With savage glee, the barbarians tore the dead bird apart, strewing the ground with its feathers and blood.
In the sudden silence up on the wall, Skerry materialized beside Kivik. “Let them gloat while they still can,” he said, raising one hand in a fierce gesture. “At least we know our own messages were received, or else why was the bird flying back to us? We know that help is coming.”
“Yes, but how soon—and how many men?”
At that moment, another wave of Eisenlonders came scrambling up the ladders and fought their way past the men at the parapet. Kivik and Skerry both waded in, shouldering a way through the press, hammering blows to right and left. A barbarian took a swipe at the Prince’s head; he flung up his shield just in time and received a jarring blow that he felt all the way up his arm to his shoulder.
The battle raged on. The sun burned like an ember in the grey sky, and sleet continued to fall. It seemed to Kivik that he had been fighting for an eon, for an eternity, yet the sun had progressed only a little past noon. A sudden outcry brought him running back toward the gatehouse, forcing his way with shield and axe.
The giants had created a battering ram out of a tree trunk and two wagons, and were using it against the great double-sided gate. Timbers groaned and iron hinges screeched, but the gate that had never failed in a thousand years held. Kivik arrived on the walkway above the gatehouse just as the ice giants rammed again. He felt the shock through his feet, heard the protest of wood and metal below.
How much longer can it hold? he wondered. Forever, according to the legends, but his faith in the magical impregnability of the fortress was rapidly fading in the face of this determined attack.
He rallied his men, shouting an order to pick up some of the larger stones from the trebuchets and drop them on the giants. As soon as the ram rumbled into action and those who operated it came within range, the stones rained down. Most of them bounced off the giants’ thick hides, doing little harm, but one rock larger than the rest landed directly on a giant’s head and sent him toppling. The men cheered. The Skørnhäär roared and positioned the ram for another rush.
“More stones and bigger,” Kivik called out to those behind him. “And send me some of the archers from the west wall.”
Even in the inner wards, there was no avoiding the tumult and uproar of battle. Some of the refugees made a show of indifference, trying to carry on as usual, observing the rhythms of their everyday lives. Young children shrieked and played noisy games while their mothers bustled about the kitchen, boiling up cauldrons of very thin porridge, brewing unnourishing soups out of snow, chicken bones, and the occasional beetle or spider for flavoring. The blind man in the pantry amused his grandchildren by deftly constructing slingshots and whittling out wooden tops.
But in other parts of the fortress a sickness was spreading. Already weakened by the dwindling food supplies, many were sinking under the added burden of fear and uncertainty. Or perhaps, thought Winloki, they are finally succumbing to a subtle malignancy in the fortress itself.
Like her fellow healers, she tried to be everywhere at once. By midafternoon, dozens were burning up with fever; others had simply collapsed. She had nothing to give any of them but wormwood and clavender, which she dared not dispense with too liberal a hand, reckoning most of them too frail for a violent purge. In the infirmary casualties came in so quickly that before long there was no place to put them. At Thyra’s suggestion half of the healers moved to an outer courtyard, where they set up tents and cots just inside the second gate. It was there that Winloki spent the next several hours, digging out arrowheads, slapping on poultices made of cobweb, and binding up shattered limbs.
“You ought to take care, Princess,” Syvi admonished her as they worked side by side trying to keep the most desperate cases alive. The more experienced healer was herself pasty-faced and hollow-eyed, yet she knew her limits and had never been known to exceed them. “You don’t eat, you don’t rest—you ought to know the danger in draining too much of your strength. If you collapse or die, what good will you be to any of these men?”
Winloki answered absently, agreeing to eat a bite and take a nap eventually, a promise she had no intention of keeping—or of breaking either, it passed so quickly out of her mind—and went on applying tourniquets, cauterizing wounds, and working spells to stop the flow of blood.
Most of the day had already slipped away before she realized that one man or the other seemed always to be following her, that some familiar faces were turning up again and again as she moved between the tents.
“My cousin has ordered you to guard me!” she accused the boy Haakon as he helped her to lift an unconscious man onto a cot. By this time she was dripping with sweat and bloody to her elbows—she who used to pride herself on the neatness and dispatch of all her healings. “Did you suppose that I wouldn’t notice? I may be distracted, but I’m not yet blind!”
Over by one of the tent poles she spotted a man with a hard, sober face trying to look inconspicuous. If Haakon and Arvi were there, she had little doubt there were other guards lurking in the vicinity. “Truly,” she said under her breath, but loudly enough that they both might hear her, “it seems there are better things you might be doing!”
The youth blushed and ducked his head. “We do as Prince Kivik bids us, my lady. Your danger may not be immediate, but when and if it is—”
“Danger?” Winloki gave him an incredulous look, though all the time her hands were busy cleaning, bandaging, rubbing on salve from an iron pot. “Why should I be in more danger than anyone else? It ought to be less. Surely even Eisenlonders respect the sanctity of healer’s grey!”
Arvi abandoned the imperfect concealment of the tent pole and came over to stand beside her. Not so long as ten days ago he had been carried into the fortress as cold and stiff as a frozen corpse, after one of the sorties. It had taken all of Winloki’s skill, all the power of the runes on her ring, to bring him back again. “I suppose there must have been healers in some of those settlements we saw, the ones that were levelled and burned,” he said. “Where are they now? It’s certain we never met any among the refugees.”
The din, which had receeded while she worked, broke out afresh. Men swore or vomited in pain; some of the more serious cases babbled and begged for relief. Winloki pressed the heels of her hands to her temples, willing the pounding to cease. Yet she had never been one to give way or to ask for protection, and she was not about to do so now.
“If the barbarians have been slaughtering healers, you ought to be guarding Syvi, Thyra, and all of the rest of them—I can look after myself.”
As if in answer, she heard the crash of a ram, followed by wild horns blowing. A volley of rocks overshot the walls and landed not far from the tents, striking sparks off the marble pavement.
All this time, the gates had continued to hold, though one side hung slightly askew on twisted hinges. A party led by one of Kivik’s captains began to build a barrier of carts and wagons just inside, an added precaution should the gates finally fail. It must have been a powerful magic the witches had woven into the fabric, or the timbers would have split long ago.
For Kivik up on the wall-walk, exhausted after hours of fighting, it seemed that his movements had slowed, that every movement he made required an infinite effort. The only thing keeping him alive was a similar lethargy on the part of his opponents.
He had discarded his shield as much too heavy, had been forced to abandon the axe when it lodged in an enemy’s skull and refused to come loose. He was fighting two-handed, using a sword that somebody tossed him when he lost the axe. There was a hard ache in his chest, and pain stabbed at him with every breath; he thought that some of his ribs must be broken.
It hardly mattered by now, because he knew he was going to die. The battle had continued too long; no skirmish in the field had ever lasted for so many hours. His men were dropping from sheer exhaustion, but the numbers of the enemy were constantly refreshed. He fought by instinct rather than conscious thought. When two men tried to engage him at once, he sidestepped to avoid a blow, raised his sword, and struck and struck again. Blood fountained, turning to ice in the freezing air, landing with a faint rattle on the stonework.
Then, unexpectedly, lightning leaped across the sky; thunder crashed and roared. The snow stopped falling—not gradually, but suddenly, unnaturally. Kivik watched in a daze as all of the snow that was in the air rose up with a whoooosh in a great turning cloud and went whirling away into the sky. A hush fell over the fortress and the enemy camp below.
In that moment of dreamlike clarity, he forced his way to the parapet and gazed out across the valley, watching the approach of three gaunt figures in scarlet cloaks who rode at a headlong pace through the ranks of the Eisenlonders.
The air still crackled with the promise of lightning. On they rode, these phantoms in red, their white hair lifted by the speed of their passage, and the dark mass of the barbarian host gave way before them. So pale they were, their faces frozen to a heartless immobility, that Kivik nearly mistook them for the ghosts of dead witch-lords come back to claim their own.
One of the specters lifted a withered hand, and a spiderweb of purple lightning flashed across the sky. The concussion that followed shook the wall under Kivik’s feet, knocking him over; others, not so lucky, were thrown from the ramparts. He could hear them screaming all the way down.
Then a section of the fortifications close to the gate began to sway. Those who could flung themselves to safety where the ramparts stood firm; those who could not sent up a wail. Bits of mortar and fragments of flying stone went racketing and tumbling as the wall that had never been breached in a thousand years crashed down, taking more than a hundred men with it.