The day everything changed began with an excited milling down among the beast-men and Skørnhäär, who had already gathered in numbers much greater than usual outside the gates. Giants trumpeted to each other across the valley. White bears rose up on their haunches and sniffed the air. A snarling and a growling started up, so terrific as to freeze the blood of the men stationed on the outer fortifications.
Then one man with keener eyes than the rest spotted, very small in the distance but still unmistakable, the vanguard of an Eisenlonder army, their bronze armor shining dully in the weak sunlight, their wolf’s-head banners snapping in the wind.
Word spread very swiftly through the fortress. Messengers went running to the barracks, to Kivik’s apartments, and to the armory. Meanwhile, a hum of excitement travelled even faster than the messengers could sprint; before very long the news was being gabbled from person to person among the refugees and camp followers.
Skerry first learned what was afoot when a young guard came tumbling down a stone staircase by one of the gatehouses, almost knocking him over, so eager he was to spread the word: “The enemy has been sighted. They are almost here.”
He helped the youth to right himself, asked a few sharp questions, and sent the boy on. Then he went off with a great swinging stride through successive gateways and yards, then into the keep, arriving at the quarters he shared with Kivik only to discover that his cousin was already gone.
The Prince had been there, only moments before, a bewildered Deor told him, but after issuing a great many rapid orders he had disappeared. Skerry was not yet ready to give up the search. Moreover, he had an idea where Kivik might be found: the same place that he would have gone in his kinsman’s place.
Hastening down a hallway near the infirmary, he met Winloki hurrying along in the opposite direction. “Something terrible has happened. All day long, I’ve had a presentiment. And the shadows—the shadows have been practically in a frenzy.”
“Nothing has happened that we haven’t been expecting,” he told her soothingly. “The Eisenlonders are coming, but we have no reason to suppose they’ll attack immediately, not after a long march through the mountains. Even when they do, it’s likely to be a long siege.”
Casting a harried look back over her shoulder, Winloki continued on her way, leaving Skerry to go his.
He climbed a spiralling staircase in one of the towers, up to a breezy, roofless chamber at the top that offered an unobstructed view of the entire valley. As he had expected, Kivik was already there at one of the tall windows, watching the forward edge of the Eisenlonder army: a dark mass moving slowly yet inexorably toward the Old Fortress.
An hour later, they had still not seen the end of it. Horsemen and foot soldiers continued to flood into the valley. Those who had already arrived had set up a camp just out of arrow range—and a careful distance from their gigantic allies.
“So many of them. How can there be so many?” Kivik finally spoke in a dull voice. “It seems that for every man we’ve killed this last year a dozen more spring up out of nowhere to take his place.”
Skerry nodded grimly. “Whatever they say back at Lückenbörg, there were never such numbers in all of Eisenlonde. They must be hiring mercenaries; nothing else makes any sense.”
“Mercenaries,” Kivik said bleakly. “Let us say that most of them are mercenaries, for the sake of argument. Then how have the petty lords and chieftains of Eisenlonde found the coin to hire so many? Are there gold mines in that gods-forsaken part of the world that nobody knew about?” He put his back up against the wall between the windows, folded his arms across his chest. “Or have they rich friends, friends who are somehow, for some unknown reason, our real enemies? Are the barbarians hiring mercenaries, or has someone bought them?”
Skerry struggled to think of a logical answer. Slowly at first, ideas seemingly unrelated began to link up, to grow connections—finally creating a picture that, if it still eluded complete comprehension, at least made a coherent whole.
“Perhaps not enemies of Skyrra,” he said. “Perhaps someone else’s enemies. People in a place where a child was born with such extraordinary gifts, it was decided to spirit her away for her own protection and entrust her to strangers in another country.”
“Winloki.” Kivik caught his breath; then he nodded, one short, sharp movement of his head. “We both know, though it’s supposed to be a great secret, that she’s not truly our kin—nor even likely to be Skyrran, but of southern stock instead. And that ring, the one with the queer symbols that she wears sometimes, it’s no heirloom of our house.”
In truth, there were many strange things about their young cousin-by-adoption: that she was capable of healings even the oldest, most experienced healers could never hope to accomplish; that she had other odd, unpredictable abilities even she did not understand. What they did not know, because they had never been told, were the exact circumstances surrounding her birth.
“But who…” Kivik groped for words. “Who could be powerful enough, ruthless enough, to involve two countries in a bloody and senseless war, all because of a nineteen-year-old girl who doesn’t even know who she is?”
Skerry shook his head. “Someone who does know, only I can’t even hazard a guess who that could be.” Then his eyes went wide; he felt all of the blood drain out of his face. “Unless—unless it might be someone who keeps half of the world at war. Someone who has been sending out her armies and conquering other kingdoms for longer than either one of us has been alive. And all of it, they say, for mere vanity and greed!”
“Phaôrax?” The very name seemed to darken the air, though it was a name seldom thought or spoken in the north. “But that’s so far away, it’s almost impossible to imagine such a distance.”
It was an immense distance. The island where Ouriána, the self-styled Empress, self-styled goddess, ruled might as well have been on the moon or at the bottom of the sea, it seemed so far removed, so inaccessible. Skerry gave a little mirthless laugh, shaking off the thought. “We are building theories out of sand, snatching fantasies out of the air. It’s too incredible.”
But then another thought struck him. “Whether or not any of this could possibly be true, I think it wisest to say nothing to Winloki. She’s been so odd lately, so skittish.” He did not mention meeting her near the infirmary, or what she had said then; it was all of a piece, anyway, with the way she had been behaving for so many days. “If she took it into her head that she endangers the rest of us just by being here, she might do something reckless, something foolhardy.”
Unfortunately, they both knew that where Winloki was concerned, that possibility always existed, even under ordinary circumstances. She had a good heart, but she was headstrong and prone to act on impulse. On the other hand, neither was she a fool.
“Although there is no saying that she won’t eventually make some of the same guesses we have,” Skerry continued. “She may have done so already, which would certainly account for her extraordinary behavior.” His fingers curled, reflexively, into a fist.
Kivik nodded glumly. “With that in mind, I will assign guards to watch her for her own protection.” His scowl deepened. “In fact, I will double—no, triple—the number she had on the journey here, just to be safe.”
Far removed from Kivik’s airy vantage point in the tower, down in the mazes and the firelit chambers of the fortress below, his people were reacting with excitement, fear, and anticipation.
In the outer bailey, a martial atmosphere prevailed. The fighting men were energetic, almost eager, finding relief, after such a long period of idleness and uncertainty, in the familiar preparations before a battle. They polished their swords until they gleamed, sharpened spears, mended their gear. Messengers came and went, relaying the Prince’s orders. Even the horses in the stables caught some of the excitement, growing restive and nearly unmanageable.
Elsewhere, his gaunt host of refugees gathered together in uneasy congregations, exchanging news when they had it, speculating when they did not. Whatever spell the fortress had cast over them before, it was unravelling now that the jaws of the trap had closed and no one could escape. Sometimes they tried to bolster their own spirits, muttering about the towering height of the outer fortifications or reminding themselves and each other of the mighty gates, murder holes, and arrow slits.
“There’s seven great walls they have to get through or over,” someone would say. Or “A warrior of Skyrra is worth three from Eisenlonde.” Not one of them had been up to the ramparts to see for themselves; they could not know that the men of Skyrra were outnumbered by a great deal more than three to one.
Meanwhile there was great activity among the camp followers, those weathered and sinewy women who had seen battle before, even if their position at the rear driving the heavy wagons had usually spared them actual involvement. They fletched arrows, tested bows, put their knives to the whetstone. In the infirmary, Thyra and her healers began to cut up linens and roll them into bandages, grimly sacrificing the last of their chemises and undergowns. So the preparations went on into the evening and all through the night.
At dawn, there were signs of sluggish movement in the enemy encampment. While the Eisenlonder camp stirred back to life, two separate companies of ice giants went stalking across the fields in the early morning light and disappeared into the forest. Crows screamed in the pinewood; there was a roaring, a rending, and a crashing of many trees falling at once; the air filled with the scent of murdered pines.
Shortly thereafter the first group of Skørnhäär returned, dragging some of the tallest trees behind them. Stone axes rose and fell, and in a remarkably brief time the logs were bare of branches. Then the giants began building ladders, splitting some of the discarded limbs for rungs, chopping them into smaller segments, and hammering them to the frames. In the meantime, the second company emerged from the woods and set to work stripping branches, too.
In the gatehouse, Kivik had gathered his captains together in a small candlelit room within the thickness of the walls, to study plans of the fortifications and add the final touches to their plan of battle.
They did not take long to reach an agreement. Because the great encircling outer wall was miles around, there could be no question of defending every part of it. Some sections, however, rose much higher than others, particularly to the north, where the ramparts reached such incredible heights it did not seem possible the enemy would even attempt to scale them. Therefore, men would be concentrated at strategic locations on the east and west walls, and especially on the south, which was by far the most vulnerable.
“Particularly here by the gates, where the assault is likely to be most fierce,” Kivik was saying, when a rising clamor of voices came in through the arrow slits along one wall. His curiosity thoroughly aroused, he led the captains clattering up to the roof, to see what had occasioned such excitement.
They had no need to question the men stationed on the battlements; the cause of their uproar was there for Kivik and his officers to see as soon as they arrived at the parapet. “But what do you suppose it is that they are building?” asked Skerry.
For the ice giants had stopped making ladders and were working on something more complex and mysterious: a construction made out of logs whose purpose neither the Prince nor any of his men could readily identify. The Eisenlonders were busy too, digging what appeared to be postholes near the camp, mining the slopes just below the woods. At the same time, one of their chieftains, a great yellow-haired lout, went riding back and forth astride a white horse, shouting orders to the toiling giants.
“So they can speak to the Skørnhäär—some of them can, anyway,” Kivik said under his breath. “But in what language? What sort of speech could they possibly have in common?”
“They may speak with them,” Skerry answered, “but even so, they dare not approach too near.”
It was true: the Eisenlonders continued to give their formidable allies a wide berth. Wherever the great stony figures went, the barbarians left a broad circle of empty space around them. “I don’t envy them their new friends,” commented Roric, scratching at his beard. “The bloody skinchangers are bad enough. But it must be cursed cold down there with the cursed giants.”
Kivik could only agree. Only the lightest scattering of flakes was falling over the fortress, yet the sky continued to pour down snow and sleet on the Eisenlonder encampment. Even keeping as much distance as possible between themselves and the giants, the men down there had to be suffering agonies of cold. Nor would wolfskin cloaks and gaudy woven blankets offer much protection from Winter personified. Already many of the barbarians appeared half frozen. Their cloaks were heavy with ice and their faces almost as blue as the giants’ hair.
“May they all suffer frostbite,” growled Deor, shaking a fist.
Though Kivik eventually released his captains to their various duties, he and Skerry lingered on the gatehouse roof, eager to learn what the giants were building. Already, the creatures had placed eight stout logs upright in the postholes, packing in enough dirt to hold them in place, then added to each of these supports a cross-member, somewhat smaller in size, that rested inside deep slots cut into the tops of the uprights. Next, they began lashing wooden arms to the beams—whose purpose was finally revealed as some kind of axle.
“Siege engines,” said Skerry, his face gone blank with astonishment. “They are building trebuchets!”
Kivik, too, was momentarily confounded. Like any young prince, he had naturally been thoroughly educated in warfare, taking lessons alongside his brothers and his cousins. In the course of those studies he and Skerry had both seen drawings and even models of similar machines. But no siege weapons had seen use in all of Skyrra for hundreds of years. They were part of a past, a way of life, intentionally abandoned after the worldwide cataclysm known as the Change. Kivik strongly doubted that any of the ordinary fighting men were capable of recognizing these engines, though the barbarians were building them right under their noses.
But neither, he thought uneasily, have the Eisenlonders ever displayed any such arts of war. Until quite recently they had been best known for cattle raids, thievery, and avoiding pitched battle, their tactics—if you could call them that—consisting of lightning-swift strikes and surprise attacks. Yet there before him was evidence of a sophisticated kind of warfare unlike anything the barbarians had known or used in the past.
Kivik felt the hairs rise at the back of his neck. Not for the first time, he was aware of unknown forces and agendas at work, far beyond anything within his experience. “Say that the Eisenlonders taught the giants how to build these machines—but who taught them?”
To this Skerry had no reply, either busy with his own thoughts or else absorbed in watching the preparations down in the camp, where the Eisenlonders had taken over from the giants and were attaching ropes and a sling to each of the trebuchets.
Kivik’s mind went back to some of the more fantastic ideas they had mooted last night. It made no sense, he told himself, that the Dark Lady of Phaôrax should have gone to such lengths simply to capture or kill Winloki, when nothing could have been easier than sending emissaries to Lückenbörg months ago, years ago, to swoop down and abduct the girl.
Yet who else had the power or the will to stir up a war like this one, and yet take no visible part?
“Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe we have arrived at the right conclusion, only the wrong way around. We know Ouriána has been expanding her territories for all these decades, but we never imagined she would ever be a threat to our lands, because the distance between us was so impossibly far, and most of all because she never sent her armies farther north than Rheithûn.”
The ideas were coming swiftly. It astonished Kivik how clearly he saw things now—how wretchedly blind he and others around him had been before. “All this time we believed ourselves safe, were certain she would be satisfied gobbling up the old Empire lands, and that once she had done so, her hunger for conquest would be sated. But why did we think so?”
He answered his own question. “Because it was comfortable, because it was convenient. Yet if her armies had ever ventured into Arkenfell, or even into Weye, we would have recognized our danger readily enough! Then, at the very least we would have made firm alliances with Mistlewald and Arkenfell, perhaps with her enemies on Thäerie and Leal. But if she strikes at us now, using the Eisenlonders as her puppets, if she strikes now while the kingdoms of the north are fragmented, disorganized, not even capable of recognizing our true enemy—”
Kivik drew in a long breath and let it out. As things stood now, Ouriána might swallow all the kingdoms of the north at a gulp and be in a position to attack the coastal principalities of Hythe and Weye from the north and south at the same time.
As if it were a sign, the sun disappeared behind a bank of clouds, casting a deep shadow over all the valley.
By late morning the air quivered with tension. Knowing that the first assault would begin very soon, the defenders assembled in force up on the ramparts. Their helms and shield-bosses gleamed with a cold light; their swords and spears gave back a deadly glitter. On the valley floor the enemy stood ready, rank upon rank, and a murmur rose up from the horde, like the sound of the sea.
Kivik passed among his men, speaking such heartening words as were customary before a battle. Behind a feigned cheerfulness, a reckless air of courage, he managed to conceal his own misgivings. And the men responded: backs were a little straighter and heads rose a little higher wherever he went.
Down by the trebuchets, the giants had harnessed the largest of the Varjolükka to the dangling ropes, and the purpose behind all the digging on the slopes was no longer a mystery. The Eisenlonders had been mining stones, stacking up great piles of rocks and boulders by the siege engines, ready for use.
At a signal from the man on the white horse, giants by each of the machines took up several large stones and dropped them into the slings. One by one, the loaders aimed and roared out their orders, bear-men rose up on their hindquarters and heaved on the ropes, and the wooden arms swung, slinging the first deadly missiles high into the air, speeding toward the fortress. Up on the walls, men scattered before the deadly barrage of falling stones.
Under the covering fire of the trebuchets and a rain of arrows from the Eisenlonder archers, other giants began to haul the long siege ladders forward. With the use of long forked poles, they pushed the ladders upright, angling them against the walls until they were lodged so firmly between the battlements that the defenders were unable to shake them loose.
As the giants drew back again, a lone trumpet sounded; a great noise went up from the barbarian host. Then the front ranks swept toward the foot of the wall and began swarming up the ladders. The battle had truly begun.
At the beginning, the men of Skyrra were able to cast down most of the ascending Eisenlonders as swiftly as they climbed up. But the numbers of the enemy were just too great. Before very long they had forced a way from the ladders to the parapet, from the parapet to the wall-walk, pressing the defenders hard.
Again and again, Kivik flung himself into the middle of the conflict. No prince of Skyrra had ever hung back during an engagement. In truth, when the battle fury gripped him, it would have been impossible for him to hold still. He moved from one point to another, wherever the fighting was most heated, shouting out encouragement to his men, slaying every Eisenlonder who came in his way.
In the noise and confusion of battle, his heartbeat accelerated, while everyone around him seemed to slow. He no longer felt the cold. Sweat dripped down from his forehead into his eyes and he dashed it away with a thoughtless gesture. When one shield shattered, he snatched up another and kept on fighting without a pause.
Through the corner of one eye, he could see Skerry fighting along beside him. His cousin’s style was altogether different, each stroke aimed methodically, precisely, so that his opponents fell back steadily. A hail of arrows came pattering down, glancing off the stones, and Skerry ignored them. A sword flashed and he swung up his own, hardly breaking a sweat. When a barbarian lunged in his direction, Skerry capably finished the man off.
Kivik adjusted his grip, which had grown slippery with somebody’s blood, then took a mighty swing at a convenient head. The barbarian flung up his sword to block, and the blades locked. Kivik pushed with all his might, forcing the man to take two steps backward; then, as the swords disengaged, he aimed a swift downward cut to the knee. Somehow the blow landed higher than he intended and was absorbed by the skirt of a chain mail tunic.
Kivik ground his teeth. There had been a time—when he was young, very young—when he had firmly believed that a man fought only for honor and glory, that winning a battle was less important than how it was conducted. All this had changed: he fought now for the survival of his people and had no time for the conventions of combat. Ruthlessly, and with a lethal absence of compunction, he took every advantage he could. So when the barbarian swung, Kivik ducked, blocked with his shield, and moved in closer. Pursuing his advantage, he heaved up his sword and drove the pommel down, with all of his strength behind it, on his enemy’s helm.
Momentarily stunned, the Eisenlonder stood immobilized. Seizing the moment, the Prince planted his heater shield against the other’s buckler and pushed, sending the man backward over the inside parapet wall and hurtling ninety feet to the yard below. Kivik did not even stop to watch him fall.
As he turned, a rain of stones fell on the walkway almost at his feet. He leaped sideways, but not quickly enough to avoid an explosion of sharp pebbles as stone met stone and several of the rocks cracked. One fragment hit him just above his eye, drawing blood. He hardly felt the sting.
Somewhere in the press of battle he had lost track of Skerry. There were bodies everywhere, Skyrrans and Eisenlonders alike, and he could only hope that his cousin’s was not among them. When he brought his sword crashing down on the helmet of an opponent, the blade, which was already notched, shivered into splinters. He tossed it aside, caught up a bloody axe from the slackened grip of a dead barbarian, and hewed to right and left.
There came a brief lull, one of those welcome moments in the ebb and flow of battle when it was possible for Kivik to catch his breath. The men around him had beaten back a flood of opponents and managed to upset one of the Eisenlonders’ ladders. Those on the bottom rungs who had survived the fall were struggling to erect it again.
Then one of the captains—Roric or Haestan, he could not be certain which—gave a breathless whoop of joy, and somebody else flung out an arm, pointing. At first, Kivik saw nothing but a blur of wings above the field of battle, then he realized with a lift of his heart that it was one of his own messenger hawks sent out days before. Taking this for an omen, someone behind him gave a hoarse cheer.
A flight of arrows from archers down on the field went singing through the air. The bird turned, describing a beautiful curve across the sky, and by some miracle avoided being hit. Kivik held his breath. Then another flight went up, more accurate than before. One arrow clipped a barred grey wing, another struck full in the feathered breast. There was a brief flutter, and the hawk dropped like a stone.
It landed in the ranks of the Eisenlonders, where whatever messages it had been carrying were lost.