Before I could vent my surprise, it reared back, punching its wings down, and staggered into the air several feet before crashing back down, and the dizzying surge of the ground toward our faces prompted me to scream a warning. It twisted, holding us to its breast, and somehow failed to break its spine on either the enemy or the unyielding stone shards scattered among them like enormous fangs. Again it pumped the vast wings, shaking off the dead things trying to cumber them, and managed the air again. This time it skimmed several feet before falling, and it touched down with its hind legs before pushing off again.

  Its stumbles tore my heart, for I knew it to be wounded—and terrified me, because it was holding us in its enormous hands, and I could not imagine how much it would hurt to be smashed to the earth on one of its abrupt landings. But somehow it managed to ferry us over the heads of our foes, and its final stop brought us to the northeastern corner of the courtyard, where the dead had not yet penetrated and our line held firm. It released us there and collapsed, and I rushed to its head. “Don’t die,” I said. “Not after all this! You must not!”

  Amhric’s hand on my arm stayed me. I looked to him, wild, and he said, “It is injured but not fatally. If we can stay this tide....”

  I shuddered and nodded, squaring my shoulders. I could not remember when I had last been this weary. “Let us finish this.”

  Finding someone who could give us account of the battle was impossible. As we ran south, seeking a break in the fight, one of the Church’s standards lifted over the fray: the Vessel’s Cup, still gold despite the rips and stains that sullied it. Around the banner, the soldiers rallied.

  “There,” Amhric said, pointing, and a limp pennant was floating now, green and copper. “E Sadar’s standard.”

  Thank God they lived. For now. “They need us. They need you. Where can you do your work?”

  “It’s easier if I can see,” he said. “But I can’t be near the front. If they attack me, I won’t know it.”

  “That’s what you have me for,” I said. I took his hand. “Come.”

  Finding a vantage from which
we could perceive the shape of the fight was impractical from the south, where the courtyard and the field over the broken wall had become pandemonium. We fled north instead, climbing the nearest stairs and racing down the wall-walk. At its southernmost corner, over the gate, Amhric stopped, swaying, and grasped the parapet. “Here,” he gasped. “Stop, Morgan.”

  I stopped, hands flexing on the staff. From here it was all too clear that we were losing. The dead had engulfed half our people and cut them off from one another, and though they could fight without leadership until their last limbs were rent from their bodies, our people needed each other. “Oh God,” I whispered. I dared to allow myself to think of Ivy and Chester, of Radburn and Guy and Eyre, of the genets, of the drake. “If ever an angel we needed, we need one now!”

  “God calls us to serve,” Amhric said, soft. “And so we do.” He lifted his hands, palm up, and breathed deeply, and once again that crown formed above his head, as it had done so long ago on the coast of Kesina when he’d called for aid. It spiraled, coruscating, long wisps of gold that reached outward, touched me, caressed, moved on. I shivered, held fast by awe, and watched as its light expanded, became a mandorla edged with elven glyphs. I knew without speaking that this was more work than he’d ever undertaken; that not even the effort he’d expended before we’d fallen had equaled what he did now, for this was a communion so deep that he was lost to speech and thought. All that existed for him was the magic, and once he had it firmly in hand, he opened his fingers... and let it go.

  There was no sign of it reaching the elves or the knights. No bright flares of light sparked amid the heaving melee below. But beneath my gaze, the shape of the fight began to change. Knots of humans and elves grew denser, extended. Joined one another. Began, gradually, to close around the host of the dead. It happened so slowly: as my mantle had settled, it was a personal revelation, an epiphany that shifted the balance of each singular blow, every individual fight that happened beneath us. But shift it did, and I took position between Amhric and the nearest stairs with grim resolution... because I knew at my back my brother was winning us this fight, foe by foe, and if he died at this moment, so would we all.

  But the threat did not come from the dead. They cared nothing for us; we were a vague sense of light they desired, but they did not understand elevation. I was still scanning the wall-walk for any sign of the foe when I heard the scrape of Amhric’s foot slipping. As I turned, I found him staggering, and with a cry I threw the staff down and grabbed for him, in time to keep him from falling.

  He did not even feel me doing it. His trance was complete; he could have toppled from the battlements and never known to save himself. Distressed, I lowered us both to the ground and arranged him so that he could lean against my side. With an arm around his shoulder, I kept him upright, and dragged the staff over in case we were beset. And there I abided until I sensed his breathing stuttering, and then I... I panicked, and grabbed his burning hands and shook him. “Amhric! Come back!”

  The light shivered. He gasped in a breath and opened his eyes.

  “Stay,” I said. Commanded. Pleaded.

  “Stay,” he murmured, entreaty.

  I held him and he went again where I could not reach, like a man drowning in dark waters. He left me with a terrifying new battle, one I hardly knew how to fight. To rouse him from the trance was to interrupt the work that was saving us all. To let him sink too deeply... I knew he would be lost. That he could be subsumed by this effort. He, too, inhabited a shell of skin and bone and blood. Even a king could use up magic too fast for the curse to keep him alive.

  The times I drew him back from that stuttering near-extinguishment were rarer than the times I poised, panicked, wondering if I should, or if I would be too late. I existed in a perpetual anxiety, caged by my own racing heart and careening thoughts.

  The vigil would never end.

  The vigil would kill us both.

  The vigil was our private hell, and I would exist there forever, barred from reunion with my friends, my beloved, all the people who gave it meaning.

  The vigil was all that I had been trained to hate, because I’d stood it a thousand thousand times before over my own failing body, without so much as the grace of knowing what afflicted me, and I hated it now even more than then because I kept it over someone else.

  And yet I stood it. More than stood it: I bent my head to it, and submitted to the interminable terror of it, and together, we persevered.

  14

  What I knew next was a touch on my arm, tender with worry, and the gladsome sound of Ivy’s voice, meaningless until words resolved from the music of her gratitude, “...all right, Morgan. It’s all right, it’s over. You can let go.”

  The weight of Amhric’s body against mine had become the entirety of my world, but her hands offered a bridge to something wider. I let her lead me there, saw again the gray of the sky, the darkness, felt the rough stone beneath me and the complaints of my spine at having kept a single position so long on such unyielding terrain. “Is it... has it not been... how long....”

  “It’s night again,” Ivy said. “But the battle is over, and we’ve won.”

  My mouth was dry. Talking was an effort. “So quickly?”

  “It’s been over a day,” she said, and now I heard the exhaustion in her voice. “We haven’t slept in a long time, my love. But we can now. The dead are done. There are....” She sighed. “There are bonfires burning. Come.”

  “Amhric,” I murmured.

  “Chester has him.”

  Chester did. It was telling that I hadn’t so much as perceived his presence until this moment, when I felt Amhric being drawn from me. I let my brother go only because it was Chester to whom I was entrusting him, and staggered upright only to fall against Ivy. All my muscles protested as if I had been abusing them; I had not felt them so wracked since the seizures that had once circumscribed my life.

  Ivy caught me beneath a shoulder, and a wash of gratitude swept me that I loved a woman who could hold me up when I was weak. With her aid, I straightened and saw what we had wrought.

  The bonfires were each the size of a house, and there were five of them, and in each the bones of the dead piled amid what little fuel could be found to stoke them. Against the bright tongues of flame I saw the silhouettes of the men who were keeping them burning. There were no other guarantees against the resurrection of our foes.

  The courtyard itself was devastation. Our fallen, covered in their cloaks or coats, were lined in desolate rows, for they too would have to be given to the fires. There would be little ceremony and no burials. Even if we could have ensured they would lie quietly, there would not have been room for them all.

  “So many,” I whispered.

  “Better than all of us.” Chester, grim.

  I hated to ask, to be so selfish as to ask, but I could not stop the words. “Did... were...”

  “We’re all alive,” Ivy said, softly. “Even Carrington.”

  “The Vessel as well. And your elf.”

  “And the drake,” Ivy finished. “Thank God for the drake. Toward the end he was the only thing keeping the things off us.”

  I sagged, my relief so powerful I discounted my guilt at feeling it. “The genets?”

  “Stayed underground, as you commanded,” Chester said. “With the non-combatants.”

  Something about the way he said it—I glanced at him, found his gaze hard, unreadable. Perhaps he read my inquiry in my eyes, for he said, “They won’t find an easy welcome anymore, given how many of us volunteered to fight and die while they lingered in safety underground. Particularly since they were more than willing to accuse you of demon sorcery.”

  I flinched.

  “We can worry about it later,” Ivy said, tired. “Let’s just go. You can talk to Rose about the fight and then maybe we can all finally get some sleep.”

  When I touched foot to the courtyard, I found it awash with gore. Ivy steadied my arm and maintained a traction, pulli
ng me along. “Don’t linger,” she said. “Just keep walking. And don’t look down.”

  And I had dragged her into this? Had exposed her not just to hardship, but to a scene out of some phantasmagoric nightmare. The dirt layer over the courtyard’s stones had been stirred with the blood and body fluids of the fallen until it had become a reeking muck. How much rain would it take to wash this place clean again?

  It was only because she was still walking that I continued. Otherwise I would have balked at the prospect of covering the battlefield. It had been a full day since I’d been dry, but I found myself longing for a bath with a yearning so intense it quickened my breath: a mistake, as that brought the fetor more powerfully to my nose.

  “Think of roses,” Ivy said.

  “Does that work for you?” I asked.

  Her mouth quirked. “No. But I felt obligated to say something.”

  Could I? I could. I laughed, and if it was a small, strangled noise, it was at least a laugh, and it won from her a fuller smile.

  We walked past the bonfires, enormous presences when encountered at ground level, and deeply affecting; extending some three stories in height, they scorched the moisture from the air and sucked it clean, burning so hot the only scent they gave off was a lightning-burnt tingle in the nostrils. The heat was welcome; I had forgotten what it was like to be warm. And they made a noise: snapping and roaring, filling the ears. In the privacy afforded by our passage past them, Ivy whispered, “Oh, Morgan. I was so afraid...!”