A ladder toppled, crushing a score of attackers.
Huwen made his way along the parapet amid cheers from his men. Finally, a gain. Encouraged, his men renewed their ferocity.
Another ladder fell, and another. His archers rained arrows down on the peasant fighters before they could raise their shields. A wind sprang up, and the shafts of the attackers were blown back, failing their marks, while royal bolts flew on guided wings. The soldiers cheered.
The rebels’ fiery machine exploded, killing dozens of their own. The battle, as by a miracle, had turned.
And Huwen knew what his brother had done.
He clamped his mouth closed. Wenid was supposed to have joined him, here on the ramparts. But the battle had called Huwen away, kept him occupied—
Wenid and Eamon had defied him.
Huwen caught an archer by the shoulder and the man dropped to one knee. “Majesty.”
“Send a page to fetch Prince Eamon to my apartment. Tell the page to instruct my brother that I will brook no excuses.” Exhausted by Heaven or not, Huwen would see him. He considered sending for Wenid as well, but he had no stomach for another confrontation like this evening’s. Huwen would send soldiers to arrest him.
The archer hurried away, brushing past a courier rushing in the opposite direction. Uther.
“What news?” Huwen asked.
Uther handed him a paper, his face grim.
The seal of the Holder of Histories. Huwen broke the wax and read.
Wenid Col was dead.
Colm could not believe what was happening. Or...he could, and it sent dread into the pit of his stomach.
A candlemark after midnight, the tide of battle reversed.
They’d breached the outer walls and entered the city, but now, against the castle wall, their ladders were repulsed. Capricious winds deflected missiles from their marks. Royal weapons struck true.
Magic.
Behind the castle walls, a mighty prayer had been granted. Meg must have failed in her mission. Which meant she was imprisoned or dead.
Colm, directing replacements to take up the ranks of the fallen, looked to Orville’s machine, moved now to the middle of the street before the castle’s main gates. If only this monster, though made of metal by mere men, could defeat their enemy. It was their one hope.
Another ladder was repulsed. No matter the heart and skill of the uprising attackers, it was they who found uneven ground to trip them, blows missed or squandered. Imperial ranks pushed them back, forcing hand-to-hand combat against the city wall.
Then word came from the troops attacking the castle on the east. Dwyn Gramaret had taken an arrow to the chest. Fearghus, just visible, mounted, consulted a courier. Did he know?
Colm roared at the stars to drive away the image of his rebel king toppling from his horse, lost to sight beneath the melee. Sulwyn was nowhere to be seen.
Swinging his blade, Colm spurred his beast. Touching the death token at his neck, he urged his men forward. But the result was a weak gain followed by a deeper loss as men fell back to a rain of bolts, buoyed by the wind to unprecedented range.
Magic.
The steam trebuchet coughed, spouted fire and clouds, and exploded in a deafening burst of flying metal brands. A crater appeared where it had once stood, surrounded by a writhing mass of bloody bodies.
The gates opened. Swordsmen poured out, flooding the square. The uprisers’ cheer fell to silence.
Then, defying the Gods, Orville’s cannon, standing almost alone in the far battlefield, landed a true shot on Coldridge’s keep.
The ancient structure crumpled as though built of sand.
The boy lay on the floor, working at the belt holding his wrists behind his back, his breath a ragged rasp, his throat beneath his death token collar, bruised. He stared up at Meg.
Thank the Many, he lived. Had he swallowed her charm of forgetting? Meg knelt by him and showed him the knife. “Cry out and I’ll stop your voice with this.” Her hands were trembling and she wasn’t sure she could carry out the threat. But then, she hadn’t thought she could stick a knife into Wenid.
The boy, eyes huge, nodded.
She pulled back his gag. “The magiel has my sister. Where is she?”
Terror of a different caliber flicked across the boy’s face. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I swear—” He was sensible, at least. Perhaps she hadn’t managed to administer the Memory Loss.
An explosion burst overhead and a beam in the ceiling cracked, angling down into the chamber. Stones smashed to the floor, bouncing, shattering. Meg ducked and shielded her face from the spray of shards and pebbles.
The boy’s brows shot up. “He has cells. Dungeons.”
Yes. Of course.
“I can show you.”
She rolled him over and, untying the sash, hauled him to his feet. She fastened her fingers on the back of his collar. “Go.”
A crack shuddered through the keep. The floor beneath Meg’s feet lurched. She and the boy stumbled before they could catch their balance. The corridor was eerily empty, several doors standing open. She gave him a shove, and he scrambled for the stairs.
Holding the smooth railing, she raced down the sloping marble steps behind him. The livery she wore was blood-soaked, but blood would not make her stand out. Her skin and gender would, though. If need be, she had a spell of Confusion. She didn’t know how long she’d spent in the dungeon, or in Wenid’s apartments, but through the window the blazing city was still swathed in deep night.
An ear-shattering boom shuddered through the keep. The stairs sighed, and leaned further, rubble raining on them. Meg and the boy bolted down the next flight of stairs.
A massive block of stone dropped silently from a great height above them. Meg yanked the boy back, throwing him to the wall and covering him with her body. The block smashed onto the steps below, shattering into a spray of cutting shards. A fragment of marble struck her back as shooting splinters of stinging rock splashed across them.
“Go.” She hauled him to his feet and propelled him around the broken steps as another block landed behind them.
They reached the main corridor. Servants and courtiers ran toward the entrance.
“This way.” He dodged left through a door and down a spiral into the dark. “Here.” He stopped by a niche and grabbed a handful of candles. “Can you light them?” This was no time to question use of magic. She did.
At the bottom of the stairs, he pointed to a short tunnel. “There’s a door. At the end.” He took a step back. “Please, my ma—”
She registered the boy for the first time. Only a boy. “Yes. Go.”
He turned and sprinted up the stairs.
She stepped to the end of the tunnel. The door was locked, but it yielded to her touch.
Within, a single candle stub guttered in a tiny cell. A man knelt over someone lying on a low bed. He wept.
There was no time for his grief. “Is this my sister?”
The man rocked back and forth against the bed, moaning softly.
Meg came closer. A woman in a fine dress curled into a ball on the bed under the man’s protective arm. The woman wept as well. Not Rennika.
—Janat?
Meg fell to her knees beside the man. “Janat?” She shook her. The woman’s face was buried in her hands, but her form, her hair...
The woman’s body tightened and her keening deepened.
“What’s wrong with her?” How had Janat come to be confined in Coldridge? And where was Rennika?
The man did not reply. The man...Gweddien? How—
The keep had collapsed under Orville’s cannon. They couldn’t wait on whatever grieved them. “Can she walk?” Meg demanded.
Neither the man nor the woman responded.
Meg fixed her candle to the table and pushing Gweddien aside, pulled the woman to her feet. In the flickering light, she saw her tear-swollen features. It was Janat.
Huwen stood back from Wenid’s body, laid out on the floor of the throne room in the pale light of dawn. In the city, fighting continued but had shifted to hunting out those final nests of uprisers who had not died or fled.
“A stab wound.” The Holder of Histories pointed to a gash just below his rib cage, congealed, now. Much of the blood had been wiped away from the magiel’s skin and the dark wounds looked like incongruous mouths. “Here. And a second, here,” the Holder went on. “Likely, these disabled him, and then the assassin cut his throat, to be certain he was dead.” He pointed to the gash beneath the magiel’s ear.
The commander spoke. “I interrogated Wenid’s guard. He left his post just after one chime, when a call came from the wall for reinforcements. The assassin could have entered his apartments then.”
Huwen’s order. Piss.
But the Ruby had only just been used, maybe a candlemark ago. Had the magiel been attacked while insensible in Heaven? And if so, why was Eamon not taken with him? And where was Eamon? “Where’s the Ruby?”
The holder lifted his head. “In...the shrine,” he said uncertainly.
“It wasn’t on Wenid’s body?”
“No.”
“But it was just used.”
The holder frowned.
Something...“Go check. Be sure the Ruby is safe.”
The events did not add up. If Wenid was dead, who had prayed to the One God for victory in battle? Eamon could have done so, but Eamon could not go to Heaven without a magiel.
The page he’d sent earlier to summon Eamon appeared and bowed.
“Speak.”
“Prince Eamon is not in his apartment.”
Meg pushed Janat over a tumble of stones clogging the stairs to the cells. Her sister stumbled stupidly as though she cared nothing for the destruction of the keep. The war. Life. Gweddien had not even roused himself to leave the cell.
Gods, to be able to find the solace of a shrine. The listening ear of a Holder.
Meg and Janat emerged into the bailey. A crowd of townspeople milled or sat, exhausted. The smell of smoke lingered. Ghosts, too.
In the light of the paling sky, the back gate where Meg and Kilovan and Xanther had entered with their milk jugs—only yesterday morning—was closed.
Piss.
She propped Janat’s arm over her shoulder to keep her from sinking to the earth in helpless despair, and they made their way with the other refugees toward the main gate.
And the bailey vanished.
Meg lay on the sharp scree of a cliffy, windblown mountainside. Night. Early fall, with the smell of snow in the air.
She shifted, lifted her head from the shale. Janat. Her sister was so young—and Rennika, only a child. They lay snuggled close to her, sleeping. Nanna’s eyes were closed, her mouth open, an arm thrown over Rennika. Far below, faint shouts rose from Archwood’s walls.
The night they’d run from King Artem’s men.
She, too, had been young, then. Not so much in years—what was seventeen compared with nineteen?—but in naiveté. She’d wanted gowns from Aadi. She’d wanted to be a celebrated magiel taking her people’s wishes to their Gods. Now...she wanted only to survive.
No, she did want something. She wanted her sisters.
By the Many Gods, Meg hoped her seventeen-year-old self inhabiting her body could escape Coldridge castle.